The Blanton Museum/Austin, TX

Nothing like a bomb threat to liven up a museum visit.

There we were, at 12:30 pm, passing the Attic pottery and entering Modern and Contemporary Art in the new home of the Blanton Museum in Austin, Tex., when a young polo-shirted, chino'd musem guard asked us to calmly exit the building. Most of the guards were, or professed to be, clueless about why the museum was suddenly closing, but one guard said there'd been a bomb threat that had apparently been found to not be credible. I guess protocol had to be followed. So out we went and across the street, vouchers for a return visit in hand. Happily nothing came of the threat that I could tell.

After years of controversy, the museum has emerged to be a good looking, but not very remarkable addition to the UT campus. (The photo above, by the way, shows a lamppost outside the Blanton where everyone seems to deposit their entrance stickers, as well as those from the Texas State History Museum.) The design of the museum doesn't make much of a statement, but its limestone facade and white, open interior with diagonal skylights is pleasant, if not wildly interesting. It was supposed to be designed by modernist architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, whose projects include the Tate Gallery of Modern Art in London, but the UT System Board of Regents didn't think the design fit with the surrounding architecture--too bold, accounts have said.

The UT Master Plan calls for building in the Spanish Renaissance style, using red-tiled roofs and limestone (given that, why ask minimalist-minded modernist superstars to design your building?). After the architects and the board when back and forth, the architects quit in 1999. There's a very telling back and forth between one member of the Board of Regents and Herzog here. One of my favorite points Herzog makes is that "universities should be places that encourage change and that value innovation more than imitation." The member of the Board of Regents, who clearly hates the modern buildings already on UT's campus, replies, "We are not willing to turn our campus into a proving ground for experimental modern design." There's a good Austin Chronicle article on the controversy here. The Dean of the Architecture school resigned in protest over the whole mess (though he's still on the faculty, just not the dean anymore). The Board of Regents went with the Boston firm of Kallmann McKinnell and Wood instead.

While the style of the building may be conservative, it has some very cool and very thought-provoking art installations. There's an amazing one by Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles, called "Missao/Missoes (How to Build a Cathedral)." (His other work is worth checking out on google images.)













It is composed of a black-veiled area that you enter to look up at a ceiling of 2000 hanging cow bones with a string of 800 communion wafers stretching down from the middle and connecting the bones with 600,000 bright copper pennies.

A fascinating bit of information found on the web (you can find the post here, but this is basically it): "Built in 1987...the artwork is unique in the fact that it changes wherever it goes. The artwork is a floating piece and the coins are the smallest denomination that the country it is shown in has. In the Blanton, where the piece is currently showing, pennies are used for the coins. In another country, however, the coins may be silver or gold colored instead of copper. Cildo Meireles illustrates this cathedral as a combination of the coins representing wealth, agriculture represented by the bones, and religion represented by the wafers. "The installation draws attention to the fact that the conquest of the Americas was as much about economics as it was about religion or saving souls" (Blanton)."

Another very cool installation is one called "From Texas with love 2002." It's by Emily Jacir, who was born in Amman, Jordan. (Good article about her recent project on a very interesting blog here.) She asked Palestinians living in Israel what they would choose to listen to if they could get into a car and drive for an hour without being stopped at checkpoints (what seems so easy to us is such an impossibility for them). There's a monitor showing video footage of a vast expanse of West Texas desert through a car's windshield, and a few iPods at the monitor play the songs the Palestinians chose. These are some of them; I focused on the Western songs, which made up a decent chunk of the choices:
-"Freedom," by Jimi Hendrix
-"The Thrill is Gone," by B.B. King
-"Ishta tellak" (sorry, can't get the right accents in there) by Fairuz (Fairuz was very popular)
-"Wild World," by Cat Stevens
-"Fly Me to the Moon," by Frank Sinatra
-"Patria," by Ruben Blades
-"Autumn Leaves," by Tony Bennett
-"Get Out The Map," Indigo Girls
-"I Can See Clearly Now," Drifters
-"Message to Love," Hendrix
-"Biladi Biladi" by Sayed Darwish
-"Material Girl," by Madonna

Both of these installations are part of the museum's great Modern and Contemporary Art collection, which features a lot of paintings from the Suida-Manning collection (formed by a family of art historians). The Blanton takes a very interesting approach in mixing its Americas in an "exploration of the frontier and historic notions of what 'American' means." (Interesting article on that here.)

