Exit Strategy Required for Cosmococa-Programa in Progress, CC4 Nocagions

Sunday, January 16th, we went to Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. When I found this exhibition at MOCA I was so excited to bring my one-year-old through it. She really got into Between Bodies/Tijuana by Nina Waisman, an audio installation at the 2010 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art we experienced a few months ago. And she just started swimming lessons at the YMCA two Saturdays ago, so I thought Hélio Oiticica and Neville D'Almeida's Cosmococa-Programa in Progress, CC4 Nocagions (the one with the pool) would just be the coolest thing ever.

MOCA's website seemed to emphasize the logistics of using the pool so it seemed like they really wanted people to swim to complete the piece. I searched everywhere for a report of someone's actual experience swimming in the pool as part of this exhibit. I found nothing. I just trusted that when they said they'd have towels and
changing rooms they'd really have towels and changing rooms. I figured as long as I packed our swimsuits, it would be totally doable.

After experiencing all the other pieces, we finally arrived at the staging area for piece and it looked promising. They had a lovely stack of clean towels and dressing stalls as private as any clothing store. There were other families in the pool. A lifeguard was on duty. We had our suits. No problem.

So we changed into our swimsuits and went into the installation. There were little cushions on the deck along the edge of the pool to sit on. So I sat on one of the cushions with my child in my arms with the idea that I'd scope out the pool and then get in. Well, the cushion sort of slipped so I slid into the pool, landed on my feet just fine, with my child in my arms. A little more of a surprise entry than I had hoped for, but no big deal.

The water was as warm as the Y's heated pool. It was really shallow (90 centimeters as described in the information about the piece I'd read beforehand). The floor and sides of the pool are a slippery plastic that reminded me of the bottoms of above ground pools when I was a kid. But with a little care, I managed not to slip in such a way that might imperil my child.

We did our front glides and our back float just like in swim class, but in a dark room in a pool with blue lights around it while slides of John Cage's musical scores covered in cocaine cycled on the wall all to the music of John Cage. Sounds weird, but my child totally dug it. She was actually way more into it than she was into swim class the day before. The lifeguard was really friendly and complimented us for coordinating our blue and green swimsuits with the blue and green lights in the
installation, which was somewhat intentional on my part. I felt like I had done this literal immersion of my child in art really well.

Then it was time to get out of the pool. My child was easy. Her dad had a towel and I handed her up to him. No problem. Also, no ladder. No stairs. No grab rails. No nothing to help you get out of that pool. But it's only 90 centimeters deep, right? Well, the water is only 90 centimeters deep, but the side of the pool actually extends about another foot and a half. So that's about four and a half feet. I'm 5'7". Now, I've jumped out of the side of a pool before, but it's
actually easier if the pool is a little deeper because you've got buoyancy on your side, and I am nothing if not buoyant. But in only three feet of water, you get no help from buoyancy. The height of the pool was too high for me to get my arms under me sufficiently to pull myself out. I will also concede that my upper body strength is nonexistent.

So I jumped off the slippery bottom of the pool and pushed myself up with my arms as far as I could go. I leaned over onto the deck as much as I could. The edge of the pool was hard, sharp, and non-slip, so it was pretty tough to shimmy up even when I got my upper body onto the deck. Then I tried to throw my leg up onto the deck. I gave it my best shot about four times before the lifeguard hoisted me from the top and some totally random and quite probably very sketchy dude pushed me from the back and very slowly extricated me from the pool.

In addition to the glaring, but rather temporary humiliation (which I'm furthering by retelling this story as often as possible), I suffered some SERIOUS bruises on my tummy and leg.

The moral of the story: when you immerse yourself in art, you need an exit strategy.

If you're in the L.A. area before the show closes February 27th, my daughter and I highly recommend you go. Next Suprasensorial will travel to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., where it will be on view from June 23 through September 11, 2011. Be sure to pack a swimsuit and work out an exit strategy.

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Art Museum Curators Super Bowl Bet

On January 29th All Things Considered had a neat interview with the curators of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art regarding a Superbowl bet in which the loser will loan an artwork to the winner for three months.

