syncategorematic (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
syncategorematic) wrote2010-07-15 12:33 pm
syncategorematic) wrote2010-07-15 12:33 pm
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This is not art to me, all those squares and things. Real art has, you know, like a madonna in it?
It's no longer my feet, it's my knees and back. At least in both of these cases I can tell it's muscles and tendons hurting --- ligaments and spine would have been way worse.
My brother and I spent five hours walking around the Reina Sofia Museum of Modern Art.
First of all, I LOVE the architecture of the Reina Sofia, even though it is one of those buildings where an old building got a glass-and-steel structure built next to it and moulded with it. The glass-and-steel part is awesome, even though the elevators, within columns of glass, gave me vertigo. I took a lot of photos just of it.
The SITE building at the University of Ottawa tries to imitate this style, I think, and I think I appreciate the architecture of that building more now that I am no longer a student there.
First of all, we went into the exhibition on The Potosi Principle. In short, it is about exploitation of workers by the capitalist system. In long...it is a series of 32 exhibits in various media, from oil paintings to videos to glass bottles to interactive computer maps to texts, ordered in a knotwork pathway around a room that you need a program book with commentary to go through. Sometimes the program book makes you return to a previous exhibit to look at it a bit more. It covers silver mine workers in Potosi, Bolivia, throughout history; migrant workers in China, illegal immigrant workers in Dubai, the influence of the Catholic church, the plight of women, the destruction of quipu and the knowledge of reading them, the way Russians were taught English using the writings of Karl Marx, etc. etc.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
changeofthemoon would have enjoyed it a great deal, I think.
My favourite part of it was a Russian film with Spanish and English subtitles, a Brechtian songspiel on the proposed building of a 403-metre skyscraper by Gazprom in St. Petersburg, in imitation of Dubai. And the film is available online (I haven't checked if the subtitles are there, due to bandwidth limits, but given that the blog entry is in English, they should be). Thirty minutes. Recommended.
Out of there we went into the modern art itself, displayed in somewhat more traditional format.
Thankfully, in almost every room, the Reina Sofia provides laminated info sheets in Spanish and English, giving background on the artists and themes of that room.
I like modern art; it nearly broke my heart the day we were in New York and due to family yadayada came too late to visit MOMA (I went the next day). So far I've made it a point to visit MOMA, the Tate Modern, the Guggenheim, and now the Reina Sofia, among the world's modern art museums.
Usually alone. I know about art mainly through hearing a lot of trivia questions, but for a dilettante I know enough about art history to appreciate it. My brother did not have such knowledge, and a lot of the exhibits, such as the readymade art movement or even Picasso, he did not enjoy.
I think of the point of modern art as trying to convey what cannot be said in words, to reach to a part of your mind below the verbal and literal. Not all pieces succeed; no one piece succeeds with everyone. But I am willing to walk through a lot of meh to see the ones that blow my mind, because the ones that do, really do. Even if they are a toilet tipped on its side (there IS something very compelling about Fountain, I have to say.) There's a reason I have Broadway Boogie-Woogie reproductions both at home and at work.
Now I can say I have seen some other really famous paintings live, the greatest of which is, of course, Guernica.
It has a room to itself, with on the opposite wall, Dora Maar's photo series of how Picasso did it. Photography is forbidden in that room for some reason (like, there are no reproductions online or something? Somebody is going to claim they did it?). Alarms go off if you get within a metre of it; I guess they are seriously concerned about vandalism of their national treasure. In the opposite room there is a documentary reel about Guernica the air raid playing. I did not watch all of it, but some of the shots made me gasp, seeing the holes in the ground where a house would have just vanished.
I took a perverse pleasure in photographing, in other rooms, the paintings and sketches that show that Picasso could damn well draw realistically if he felt like it. Indeed, the preparatory sketches for Guernica show a much more realistic bull, for instance. It is also interesting to see that the horse head and the fist of the person lying on the ground changed positions between the initial drawing of the mural and the finished painting. I looked at it for a long time, wondering at the decisions he made, seeing new details in it.
(From what I heard, Picasso could be a right bastard to his nearest and dearest in life, but dammit, you have to admit it, the man was a genius. My brother could not understand the fuss made over Picasso; I explained to him, in gloss, that Picasso, and other modern artists, wanted to separate the mirror-up-to-nature realism of art from the emotional impact of it; Picasso, for a lot of people, succeeded.)
The Reina Sofia also has a huge collection of Joan Miro, including an outdoor sculpture I had been sure was a Henry Moore; a bunch of Dali including a 1939 painting called 'The Enigma of Hitler" that I looked at for a long time; a great many Spanish Civil War artworks besides Guernica itself; a large collection of Juan Gris; and up in the third floor in an exhibit focussed on the Valparaiso school of art and architecture, a new favourite abstract artist of mine, Roberto Matta. At first his drawing titles amused me because when I see "Morphology", I think the linguistics discipline; then i took pictures of them because I actually liked them. Some abstract art hits me; these did.
There was also an exhibit for apparently, a modern art conference, which featured among other things a giant spider that may just have been by Louise Bourgeois (not the Maman spider, another spider, but still this amused me.) There was also an exhibit of black-and-white photography of Manhattan, including some by Catherine Opie; I had seen a Catherine Opie exhibition at the Guggenheim and really liked her portraits; had been trying to recall her name when I saw it under a streetscape.
"One thing I'm wondering," I said on the walk back, "all those paintings, sculptures, photographs --- and there is not a single item of digital art? Why not?"
