Arts in New York City

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Man On Wire – Philippe Petit

I agree with McCann’s idea that Petit made both the city and himself into art. By accomplishing such a dreamlike feat, he succeeded in making the Twin Towers seem more human, if not a piece of art, which at the time of construction failed to gain favor from public. And then he went on by walking on such a thin rope so high above in the sky, and gave passersby and those who would meet his experience through different mediums – such as us who got to have an almost first person experience through the documentary – a breathtaking experience that would linger in their minds for a long time. As we discussed in class, this is a type of public art; one that you enjoy more as you come across it, rather than the ones you see in a museum, which you nevertheless enjoy, but doesn’t give you the same kind of an unexpected pleasure.

Subway Art – “Under Bryant Park”

Why Do We Collect?

1)            People collect for various reasons; some of them are quite obvious, and others can be understood as we try to make sense of the things we commonly do every day. One reason Kimmelman suggests is that people collect because “collecting can be a great art if earnestly engaged in.” According to the assigned reading, Kimmelman states that this is why most of us like viewing collections even if we ourselves aren’t collectors. Another point that he brings up is that “collecting is a way to bring order to the world, and to define some idiosyncratic nice for the collector, as art does for an artist.” Personally, I think that collecting is a form of expression of an obsession. Not to mean that collectors are eccentric (as Kimmelman also noted), or that they are OCD driven, but they are expressing their obsessive behavior through the things they collect and possess. Kimmelman mentions three types of collections in the article – Hugh Francis Hicks’ lightbulb collection, Albert C. Barnes’ collection of exotic art pieces, and Terrell’s collection of sculptures of light. One similarity that they share is that these collectors make the viewer look at certain object in a new light. For example, not everyone would have been able to realize the beauty of light before paying a visit to Dr. Hicks’s lightbulbs collection. And no one would have thought to put such contrasting artworks together and create something new as Barnes did. Also, as light entails the idea of being ephemeral, you wouldn’t quite expect to see it in such big bulky machines that Terrell created.

2)             Wunderkammers, with its literal meaning of “wonder cabinet,” are usually either rooms or cabinets that contain objects of “wonder.” They usually include objects belonging to natural history, geology, ethonography, archaeology, religious or historical relics, works of art, and antiquities. In the past, wunderkammers contained whatever was the biggest, the smallest, the rarest, the most exquisite, the most bizarre, the most grotesque; they were meant to encapsulate the world in microcosm. The objects are displayed in a very organized manner, which indicates the orderliness of the natural world.

3)            Wunderkammers and modern museums have a strong historical relationship in a sense that most modern day museums are built with basically the same ideas and purposes that wunderkammers had in the past. Wunderkammers presented to the viewer objects of the wonders of the natural world, or things that people wouldn’t see in their ordinary lives. Similarly, current day museums contain objects that are relatively hard to be seen, or things of certain specialties.

Jeannie

hi

Is There A Relationship Between Art and Math?

The Guggenheim Museum Experience

PART ONE

The Building – The building consists of multiple parts, but the main form of the building seemed to be the rotunda, with multiple lines across it, which later turned out to be the spiral ramp inside the building. The museum itself was mainly white, and the sidewalks outside were grey. The sidewalk also had a round circular pattern to it. The same type of pattern was also seen on the inside floor as well. According to an informational clerk, there were not any additional sections to the building except for the small art galleries found throughout the building. There were also tiny one-person bathrooms in the corners. In one empty space, they had built a gift shop and a reading room as well. Also, there were several couches were people could sit down, in areas without any artworks displayed. The white walls along the ramp were made of concrete.

