MFA Lecture Series - EXTRA CREDIT (Merlin Carpenter)

Merlin Carpenter, No Re-Entry, 2011

Today, I attended a lecture by artist, Merlin Carpenter. During the lecture, Carpenter talked about three of his recent exhibitions. The first exhibition featured a door barricading a room. In order to enter the exhibit and see the paintings within, one had to pay 5000 euros, or they could stay in the greeting area and pay nothing to see playing cards with the paintings on them. Through this exhibit, Carpenter plays with the idea of commodity. As an artist, one produces commodities of no value, but with regard to the capitalism system, art becomes of value. Thus, paying 5000 euros becomes alright in the minds of the consumer to view and purchase commodities. Furthermore, Carpenter criticizes how money plays a crucial role in the art world. In addition, another exhibit carpenter talked about was titled Tate Cafe. In the exhibit, Carpenter sent up the space to look like a cafe, furnished with pricing menus, chairs and an no re-entry door. The no re-entry door symbolized how the space was an organized thought out area, but when the viewer left the space, they would return to a world of chaos. Furthermore, the door symbolized how the artist can manipulate the viewer, like the manipulations of a capitalist society. As such, through this exhibit, Carpenter shows how the artist is a free person, but works within the constraint of capitalist realism. Moreover, the last set of slides Carpenter displayed to the audience was of his project with around 30 faux Burberry pattern paintings. Carpenter brought these Burberry paintings throughout Eastern Europe with him. Bringing these paintings throughout Europe with him allowed him to juxtapose the symbolic nature of the pattern of Burberry in that it has resulted from a capitalist society with the wildly capitalist society of Eastern Europe. While the Burberry paintings are seen as lavish, when set next to an rundown environment of Eastern Europe, it looks even more lavish. In a sense, while capitalism works for Burberry, Carpenter suggests that it may not be beneficial for everyone, such as Eastern Europe.

Merlin Carpenter, Burberry Paintings, 2010

Although Carpenter's work lacked artistic aesthetic value to my personal taste, it was interesting to learn of his ideas. Carpenter highlighted to me the importance of viewing art through the constraints of capitalism. Capitalism is prevalent in society, and as an artist, one must not completely avoid the system. While artists desire to be removed from the ideals of capitalism, without working within the constraints of capitalism, artists will be left out of the competition for influence.

MOCA Exhibition

I couldn't find the Sagmeister exhibit, so I enjoyed the Urs Fischer one instead.
The Urs Fischer exhibit is on display from April 21st to August 19th. I found these three exhibits particularly interesting.

Bread House                          Portrait of a Single Raindrop

The Untitled piece with a house made of bread has the appearance of a cabin constructed of bread. The long baguette pieces act as structural timbers, while the sliced pieces look like the running bond of masonry bricks. Upon a closer look, the piece is actually constructed of wood and merely covered and filled with bread. I think the piece would have been much more interesting if it were solely constructed of bread, but there are probably structural limitations to how well stale bread can hold itself up.

The Portrait of a Single Raindrop is a huge 'hole in the wall.' I love how the negative piece is resting against the wall in the back, supporting the idea that 'nothing' is wasted. The rough cut of the wall really reveals the massing and draws attention to the structural light gauge steel.

The juxtaposition of these two pieces becomes an interesting way of drawing attention to the architectural structure of construction. The bread shows the concept of connections made by tectonic pieces, while the Portrait of a Single Raindrop becomes a cutaway expression with the lack of structure. 

 
Suspended Line of Fruit

This Untitled piece contains a line of fruit that is elegantly suspended only inches from the ground. Each of the six pieces of fruit hangs from a thin, clear string that is attached to the ceiling. Although the fruits are in sequential order by size, the grape at the end (or beginning) of the line is barely noticeable. As the fruits age and rot, it's clever how the fruits are suspended so that ants won't crawl on them; however, this is in a museum, so they probably make sure there are no insects to disrupt these art pieces.