Museumology

As most of the art we see these days is in museums, I hope this post about museums doesn't veer too far off the topic of art history.

Back on November 20, 2008, Edward Rothstein's review of the newly renovated National Museum of American History appeared in the New York Times. One part of his critique particularly stuck in my craw,

. . . [T]he installation of 400 objects from the museum’s collection mounted in 275 feet of display cases in the new spaces [relies more on sensation than explanation and exploration]. It is an array of curiosity cabinets loosely organized by subject, with items like an 1870s surgical set, a Kodak Brownie camera, and a set of Vietnamese manicurist’s tools. The objects fascinate, but the miscellany is so deliberate, it is as if variety itself were the subject.

To the extent that Rothstein complains about the lack of information provided with objects in museums, I heartily agree. The dearth of signage trend has been noted in the National Museum of the American Indian's sculptural collage of artifacts without any notation of their origin as well as the Georgia Aquarium's over reliance on volunteer docents in lieu of any signage at all - a post-literate museum. However, I find any complaint about the diverse array of seemingly unrelated objects reveals more about the reviewer's ignorance of the history of museums than any failing on the part of the National Museum of American History. The National Museum of American History's presentation of an eclectic collection of esoterica harks back to the precursor to the museum, the wunderkammer.

Moreover, the Smithsonian Institution can be considered a Wunderkammer, the NMAH being one part of a larger, even more diverse, and in Rothstein's view incoherent, whole consisting of over 136 million objects.

Meanwhile, All Things Considered has a series about museums. First, a piece on the history of museums. The second installment focuses on the director of the Virginia Museum of Art.

Watts Towers & Pique Assiette

Friday my friend April and I went on a field trip to the Watts Towers created by Italian immigrant Sabato "Simon" Rodia. Rodia was a tile layer by trade. He used the same technique on his towers as Antoni Gaudi used in Park Güell in Barcelona: Pique Assiette which is the application of decorations by embedding carefully chosen shards and objects into drying mortar during the building process. You can also see examples of this technique on the exterior of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.


Unfortunately, the towers are currently under renovation so we couldn't go through the sculptures, but we got a pretty good view walking around the exterior.

The director of the Watts Towers Arts Center was incredibly enthusiastic and friendly and in all ways awesome. She was genuinely sad that we came at a time that their gallery was between exhibits, so she more than made up for it by introducing us to one of the artists, Augustine Aguirre, who was dropping off or picking up a box full of wire sculptures that looked like butterflies. We missed some show!




April noticed these sunglasses hanging between the scaffolding and one of the three towers. Could it be a member of the restoration team added his own piece of ephemera to the sculpture?


Hearts are a prevalent motif in the sunken relief as well as in the free-standing sculpture. Rodia immigrated to Pennsylvania with his brother who died in a mining accident shortly thereafter. Later he married and had three children, but the marriage ended badly and Rodia never spoke to his ex-wife again. Perhaps this recurrence of love lost explains the frequency of the figure of hearts in his work. Now, for the Heart of Watts Project, R. Judson Powell creates unique, handcrafted glass mosaic hearts, inspired by the Watts Towers and the heart motif that is scattered throughout them.

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Nefertiti's Face Lift

My partner in A(rg)H discovered this excellent article over at AOL News (who knew that was a source for this sort of thing?) regarding the discovery that a bust of Egyptian Queen Nefertiti was altered between its first and final draft. The article includes a quite thorough gallery of images.

Color Theory Update

I recently updated my Color Theory Index to include another artist focusing on color theory.

Via Dear Ada I found artist Sarah Charlesworth's Concrete Color series, a beautiful set of photographs with color theory as their subject matter. Googling the title of each piece could provide a seminar's worth of color theory. For example, Googling "Ostwald Triangle" led me to ColorSystem.com's amazing page about German chemist and color theorist Wilhelm Ostwald.

Egypt on Route 66

A nugget from KPCC's local news coverage that I thought might supplement our vast knowledge of ancient Egyptian art: Egyptian artifacts exhibit makes exclusive appearance in Southland by Steven Cuevas.