Well, there were a couple of exhibits in the Potosi Principle that could sort of count, but not really. Really, there are absolutely stunning digital artworks being created out there. Is even the modern art scene conservative? Anyone closer to it than I am that can tell me where there are physical galleries of stunning works of Photoshop and Corel Draw?
My brother and I spent five hours walking around the Reina Sofia Museum of Modern Art.
First of all, I LOVE the architecture of the Reina Sofia, even though it is one of those buildings where an old building got a glass-and-steel structure built next to it and moulded with it. The glass-and-steel part is awesome, even though the elevators, within columns of glass, gave me vertigo. I took a lot of photos just of it.
The SITE building at the University of Ottawa tries to imitate this style, I think, and I think I appreciate the architecture of that building more now that I am no longer a student there.
First of all, we went into the exhibition on The Potosi Principle. In short, it is about exploitation of workers by the capitalist system. In long...it is a series of 32 exhibits in various media, from oil paintings to videos to glass bottles to interactive computer maps to texts, ordered in a knotwork pathway around a room that you need a program book with commentary to go through. Sometimes the program book makes you return to a previous exhibit to look at it a bit more. It covers silver mine workers in Potosi, Bolivia, throughout history; migrant workers in China, illegal immigrant workers in Dubai, the influence of the Catholic church, the plight of women, the destruction of quipu and the knowledge of reading them, the way Russians were taught English using the writings of Karl Marx, etc. etc.
changeofthemoon would have enjoyed it a great deal, I think. My favourite part of it was a Russian film with Spanish and English subtitles, a Brechtian songspiel on the proposed building of a 403-metre skyscraper by Gazprom in St. Petersburg, in imitation of Dubai. And the film is available online (I haven't checked if the subtitles are there, due to bandwidth limits, but given that the blog entry is in English, they should be). Thirty minutes. Recommended.
Out of there we went into the modern art itself, displayed in somewhat more traditional format.
Thankfully, in almost every room, the Reina Sofia provides laminated info sheets in Spanish and English, giving background on the artists and themes of that room.
I like modern art; it nearly broke my heart the day we were in New York and due to family yadayada came too late to visit MOMA (I went the next day). So far I've made it a point to visit MOMA, the Tate Modern, the Guggenheim, and now the Reina Sofia, among the world's modern art museums.
Usually alone. I know about art mainly through hearing a lot of trivia questions, but for a dilettante I know enough about art history to appreciate it. My brother did not have such knowledge, and a lot of the exhibits, such as the readymade art movement or even Picasso, he did not enjoy.
I think of the point of modern art as trying to convey what cannot be said in words, to reach to a part of your mind below the verbal and literal. Not all pieces succeed; no one piece succeeds with everyone. But I am willing to walk through a lot of meh to see the ones that blow my mind, because the ones that do, really do. Even if they are a toilet tipped on its side (there IS something very compelling about Fountain, I have to say.) There's a reason I have Broadway Boogie-Woogie reproductions both at home and at work.
Now I can say I have seen some other really famous paintings live, the greatest of which is, of course, Guernica.
It has a room to itself, with on the opposite wall, Dora Maar's photo series of how Picasso did it. Photography is forbidden in that room for some reason (like, there are no reproductions online or something? Somebody is going to claim they did it?). Alarms go off if you get within a metre of it; I guess they are seriously concerned about vandalism of their national treasure. In the opposite room there is a documentary reel about Guernica the air raid playing. I did not watch all of it, but some of the shots made me gasp, seeing the holes in the ground where a house would have just vanished.
I took a perverse pleasure in photographing, in other rooms, the paintings and sketches that show that Picasso could damn well draw realistically if he felt like it. Indeed, the preparatory sketches for Guernica show a much more realistic bull, for instance. It is also interesting to see that the horse head and the fist of the person lying on the ground changed positions between the initial drawing of the mural and the finished painting. I looked at it for a long time, wondering at the decisions he made, seeing new details in it.
(From what I heard, Picasso could be a right bastard to his nearest and dearest in life, but dammit, you have to admit it, the man was a genius. My brother could not understand the fuss made over Picasso; I explained to him, in gloss, that Picasso, and other modern artists, wanted to separate the mirror-up-to-nature realism of art from the emotional impact of it; Picasso, for a lot of people, succeeded.)
The Reina Sofia also has a huge collection of Joan Miro, including an outdoor sculpture I had been sure was a Henry Moore; a bunch of Dali including a 1939 painting called 'The Enigma of Hitler" that I looked at for a long time; a great many Spanish Civil War artworks besides Guernica itself; a large collection of Juan Gris; and up in the third floor in an exhibit focussed on the Valparaiso school of art and architecture, a new favourite abstract artist of mine, Roberto Matta. At first his drawing titles amused me because when I see "Morphology", I think the linguistics discipline; then i took pictures of them because I actually liked them. Some abstract art hits me; these did.
There was also an exhibit for apparently, a modern art conference, which featured among other things a giant spider that may just have been by Louise Bourgeois (not the Maman spider, another spider, but still this amused me.) There was also an exhibit of black-and-white photography of Manhattan, including some by Catherine Opie; I had seen a Catherine Opie exhibition at the Guggenheim and really liked her portraits; had been trying to recall her name when I saw it under a streetscape.
"One thing I'm wondering," I said on the walk back, "all those paintings, sculptures, photographs --- and there is not a single item of digital art? Why not?"
Well, there were a couple of exhibits in the Potosi Principle that could sort of count, but not really. Really, there are absolutely stunning digital artworks being created out there. Is even the modern art scene conservative? Anyone closer to it than I am that can tell me where there are physical galleries of stunning works of Photoshop and Corel Draw?