Llyn Foulkes

On Saturday I visited the Hammer Museum to see an exhibition of artwork by Llyn Foulkes. It was an eclectic display of surrealist, pop, mixed media, and three dimensional paintings. Foulkes addressed many themes through various methods over the span of his career. Some works displayed nostalgia, some presented gory portraits, and others explored the corrupt nature of commercial pop culture.

This work, Return Home, seems very nostalgic, the head being placed on a chalkboard, which is often associated with childhood. The vintage postcards are another motif present throughout many of Foulkes' pieces.

Foulkes' piece With Love is a self portrait he had been working on for many years before covering the forehead and eyes with bloody red paint. This bold move began a series of paintings with bloody and severed heads.

Some of Foulkes' works extended beyond the painting's boundaries.


















Many of Foulkes' works of art used a great deal of texture, often protruding from the page and becoming three dimensional. The Awakening, a sad portrayal of a marriage's final years, utilizes various materials to create this effect.














Llyn Foulkes also created a series of large desert rock paintings in psychedelic and electric blues, greens, and pinks. In person these paintings were evocative and beautiful. Foulkes, however, was not pleased with the lack of depth in these painting, although they were well received by critics and art galleries.


















Foulkes addressed the of commercial pop culture through a series of paintings that included the iconic Mickey Mouse as the symbol of an industry that brainwashes children, effecting not only their lives but their parents' as well.

 The final two painting presented in the exhibition, The Lost Frontier and POP respectively, were each displayed in their own rooms. Each room was completely dark with black walls and each painting was large enough to cover most of the wall. The paintings, Foulkes' masterpieces, combined many of the themes that were present throughout Foulkes' work. The texture of the masterpieces, and the way Foulkes indented and brought forward different parts of the pieces, created light and movement. In the last piece, POP, music created by Foulkes was playing in the room. It was really amazing to view these paintings in such an environment.

For further information on Llyn Foulkes, visit his site.

LACMA Visit

Our visit to the Los Angeles Coumty Museum of Art was a really inspiring and enjoyable experience. The Ken Price sculptures were probably the highlight of my visit because I would never imagine there could be so much to sculpture. It's astonishing to see how Price incorporated shape, color, patterns, and texture into a 3-dimensional art piece through such a unique process. Quite honestly I have a hard time seeing the aesthetic appeal in some of his works, but the most impressive aspect was the creation of the pieces.

My second favorite has to be Ed Ruscha because I really admire his designs, and to see it in person is really quite a unique experience as opposed to seeing it through a computer screen. The Drawing Surrealism exhibit was personally inspiring for me because I took drawing for the first time this past semester, and I never really understood the importance of line and how to preserve line quality until I saw this exhibition.

Trouble in Paradise at the Grammy Museum

Some of my friends in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism had the privilege of assisting Communication Professor Josh Kun in curating an exhibit at the Grammy Museum during the Fall 2011 school semester. The Latino/a Student Assembly at USC organized a Power Trip to visit the exhibit in March. The exhibit was finally open to the public on February 22, 2012 and was made possible by the Grammy Museum in conjunction with the Getty initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980. The actual exhibit title is Trouble in Paradise: Music and Los Angeles, 1945-1975. Kun said that his ultimate goal for the exhibit was to inform the public and break traditional thoughts on what happened in LA during the specified time period. Usually when people think back to the time between 1945 and 1975 in terms of music, they think Beach Boys, Elvis, and Rock and Roll. But they miss a huge chunk of history! In the exhibit, Kun and the USC students involved with the project managed to include installments of first hand references in the form of photos, news reports, record sleeves, etc. to show how Chicano Rights protests and important movements during the Civil Rights Era were reflected in popular music of the times. Important parts of the exhibit were the music stations where guests could actually sample music bits. The exhibit is still open, but only for a limited time, so check it out!

Christian Marclay’s 'The Clock'

I went to see Christian Marclay’s The Clock at the LACMA a few days ago. Screened from noon on Saturday March 24th to noon on Sunday March 25th, The Clock is a 24-hour, single-channel montage created from thousands of clips from cinema from its beginning to the present. Each clip is connected with something related to clocks, and synchronised to the viewer’s real time.