Just FYI, I believe the transcript of the interview between Cuevas and Eva Kirsch, the curator responsible for the exhibit at the Robert V. Fullerton Art Museum at Cal State San Bernardino, got confused with the material of which the beads in the world's oldest dress are made. It's our old friend faience, like the famous blue hippo, not "ionz."

Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party at The Brooklyn Museum

About thirteen years ago I was working on my senior thesis or something and spent a lot of time thinking about feminist visual art. Didn't really understand anything. Just spent a lot of time thinking about it. One piece that I read about but didn't really get was The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago. I finally had the chance to see The Dinner Party during my trip to The Brooklyn Museum to see Gilbert & George. In fact, on my way out of Gilbert & George I saw a sign that said something about Judy Chicago and The Dinner Party with an arrow pointing down a hallway and I thought, "Not THAT Judy Chicago. Not THAT Dinner Party." And I just had to follow the arrow.

The Brooklyn Museum's website has a VERY thorough section on The Dinner Party including a virtual tour of each place setting with quite possibly more information than you would EVER want to know about each and every one. Also, perhaps more directly relevant to our endeavor, it includes readable reproductions of the Heritage Panels segment of the The Dinner Party, some of which describe female artists from a number of historical periods.

I suspect we'll get to feminist art eventually in Stokstad's Art History. And maybe we can take some time then to try to wrap our collective brains around The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago.

TxtStyles/Fashioning Identity & Timbuktu to Tibet: Rugs and Textiles of the Hajji Babas

If you'd like to read my review of the TxtStyles/Fashioning Identity exhibit at the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian through December 28, 2008, and Timbuktu to Tibet: Rugs and Textiles of the Hajji Babas at the Textile Museum through March 8, 2009, please click here.

Gilbert & George at the Brooklyn Museum

One highlight of my east coast tour was a visit to the Brooklyn Museum expressly to see the Gilbert & George exhibit.

Jeffrey Yamaguchi of 52 Projects has some great pictures from Gilbert & George at the Brooklyn Museum. Additionally, on the Brooklyn Museum's website there is a video of Tim Marlow interviewing Gilbert & George at Target First Saturday on October 4, 2008. There is also a video of a conversation with the artists Gilbert & George and Brooklyn Museum Director Arnold L. Lehman at the Members Preview and Reception held on October 2, 2008.

To the extent I knew anything about Gilbert & George before walking into this exhibit, I thought of them as well-dressed performance artists. They call themselves living sculptures. In the center of the first room of the exhibition display cases house ephemera from their early, what I'll call performance pieces. At the beginning and in the middle of the exhibition there are videos of their singing sculptures and other performances. So to some extent, they are performance artists.

Gilbert & George designed the installation at the Brooklyn Museum, responding to the architectural layout of the galleries. The presentation in not chronological. Often their series are designed around the space that they will be first exhibited. Here the series are, for the most part, not shown together. So what is the governing principle behind the design of the installation? While I navigated the first room, before I had even read that the artists had designed the installation, I suspected that the design was intended to guide the viewer around in a very specific pattern. Around the outside walls was the series The Nature of Our Looking. Around the interior walls were a number of postcard collages. In the center was a circle of display cases. The labels on the ephemera in the display cases were not in standard museum order - left to right, all facing the same side of the case, as close to the object it described as possible, as close to the edge of the case as possible. Instead the arrangement of the labels and the narrative of the labels - there was always a clear starting point - forced the viewer to move around the cases is a specific direction which varied for each case. Once I recognized this, I started to wonder if the objects in the case were the art at all, or if the dance of viewer around the cases was the art. In their interview with Tim Marlow they confirmed my suspicions. In designing the installation they were concerned with how the viewer comes into the room and how they move through. They intended to guide the viewer through.

