Saturday, September 4, 2010
Art-A-Day
Friday, September 3, 2010
Berlin museums 4 -- Hamburger Bahnhof
If you have any German at all, even the Berlitz guidebook variety, you will be able to translate the name of this museum as "Hamburg Railroad Station." Yes, it used to be a railroad station (the trains to Hamburg left from here) but since they built a fabulous, shiny new station a few years ago, a couple of blocks away, the old station has been converted to a contemporary art museum. The core of its collection is art donated by a rich guy who particularly liked five artists: Germans Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer, and Americans Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly.
I have never been a big fan of Beuys, even though I identify strongly with his tendency to pick up junk on the street and call it art (perhaps this is a slight oversimplification). His shtik has been his use of felt and fat, supposedly because he was rescued from a winter plane crash in Crimea (he was in the Luftwaffe in World War 2) by nomadic Tatars who saved him by smearing fat all over him and wrapping his body in felt. The story doesn't hold up to fact-checking, but the shtik continues. I do have a soft spot for artists who use felt, being a fiber type myself, and a huge sculpture of tallow on display at the Bahnhof was impressive, probably my favorite Beuys artwork I've ever seen.
Joseph Beuys, Skulptur, die nicht kalt werden will (Sculpture that will not get cold), 1977
By contrast, I love Kiefer and was delighted to see several paintings and a sculpture. Kiefer's recurrent theme is Germany and the toxic fallout from war and nationalism. Many of his paintings are variations on the image of a deserted battlefield, endless expanse of mud and waste. I wrote about his "Hermannschlag," also at this museum, in an earlier post.
Anselm Kiefer, Hoffmann von Fallersleben auf Helgoland, 1983 1986 (H von F was a poet who went to the island of Helgoland and wrote what became the German national anthem)
Anselm Kiefer, Maikaefer flieg, 1974
Andy Warhol, Mao, 1972
"Mao" dominates its room, one of the biggest Warhols I've ever seen. He used the image of Mao in many different versions, including four-patch and nine-patch arrays, but this one is just the one face, vastly larger than life. (The purple doodads on the wall behind it aren't part of the painting but they sure add to the impact!)
And then there's Robert Rauschenberg, also on my top ten artist list (or maybe top five??). I liked two of his earlier paintings, which seemed similar in their use of red, black and white.
Robert Rauschenberg, First Time Painting, 1961
Robert Rauschenberg, Summer Rental + 3, 1960
I could go on and on -- this art is world-class and there's lots of it.
I have never been a big fan of Beuys, even though I identify strongly with his tendency to pick up junk on the street and call it art (perhaps this is a slight oversimplification). His shtik has been his use of felt and fat, supposedly because he was rescued from a winter plane crash in Crimea (he was in the Luftwaffe in World War 2) by nomadic Tatars who saved him by smearing fat all over him and wrapping his body in felt. The story doesn't hold up to fact-checking, but the shtik continues. I do have a soft spot for artists who use felt, being a fiber type myself, and a huge sculpture of tallow on display at the Bahnhof was impressive, probably my favorite Beuys artwork I've ever seen.
Joseph Beuys, Skulptur, die nicht kalt werden will (Sculpture that will not get cold), 1977
By contrast, I love Kiefer and was delighted to see several paintings and a sculpture. Kiefer's recurrent theme is Germany and the toxic fallout from war and nationalism. Many of his paintings are variations on the image of a deserted battlefield, endless expanse of mud and waste. I wrote about his "Hermannschlag," also at this museum, in an earlier post.
Anselm Kiefer, Hoffmann von Fallersleben auf Helgoland, 1983 1986 (H von F was a poet who went to the island of Helgoland and wrote what became the German national anthem)
Anselm Kiefer, Maikaefer flieg, 1974
"Mao" dominates its room, one of the biggest Warhols I've ever seen. He used the image of Mao in many different versions, including four-patch and nine-patch arrays, but this one is just the one face, vastly larger than life. (The purple doodads on the wall behind it aren't part of the painting but they sure add to the impact!)
And then there's Robert Rauschenberg, also on my top ten artist list (or maybe top five??). I liked two of his earlier paintings, which seemed similar in their use of red, black and white.
Robert Rauschenberg, First Time Painting, 1961
Robert Rauschenberg, Summer Rental + 3, 1960
I could go on and on -- this art is world-class and there's lots of it.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
So you can't draw?
Not to worry -- you can still be a great artist. Besides, this is faster than drawing.
Cy Twombly, School of Fontainebleau, 1960 (detail)
at Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin
at Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Huge quilts -- my new plan
I love to make huge quilts; while small or medium ones can be appealing, there's no substitute for the impact of a really big expanse of art. But it's getting harder and harder for me to physically wrestle huge quilts through the sewing machine to get them quilted. No room for a longarm, and I don't really want to use one anyway.
So after it nearly killed me last year to quilt two huge pieces for the Nancy Crow invitational show, Color Improvisations, I decided to try a new approach.
I made my latest batch of huge quilts in two pieces, finished them, then sewed them together into diptychs. Finally put the last stitch in yesterday and I am so pleased with how they turned out!
