the arts in new york city

conceptual art, minimalism

“Here, the new figures signify an appropriate expression of human consciousness or, conversely, human appetite. Fittingly, several of them even seem to be either generating or absorbing the radiating lines or drifting patterns that surround them, as if in a state of drug-induced agony or ecstasy.”

New York Times, September 2002

I had never been to any formal art galleries before this, so I was excited to find out that the public can walk in any time the space is open to enjoy the art. I liked all of the artwork we saw, and it was interesting to see the way the shows were curated.

All of the galleries we visited dealt with the passage of time and the transience of material goods in contemporary culture. Each gives a specific view point on consumerism and the modern cultural experience.

Distillation

Paine’s installation piece runs through the entire gallery, creating the sense of a living and growing being existing as part of the interior space. The steel body includes many objects indicative of alchemy, such as flanges, vessels, and tanks of varying size and finish. The entire piece presents as some kind of circulatory system, able to bring material through the sculpture itself. In another room of the gallery, Paine has created intricate simulacra of fungi, relating the natural world to the brash industrialism of the steel sculpture. The two pieces work in harmony while still maintaining separate entities, highlighting the relationship between what is real and what presents itself as real. The piece has a strange, somewhat grotesque feeling, inviting the viewer to closer inspection of the deformities of the steel.

Among Friends and Enemies

Temple’s exhibit features hand drawn portraits of figures in the news, selected each day by the artist and placed on the page according to her view on the impact their actions will have on world events. Because a new portrait is added everyday, the gallery is always changing to reflect new events and new faces, adding a specific temporality to the entire show. Also included are Temple’s screen prints, which feature images of President Obama in seeming conversation with Lincoln, translating history into contemporary events and issues. The gallery also has a sculpture installation of a beaver pelt and crumpled paper, providing commentary on the Astor family relationship and controversy surrounding the only son and his forging of Brooke Astor’s signature. Temple’s exhibit relates her views on contemporary and past events, showing her insight and opinion on the changing circumstances of our world.

The Universe Next Door

Morell works in camera obscura, using a small hole in an otherwise sealed window to create an aperture, transforming the room into a camera. The outside image is thus projected inside in a process that is captured in an instant by digital photography, although it takes a lot of time for enough light to enter the space and produce a visible image. He plays with the concept of timelessness, choosing locations that remain iconic in common culture and world travel. The image of Times Square was particularly fascinating to me, with its juxtaposition of the bright neon light and bustling crowds outside projected onto the private humble space of the hotel room. It is interesting to see the relationship between the outside inside world, lending Morell’s pieces an interesting form of site-specificity.

Waste_Generation

The main piece in the exhibition is Doyle’s hand drawn animation piece “Apocalypse Management” depicting the destruction and evolution of a city as it changes and conforms to the struggling adverse forces of nature and industrialization. Doyle created this piece in reaction to the events of September 11, working with the concept of devastation and subsequent rebirth. He puts emphasis on ornamentation and symmetry in his drawings, perhaps expressing his desire for order and balance in the otherwise irrational chaos of waste and destruction. Like Canogar, Doyle is in tune with our society’s ability to waste resources and exploit nature’s rational order, shown in the various representations of leaves and vines as decorative ornamentation.

Trace

Canogar uses found electronic materials as the foundation of his pieces, projecting moving light images onto them to create an interactive, “phantasmagoric” experience. He informs the traditional ready-made with allusions to contemporary culture and consumerism in “Spin” and “Dial M for Murder”, commenting on our society’s ability to discard pieces of art encoded on electronic materials. In “Spin”, Canogar projects short clips of 100 DVDs onto their mirrored, spinning surfaces, creating illusory reflections that remind us of primeval forms which are projected back onto the opposite wall. “Dial M for Murder” features an installation of VHS tape from Hitchcock’s film, onto which the artist has precisely projected moving lines of light invoking the human circulatory system and otherwise fluid, kinetic energy. He wants to communicate a sense of the fleeting, transitory qualities of visual experiences as perceived by our memories and collective experiences as a consumerist society.

I am part of the group of Macaulay students curating and organizing the December Snapshot exhibit, and so far it has been an amazing experience. Corey D’Augustine, our guide and mentor for the project, is an art history professor at Pratt Institute, a member of the MoMA conservator staff, as well as an accomplished artist. This past weekend he took us to a photography show at MoMA so we could get some ideas for our own exhibit of student artwork. Afterwards, he and the six of us students sat down over coffee and talked about life in the museum world. I was hit with a feeling of such serendipity- here I was in the MoMA with an active art historian and conservator who was willing to share his knowledge and expertise for our benefit.
I can’t wait to see what else I’ll learn through this experience, and I hope that I can get an idea of what is really is to be a curator so that I can look forward to it as a possible career.

I am writing my english 120 research paper on Dada; the cultural movement that rejected culture, made by artists who rejected art.

Karawane by Hugo Ball

Through my research, I discovered an art movement from the 1960s called Fluxus, which embraced the same anti-art, anti-commercialist sensibility. The origins of Fluxus are with John Cage, the composer we studied earlier in the semester who composed works for the show at the Guggenheim Haunted exhibit. This featured his piece 4’33”, a revolutionary composition of perceived silence, which is actually meant to be the sounds of the environment featured for the entire 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Cage taught classes at the New School, inviting artists such as Marcel DuChamp, a pioneer on the Dada scene decades before. Fluxus focused on experimentation with indeterminacy and minimalism in sound, design, literature, and philosophy. Like Dada, it sought to unite all creative and conceptual disciplines.