Having been exposed to Andy Warhol's work in film school, I questioned whether their manifesto-like declarations about art, that art should be democratic, have subject matter, meaning, have a moral character and the idea of "Art for All," are sincere. To illustrate their idea of Art for All, they described coming into a gallery the day after their exhibition opened only to find the gallery owner looking quite unwell. When asked why the long face he replied that the woman who comes to clean the gallery loved their exhibition.

Can two people who describe themselves not as a collaboration, but as one artist be serious? Can an artist who describes everything they do as sculpture when nothing they do fits within the traditional definition of sculpture be anything but ironic? When asked at the Members Preview and Reception held on October 2, 2008, whether they were influenced by Andy Warhol they responded,

Andy Warhol and Pop Art in general was a celebration of consumerism. We want to be a celebration of humanism.

They're images appear in almost every piece of photographic work. But they insist that the works are not self-portraits. Rather, to paraphrase their interview with Tim Marlow, they are visual letters to the viewer - Gilbert & George speaking to the viewer. They are the subject of all of their thoughts. They take what is in their brains and show it on the wall.

We have no plan when we go to the studio in the morning. However we are that day, that is how the pictures will be. Ours are all coming from the inside. We're always looking for the moral dimension of the subject matter. It has to have a human moral issue.

They strive for human, moral subject matter in response to the abstraction that was prevalent in the art world when they began in 1968 and is still going strong today. Like my friend Mary, they're not into Rothko, what Mary calls my stripes.

But Gilbert & George are not without formal structures. Their largest, both figuratively and literally, contribution to the art world is multiple series of large scale photographic works. The vast majority of their works consist of photographs in thin black frames tiled next to other photographs in thin black frames. This results in the appearance of a black grid. Gilbert & George explain this structure as purely the result of their means of production. They started in a small studio with no money. The only way they could make larger works was to make a big picture out of small fragments. Also that was the only way they could transport such large works. But once the grid came into being it came to control the composition slightly.

That slight discipline gives us a good way to make a controlled design.

Their works are almost uniformly based on symmetry and reflections. When they say the grid came to control the composition slightly, I feel they must be making a radical understatement. Between the ability to print multiple images inherent in the photographic or computer graphic media and the repetitive structure of the grid, their pictures have very quilt-like qualities.

I saw Gilbert & George after I saw the Panza Collection at the Hirshhorn Museum. Both address the idea of collecting the uncollectable. In the first room of the Gilbert & George exhibit the display cases full of ephemera from their early performance work reminded me of Hamish Fulton's works in the Panza Collection. Hamish Fulton makes treks through rural spaces. These walks are the art. The photographs with printed texts are artifacts of the walks. Similarly, the invitation to Gilbert & George's dinner is not the art. The dinner is the art. But what we have left after the dinner is this collection of invitations and menus. How is that any less abstract than Frank Stella's stripes? How is that any more accessible to all?

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Supplemental Reading

My friend Jennifer, who's a professor of comparative literature and specializes in ancient Greek stuff, recommended the following books to supplement our studies of art stuff:

• The Tomb of Agamemnon (Wonders of the World) by Cathy Gere
  
• Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration by Georges Didi-Huberman and Jane Marie Todd

The Panza Collection at the Hirshhorn Museum

On a last minute whim I stopped by my favorite museum on The Mall in Washington, D.C., The Hirshhorn Museum. Lucky I did because the current exhibit, The Panza Collection, is stunning. As usual, the exhibit is free, and it runs through January 11, 2009.

In The Panza Collection exhibit the Hirshhorn displays thrity-nine examples of Conceptual, Minimal, Light and Space, and Environmental art which the museum recently acquired from Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. The Hirshhorn has put together a PDF checklist of all the works. The pieces that most moved me were the Conceptual works which favored ideas over the creation of unique objects. In other words, pieces that really push the viewer to question the very idea of art.

For example, Hamish Fulton makes treks through rural spaces. These walks are the art. The photographs with printed texts are artifacts of the walks. I got into a conversation with a super-awesome interpretive guide about this. If I went on a walk with Hamish Fulton, would I be observing art? Arguably the art is his subjective perception of the walk, so I could observe him subjectively perceiving, but is that any closer than viewing a picture he takes on the same walk and labels? Another Fulton piece in the collection is Moonrise Kent England 30 September 1985. Basically, he drew a little circle on a piece of paper and the "art" is Fulton's permission to reproduce that however the owner chooses. The Hirshhorn decided to use paint and vinyl lettering on an entire wall.

