Monet Can't Buy Me Love

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House of the Eternal Return

Meow Wolf

Santa Fe NM

This is an explorative installation, based around a story of the disappearance of the Selig Family, the Meow Wolf team works with actors and technology to weave a story of mystery, that may or may not have an ending.

In this place, the normal rules do not apply, and visitors with curiosity and imagination are rewarded, other people will probably feel a little uncomfortable. 

If a haunted house is designed to give you the thrill of fear, then this house is designed to reignite the spark of make-believe in you. They invite people of all ages to explore, and while I’m sure children are one of the main audiences, I have no doubt that the people running the house get a thrill from seeing parents whispering conspiratorially too each other.

Play is important, pretend is critical. But it’s hard, especially when someone’s life is defined by deadlines. Which is why fun places like this house are so important, they give us permission to slip back into those make-believe roles and enjoy our own imagination for a while.

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Anicka Yi

“Life is Cheap”

Winner of the 2016 Hugo Boss Prize

Guggenheim

The Hugo Boss Prize is awarded every other year to any artist of any age and nationality. Less than ten artists are nominated by curating judges from the Guggenheim, and only one is chosen to show their exhibition and receive 100,000 dollars.

Needless to say, this award undoubtably favors artist who work big. Not necessarily in scope, but in concept as well. I’d say Anicka Yi makes big work in both of those senses.

“Life is Cheap” is not just a giant, it’s an environment, one that Yi uses to challenge you. You don’t get to experience her work on your own terms, every part of you and your sensory experience is in her hands.

The air around you is filled with a foreign scent, one specifically designed by Yi working with molecular biologists. The scent is designed to be a cross between the natural oder of an Asian woman, and the pheromones of an ant. 

Speaking of ants, take a look at one of the room sized dioramas on one end of the hallway. It’s filled with millions of ants, milling about in what looks to be more of microchip than an ant farm. 

On the other end of the hallway, is another room. This one filled wall to floor with agar plates, spewing with colorful bacterial growth. Thankfully there is a pane of glass that separates you from it.

It’s a lot to process, are you shocked? Are you disgusted? Are you fascinated? I can say one thing, you are certainly not bored. Yi has succeeded in making a new world in this hallway, but more importantly she has succeed in making you forget about the world you came from. The mind works fast, and adapts quickly to new environments, but in the moment of adaption, it is vulnerable. 

Yi takes advantage of that vulnerability, because she has some things to say and a few things that she wants you to reconsider. Let’s say, for example, that you’re afraid. You’re looking into the germ room, and thinking that the black plague may very well be growing in there. Or your eyes inch toward the ants, imagining those groping incectoid feet crawling all over you, over taking you. Wow, what a gift. Yi has just given you fear, real fear. A genuine emotional reaction welling up inside you begging to be examined, unpacked, and reconsidered. Think, you are in the Guggenheim, you are safe. These creatures around you, they are extremely visible yes, but they are also extremely common, they exist with us. But we perpetuate the myth that our hands are free of bacteria after we wash them, and our potato salad has never had one ant crawling inside it. Fear is natural, but it is also irrational, in that it does not spur one to make exclusively rational choices. Yi may give you that reaction of fear and then also provide you with this safe space to better understand that fear, and what about it motivates you.

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Sonia Gomes

Tantas Estórias, 2015 thread, fabric and rope

Rubell Family Collection

Right off the bat, I know what you’re thinking. “Wait I don’t speak Spanish, what does that title mean?” Ok well it’s actually in Portuguese, so shame on you for assuming that just because there’s an accent it’s Spanish. But if you must know, the title translates to “Many Stories”

I love a good title, and this one takes the cake. It’s a weighty title, with cultural significance. It sets the tone well for the piece, which is itself not one story necessarily, but many. 

This piece has an obvious focal point, so that seems like a good place to start. It’s the two eyes near the middle, and the only part of Gomes’ piece that indulges in color. If we were to interpret this work as that of a face, then these eyes would be weighty, and watching. And how does it make you feel, to be watched by a story? It makes me feel a touch uneasy to be honest. Like the piece expects me to show it something, like I’m supposed to be the art being interpreted.