My Experience of the Guggenheim Building – There are a couple ways through which you can move through space. You might choose to use the elevator, to go up several levels at a time, or you can choose to walk along the ramp while browsing through the artworks. I went up from the first level to the fifth level (Haunted) by the elevator, and then walked down as I took notes of the artworks. I could see various types of artworks as I walked, and I also noticed the change in lighting depending on the piece; some had bright normal lighting, while others had very dim lighting, and still others had no lighting at all (such as Stillness by Tacita dean). I could hear many different types of sounds, including the sound of the people who walked by, the sound of the piano that seemed to be always playing in the background somewhere, and there was also a musical piece of a woman singing, which I discovered to be The Shallow Sea by Susan Phillipsz. I found out from one of the museum monitors that the piano piece is the same melody as The Shallow Sea.

PART TWO

Orange Disaster #5, 1963. Andy Warhol – The image consists of fifteen different copies of the same image, the image of an electric chair. The artist chooses to repeat the same image with the idea that the repetition of the image takes away fear and violence that the original picture might represent. I think that the title Orange Disaster #5 means that what could be a disaster has already happened five times, and therefore diminishes the fear and anxiety that might be associated with it.

Untitled, 1963. Robert Rauschenberg – The image contains; human skeleton, a family canoeing, skyline of New York City, a man hangliding, a factory, a bicycle wheel, an umbrella, and a group of various random words formed into a big circle which I later found out to be the memoirs of his past. I think that he found most of these pictures from other sources, but some of them might be his own, as these images supposedly represent his autobiographical aspects. At first I had a hard time trying to understand the meaning of his work, but they came to make sense as I looked at them as a form of an autobiography.

Herald Tribune: November 1977, 1977. Sarah Charlesworth – The text is intentionally left out to emphasize the importance of the pictures. The lack of text helps bring out the images of the past and memories related to them, which are past now but present then. For example, we see historical figures that were active in the 70s but are long gone now, whom we now see in very different contexts. The 26 panels are laid out in chronological order, for the entire month of November 1977. It tells me that numerous important events were happening especially during this month, even though I can’t fully comprehend most of the pictures displayed.

Soundwork by Susan Phillipsz – The music seemed to contain two different parts – one with the piano, and the other with the sound of a woman singing. Both sounds seemed to convey the feeling of calmness, but at the same time loneliness. I learned from one of the museum employees that the song is actually from a movie called “The Innocence.” The song seemed to be somehow related to the HAUNTED artworks, as they both present the feeling of mysteriousness and somberness.

Stillness by Tacita Dean – The artist chose to film the performance of Merce Cunningham, even though at first glance they look like still pictures. This seems to be an appropriate choice of medium because as the title of the artwork suggests, her intention is to capture the stillness of the dancer, and usually the audience will expect a lot of movements and motions in a video work. The installations are laid out in sort of like a series, one screen next to another. There are a total of six screens that are of different sizes. Some images are life sized, and others are smaller. You cannot see the screens all at once – you must walk through them and look at one at a time. The installations are set in a very dark area, and I think this adds to the still, calm atmosphere the artist intended to create.

Trauma and the Uncanny – The word uncanny, based on my viewing of the artworks, seems to indicate a sense of loneliness and nostalgic longing for the past, as well as the ambiguous borderline between past and present. Especially, a piece that I saw that is called Gillian Wearing gives off a sense of eeriness, despite the fact that the image is of a portrait of a child. As the title Trauma and the Uncanny suggests, the work seemed to indicate the contrast between the bright and the dark, and childhood and adulthood, all at the same time.

Wunderkammer!

Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins, MIT Press, 1993

So I wrote this post a few weeks ago thinking one day I would add more information on wunderkammer than just a single line indicating the image source, and that day seems to be today!

The Met and the Guggenheim museum might not have existed without the birth of these wonder cabinets, or “wunderkammers.” in Renaissance Europe. Wunderkammers were precursors to modern day museums and many other art collection institutions.

Wunderkammers, “wonder cabinets” or cabinets of curiosities, appear much like modern day museums during the Renaissance period. The range of the types of objects they had was very broad. They contained everything from fine art works (sometimes cabinet paintings) to objects pertaining to history or science. Wunderkammers, as I have come to learn, were some times even considered a microcosm.

The display and organization of the objects appear a little messy to me, I hope that at least they made the effort to organize objects by category…or are they?

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