Time marked the shift from one scene to the next. It was conveyed through different things like clocks, watches, sundials, towers, speech, horns, etc., and different channels like audio, video and suggestiveness. The different ways time was told was one of the things that kept the film so interesting throughout.

Another novel aspect of The Clock that I had never before experienced (and I think I always wondered how this would be like) was that the time in the film was the same as the time in real life. Although the Bing Theatre was pitch dark, you could tell what time it was outside based on what was going on in the film (and I checked the time on my phone to confirm, just in case; the movie time was accurate).

The film had scenes of various famous characters, actors, scenes, eras, films, from the classic films to the contemporary ones, all connected in their interactions with clocks. I am not sure whether I found this a celebration of cinema or Hollywood though. I think the celebration was more for the clocks in cinema, or rather how clocks were communicated, which in turn has broader meaning in cinema and communication design. It seems like a great accomplishment by Marclay who managed to complete this task of selecting, cutting and clipping all these videos together to make something 24 hours long. The variety in the way the time in each scene was captured by each director was refreshing, reminding the viewer of the different degrees of creativity that spans the length of cinema’s history. Marclays seems like he has an eye for such things. It was funny how I was seeing the principles of design like balance and proportion in many of the scenes, from those that were shot decades ago to barely a few months ago.

I feel kinda bad though: I saw it for about two hours and I couldn’t take it anymore because I got irritable and frustrated for some reason. But I guess I’m lucky to have experienced it.

Rather unrelated, but if you’re into design and film things, watch L'eclisse by Michaelangelo Antonioni. Every scene is shot like a work of art and it’s awesome :O.

ON RIGHT NOW: Capsize and Now he’s out in public and everyone can see

Although I am not much familiar with the mechanisms behind performance art, when I went to the current exhibits at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), I could see the many ways how the artists employed performance to make art. I think they are great for anyone interested in learning more about performance art. And even if you are not interested, they still show you about the many ways you can enhance any work of art through performance.

*Spoiler Alert* *Nudity Alert*

The first exhibit, Capsize, by Tad Beck and Jennifer Locke, was technically not merely performance; it was more graphic art. The performances had been captured before-hand via film, and played again on a loop at the exhibit. One performance was actually carried out during the opening, recorded, and played on a loop at the front gallery for the rest of the week. Beck acknowledged that his art was not so much performance, as it was the way performance was captured.

the bubble pictures

For example, in the bubble pictures, the elements in the pictures were captured in a surreal manner, jumbled up like a Rubik’s Cube. The water took up most of the area, and through the blurry background you could make out the figure of a nude male. It is only through the tiny bubble in the centre that you can see a defining shape. This is certainly something that would be hard to pull off with the performance medium alone.

the guy on the stool

On the other side of the exhibit were pictures of a man in various positions on a stool. The way this man was captured on film, in the air, probably in the act of some flailing motion, but captured in an extremely still frame, made the viewer contemplate whether he was in motion or not. This balance again plays on the medium of performance art.

The other pieces were two pairs of videos projected onto opposite walls of the gallery, with the two videos from each pair synchronized with its partner and projected next to each other. The videos captured a similar topsy-turvy performance, but this time the videos were shot through opposite angles. However, they still retained a common focal point, and were placed next to each other based on this focal point. This created an extremely vivid contrast, one that struck me powerfully.

the seated bald guy looking at himself in the projection.
in the back you can see the paired projections.

The live performance capture that took place on the Thursday opening comprised a nude male sitting on a high stool (which he climbed and descended using a white, fetishy swing) that was placed in a black, rubber boat, and being doused in glue by the artists, who were clad in white coats (the whole room was white; so was the glue, which became transparent as it dried up). He then sat there for three hours, being turned around on the stool 180 degrees every half-hour. He was being captured through a video camera from the ceiling, and you could see the video in the front gallery, projected here as well from the ceiling onto the floor. It was like a replica, except that there was no literal performance taking place in the front gallery. All this time, spectators could go the back micro-lounge and see the performance take place through a glass panel. Although the next day the model/artist said he did not intend for this, he was shivering and twitching by the end of his performance. I think it actually served to bring out the themes better, especially those of sexuality and (probably) erotic sadism.