That was a bit of a tangent, more to the point, I think Gomes wants us to see a face, but I also think she wants us to see roads, and cracks in a well-floured slab of bread dough, and all sorts of things. That’s what’s wonderful about operating in the realm of abstraction that Gomes does, it invites our brain to have a field day trying to interpret the abstract entity as a concrete shape. It’s much more interesting than just making a portrait.

I don’t have much else to say in terms of interpretation, I get the feeling that Gomes’ process was one of feeling and expression rather than blatant conceptualism. I will say though, that I heavily jive with her choice of medium. She works almost exclusively with found or gifted threads, fabrics, and cloths. So it’s a guarantee that each piece of material comes with a story. Comes is like a painter, working with precious dyes, each blessed by a priest, it’s almost impossible not for her to make something enchanting with all that magic. Furthermore, while her chosen media certainly offers coherency, each rope and string is bound to be different and offer a new flavor to the piece, like the imperfect skin mosaic of the human face.

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Wangechi Mutu

 A Promise to Communicate

This sculptural piece will be on display at the Institution of Contemporary Art/Boston in January. It is done in the medium of paper pulp, glue, and red soil. 

This piece seems very intentional, because of the two different mediums. One a smoothed and gritty light brown, the other a soft crinkled smoke grey. Mutu’s sculpture feels very allegorical in these choices, although what theme she is trying to evoke still feels mysterious until one takes the title into consideration.

A Promise to Communicate is a fantastic title, it’s basically a poem in itself. A promise gives the viewer the idea of yearning, of being away from where one wants to be or who one wants to be. To communicate is such a seeming simple idea, and yet it’s such a loaded phrase. What does the word imply? Is it enough to just greet a person for the two of you to be communicating or do you have to emphasize with them to the fullest extent of your abilities?

Furthermore, Mutu’s choice the translate this idea into a 3d sculptural work resonates, she is solely a sculptor so we have to ask, why she thought that this theme would work best in this form. An answer that comes to mind, is that she wanted the viewers to be especially cognizant of this idea and its relevance to the here and now. A yearning to empathize and bridge gaps is certainly present in the world today, and yet the goal itself is amorphous and can’t really be defined. 

I think that Mutu captures that longing very well in her piece. The grey material looks like fingers, reaching, grasping, just barely touching. Their surface a complicated and labyrinthine shape that describes a diverse and willing population. The goal that the fingers are reaching for an alien and idealized shape.

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SAHM (above) and Quiet Party (below) by Allison Reimus

Recently exhibited at Des Moines Yellow Door Gallery. 

Reimus’ work echos the aesthetic pictured in SAHM and Quiet Party. One of monochomaticity fighting a droll battle with strange splashes of color. Most of her work is small in size and relatively flat, done on paper or canvas.

Whenever I see an artist stick so closely to a certain style and look it makes me think that there must be some theme that the artist is obsessively trying to discuss. 

I think that’s why I was racking my brain for a big and mysterious theme that fit with her work. Is Reimus criticizing our modern day views of happiness? Is it an exploration of color in a vacuum? Is it a discussion on the mediums used in traditional painting? Maybe, but I think the theme is a little smaller than that.

What I mean is that this work seems to be more like a diary entry than a critique or an exploration of a huge human mystery. Maybe diary isn’t the right word though, it’s more like a journal scrapbook of her daily life. 

Take a look at SAHM, (what I assume stands for Stay At Home Mom) at the mundane yet festive deflated balloons, the darkened walls that your husband insisted be painted a light charcoal because he couldn’t stand bright garish colors. But you couldn’t help but play that small cheeky little trick at the next kid’s birthday. And when he walked in, to see your clean charcoal kitchen haphazardly colored with a parade of awkward colors, he smiled. And you smiled, the two of you having an entire hilarious conversation in a glance.

And of course there is no reason that this interpretation is any less valid than any other, no reason that what looks like a slap-dash art project at first glance can’t be a poetic recreation of one birthday snapshot, taken years ago.

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https://vimeo.com/238962416

Alejandro Figueredo Diez-Perera

Love is a Rebellious Bird

2017

This installation takes place in two parts, first there are the very minimalist textured paintings pictured above. Second there is a video playing, a compilation of people from Cuba dancing presumably they are video taping themselves. The soundtrack to these dances is orchestral and seemingly out of place with the dance. An excerpt of the video is attached in the hyperlink above, please watch it. You’ll like it. Promise.