Here's how they do that, in a nutshell: After a gallery of works depicting the American West, complete with Frederick Remington paintings and sculptures, and some incredibly realistic paintings by Henry F. Farny, like "Council of the Chiefs" (which is not the one shown here, by the way) you move into the America/Americas permanent exhibit, which examines "how Latin American and American artists responded to and incorporated European strains of modernism in the early 20th Century." It presents a work by Uruguayan artist Joaquin Torres-Garcia near a work by Arshile Gorky, and a Mark Rothko work (I had no idea that he was born in Dvinsk, Russia) by a David Alfaro Siqueiros painting of the torture of Cuauhtemoc (sp??), with the red and yellow fire painted in thick industrial paint that reaches out of the canvas. The painting tags tell you when and where the person was born, where they lived and worked for what period, when they died and where. My only wish: I'd like to know what the museum paid for each piece.

My wonderful 12-year-old nephew, Liam, had a favorite at the show, this painting by Kazuya Sakai, called "Filles de Kilimanjaro III (Miles Davis)". (I have to check with my equally wonderful niece, Jessie, to find out her favorite.) The painting is mentioned in this article, which notes that "It’s hard to get more international than Sakai, who was born to Japanese parents in Buenos Aires and lived in Mexico for a decade before the university invited him to teach as a visiting artist. He never returned to Argentina and died in Dallas. He is a Latin American artist of Japanese heritage painting a piece for an American jazz musician."

One quirky thing the museum does in its free audio guide is have Austin business owners (as well as UT professors, who make insightful comments) comment on paintings. So while you're looking at Domenico Paola's "Allegory of Youth" you're hearing the owner of Austin hair salon Anew comment on the woman in the painting and the symbolism of the hourglass. For him, the hairstyling client is the canvas, we learn, and God's gift to us is that he lets our eyesight get worse as we grow older so we can't see our decay so clearly, ha ha ha. He shows up again later, commenting on the subject's dress in "Portrait of a Man," by Nicolas de Largilliere. His focus here is on the "incredible center part" in the man's hair, and how it centers you, the viewer, with the person's body and face. O-kay. Thanks for that.

We also get a local landscape designer commenting on the flowers in Sebastiano Ricci's "Flora." "That's a yadda yadda flower, native to yadda yadda," etc. I like the attempt to connect the local community with the art in such a direct way, but the comments were not enlightening. Maybe a better idea would be to have a two-tier audio, where pressing No. 1 gets you the curator/expert's comments and then pressing No. 1a gets you the local businessperson's additional comments. Of course, here I am, blathering on about my views on art and I'm no expert, but people who are reading this have actively chosen to read it (perhaps with my prodding, but nevertheless!).

Additional stray Blanton info:

Right across the street is the Bob Bullock (yes, Sandra is related to him, or so someone told me) Texas State History Museum. You can also walk to the Ransom Center, which is another good UT art collection. And the State Capital is nearby.

There will be more Blanton to love soon: Once an adjoining building that will house a museum store, cafe, auditorium, classrooms and office space is completed in 2007, the Blanton complex will top Harvard as the largest university art complex, at some 180,000 square feet. Right now, it has more than 17,000 works of art in its collection. The museum site tells us that "In 1988, the Blanton established the first full-time curatorship in Latin American art in the country. The move solidified the role of the art of Latin America in the collection, and the collection continues to draw significant gifts to this day." The writer James Michener and his wife Mari have been big art contributors and financial supporters of the museum for decades.

