Monday, May 21, 2007

Hammer Museum: Permanent Collection (Daumier)


Honoré Daumier collection is great. It's so contemporary! The lawers (c. 1860) haven't changes since then. He has a great talent of capturing the character and telling a story.

My other favorite piece is Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (c. 1866-1868). It has a great composition that certainly comunicates the aspects of materialistic and poetic.

Show at the Hammer Museum




I wasn't really impressed. My overall feeling is that Vija Celmins is a little bit obsessive. I like to look at the night sky, too, but why produce so many of them? Although I understand the artists who create their work for therapeutic reasons, that seems to be the case. She is very skillfull, though, and I liked some of her work that had political aspect.



Regarding the film by Austrian artist Mathias Poledna "Crystal Palace": It's nice to bring the nature into the movie theaters. But so what? It lookes like an attempt to be unique and experimental without having a great idea.





Erik van Lieshout is not my type of an artist, either. I like the art that has roughness to it, but I want to see a great idea and aesthetics, too. His stuff looked like another desperate attempt to be unique by a graduate student.

Georgia Rule



I certainly enjoyed it. The film is directed by Garry Marshall, and the cast includes Jane Fonda, Lindsay Lohan, Felicity Huffman, and Dermot Mulroney.

The film shows three generation of women in the family, and their past is unfolded in an interesting way. It's a very good attempt to analyze the characters. I also liked the contradiction of values between California and Idaho.

My mom made an interesting comment: "Why such whore women got such great guys?" That's a mystery to me, too.

Multimedia Festival at CTVA department, CSUN

It included the student work from web design and video/film classes. It was certainly very informative. I got a very good idea on how they teach web design, and I'm planning to take a class there to improve my skills.

In terms of the short films, I liked a lot of them. There way a n interesting short by Eric Jerome made in a silent black and white movie style.

The other one I remembered is called "If You Smoke, You Die" by Marten Weydah. The story is about a guy who is addictive to smoking and his girlfriend who is trying to stop him. Very Funny. Cigarettes play a lot of tricks with the poor guy, finding him anywhere...

The film I liked the most is called "Her Interests" by Chris Goodwin. It's a comedy about a very shy guy who is having trouble with dating/building relationships, and his friend who is trying to help him. It's hilarious.

Friday, May 18, 2007

Venturous Vanguard Video Festival 2007


I really liked the variety of work there. It ranged from experimental animation to experimental documentaries.
I think my favorite piece was Ode to Persephone (3 min) by Swati Khurana. She is from India, but she lives in New York. The piece is very poetic, it basically shows the women against white background playing with the flowers, and it's inter-cut with narrative poetic interpretation of the myth: "Her love for flowers led her into darkness... She is not afraid of winter, she is afraid of forgetting that spring exists..."

The other piece that I really liked was Tudo (5 min) by Maria Rosa Jijon, Italy. It really reminded me "Nostalgia" by Andrey Tarkovski. It looks like a short film in a documentary style. It has a very poetic narrative (which I really appreciated as I know some Spanish) that compares the life conditions and circumstances of people of upper and lower social class. The narrator is a homeless person. This long list of comparison and contrast ends with the words: "...but we love life, too..."

For more info go to www.contemporarymap.org

Kim Abeles: show at SCAPE



I really enjoyed it. Kim made a series of 3D work that is based on her observation that homeless people don't have their shelters under the trees. She mapped the homeless people's locations in the downtown LA, and she mapped the trees in the same area. Her work is both conceptual and beautiful, which is a rear quality in today's art world.

I noticed the pair of children's shoes wrapped in the newspaper, and I really liked this piece. It seemed so personal to me.
For more info, go to www.scapesite.com

Lecture at the Hammer museum: Paul McCarthy

Horrible. Really horrible. I left after an hour and a half, and I only regret that I didn't leave earlier. 90 percent of the staff that the guy was showing was porn and shit (literally). And he is the professor at UCLA. Well, fine, if you do so-called "conceptual art", at least explain what the concept is. No. He would just go like: "And here me and my friends did this piece of porn", show the slides and move on. I
was hoping, since he is a professor and got international acclaim, he would play with the audience and say something smart at the end, but the more I looked at him, the more I realized that this may not happen. Anyway, I finally decided that I'm not going to be a guinea pig for him.

Radical Communication: Japanese Video Art, 1968-1988 at the Getty


It got a few interesting pieces in it. I particularly liked "Statics of an Egg" (1973) by Fujiko Nakaya. It has a lot of psychological tension. The other one that I liked is "TV Drama" (1987) by Yoshitaka Shimano. I can perfectly associate with his hatred of television. And I really enjoyed "the happy end of the TV drama".

Some of the work was too much technological based, that was certainly interesting at the moment it was created, but now it doesn't look that interesting, although it certainly has some historical value in it.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

The Namesake



Very nice movie about indian immigrants, mostly second generation. I was surprised how they put together indian, american and russian cultures (the main character was named after the Russian writer Nikolay Gogol). I like the way the relationships between the immigrant parents and their children who grow up in the new culture are portraited.

It is ironic though that even the "immigrant" movie happened to be about the upper middle class again.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Revealed: Women, Art, Life, Success

I really liked the discussion. It was very informative. I think my favorite question was about combining artistic career with raising kids. (It was actually the first question asked by the audience members). There was a variety of answers united by one theme: "It's hard". Although woman who already have kids didn't regret it.

Here are a few comments that I liked:

"We behave like we have a profession. [ ] We have a calling." - Judy Baca

"When you do public art, you're invisible."- Kim Abeles

"For the public art, I'm always amazed how it can be so personal." - Kim Abeles

"You are talking about emerging... if it doesn't work, just re-emerge. [ ] Just find the place for yourself."