Fulton's Moonrise Kent England 30 September 1985 is in the same conceptual vein as Lawrence Weiner's works. According to the brochure,

Lawrence Weiner's artwork has consisted solely of what he calls "statements": words, clauses, and phrases that may be realized in any format (written or spoken), in any context, by anyone--or not at all.

When it acquired A rubber ball thrown on the sea, Cat. No. 146, 1969, from Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo The Hirshhorn received a card on which Lawrence Weiner granted the bearer permission to reproduce the words, "A rubber ball thrown on the sea" however they chose. Again, my super-awesome Interpretive Guide and I discussed the intellectual property rights issues surrounding works like this.

A rubber ball thrown on the sea

Did I just steal a piece of art from The Hirshhorn? You can ask Lawrence Weiner December 11th at 7 p.m. in the Hirshhorn's Ring Auditorium.

Douglas Huebler typed letters explaining the process and that the letter was part of "the form of the art." In the letter accompanying Duration Piece #12 Venice, California--Plum Island (Newbury Port), Massachusetts, 1969, Huebler claimed to have transferred sand from a beach in Venice, California, to a beach in Plum Island, Massachusetts, and vice versa. Moreover, he would do so every ten years, though the purchaser of the artwork is financially responsible for all future sand transfers. The letter goes with a picture of darker sand on lighter sand and a picture of lighter sand on darker sand. This in and of itself is amusing. And when I read the letter, I fully believed that Huebler had been to both of those places and transferred the sand just as his letter explained. Then I read the brochure,

Already well-regarded as a sculptor by 1968, Douglas Huebler rejected three-dimensional object-making and began to create pieces comprising snapshots that "picture" the commonplace, often absurd, actions described in the accompanying captions. His work suggests how language can override photography's supposed ability to capture reality and thus ultimately determine our understanding of both events and the images that represent them.

So is transferring sand from a beach in California to a beach in Massachusetts "absurd"? Was I totally gullible to believe the letter? Was the sand in the picture even at a beach? Were Dario Robleto's collections of macabre ephemera, such as charred tape recordings of rare birds, in Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego which I talked about previously, real? Is anything depicted in art "real"? Does it matter? Does realness make art any more or less genuine?

I plan to recreate Jan Dibbets' Flood Tide, 1969, a series of photographs of the tide washing away a mark in sand, at Hilton Head on Thanksgiving.

Continuing my obsession with museum signage, the signage in The Panza Collection was rather large, yellow vinyl letters on the wall. The first few pieces in the exhibit consist of vinyl letters on the wall. This confuses the art and the signage. This was at the request of Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. In fact, he actually requested that the letters be even bigger. Curator Evelyn Hankins wanted to use traditional signage: black lettering on white cards attached to the wall and eventually compromised by reducing the size of the vinyl lettering.

If someone could do me a huge favor and go to the Gallery Talk on Friday, January 9th at 12:30 p.m. when Curator Evelyn Hankins will discuss the idea of collecting the uncollectible with Curatorial Research Associate Ryan Hill, I would greatly appreciate a full transcription. Just head to the Hirshhorn Museum Information Desk at 12:30 p.m., January 9th. Thank you!

P.S. The picture at the top of this post is one I took of the brochure cover which depicts Robert Barry's Steel Disc Suspended 1/8 in. Above Floor, 1967.

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Pompeii and the Roman Villa at the National Gallery of Art

My friend Mary and I, the last remaining members of the Art History Reading Group (a.k.a. A(rg)H) had the opportunity to tour the exhibit Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The exhibit is free and runs through March 22, 2009.

If you're reading along in the second edition of Marilyn Stokstad's Art History, this exhibit was particularly relevant to pages 203 through 211 in the chapter on Etruscan Art and Roman Art.