On one I joined the parts with a feather stitch; on the other I made figure-eight tacks every four inches. I used 5-weight perle cotton for both quilts. I made the stitches prominent and didn't try too hard to have them perfectly regular, figuring that if you're going to sew things together you might as well flaunt it.
The quilts are both in the vicinity of 75" square; each half was narrow enough to fit comfortably onto 43" backing fabric. But even those pieces were cumbersome to wrestle around. Although my system of folding and securing the quilt into a bundle worked beautifully, I think my next huge quilt will be made in four pieces rather than two.
So after it nearly killed me last year to quilt two huge pieces for the Nancy Crow invitational show, Color Improvisations, I decided to try a new approach.
I made my latest batch of huge quilts in two pieces, finished them, then sewed them together into diptychs. Finally put the last stitch in yesterday and I am so pleased with how they turned out!
On one I joined the parts with a feather stitch; on the other I made figure-eight tacks every four inches. I used 5-weight perle cotton for both quilts. I made the stitches prominent and didn't try too hard to have them perfectly regular, figuring that if you're going to sew things together you might as well flaunt it.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Tokyo Art
The Mori Art Museum, located on top of a 54-story office/retail/residential/hotel tower in Tokyo, is one of the very few places in Japan to see contemporary art. It has been open only since 2003 and does not have a permanent collection, but functions as a Kunsthalle to present revolving exhibits. The show I saw last month was super!
Yoshioka Tokujin, according to the artist statement, likes “recreating undeterminate phenomena, such as light, snow, storms and wind, which do not have a distinct shape or color.” To recreate snow, for instance, he built a room out of clear plastic and filled it halfway with feathers, then uses two electric fans to blow them about. The fan comes on for 35 seconds, then goes off for a couple of minutes while the feathers gently settle into drifts.
Yoshioka Tokujin, Snow, 2010
He also makes huge slabs of optical glass that resemble blocks of water and produce magical refraction patterns as you look at or through them; one of these, at 4.5 meters long, is the world’s largest single piece of optical glass.
Kuribayashi Takashi, Forest from Forest, 2010
As spectacular as these earlier pieces were, the best part of the show was the stop-action animation films made by an Indonesian artist group called Tromarama. If you think it takes a lot of work to do clay-mation, you should see what these guys do! For instance, they animated one film by carving 402 woodcuts into plywood, but one piece constituted many, many frames of the film – they would make one gouge, photograph it, make another gouge, photograph it, and repeat until the entire figure emerges from the black-painted wood background!
Tromarama, still from Serigala Militia
They also did a film that used 12 kilograms of buttons and 1 kilo of beads, all painstakingly arranged into pictures and designs. Another film used 210 pieces of batik on cotton, each about 6 x 18 inches. (And we know how time-consuming it is to produce a batik to an exacting pattern!)
This is termite art at its most mesmerizing.
Tromarama, still from Zsa Zsa Zsu
Tromarama, stills from Extraneous
Yoshioka Tokujin, according to the artist statement, likes “recreating undeterminate phenomena, such as light, snow, storms and wind, which do not have a distinct shape or color.” To recreate snow, for instance, he built a room out of clear plastic and filled it halfway with feathers, then uses two electric fans to blow them about. The fan comes on for 35 seconds, then goes off for a couple of minutes while the feathers gently settle into drifts.
He also makes huge slabs of optical glass that resemble blocks of water and produce magical refraction patterns as you look at or through them; one of these, at 4.5 meters long, is the world’s largest single piece of optical glass.
Yoshioka Tokujin, Water Block, 2002
Yoshioka Tokujin, Waterfall, 2005-6
Kuribayashi Takashi made two monumental installations depicting borders. In the first, you enter a large room to find yourself below a low ceiling of warm-tinted translucent washi paper. As you stoop to walk into the room, you notice and head for several holes in the ceiling; when you poke your head through the holes you realize that you’re now just above the floor of a forest made from white paper trees. Why did the white-white paper seem so golden from below? Who knew that the ground is only paper thin, and there’s a whole world down there where people can walk around and perhaps peek up at us?
Kuribayashi Takashi, Forest from Forest, 2010
In the second, a mountain almost as tall as the ceiling has a small "water" surface at the top. The boundary between water and land seems arbitrary and almost irrelevant in this view.
Kuribayashi Takashi, Islands, 2010
As spectacular as these earlier pieces were, the best part of the show was the stop-action animation films made by an Indonesian artist group called Tromarama. If you think it takes a lot of work to do clay-mation, you should see what these guys do! For instance, they animated one film by carving 402 woodcuts into plywood, but one piece constituted many, many frames of the film – they would make one gouge, photograph it, make another gouge, photograph it, and repeat until the entire figure emerges from the black-painted wood background!
They also did a film that used 12 kilograms of buttons and 1 kilo of beads, all painstakingly arranged into pictures and designs. Another film used 210 pieces of batik on cotton, each about 6 x 18 inches. (And we know how time-consuming it is to produce a batik to an exacting pattern!)
This is termite art at its most mesmerizing.
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