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.