Luka's Arts In NYC

I would have to say that my favorite piece in whole play would probably have been the Kleinzach piece, which was in the prologue and epilogue. It was a very comical piece, but in the epilogue, when you realize that the main character Hoffmann makes himself Kleinzach, who is a dwarf. This piece happens when Hoffman, the main character of the opera, enters the bar. This piece is a bar song. The whole ensemble in the bar sings it but Hoffman leads it.

The music for this piece is repetitive, as in it follows the same groove and melody thorughout thewhole piece. The Vocals are conversational; when Hoffman says something the audience repeats the last word/phrase. The sound of the music is very playful but and reminds me of a bar scene.

The reason why this was my favorite piece was because i liked how the music went along with the vocals and the performance on stage. I like how the motions imitated the content and noise from the vocals. I also just thought it was a very comedic, yet sinister part of the piece that was very entertaining to me.

David Ellis is a painter and in a way a movie maker as well. He usually paints huge canvases on floors and walls, as well as does his own structures. His art honestly to me is probably the most diverse and original type of art. When I met David Ellis at the Macaulay building i was simply blown away. He has a very urban influence, which makes his style refreshing and i recognized one of the groups that interviewed him. His style is also semi cartoon-style which adds this youthful sense to his art. But i also love how textural his art can be. Often there are pieces that are very detailed and have many layers.

The thing i like about David Ellis the most is his ability to combine different mediums. For example, he had a piece that was set up in this gallery at RICE University in Texas where he made this painting on these oil drums and paint cans and made these devices so that the cans would be hit to make a sort of beat. He incorporated music into art. To me this is amazing. I think this idea is extremely unique and very innovative. It also must’ve taken a lot of talent in many different fields.

David Ellis believes that art isn’t permanent. In his movies he often paints and repaints over a work and never has really a set image that he keeps. He’ll make a painting and then painting it white and paint a completely separate thing. This philosophy to me is admirable, but i don’t know how he doe it. If there was a piece that i did where i thought it was really good, i wouldn’t be able to bring myself to paint over it, also with this policy he often does a painting in one swoop, which means there really isn’t room for extreme error. He doesn’t draft his work.

Since we saw David Ellis for class I have to say that he has been one of my favorite artists. I love his style and love the way he approaches his work. He also seems like a very cool guy. I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed this trip and i might have been my favorite out of all the trips that we have gone on.

This is the piece made out of oil drums

“Vistaar”

Choreography by Madhavi Mudgal

Music by Madhup Mudgal

Costumes by Madhup Mudgal

Choreography – With this piece I really enjoyed the choreography. The performers often moved as one unit make different almost geometric shapes. The dancing was also a part of the music since the costumes had beads or coins attached to the dresses their movement worked as a sort of percussion instrument. The dancers were all female. There were five of them. They each had an outfit that was the same except for the color.

Set/Stage and Light Design – The light played a big factor in this. It helped set the focus of the audience by shifting around the stage from musicians to dancer. The rest of the stage is dark except for the one spot light and there is not backdrop. The costumes were traditional very traditional and heavy looking dresses with things that made sounds on them.

Music – It sounded like traditional Indian music. Every person on stage is a part of the music from the dancers to the musicians. There is a lot of movement in the music and it is very up beat. It was live. The relationship was that they all moved in unison, dancer and musicians. The dance was part of the form of music.