I would like to add here that the thought behind the way the gallery space was used was also a new thing for me. I had never thought that so much time went into the perfect placement of each work to achieve harmony and the greatest effect on the spectator. The walls of the front gallery were completely covered by 5 giant projections. The empty space was used for hanging still pictures. The ambience created by the sound of the water made one feel like in a different world, as if experiencing the performance first-hand. The way that the artists made use of the unique dimensions and shapes of the gallery space was like a part of the art itself. For example, Beck and Locke decided to use the central pillar in the micro-lounge for the swing, and use the area next to it for the boat. The curator for this show was Marjorie Vecchio.

This environmental effect was especially more prominent in the next exhibit that was synchronously going on in another room separated by a heavy, black curtain made by Kim. In this exhibit, called Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, Natalie Bookchin created an 18 channel video using excerpts from videos collected from around the world through the internet, of random vlogger’s comments on scandals involving African-American men. The different layers were not put into one video, however. Each layer was put on 18 separate television screens scattered throughout the dark room. So, if you entered, you would suddenly be turned around by one TV person saying “HE IS BLACK!”, then, in perfect sync, another would light up with someone saying “I am not racist, but...”. So many different patterns were explored in this way, with sometimes many screens working together to say similar things, or just one screen saying something weird or sanctimonious, or sometimes the whole room would go dark, silently begging for reflection. In general, this presentation in such an empty environment, combatted with the room’s irregular, yet harmonious, saturation with so many voices through different senses like audio and video, made one feel like in a different world. The irony here is that this is the world we are living in.

stills of the different vloggers.

While one spectator came out of the exhibit after five minutes feeling disoriented, I felt that the longer you stood there, the better you could connect the dots about societal attitudes and changes.

After viewing this exhibit, I was thinking about how much of contemporary art these days includes performance. Maybe this is similar to how rhetoric is used in all mediums to call for interactive engagement.

Apart from these two exhibits, there is also the exhibit from last week’s Staalplaat Soundsystem performance and Margie Livingston’s Twenty Gallons up at LACE.

More information here.
Photographs taken from the LACE website for education purposes.

Museum Visit : Action/Reaction

i found the theme of this exhibit, action/reaction, to be very relevant to this time period, especially in the ways that the artists interpreted the theme. although it is very broad and could be completely lost on our generation, the approach that the artiststook made it current and very accessible. for example i really thought that the reusable bags made out of billboards were really innovative and presented such a creative way to react to the issue of shopping bags. the prius billboards made of plants, in my opinion, captured the theme the best. the design is something that is visible to a vast amount of people, and the way that the designers took the purpose of the object they were promoting into consideration whileconsidering the materials i found to be crucial in the representation of the prius. the most interesting design was the house built with the retired airplane wing as a roof. although it proved to be extremely impractical, the product was visually striking and perhaps will inspire other artists, architects, and designers to take a more practical approach to this idea. i really did not enjoy the crystal designs, which were showcased as futuristic suits for strange alien-like woman. honestly i dont understand the artist's vision, nor did i find it visually stimulating. it was pretty ugly, but not in a good way.

Collection: MOCA's First Thirty Years

The first thought I had as I walked around the exhibition was the amount of variety that the artists showed. Then I realized it made total sense, because the works represented over 200 artists and a time period from about 1940 to now. MOCA holds the most important artworks from the postwar period to now. Nevertheless, from paintings to sculptures to sketches to musical art to poster art to mechanical design to video art, it was like tapping into an amazing resource of many ideas coming together, somehow under the pretense of being one coherent show. As Liz Larner said, "There is a whole tradition where volume and density and mass are almost the same thing..."

I chose to visit The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, showing the portion of the Collection dated from 1980 to current times. As I said, MOCA found it difficult to categorize the many different forms, concepts, and media that had arose during the last 30 years. They also chose to display artwork not only from Los Angeles and the United States, but also from international channels.