The exhibition is organized into three sections: Roman houses and villas, Romans' interest in all things Greek, and the influence of ancient Rome on European art after the discovery of the ruins of Pompeii in the 18th century.

In the chapters we've read so far (through chapter 6 Etruscan Art and Roman Art), Stokstad spends a lot more time on architecture than I expected. In her chapter on Etruscan Art and Roman Art she dedicates half the chapter exclusively to architecture. The first part of the Pompeii exhibit ties in nicely with Stokstad's coverage of architecture in ancient Rome in general and her specific coverage of Pompeii.

The houses covered in Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples do not overlap with the houses Stokstad covers. Stokstad covers the House of the Silver Wedding, the House of M. Lucretius Fronto, the House of Julia Feliz, the House of the Vettii, the House of Pansa, and the Villa of the Mysteries. Pompeii and the Roman Villa includes works from the House of the Golden Bracelet, the House of the Centenary, the House of the Tragic Poet, the House of Gaius Cornelius Rufus, the House of the Menander, the Villa of T. Siminius Stephanus, and the House of Gaius Julius Polybius as well as some houses in neighboring Herculaneum. To supplement the map on page 204 of Stokstad, I've found a map, posted by Dr. John R. Hoaglund, that shows the location of most of these houses.

Stokstad opens her discussion of The Roman City and Home by stating:

Despite their urbanity, Romans liked to portray themselves as simple country folk who had never lost their love of nature. The middle classes enjoyed their townhome gardens, wealthy city dwellers maintained rural estates, and Roman emperors had country villas that were both functioning farms and places of recreation. Wealthy Romans even brought nature indoors by commissioning artists to paint landscapes on the interior walls of their homes.

Pompeii and the Roman Villa recognizes that same theme. One of the most spectacular artifacts in the exhibit is a fresco of a Garden scene from the House of the Golden Bracelet in Pompeii created sometime between the 1st century B.C.E. and the 1st century C.E. According to the brochure,

The painted gardens visually expanded small ones, as in the so-called House of the Golden Bracelet where frescoes of flowering shrubs, birds, and fountains adjoined the real garden behind the house.

The architecture of the houses reflected the Roman's love of nature by locating the the most private domestic areas around the peristyle garden.

Another striking artifact in the Pompeii and the Roman Villa exhibit was the recreation of a dining room "or triclinia — so called because they contained three couches on which diners reclined while eating," from Moregine, south of Pompeii. The most striking feature of this triclina are the frescoed walls depicting "the god Apollo, patron of the liberal arts, flanked by the muses." These muses appear on a background of brilliant, deep red that was very popular with Roman painters and is now known as "Pompeian red", according to Stokstad who describes its use in the background of fig. 6-34, Initiation Rites of the Cult of Bacchus (?), detail of a wall painting in the Villa of Mysteries, Pompeii, c. 50 BCE. According to the Discovery Guide for the exhibit, green and blue were among the most expensive pigment while yellow and red were the most popular. Like fig. 6-37, Detail of a wall painting in the House of M. Lucretius Fronto, Pompeii, mid-1st century CE, the fresco in the triclinia is divided into panels bordered with painted architectural moldings. Unlike the way the figures interact with one another and the architectural details painted in Initiation Rites of the Cult of Bacchus (?), the figures in the fresco in the triclinia do not interact with the architectural details. Instead individual figures float in the middle of the brightly colored background. This arrangement, a figure in the center of a large blank background usually framed by trompe l'oeil architectural details, became known as a "floating maenad."

The muses depicted in the fresco in the triclinia are one example of the Romans' interest in Greek mythology. Like Stokstad, a significant portion of the exhibit was dedicated to the Romans' interest in Greek art, history, and mythology. Specifically with regard to Pompeii the connection between Roman and Greek culture is particularly strong as Pompeii was a former Greek colony, as noted in the brochure for Pompeii and the Roman Villa. Roman art adopted the style of classical and pre-classical Greek art. Roman art depicted Greek subjects, like Plato, Alexander the Great, Homer, The Trojan War, and Theseus Fighting the Centaurs. Roman art patrons imported Greek artists and Greek materials, particularly stone.

