Fallen Star

Do Ho Suh

Fallen Star

2012

Do Ho Suh’s Fallen Star is the 18th permanent sculpture commissioned by UCSD’s Stuart Collection. It reflects Suh’s on-going exploration of themes around the idea of home, cultural displacement, the perception of our surroundings, and how one constructs a memory of a space. His own feelings of displacement when he arrived in the U.S. from Seoul, Korea in 1991 to study led him to measure spaces in order to establish relationships with his new surroundings. He had to physically and mentally readjust.
Suh’s small “home” has perhaps been picked up by some mysterious force and appears to have landed or crashed onto the seventh floor of Jacobs Hall at the Jacobs School of Engineering. The roof garden is part of his design and the whole creates a space with panoramic views for small groups to gather and readjust.
Do Ho Suh graduated from Seoul National University. He received a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in sculpture from Yale University. He represented Korea at the Venice Biennale in 2001. Suh has exhibited around the world and is represented in numerous museum collections. He lives and works in New York, London and Seoul.
Funding has been made possible through private donations and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts’ program for Access to Artistic Excellence.

This is quite a thrilling piece of sculpture to discover inadvertently. Amazing. 

Madeline Sherry

http://madelinesherrypaintings.com/

Love the little film on this clip but Madeline Sherry had moves on to a new subject in her recent show. The abstracts are gone and in their place-ones like this.

As you might expect, we have gone to a lot of museums and galleries while in southern California. One of my favorite gallery shows took place at the Pulse Gallery in San Diego where recent work of Madeline Sherry was being displayed. These are huge canvasses that knocked me out.

It's in a cool area where lots of galleries have taken over spaces used by the military in earlier years. On the first Friday of each month, the galleries are open at night and have wine and cheese to make it more fun. We saw a fabulous quilt show there as well.

Most of the huge Sherry canvasses depicted scenes from post WW 2 magazines. But my favorite was a very evocative one of Lizbeth Scott from the film THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVES. In this film, Scott, depicted in Sherry's painting is the femme fatale-Lizabeth Scott. 


If you're in the area, stopping in this area is great fun.

From the Gallery: On Feb 9th, 2013 Pulse Gallery will host “Talk and Tea” with Madeline Sherry. Madeline’s series “The Times” was inspired by images and articles from a Times Magazine printed and published in 1944, the year of her birth. Her large format oil paintings capture both nostalgia and the reality of everyday life in the 40’s.


 

Marina Abramović

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/965





Watched a documentary last night on HBO about Marina Abramovic, a Serbian performance artist now in her sixties (and boy, did she look good for 64).

We saw her exhibit at MOMA in 2010. In it, she sits across from anyone who cares to take the chair. She sat there all day for three months, scarcely moving.

Much of her work, in fact all of it, make use of her body. Her body is her canvass. You might get the idea from the link above. The exhibit and Abramovic drove the other viewer in this house crazy because he saw it as narcissistic and self-indulgent, which it was. But I was a bit more tolerant because Abramovic was trying to engage the viewer more than any artist had before. She was available to them and many of the people who sat down across from her were in tears. It all comes down to the question what should art do, I think. What makes something art? Certainly it does not need to be pretty but what does it need to be?

At one point, she said her mother used to come into her room and night and wake her to say she was moving around too much in her bed. "Be still." I guess that was good preparation.

You probably won't come away from this loving the artist but I think you will find her interesting.

Does performance art work for you? Is it more performance than art?

What I Saw in New York

All for free at the Frick, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Asian Society, Philippine Center, Museum of Art and Design, and the Guggenheim.

Sunday Night Art in Detroit

Fairy Tales, Monsters and the Genetic Imagination

This is a life sized sculpture.


This was part of a terrific exhibit at the Frist Center in Nashville. Of course, I was able to identify the fairy tales, but I realized how alien (ha) most monsters are to my reading. Who is your favorite monster? What books about monsters other than Frankenstein do I need to read? Is King Kong a genetic mutation. I guess so.

One video, in particular, interested me. A group of puffballs made their way over to a sleeping child. At first, the viewer is repulsed and feels worried for the child, but your perception changes over time. Are these puff balls monsters based on their appearance, their unfamiliarity or is it the sense of threat that makes them monsters? What is a monster?

WORK OF ART: The Next Great Artist (BRAVO)

We don't watch reality shows but George turned us on to TOP CHEF last year so when I saw this show was coming on, we gave it a try.

The Premise: fourteen artists compete for a show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and $100, 000. The guy to the left did this in half a day. And didn't win. And he's 22. So you can see these artists, like the chefs in Top Chef, are not art school students. The first challenge was to paint a portrait of one of the other contestants.

I am hoping to learn more about art from the judges in this series. Some of the artists do the kind of work I find challenging. Maybe I will see its merits after three months. Or maybe I will see it has none.
We enjoyed the first one and agreed with the choice of the artist who was eliminated. He painted a clown--never a good idea.
It was on Wednesday night at eleven here. I assume it will move to ten when the earlier show concludes.

Your Taste in Books

From Hannah Stoneham's blog :
"Simon at Stuck in a Book, who is the source of many good ideas, has had me wracking my brain for at least two days. His challenge for those who choose to accept it is to find an image which sums up one’s reading taste. If possible, we are to avoid including a picture of a book or a specific character."

Me, too. One of my favorite artists is Reginald Marsh, and this picture sort of embodies what I look for in a book. It's entitled "Merry Go Round" and it's dreamy, a bit out of focus, colorful, sinister, vague, and full of life.

What picture sums up your taste in books? Let me know if you post one.

For Rick, the Paris equivalent. I was waiting for someone to ask for something from the top.

Re: Art

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Thanks to Paul Brazill for sharing this wonderful commentary on the meaning of art.

ART and ALL THAT

On my recent trip to NY, I spent a lot of time in art museums. What I noticed was a lot of installation art. I think I've said before here, I don't get most installation art.

What is a room full of newspapers pasted on the floor, some painted blue, supposed to tell me. What are a hundred monitors playing the same footage all about? What do orange peels mean? Art may be beautiful, it may tell us a truth about ourselves, it may point out illusions, it may capture a time, point up injustice, it makes you look at something in a new way. I'm sure the last is what most installation art is meant to do. But is everything worth looking at?

Clearly installation art's only for museums large enough to hold it-nobody would ever buy such art. So if you're creating art solely for museums, don't you enter into a pact with curators on some level. It's either get picked up by a museum or you're trash. Literally.

I also noticed many pieces featuring sex and violence. One piece was a naked woman twirling a hula hoop made of barbed wire. In the museum, PS I, the art from the sixties was just about being naked. But by 2010, nakedness didn't cut it so they had to find something that did.

At the MOMA, Marina Abramović's work is given a whole floor. The artist herself sits on the first floor all day long staring at whoever cares to sit across from her. Is this more than a gimmick? It makes a small point, but then what? Other exhibits had naked people two inches apart, people back to back, etc. Such a static use of live bodies.

Do you think one hundred years from now this art will be more than a curiosity?

My husband says that since we have come to respect non-representational art, we will acquire a taste for this, too. Do you think so?

What pieces of art move you most? What's art to you?