I also liked the comments of Judy Baca on the concept of success in art. I always defined it like being able to make the living with art. According to Judy, the real success in art is to be able to express yourself, to say what you want, and to work with people that you like.

Saturday, March 17, 2007

Drive By



It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon when I made it there. Here are the artists that I liked:

Bruce Gray (www.brucegray.com)
My favorite pieces are "High Heel Shoe#1" and "The Big Cheese #3" I think there is something about the dimentions of the work: It is interesting to see the small objects that we use everyday made as a large-scale sculptures.





Stuart Rapeport
Title: (choose from the following)
1. "School"
2. "Fish out of water"
3. "Don't Bite off more than you can chew"
4. "Bait"
5. "Fishwatch"
6. "The Stalker"
7. "The Infinite Patience of the Feline Eye"
8."Crouch"
9."Stay focused"
10."Look at the book picture"
11."Curiosty killed the cat"
12."Individual, family, friends, community, nation, world "
13."A dozen fish one cat"
14."look before you leap"
15."Safety in numbers"
16."Stay in school"
17."Bait and switch"

I chose #19.“Mother told me there would by days like this". Even though my mother never told me this, I still want to believe it. Especially now.



Farzad Kohan
Title: Puppeteers
Mixed Media 2006

Somehow this piece made me think of my current job at the company.

2007 Women's Music, Art, Dance & Word Festival: Celebrating Diversity



The show was opened at the 2nd City Council gallery on Saturday, March 10 (http://www.2ndcitycouncil.org) I really enjoyed the diversity of work that included all sorts of art mediums, as well as performances. Here are some pieces that I liked:

Judy Y
Model #5047
Lightjet C-print

This is the photographic portrait of a doll against dark background. The light on the mirrored image is perfectly symmetrical, and that probably makes it more disturbing. It talks to the value of the individual and the way it's perceived in the media.

Linda Bundlin
Ruby Slipper
35 mm Film Tapestry

This artist has been working as an editor for a while. Her piece is a collages put together from the pieces of 35 mm film. It looks like some sort of 3D installation from the distance, but then the viewer can move closer and see the individual images on the film.

Eileen Anderson
self-portrait
mixed media

This is a 3D installation of a female figure covered with the product labels and the wire (the kind of wire that is used on barber-wired fences for animals). "Women are often objectified and treated with disrespect".

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Casting Nature: François-Thomas Germain's Machine d'Argent





Casting Nature is the show of 18-century art that is designed around Machine d'Argent, a silver masterpiece by François-Thomas Germain. What makes the sculpture unique is that, unlike the other table centerpieces produced at that time, it had no function outside of being a decorative object.

Somehow this show really made me think of the purpose of art making. I noticed that the piece doesn't appeal to me emotionally, but, on the contrary, makes me thing of the dead rabbit and birds and regret the fact that the majority of humans are not vegetarian. Could it be because of my mindset on that day? But at the same time, the other silver pieces that had certain functionality assigned to them didn't evoke the same kind of feeling. (By the way, I'm not a vegetarian, although I'd like to be one.)



Similar is true about paintings. Speaking outside of the admiration of the technical skills of the painter, I felt sorry for the dead little birds. Maybe because in my mind little birds are not supposed to be eaten. Perhaps, for the 18th century person who didn't get much meat on the table, this art was telling a different story.

Perhaps there is a change in perception between 18th and the 21st centuries. During the period of Enlightenment, people (artists) were trying to replicate and rival the nature. Now, with all the ecological issues, there is a concept of how fragile life really is.


http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/casting_nature/

Icons of Sinai



I made it to the Icons from Sinai show on the last day. I wish it wasn't the last day, because the show was magnificent. To me, it really had a healing effect. I spent about 3 hours there, meditating on the icons and researching the historical background. One of the interesting things that I learned is that the monastery of St. Catherine was built at the spot where, according to the legend, Mouses saw the burning bush. There is also a very interesting (symbolic and poetical) parallel between the burning bush and the Virgin Mary.

Among the icons that had the strongest impact on me are the large icon of St. Peter (realistic-looking face-I believe that's what St. Peter looked like). Very interesting icon by El Greco with St Catherine's monastery at Sinai, the way he imagined it. Virgin Mary with Archangel Gabriel (I forgot the English name for the scene)-golden leaf-you can see the Holy Spirit descending. If you look at a certain angle, you can see the crucifixion in the center.

I wish I could come there again, but it was the last day of the show.

Saturday, February 24, 2007

Art Journal

Feb. 18

I visited a very interesting show of German painting at Getty. It is base on comparison and contrast of the work of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) and Gerard Richter (born 1932).

Friedrich was one of the first artists that made landscapes their subject matter. The pieces of Richter are large-scale abstract paintings, the examples of German Expressionism.
In general, Friedrich's art is contemplative and meditative. Richter's work as emotional and energetic. But at the same time there is always a sense of something greater that hides behind the detail-oriented painting of Friedrich. For example, his "Bushes in the Snow" communicate a great sense of anxiety, that brings it very close to Richet's abstractions.
Looking at the historical background, Friedrich was affected by the French invasion in 1800. Similary, Richet was getting his art education in the postwar East Germany, and he moved to West Germany in 1961.

"Cross in the Mountains: by Friedrich made me really stop and think. It depicts the mountain and the crusifiction, but there are the beams of light coming from a light source behind the mountain, like projectors in LA. Very surprising.