The artwork that caught my eye the most was a series of blurry pictures of a woman, taken from a suspicious angle and perspective, coupled with the minutes and description of her activities. I found it strange at first that the seeming work of a stalker, or possibly a detective, could be displayed to the world so easily. I read the diary of the lady, which was the underlying piece in her series, which explained that she had hired the detective man anonymously to follow her around one day. She bumped into him a couple times, and went about her day as normally as possible. However, her ultimate aim was to draw the attention of the man so that he may possibly be attracted to her. This artwork resulted in mixed feelings for me: at first I thought it was crazy the strange desperate measures she took in order to get noticed. Was it her loneliness that caused her to actually hire someone to violate her privacy? But then I realized she had given up her privacy on purpose, and therefore he was not invading it. She was conscious of it the entire time. Her call for love and attention seemed normal, as anyone would do because everyone experiences loneliness one time or another. It could also be an exciting factor to a normal, dull day--watching over your shoulder for a man who could perhaps end up being your lover.

Another art piece that caught my eye was a normal dining table featuring simple, everyday items that typically occupy that space: a plate, bowl, small plant, etc. What at first glance seemed nothing special was actually a piece of mechanical wonder. All the items on the table were rotating, upon deeper observation, at a very slow velocity. The various battery-powered machines hidden underneath the table showed proof of the artist's work. This took me by surprise because I understood that this was to show people that they should really take a second look at whatever seems normal, obvious, and on-the-surface. One could barely tell that these things were rotating, even upon close observation, but traces of movement could be detected, if just barely. This piece also encouraged me to view other artworks in the exhibition with extra careful eyes.

Overall, I enjoyed this gallery of collections from MOCA's First Thirty Years. I was amazed by many of the artworks and even the collection as a whole. The creativity and the new ways of demonstrating concepts were thrilling. It really showed me how even in the last thirty years, there has been so many different movements all over the world--and how we should look forward to more.

-Joyce Pak

MOMA-San Francisco

Over spring break, I went to the anniversary show at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in San Francisco. It was pretty cool.







This was one of my favorite pieces at the show. What first caught my eye was its size. You can't really tell but it was about as tall as the room. Its texture was incredible as well. I could tell that the artist had packed on layers upon layers of thick paint which made for a really awesome composition with great movement.















I also really liked this piece by Andy Warhol because it was the first of his works that I've been able to see in person. Also, around the time I visited MOMA I'd been studying up on his work as research for our poster project. I really like how he takes such seemingly simple concepts and makes them into complex, colorful works of art.








This piece was really cool as well. It's a sharpie drawing of part of San Francisco. This reminded me of the sketches we had to do for some of our previous projects that were all inked in. I was really able to appreciate the artist's attention to detail and I think that understanding is really what drew me to the piece.

Robert Rauschenburg

I had the opportunity to visit the MOCA museum a few weeks ago for one of my other classes Visual culture and Literacy. I was most interested in Rauschenburg's pieces because of the use of collage-like element and the different materials used caught my attention. I found his "Man in White Shoe" artwork very narrative to his personal life and the height and the use of proportions were visually pleasing. The use of pictures mounted on the top part of the shelf in his "Man with White Shoe" directed movement and a collage-like feeling because of the way it was overlain upon eachother. The use of open space between the three spaces are evened accordingly to the figure and height of the sculpture and the use of arrangement and organization allows the work to be effective because each represents a distinct part. Most of his works seem to be symbolic because the hen and the mirror reflecting the portrait of the man represents a story itself. His pieces are not collective as a whole because it does not directly provide the information to grasp on, but rather his pieces are mysterious and allows the audience to narrate their own story by perceiving the images and pictures placed inside the box.

MOPA

I had the pleasure of seeing “State of Mind: A California Invitational” a photography exhibit on display at the Museum of Photographic Arts located in Balboa Park in San Diego, in addition to their permanent collection. The show is a celebration of California photography in the 21^st century. Although the artists reside in a similar geographic location, the photographs varied vastly. From portraits of mini beauty queens, to the classic female nude; from landscapes to lynchings. Todd Hido created a series called A Road Divided, in which he took pictures of landscapes as he was traveling through a rainy car door window creating an eerie and hazy feel appropriate for the weather he was depicting. In the erased lynching series, Ken Gonzales Day took old photographs of lynchings and erased the victim. I speculated that the photos were meant to problematise the viewer by placing the viewer amongst the perpetrators. Susan Anderson created High Glitz, a series of portraits of young beauty queens, in full make up and dress. These photos are unedited and are meant to draw attention to how these young girls are made up to emulate more mature expectations for beauty. Overall, the show had great variety from photographs meant to capture unlikely moments of beauty to photos that confront social issues.

