The Arts in New York City

Diwali is a significant festival in Hinduism, which originated in India. It is the celebration of the return of Lord Rama, king of Ayodhya. He returned from a fourteen year exile in the forest. People of Ayodhya celebrated by lighting rows of lamps. Today in present day, people celebrate Diwali by lighting candle at home and also at the temple. In our house, we lit up candles on the stairs and on the front steps. In addition to the candles some also light firecrackers at night. I remember lighting firecrackers when I was in Bangladesh. On Diwali my brother and I used to get money from my grandparents and light them in our backyard. There used to be so many different types of them. However it is hard to do such a thing here in New York City. Instead we light different colored and sized candles in our house. Last weekend on Diwali my sister made a few patterns with the candles. When I turned of the lights, the light was remarkable to look at. These patterns could be seen differently in everyone’s eyes. It is amazing how a religious holiday can result in art.

Throughout my week, while doing several hobbies, I realized something.  This realization was apparently something that has been existant in my justified true beliefs.  As several of my homies and I headed toward the park, I consciously acquired retained knowledge of the first day of IDC class where we discussed how soccer can be seen as an art.  As my friends and I started playing, we played using deceptive tricks.  As I began to stare at the way the players moved with the ball, it almost looked as if the players were dancing with the ball.  The rhythmic movement of the feet was seen almost as if it was coordinated.  Whenever I got the ball, this notion was set upon me.  The ball was my girlfriend; as I moved my feet, she gently followed my step and danced with me throughout the field.  Soccer can be made fancy and rhythmic if you put a little effort to see it as an art.

When I came across the trailers for “American Gangster” while watching TV, I figured that it would be just another pointless action movie with no substantial plot. However after being persuaded to see it by Dan and Joanna, I was pleasantly surprised. I found this movie to be a work of art in that it depicted the intense, criminal culture of 1970′s Harlem. The film mainly tells the story of Frank Lucas, a self- made millionaire whose cocaine business reached the peak of its success in the 1970′s and also saw its downfall soon after. However, unlike most action/mobster films with repetitive fist fights and annoying gun shots, this film was perfectly planned and choreographed from beginning to end. It immerses the audience into the world of the drug trafficking, and it was extremely realistic because the majority took place in New York City. I was also very impressed by Denzel Washington’s portrayal of Lucas. At the end of the movie, I forgot who Denzel Washington was and was only able to think of him as a ruthless drug gangster. There was some intense visual imagery in the film which I felt was very effective in allowing the audience to see through the eyes of the people experiencing this crazy lifestyle. I definitely recommend this film to anyone who has not seen it yet.

For the past three weeks, I had the opportunity to work on Anton Chekhov’s critically acclaimed play “The Seagull” at Brooklyn College. Not as an actress however, but as a crewmember. I was assigned the job of the “sound operator”. This was totally unfamiliar territory to me, but over the course of three weeks I experienced the complex and often stressful job of the people who truly take care of bringing the authenticity of a play to life – the crew. As an audience, one gets to enjoy the captivating performances of the actors and take in the marvelous set, lights, sound, period costumes and props. These components, which at times we don’t give enough credit to, let one engage and find a connection to the circumstances of the play. What is going on behind the scenes however does not reflect the beauty of art and theater at all – it certainly posed a new challenge and experience to me. During shows, I sat on a headset in a small, dark sound booth, waiting for my stage manager to call the next cue. I realized that I didn’t perceive “The Seagull” as a beautiful play filled with great characters anymore, but it turned into a technical piece of text to which I didn’t have any emotional connection and merely dissected it into cues, breaks and “stand-by’s”. It was enriching as an actor to make this experience of being a crewmember. I believe it broadened my horizon to the extent that I now understand the complexity and huge undertaking of only one play – the people, technicalities and money that is involved; something that the audience and even actors mostly don’t pay much attention to.

Have you ever notice how much art is actually around us? There is no need to travel a gazillion times to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see art. We encounter art everyday just by attending Baruch. The Baruch Newman Vertical Campus houses numerous pieces of art. On every floor, you can find at least a couple of paintings or pictures. There are the chrome prints on the third floor; there are the black and white nature prints on the ninth floor; there are the series of “Produce Better, Live Better” ads on the tenth floor. Even the building itself can be considered artistic in its structure. The Vertical Campus is innovative in its organizations of stacked atria with expansive windows that allow so much daylight into the building. Photographs of the external building and internal setting are display all along the walls as you enter the Baruch Performing Arts Center. The BPAC acts as another way of providing the Baruch community with art as many plays and concert series are held there. If you don’t have the time or money to venture elsewhere to experience art, all you have to do is take a walk around the building during your breaks.