Ok so this one is a tricky piece, I feel like I have some appreciation for it but I also think that there is a large cultural component to it that I am blind to. Alejandro is himself a Cuban artist, which is presumably why he wanted only Cuban dancers in the video. What really baffles me then, is how we are supposed to step inside this piece and understand something that was built from a lifetime of Alejandro’s cultural context. Actually, I think that might be one of his points.

The thing that jumps out to me about this piece besides the meaningful cultural allusions, are all the awkward juxtapositions. The minimalist white paintings and classical music stand in stark contrast to the organic clips of dancers. It’s possible that what ‘Love is a Rebellious Bird’ is saying is that an understanding of a culture must be done in the context of that culture. It is unnatural to take one part, say a flashy dance, or a certain type of food, and slap it into mainstream western life without an understanding and respect for the culture which those things came from. That is theft of heritage, that is cultural appropriation. 

That is just my surface level interpretation though. I suspect that there is much more than just a critique hidden in Alejandro’s work. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was yearning to show us a part of his culture in this piece, to teach us about the people he loves on his own terms, not ours. But he probably wants us to try, to reach out and make the effort, to extend our ears and listen before he decides to share.

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“Untitled” Film Review

Whoops.

So, it’s been a little while, but let’s talk about this film.

I’m glad that watching this was one of the first things we did in Intermedia Class, because while I had an open mind going into this course, I still had minor hang ups about contemporary art.

What makes it art?

If this can be art, then can’t everything be art?

Is the interpretation inherently subjective?

Is contemporary art necessarily elitist?

The film covered all this with a charm and good natured sense of humor, without lampooning the subject itself. In the character of the Curator we got to see someone who was absolutely beholden with the amorphous world of art. Sometimes it was to a humorous extent, like when her leather clothes themselves were shown to be stylish and unique but altogether too unpractical. Or the character of the Atonal Musician, who spoke so highly and particularly about his art, (you have to put your leg into the bucket kick) but could not articulate any specific intention behind his choices and apparently drew much of his inspiration from a plastic bag stuck to a tree outside his window. 

The funny side of these characters is obvious and it’s meant to be laughed at, but what the film takes seriously is their passion. The Curator is not a parody, she’s skilled at what she does, and her keen eye for good contemporary work is it’s own. She is not beholden to the whims of the art world the way the collector is, she saw the value in the Martin Creed character without him having any sort of fame or shine to him. And by consuming art that has intention, and that carries a concept, the curator grows herself, and expands her mind. This is an objectively different experience than one would have looking at the simply aesthetically pleasing abstract work of the Circle Guy. That is work that doesn’t offend, or at best pleases, the Curator shows us that good art challenges.

The Atonal Musician was harder to emphasize with, but maybe that’s because atonal music is so fringe, while every American has had at least one encounter with contemporary visual art. Like that art, our Musician shows us that when we limit our ears to only pleasurable sounds, we limit our sensation of sound itself. Furthermore, music loses it’s power when it is only meant to please. In one scene the Atonal Musician is playing a classical piece in a restaurant, but no one is listening. The music has been relegated to background noise, that will only be listened to if the listener wills it. This results in an overall loss. A loss for the listener, who could have gained a deeper appreciation for a sound and grown in some way, and for the musician, whose ideas remain unheard.

Altogether the film subtly shows us, that those who follow their art for their art’s sake, not for commercial or aesthetic success, gain a sort of happiness. And those who value the novelty, the pioneering, and look past any sort of off-putting unconventionality of a piece, gain a sort of happiness of their own. 

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Autumn Leaves

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Imitation of Lives 

by Jimmy Robert

Performed this November in New Canaan CT

Part of the Performa 2017 Biennial

This is a performance art piece performed by the two actors pictured above. The space they are performing Imitation of Lives in is also a special one. It’s Philip Johnson’s Glass House, an iconic piece of modernist architecture with completely transparent walls, giving someone looking in from the outside an almost completely unobscured view of the living space.