Getty Villa! Greeks Keepin' it Classy

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting the Getty Villa, the Getty Center’s sister museum. The Getty Villa’s collection focuses mostly on ancient works from Greece, Rome, and Etruria. The entire museum is modeled Roman architecture and features gorgeous fountains and gardens in addition to art works. My visit focused mainly in ancient Greek and Roman pottery. The museum organizes ceramics by themes including athletics, war, animals, gods and goddesses. Greek and Roman pottery was hand built, but with incredible precision and technique. This is also reflected in the detailed designs featured on the pots, which usually depict an event. The designs usually feature silhouettes of profiles and extremely intricate detail (some of these patterns could be great inspiration for Design I!). The pottery demonstrated a lot about ancient Greek culture, and they definitely went through a sexist party animal phase. Some of the larger pots were offered as a prize for the winners of athletic competitions, but it wasn’t the spectacularly crafted vase that was valuable…it was the wine contained inside. Also, much of the decorative pottery was meant for the males’ large debaucherous gatherings. The images depicted on cups and plates were meant to be entertaining and humorous for the men and often included themes such as: being really intoxicated, homo-eroticism, and having sex with everyone except for their wives (wives were meant to produce legitimate babies whereas prostitutes and young men were up for grabs). These pots feature a younger man holding a pot while his superior urinates into it and a young man having a sexual encounter with a prostitute…keep it classy Greeks, keep it classy.

Blum & Poe Presenting Carroll Dunham

Also found on the La Cienega Blvd. row was the art gallery Blum & Poe. It was currently presenting the artwork of Carroll Dunham on the first floor. Carroll Dunham is an artist working in New York and Connecticut whose artwork was the center of many one-person exhibitions. His work is even included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NY, and many other venues. I found the contrast between Dunham and Natrop highly interesting.

Where Natrop mainly used cut pieces of paper to convey his intentions, Dunham uses paintings--in this particular exhibition--of mainly trees, and human-like characters to depict meaning. Dunham, unlike Natrop who chose to use soft muted colors, employs a vibrant, playful palette which adds to the strange quality of his paintings. At Blum & Poe, Dunham combined two of his most well-known type of paintings. One is the human-like characters, colored with pink, flesh tones, with full nudity and a discomfort to the perspective and to their poses. Another are his detailed, comic-like paintings of trees that have a hint of being dug up or a coming fall.

In view of the unrestricted naked bodies, one can see the underlying glimpse of the trees--behind, surrounding, inbetween, underneath the bodies. The connection between the nudes and the natural atmosphere. Dunham uses the effect of a subtle shifting foreground and background to unify his two ideas as a whole, balanced painting.

I was surprised to see how intimate yet blunt these images were. Unlike Natrop who used a more subtle, even ambiguous nature to his artwork to convey struggle and complexity, Dunham uses a more obvious tone--although his message may be hard to interpret. Although Dunham did have some sort of subtlety to his message, it was more of a louder medium compared to Natrop's which was much more ambiguous. Dunham also used a more wide, bright space to display his artworks, whereas Natrop used his enclosed gallery and the structure of the building to enhance his implications.

I really enjoyed the playful-like tendency that hid the conflict being depicted within the pictures. I think that is what attracted me to these colorful paintings. They seemed so lively and exciting but represented a more creepy meaning.