The feet of the Monument

The narrative of the film follows the rise and fall of the Empire of a man named Soho Eckstein who bought half of Johannesburg. Soho Eckstein is a greedy man, who is always wearing a dark suit and is portrayed as angry, over worked, isolated from regular society and glutinous. Another of the main characters is Soho Eckstein’s wife. She is represented as often bored and unattended to, which leads to her promiscuous affair with Felix Tittlebaum. In the end though, after Eckstein’s empire falls, he ends up back with her. Felix is viewed as a captive. He is forced to be where he is and wants to escape it as much as possible. His only way of escaping it is by his affair with Mrs. Eckstein. Only when he is with her is he truly happy. I think Felix and Soho represent two parts of the artist, the workaholic and the more natural one. When he is at work he must neglect everything he loves. He therefore is more angry and greedy and is darker of a human. But when he is with the person he loves he is happy and less dark. But only when he can destroy his original corporate work can eh go back to what he loves, in this case it was a woman. I think that woman in the artist’s mind represents art. I don’t fully know Kentridge’s biography so I’m not sure if this is the case, but he might have done this by just saying that this dilemma follows every person. Only when one person can shed and destroy the shackles of skyscrapers and corporate world can one go back to what they enjoy most about life. That is what the big fight between Felix and Soho is. It is the dilemma between these characters of whether a man should be married to his job or the woman he loves.

My favorite part of all the four movies was the monument. When it showed this man bound to be under a burden that he may want to break but can’t because it weighs him down while bound him by the feet I thought this was a great metaphor for how in the modern world often people are forced by the corporate and capitalist world to pursue careers that are more profitable instead of more enjoyable. People seem to ask themselves nowadays what is a better career choice instead of what they truly enjoy doing. And the monument represents the mistake the man has made by focusing on this career. Now he is shackled and bound, never to be able to pursue his true dreams and to only be carrying the burden of a job he doesn’t enjoy.

Miranda Lichtenstein

This is my favorite piece of the exhibit because i love the way it plays on reflection. The way the water reflects the face of the woman adds a surreal edge to something that almost seems trivial, like swimming. This piece i think truly embodied the exhibit because it symbolizes the idea of finding oddity in everyday life. That there is this sense of uncanny within us lying underneath the surface. i also love the vividness of the water because the color almost seems painted on. It almost adds an uncanniness because the piece almost feels like it blends between panting and photography. Also the way  the water distorts the edge of the pool makes it seem almost like a landscape. So in this way it is also nature vs industrialism, where the wall is industrialism and the water  is nature.

I think the way the Starns brothers changed our way of art is that they changed the way we experience it. In a lot of art you’re usually able to see the whole piece at one point at least. In the Big Bambu piece it was impossible to see all of it. There was no upper level and it was too big to see all of it from just one side. For example, when you first walk in you see the wave, which is the main part of the whole piece. But as you go into it you see every individual branch of Bamboo and how they differ. You see different shades, different thickness and even different strings that were used to tie up the piece. It changed our perspective of the piece because it gave into the idea that there is more than meets the eye.

The Starns brothers change our perspective of the city by making it a backdrop of the piece. When I walked through the whole bamboo structure and looked at it from the other side what I saw was the city. It seemed as if it was the background of the actual piece and as much a part of the piece as was the bamboo that it was built on. But the city also in this case takes a secondary role. It is a tool as opposed to a focal point. When we think of the city we think of it as big, something that would be focused on and less complimentary and more taking away from other things, but in this case it is complementary. I think the reason why the artists did this was to show that the city is really a tool that can be used whichever way you want it. They are saying the city is what you make out of it and how you utilize it is your own choice.

The Starns changed the way we perceive the Met because they gave the museum a new layer. Big Bambu added a whole new floor almost to the Met. Not only that but it added almost like a roller coaster amusement ride type of feel to the Met. It didn’t feel as if that part of the museum was more like rather than like something similar to the Wonder Wheel or the Cyclone. Like the fact that you had a line for the elevator that went up to it gave me this sense of waiting online for a roller coaster. The anticipation and excitement of waiting to see what you were going up against and the simple fact this was a huge wooden structure adds to that similarity in correlation.

While looking at the “Big Bambu” I saw a piece of art that was not only art but a representation of the city. It was a ride for children to play on. A Jungle gym of sorts and this really made me see that art can be literally interactive. When I saw this piece only one thing truly came to mind. It was this Jungle gym in front of the Guggenheim Bilbao. It was very well done artistically. But it was also a playground. I’d put this type of art in a genre. I would call this physical art. In a lot of forms of art the audience has visual interaction with the piece. In music you have audio interaction. But there are very few pieces with physical interaction.

This is only the side you see when you first enter the exhibit