A Roman twist on Greek art that I found particularly interesting is the move from public spaces to private spaces. Specifically the brochure noted,

In Greece statues of gods and goddesses were set up in sanctuaries and public places, but in Pompeii a sculpture of Artemis (no. 102), goddess of the hunt, was installed in a colonnade around a domestic garden; formerly public art became private.

Would Greeks have painted Apollo and the Muses around their personal dining room? Or would that have reduced the divine to the merely decorative?

Also like Stokstad, the exhibit drew connections between Greek pieces and Roman pieces to demonstrate what aspects of Greek art ancient Romans adopted. Like the inclusion of works by other contemporaneous portrait artists in the Bernini show at the Getty, I found this comparative approach very helpful.

I was not blown away by the exhibit's coverage of the 18th century reception of the discovery of the ruins of Pompeii. Perhaps it drew a parallel between the Romans at Pompeii in the 1st century obsessed with all things Greek, buying reproductions of Greek art to decorate their homes, to the Western Europeans of the 18th century obsessed with all things Pompeian, buying reproduction of Roman art to decorate their homes. Something about this section reduced all of the exhibit to a cycle of consumption. The fact it opened onto a gift shop probably didn't help any.

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Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet

While I was in San Diego last weekend I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art downtown (1100 & 1001 Kettner Blvd - right next to the train station). My in-laws had gone to the branch of the museum in La Jolla earlier in the week (700 Prospect St). Downtown there was a special exhibit called Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet. It showcased works created by artists who had participated in residencies at world heritage sites around the world.

From MCASD's website:

Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet is a pioneering artist residency and collaborative exhibition project that, for the first time on this scale, uses contemporary art to investigate the relationships between fragile natural environments and the human communities that depend upon them. This collaborative multi-year exhibition project sent eight leading artists to eight UNESCO World Heritage sites around the globe to create new work informed and inspired by their experiences in these diverse cultural and natural regions.

If I had to pick a favorite it would be Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's film of the Mistubishi saltworks. The movement of the camera, the stillness of the landscape, and the invasion of the trucks stunned. He also made a montage of MacBeth card shots, which help in color correcting film, which is something that I'm currently a little obsessed with. It wasn't the biggest message of the collection, but the films certainly stood on their own as art.

I would probably have dug the performance of Ann Hamilton's piece, but the installation of ephemera from the performance combined with audio and video both used in and of the performance didn't have the impact that I imagine the performance itself had. Trying to recreate the urgency of performance in an installation is tricky. There was an exhibit as part of New Art in Austin: 20 to Watch at the Austin Museum of Art - Downtown during SxSW 2008 that was basically a karaoke machine of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., speech in Washington, D.C. When visitors picked up the microphone and performed the speech, it was really quite moving. I wonder if something to that effect couldn't have helped this piece. There was a script of the performance on a stand. How many steps is it from a script on a stand to a karaoke machine?

Dario Robleto's collections of macabre ephemera were definitely the most compelling pieces in the show. Particularly a piece which was basically a glass curio cabinet filled with frames containing typed stories about specific Lazarus species. If you think about museum signage like I think about museum signage this piece was particularly interesting in that it was a display of museum signage - these framed cards could easily be attached to a wall next to a photo or display or, apropos San Diego, a zoo enclosure. But in this piece the labels are the objects on display. Makes me want to collect museum labels.

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More Color Theory

I finally finished Exercise 1.4 in The New Munsell(R) Student Color Set. The exercise basically asks you to complete the book by filling in the blanks on the color charts with colored chips. I've blogged about Munsell's color theory before elsewhere. I've also blogged about my specific experience assembling the color charts, back when I'd finished only the first three out of ten. Click here to see a new post in which I share my pictures of the completed charts with a few observations.