The six-year-old girl tucked her hair behind her ear with her right hand while holding the book down on her lap with her left. Softly but clearly, her young, immature voice chirped amidst the voices of loud grown-up gossip. “I do not like them in a box. I do not like them with a fox.” She clenched her little baby teeth slightly, and pronounced the x-sound as distinctly as the sound of a shoe crushing a crisp autumn leaf. “I do not like them here or there. I do not like them anywhere.” She lifted the tones of the last words of those sentences, mistakenly reading them as if they ended in questions marks instead of periods. I opened my mouth to correct her, but decided that her mother would not like it if a stranger spoke to her. “I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam-I-am.” She turned the page with her small, delicate fingers, and continued to read. Her audience consisted of just her mother and me, a stranger sitting beside her on the train, listening to every word projected by her high-pitched voice that reminded me of the first time I read that book by Dr. Seuss.

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Waiting for the Arts of Japan guide tour, I wondered if I would find anything of interest. The Arts of Japan section of the MET was located within the Chinese gallery. One exhibit that stood out was located in a small hallway towards the end of the tour. There were many woodblock paintings, by Toshusai Sharaku, lined the small golden walls. The pieces were created by tracing a pattern onto a woodblock and then carving out a relief, slathering with ink and imprinted onto a sheet of paper. The pieces capture the naturalness of human emotion. Many of the faces are distorted and unflattering in order to create expressions, emotions and realism on psychological levels. Sharaku used actual actors from a traditional Japanese theater to portray these characters. I found these images to be very interesting and I liked how they expressed the many feelings that the humans can portray. There are many sides to humans that are not pretty and it is hard to hide that. I like the way Sharaku portrayed these images all together to show the many expressions side by side.

Art serves not only as eye candy but also to make political statements, much like what Dan Perjovschi did with Projects 85. Clearly not focusing on aesthetics, the hand-drawn stick figures were scrawled across the massive wall in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art. Not only were they amusing, but it reflected American values and issues. For example, in one part, there were pictures of “unsafe things,” including airplanes and envelopes. In another, the perfect flight passenger was naked. There were also references to pop culture so even children can relate, such as a line of people listening to iPods. This just goes to show that art is not just a pretty picture but can be a medium to get news of current events across to the public as well.

After having my fill of paintings in museums such as the MoMA, the Guggenheim and the Met, I felt it was time for me to see some more pictures, but… in motion. Movies and TV programs are the everyday means of displaying the arts of motion pictures. But how does it all work? To answer this question one must venture into the heart of Queens and head to the Museum of the Moving Image located in Astoria. Residing across the street from the famed Kauffman Studios, the Museum of the Moving Image’s goal is to advance the appreciation of the art, history, technique and technology involved in film, television, and digital media. The museum offers some great exhibits such as “Behind the Screen” in which I got to see the various aspects of movie making like the production and marketing of the movies. I was also happy to find that the museum had its own theater. I managed to sit in on one of the shows, which was a classic episode of Captain America. What I found the most interesting, being a sports fan, was the replica of a sports broadcasting station. In it, there are several screens all showing different images of a sporting event. The exhibit simulates how a producer must decide on which screens to show, for how long he must show them and when he must show them. This place was great and, if you like movies and TV you will love the Museum of the Moving Image.

The trip to the Guggenheim museum certainly enriches my experience of the exploration of modern art. I have a chance to observe many paintings painted by great artists in person rather than reading from books; it helps me to appreciate and understand these paintings better. There is one painting called composition 8, by Vasily Kandinsky, struck me and lasted in my mind for a longer time than many others paintings did. I actually learned about this painting in my art class in China several years ago, and it was a bit exciting to finally see it in person. Kandinsky emphasizes on geometric forms in this painting to establish a universal aesthetic language and to expand his own pictorial vocabulary. His belief in the expressive content of abstract forms is clearly indicated in Composition 8. The colorful, interactive geometric forms create a pulsating surface that is alternately dynamic and calm, aggressive and quiet. The importance of circles in this painting is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium. Kandinsky suggests that everything in the world exists in balance and harmony.