-Joyce Pak

Taylor De Cordoba presenting Chris Natrop

I recently visited the La Cienega Blvd. row of art galleries and shows. Out of the several of them I visited, Chris Natrop's show interested me the most. From the start I felt adventurous entering her gallery: the door was unmarked, there was no "open" sign to welcome visitors, and the windows were covered. Once I entered, I understood why it was necessary to block off the natural sources of light within the gallery. Natrop cleverly implemented colorful soft lighting, combined with the use of the actual gallery architecture to present hisartwork. The result was a beautiful ethereal effect that continued the atmosphere of mystery and complication. This installation was called myopic spring tangle, which featured hand-cut pieces of paper hanging from the ceiling in an inventive, tangled manner. These pieces of paper were also colored with watercolor. He also cut up mirrors to be displayed in a similar fashion; the mirrors themselves looked like threadwork.

I thought that these tangles of paper had resemblance to natural cities made of trees and flowers and water, much like one would expect in a fairy world. In reality, Natrop found inspiration in Los Angeles--mainly in the Los Angeles river, found in the narrow concrete channel, man-made and mainly used to control seasonal flooding. He wished to depict the relationship between man and nature: "Swaths of urban detritus carried by the runoff become ensnared in the tangle of wildlife. Frayed shopping bags, tangled nylon string, shredded clothing, strips of printed-matter festoon the leaf-stripped branches, jetsam flapping in the breeze like Tibetan prayer flags." I found it so interesting how Natrop chose to depict something most people would consider sewage channels as something so beautiful--then I remembered he had meant to make it ambiguous. The mirror he used was meant to reflect the viewer in an complex pattern, meant to keep the mind searching to understanding and decipher.

I found myself wondering not only the meaning and inspiration behind these pieces of artwork, but also the procedure it took to create them. At first glance they seem to be the result of mere x-acto knives and human concentration. However, in order to achieve the precision required to cut the pieces of paper and to structurally format them, Natrop wore powerful reading glasses to assist him. This lead him into a "myopic state", hence the name of his exhibition.

I really enjoyed the beauty and alluring yet unsettling nature of this exhibition. What at first glance looks attractive and mysterious becomes much more with deeper analysis of the art. One can really begin to see the struggle and psychological allusion underlaying his seemingly calm artwork.

-Joyce Pak

James Benning's Ruhr

I recently watched Benning's film Ruhr at Redcat. With this 121 minute HD video with only seven shots, the first six ranging in length from six to seventeen minutes and the last shot lasting for what seemed like an eternity, Benning records various views of Ruhr with encyclopaedic detail. The shots ranged from Muslims at prayer to the colors of the window shutters and houses on a typical working class street. It felt as if the whole room was being forced to pray or meditate about “cinema” all together. It required a crazy, ritualistic concentration to sit through the movie and enjoy it. Ruhr provided me with time to reflect on what I love about cinema, and think about the human act of creating meaning out of images. I recommend any of Benning's films to be given a patient chance.

New York MOMA and the Metropolitan

It has been awhile since break, but I finally figured out how to get some pictures off my camera and onto my computer, and thought I would share some on here. I visited the New York MOMA and the Metropolitan Museums while I was in NY. The most exciting part was being able to see all the famous paintings that are so familiar in posters and in pictures but have a whole new quality when seen up close in person.

Both of these museums are huge, and unfortunately I tried to conquer both in the same day. This was ambitious --although almost everything on display is something amazing, it is simply impossible to see everything. As a result, I am pretty sure I missed a couple of the best exhibits, but I did manage to see the majority of the museums. There was a huge range of artists and styles from traditional, representational paintings to modern, more quirky displays. One artist being featured was Gabriel Orozco, who had his own dynamic range of artwork. I was a bit surprised then to see that this world-famous artist's first display was nothing but a plain white shoebox. The second? Four plastic yogurt lids, each with its own wall.

There were several miscellaneous pieces that I especially enjoyed and snapped pictures of. One artist had several "newspaper" paintings up. At first glance, they appear to be simple newspaper clippings cut out and decorated with a few lines of paint. Upon closer examination, however, you can just barely tell that the artist hand painted the words of the entire article and pictures himself. Lastly, there were a few brightly colored collages and mixed media works of art that stood out to me in particular and have posted here.

Overall, visiting these two museums in new york city made for one of the best museum-going experiences I have ever had, and I look forward to coming back to NY some day to get a second, more thorough look at both the MOMA and the Met.