So right off the bat, the stage that this work is presented in is already rife with themes exploring the nature of privacy, the sanctity of domesticity, and the viewers. Robert takes that a step further by giving us some inhabitants to look in on, and making this house into a home. Already there are some uncomfortable questions being asked here, before we even see any actual performance. Robert is asking us to reconcile our ID’s desire to peek in on this “family”, with what we externally claim to be our desire to leave them their privacy. Our nature as habitual watchers is exposed, but not attacked. Instead, Robert uses our natural and slightly uncouth instincts to his advantage by focusing it on a story that is often ignored by the public.

That is the story of black representation. The performers in this piece as well as Jimmy Robert himself are all black men. Black men specifically have been sensationalized, fetishized, demonized and everything but normalized by the media at large. Robert forces his captive audience to come to grips with their preconceived notions of what a black man’s life at home looks like by literally showing them a pair of black men living in a home, and all the funny, sad, and boring things that they do there. 

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Sarah Rowe’s

Vertical Disintegration 2015 

Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha Nebraska

Vertical Disintegration is a piece depicting the consumption of land and resources by capitalism and mainstream culture, at the expense of the native inhabitants and the spirituality of the land itself.

Lakota artist, Sarah Rowe, is uniquely suited to tell a story which is unfortunately still very relevant in America today. The greatest tragedy in our nations history was that it was stolen from the native inhabitants, and that our occidental culture is built upon their genocide. Unfortunately, instead of reflecting and learning from the evil perpetrated by our forefathers, there are still many cases of American Indian tribes being directly persecuted by individuals and corporations. DACA is just one example.

Rowe’s installation is an examination of an even more pervasive crime against the original people of this continent, a corruption and perversion of their own ideas. A common idea shared among American Indians was that the land they lived upon was not a commodity, but something to be sustained and cared for, as it gave live-giving resources in return. This idea is not compatible with our current capitalist culture, which offers its own view of land: everything, every tree, every blade of grass, is owned by someone. And everything can be used.

This may come across as a harsh view of mainstream culture, it does not feel like we live in a world that is essentially defined by greed and avarice. And that is true, just because a city owns a park does not mean that we cannot enjoy it much in the same way native people enjoyed their environment centuries ago. But it does change the underlying tone of that enjoyment. 

When we enjoy a tree in a park we can ignore the fact that our enjoyment of the tree itself is in fact a commodity. If everyone suddenly enjoyed nice tables a hundred times more than a wild tree, then that tree in the park would become a table, satiate the demand of our economy. And that wouldn’t be a radical transition for the tree, because it’s been already monetized based on the amount of enjoyment that people get just seeing it in its native state. The wild, the land, is being held hostage. It is alive at the moment, but only because we choose. We like to see in in a cage from the safety of our gravel trails. 

Rowe is bringing that western view together uncomfortably close with the old native view of the wild. The view that the wild can give, and take, that it is a separate entity that is bigger than you. Just look at the way decades upon decades are literally shown in the rings on the stacked logs. Why were they cut down? To be used most likely, to become the convenient key that fits into someones lock. Because now people have become bigger than the wild, we cannot be destroyed by it directly anymore, only by its absence. The flowers, the paper, and the icons upon the logs themselves serve as a certain memorial to a lost ideal. One that may not return, but remains etched in the minds of ancestors, in the same way their faces are etched upon the trees.

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Dis/Unity Reflection

This was a wonderful performance that interacted in a very friendly way with both the venue and the people who came to see it. It was a show rife with the spirit of collaboration and interactive components that put art in the hands of actual everyday viewers.

Art, and especially contemporary or intermedia art can come across as elitist or worst of all, something for white people only. But this piece was a stage for not only conversations relevant to people of color, but also for people of color to lead these conversations. Many skilled artists of color shared their performances, whether it was dance, folk guitar, or a certain type of fortune telling? And said what they wanted to say, in a way only they could say it. Their passion as well as the megaphone that is collaboration ensured that they could not be ignored.

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“Density” An Installment by Liu Wei

On display at the white cube private gallery

Liu Wei’s Density is a reflection on his upbringing in China during a time of increasing urbanization. His installation carries the implication of strongly architectural motifs, but by separating the individual pieces from a larger architectural piece, Liu opens a dialogue. 

