Song Kun at the Hammer Museum

Our last day of vacation -- we headed over to the Hammer Museum to see Eden’s Edge, a show of 15 LA Artists. It was very interesting; all the artists are far more capable of extreme obsession than am I. I liked some of the work; though not all.

On our way out, we almost missed a small show by emerging Chinese painter Song Kun, who filled a small gallery with 97 daily paintings of her life…fabulous! Her work ranges from part drawn, part painted canvases to fully realized and very well-done representational works to a number of blank canvases. At first, I took one quick pass through the gallery, intending that to be it; then went back and looked at each painting more closely, then went back again, by this time fully drawn into her mesmerizing paintings. This was my favorite art of all that I’ve seen on this coastal trip!

San Diego Balboa Park Museums

Today we headed up to Balboa Park. The first museum we came to was the Museum of Living Artists, so of course, we had to check that out. They had a show of local artists responding to the Dead Sea Scrolls (which are currently showing at the Museum of Natural History).

Good show, similar in some ways to an AVAA show. For a local show, I was impressed by the number of strong and thoughtful pieces. There were many interesting responses to the Dead Sea Scrolls.

There was a beautiful abstract called Mosaic #6 by Jane Fletcher, the prettiest piece in the show, a very funny piece called "The Dead Sea Squirrels" by Hank Gross, a very interesting torah-photo sculpture by Art Ferber, a thoughtful piece called “What Every Household Needs” by Nanette Newbry, that printed the entire Patriot Act in something like 1pt. type on a metal plate. One woman had created a piece that encompassed all (I think) of the text of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, each line of tiny text cut out and arranged in concentric shapes morphing from a circle of text to a butterfly, each shaped piece about 24” in diameter and encased between sheets of plastic (Cheryl Sorg, piece titled “Bodies I Have in Mind, and How They Can Change to Assume New Shapes"). Another notable piece was called "Scroll and Palimpsest" by Bob Simpson - a 13 panel long mixed media piece on plywood that beautifully incorporated marks that resembled writings with drawing and painting. There was a pretty groovy mixed media piece called "Sheep" by Wendy Kwasny-Bowen and a beautiful large oriental style scroll piece called "Waves in Conversation" by Rosemary Kimball, a nice small piece called "Fish Legend" by Meredith Cummings, and several other very nice or very thoughtful pieces, like "The Scroll That Never Ends" by Robert Collie, a digital piece about all the soldiers we’ve lost in Iraq.

There were also two featured artists with many works on display: Jo-Lind Eckstein and Claire-Lise Matthey Anderegg. They both did work that ranged from small to medium-large, and the work was layered and very richly textured. I loved both of their styles very much.

Next we went to the Museum of Art, and saw a few small rooms of paintings from Ingres to Frantisek Kupka and the surrealists. I really loved the Kupka piece! His work was apparently so avant-garde at the time, even the avant-garde didn’t get it. When asked what his work represented, he responded “Must then a work of art represent something?”

There was also a nice, elaborate show of Impressionist Artists of Giverny - lots of beautiful paintings by some of the apparently 350 artists painting around there at that time, including of course Monet, and also Frieseke, plus many I have never before heard of.

Tim Hawkinson's Floopsia and Uberorgan and More at The Getty Museum

Went to the Getty Museum today to see work by Tim Hawkinson. We started with his Uberorgan in the main hall. We didn’t have long to wait for it’s hourly musical performance…it was very cool. It's a massive installation of things made from household materials -- huge bladders of plastic stitched into exquisitely goofy shapes, blowing air through cardboard tubes into horns, all driven by a large scroll of paper which runs through some electronic gizmos like giant rolls on a player piano, producing a wonderful cacophony of sounds for 5 minutes every hour. The museum staff loved it (well...maybe). We definitely loved it!

Then we went to see his other pieces -- collectively called Zoopsia -- which included a bat made of used black plastic Radio Shack bags, an octopus with suckers made from photographs of the artist's fingers, hands, and lips, and a very large calligraphic ink drawing of a Chinese style dragon painted on large brown paper and hung much like an eastern scroll painting. My favorite piece of his was called Leviathon, a large 'skeleton' of a fossil-like 'dinosaur,' only all the vertebrae were little men and the ribs were the oars in their hands as they rowed down his spine. The head was created from a folded over human figure. It was so clever and really beautiful.

Then we checked out the exhibition of Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère -- I've always loved this painting, but hadn't really, really looked at it before. Only when you really start studying it closely, does it become apparent that the reflection you see in the mirror behind the barmaid is impossible...which then leads to all kinds of questions. Like why does the mirror appear to be flat behind her, yet shows a reflection as if it were on an angle? Who is that man in the reflection -- he seems closer to her in the reflection than would even be possible if he were the viewer. These are just a few of the technicalities; psychologically, it's even more perplexing. Check out the Getty link above for a little more discussion of this by far better scholars than I.

We also looked at the European Drawings on view, a nice large show of Weston photos, and some very large, and disturbing photos of current world affairs by Luc Delahaye.

Vacationing on the West Coast

First full day in LA; we got up this morning all set to go see 187 paintings by David Amico at the ACE Gallery, only to find out he was not in fact showing there. Rats!

So we made a new plan to go to the MOCA downtown.

As it happened, they were in the process of installing a new show, so they only had a couple of rooms of art to view.

Some pretty cool stuff...fabulous sculptures and drawings by LA artist Matthew Monahan. His sculptures are conglomerations of all sorts of materials, including sheetrock and wax. My favorite, though, were the heads he so beautifully drew and then folded into head shapes, sort of like origami, then place in the head position on top of other sculptural material -- very beautifully done! As you walked around a piece, the drawn eyes would follow you from their folded paper position.

The photo above is a sculpture outdoors at the MOCA, complete with birdseed and usually several live birds (and bird poop).