The Euphronios Krater

In discussing my previous questions with an outside expert, i.e., my mother-in-law, she recalled an interesting bit of news about the Euphronios krater, on p. 136 of the second edition of Stokstad's Art History, fig. 5-28. The krater is captioned in the book as Euphronios (painter) and Euxitheos (potter). Death of Sarpedon. c. 515 BCE. Red-figure decoration on a calyx krater. Ceramic, height of crater 18" (45.7 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She emailed me an article from the New York Times about the Metropolitan Museum of Art returning the krater to Italy as the Met had apparently acquired the krater from grave robbers in the 1970s. Click here to see the Wikipedia article about the krater which includes links to another New York Times article as well as other sources. Notably, the Wiki's links to the Met's collection database and a description of the piece at the Met's site are broken. A search of the Met's collection database for the piece yields no results.

P.S. I went ahead and edited the wikipedia entry to delete the out of date links to the Met and add the link to the New York Times article my mil sent me.

What is a Cult Statue?

Having posed the question of what a cult statue is in a previous post, I did what any blogger should have done: googled it.

The only clear answer I could find was from Answers.com, which defines a cult statue thusly:

Image of a divinity that served in antiquity as a focal-point for worship and cult rituals. Most cult statues were housed in temples or shrines, although outdoor worship of images is also attested. Although aniconic worship (i.e. of a non-anthropomorphic symbol of a deity such as a rock or pillar) is known in Near Eastern, Greek and Roman cults, most deities by the late 2nd millennium BC were worshiped in an anthropomorphic form and were, as such, earthly substitutes or humanized manifestations of the presence of a deity.

So my tentative answers to my own questions are:
In the description of the Parthenon on pp. 147-153 the author repeatedly refers to the statue of Athena inside the Parthenon as a cult statue. For a specific example see the last paragraph on p. 150. In this context "cult" differentiates between statutes that were not the focal point for worship and cult rituals and a statue that was worshiped. A cult statue is not materially different from another statue of the same subject, but its function was different. I'm guessing there could be a statue of Athena which was not the focus of worship or cult rituals, in which case it would depict the same subject matter as the cult statue of Athena inside the Parthenon, but it would not be a cult statue.

What do you think?

Who is the A.D. Painter?

Having posed the question of who the A.D. Painter is in a previous post, I did what any blogger should have done: googled it.

Searching for Stokstad and "A.D. Painter" led me to a funky website from Prentice Hall. By funky I mean when I try to load it a bunch of errors about missing images fill my screen. But once I closed all of those I got to a one line clue: "Women at a Fountain House, A.D. Painter." You might recall this piece from p. 135, fig. 5-27, where it is attributed to the Priam Painter. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which holds this piece credits it to the Priam Painter as well. They also have a really awesome search engine which allows you to search their collection and provides you with awesome information about each piece. Click here to see the MFA's entry on Women at a Fountain House. Be sure to scroll to the bottom and check out the five different photographs of the piece.

So the answers to my own questions are:
In the section on vase painting, which is pp. 132-137 in the second edition, the A.D. Painter is the Priam Painter. On p. 136 where the author writes that the A.D. Painter created a perfectly balanced composition of verticals and horizontals that take the shape of the vessel into account the author is referring to figure 5-27, Women at a Fountain House.

It's All Greek to Me

I've recently conquered the Greeks. In other words, I've finally finished chapter 5 in the second edition of Stokstad's Art History. But I'm left with two unresolved questions.

First, in the section on vase painting, which is pp. 132-137 in the second edition, who is the A.D. Painter? Is it the Priam Painter? On p. 136 the author writes that the A.D. Painter created a perfectly balanced composition of verticals and horizontals that take the shape of the vessel into account. Does that match the author's description of figure 5-27 or figure 5-26?

Second, in the description of the Parthenon on pp. 147-153 the author repeatedly refers to the statue of Athena inside the Parthenon as a cult statue. For a specific example see the last paragraph on p. 150. What does "cult" mean in this context? Is a cult statue different from another statue of the same subject?

Name That Art

The New York Times Arts section has been running a weekly series showing details of pieces of art at a New York museum and challenging readers to guess what artwork each is from. An earlier week highlighted animals. This week's theme is pattern. Lots of quilt inspiring goodness.