He brings his ideas of urbanization into a space where it is small, and can be examined and spoken to on an equal level. This is opposed to a city scene, where one is forced to reckon with the city environment that completely engulfs them. Here in this gallery space Liu is allowed to question the idea of urbanization.

Perhaps the biggest question Liu’s work raises is the question, “What is lost when a city grows?” Liu makes sure we are aware of the full gravity of his question by choosing his materials with surprising intimacy. Some of these materials include broken window frames, debris, and most notably books. Liu lets our imaginations play with what all these materials must have looked like individually, a heterogeneous mixture of stories and identities. Then he crushes our hearts by melting all these stories we could have explored down into one unyielding gray medium. In this way, Density is an allegorical piece that is a lamentation on cultural value that was lost in China when urbanization started its unrelenting march

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Joseph Kosuth’s “On Color Blue” (neon medium)

On display at the Brooklyn Museum as a part of the larger exhibition called “Infinite Blue” Which features the color blue across many mediums, time periods, and interpretations.

A piece like this is bread and butter for Kosuth. He often works with neon to create word heavy installations. On Color Blue is one of his more straightforward installations in that it looks exactly like a paragraph you might read in a book of poetry. Even the font (the beloved Times New Roman) screams literature, prose, and the written word. 

Kosuth may be a poet, however, he is also an artist. And the gestalt effect of his careful choice of words and visual effects, is extremely powerful. 

In a poem every word is significant, but in Kosuth’s piece he could not just type a word out and be done with it. He had to put in the actual effort to form each word with his hands, by blowing the airtight gas chambers into the correct shape.

Furthermore, the piece becomes self referential when the color of the installation itself is taken into consideration. The paragraph asks a question about the way we describe a personal emotional impression from a color. I honestly don’t fully understand the question, but the effect of lighting the entire installation up with the color blue is not lost on me. Kosuth wants you to see the color of his installation and then view the work in light (no pun intended) of that “colour impression” you experienced. If the installation was green or red, would our overall impression of the piece be different? And then what does that say about us and the emotions we can project on something just because of a detail as arbitrary as its color? 

One more thing about this piece and the idea the Kosuth is trying to illuminate (pun intended that time) for us, is what he means by the word “detached”. My first impression is that Kosuth is telling us that when we name the colour impression we get from an object, we separate the object from that impression, it’s a type of dissection in a way. So if I were to look at a painting like Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist”, and I said, “The blue in this painting gives me the impression of sadness.” Kosuth would say that I am separating that idea, sadness, from the painting itself. He also warns against doing this when he says that we should be suspicious of it. Which would suggest that the big idea that Kosuth is trying to teach here is that a dissection of a pieces parts, its color, its form, its medium, can be tempting but an individual examination of all of these parts will not create the same effect as each part working together to form the piece itself. 

It’s an homage to the gestalt, or maybe to the phrase, “don’t overthink it.” Whoops, sorry Kosuth, I think I already did.

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On display at the Guggenheim along with a larger collection of Brancusi’s sculptural work is “The Sorceress”. This piece stands at just under 4 feet and is made entirely walnut on a limestone base. Brancusi is often influenced by folk carvings, that influence manifests itself in this work’s simplistic representation of forms and the symbolic nature of the piece. Much in the same way folk carvings could hold tremendous religious or spiritual significance, the Sorceress’s sharp edges and curves invite the viewer to speculate on the type of symbolism Brancusi was trying to evoke. 

Personally, I picture the work as an examination of the spiritual healer archetype. Almost every culture, no matter how big their civilization, has a member base of its community dedicated to healing. This shaman or priest often is hailed as a spiritual leader as well. The Sorceress, then seems to be the quintessential essence of what defines these spiritual healers across all the diversity of culture. My favorite way that Brancusi evokes this idea, is how the Sorceress both seems to staring down, with her hood pulled up, as if she is examining a person, or an herb, or some smaller piece of Earthly life, it appears she is trying to puzzle out one small part of a great Earthly mystery. At the same time though, the Sorceress seems to be looking up into the great sky (from this angle she has an admittedly pointy nose) she acknowledges the great unknown and has thrust her arms out to greet it and take in as much of it as she possibly can.