Happy Goldsworthy

The perfect Goldsworthian holiday picture!*












*You might not want to break the ethereal mood by sharing the title: "Icicles, joined by saliva."

The Fabulous Frick

For high-quality art in a beautiful setting, the Frick Museum in New York (between 70th and 71st Streets, and Madison and Fifth Ave.) cannot be beat (that's Henry Clay Frick at the left, with granddaughter Adelaide, in 1918). Right now, you can enjoy a tiny (size of a modest walk-in closet) but wonderful Cimabue and Early Italian Devotional Painting mini-exhibit (closes Dec. 31), a Tiepolo exhibit (downstairs) and Masterpieces of European Painting from the Cleveland Museum of Art, which has closed its permanent exhibit while it undergoes an extensive renovation (it has loaned the Frick 14 works; exhibit closes Jan. 28).

CIMABUE. The exhibit has to be tiny, since there is very little work remaining by Cenni di Pepo, better known as Cimabue (roughly translates to “Ox’s Head”--umm, possibly not a highly complimentary moniker?) There’s something like only four portable works attributed to Cimabue. The Frick exhibit unites one panel from its collection with one discovered in a private collection in 2000 (it is now owned by the National Gallery in London). The image below is not one from the Frick--it's an earlier Cimabue and far more stylized, and you can't get the full sense of it from this image--but it's a striking painting nonetheless.

Wikipedia says the Frick's Cimabue panel, “The Flagellation of Jesus," was purchased in 1950 and long considered to be of uncertain authorship. But in 2000, the National Gallery in London acquired a Virgin and Child with many similarities (size, materials, red borders, incised margins, etc.) The two pictures are now thought to be parts of a single work, a diptych or triptych altarpiece, and their attribution to Cimabue is fairly secure.

While the Flagllation is owned by the Frick (and is the only Cimabue in the United States), the Virgin and Child is in the U.S. temporarily. For a short time, the two works can be viewed side-by-side. The pair are believed to date from 1280.”

The Cimabue exhibit is a jewel. It's an example of the Frick's incredible attention to detail that on the two Cimabue panels, the small clasps that jut a few centimeters onto the painting are painted to track with what is beneath them, so don't interrupt your visual experience at all. (Although since I noticed them, maybe they do.) But it's a very thoughtful touch. The museum also provides clipboards with a catalogue covering Cimabue works (and others), which lets you indulge your curiosity right while you're looking at the paintings. Another thing I love about the Frick is that your $15 admission fee gets you a free audio guide to their permanent collection--and, if you ask, you can get a list of local eateries from the gift shop if you're not familiar with the neighborhood. My sister and I opted to walk up to the Whitney Museum on Madison and 74th and eat at the restaurant there, Sarabeth's, which is good--and located right next to one of the Whitney's gift shops (a convenient stocking-stuffer shopping stop).

CLEVELAND MUSEM OF ART EXHIBIT. One of my favorite games is trying to decode the symbolism in paintings and the Frick's tags for its paintings are always interesting and informative. So there's The Cleveland Museum of Art's Nicolas Poussin's "The Holy Family on the Steps" (1648), with Joseph off to the side, studying a compass--an allusion, the Frick tells us, to the carpenter's trade and a traditional symbol of God the universal architect. (The writeup on the Cleveland Museum's web site says that "The representation of Saint Joseph is unusual, for he is depicted more as an architect than a carpenter.")

Another Cleveland pic on loan to the Frick is Jacques Louis-David's "Cupid and Psyche." Cupid has an incredibly mischievous smile, and the model was James Gallatin, the 19-year-old son of the American envoy in Paris.

And then there's Valentin de Boulogne's "Samson" (c. 1630; another of the loans from the Cleveland Museum of Art). In that painting, a detail like the bee on the clasp of Samson's garment alludes to the "fabled swarm of bees that gathered on the slaughtered lion's carcass and produced honey." The painting's tag notes that the bee is also the heraldic device of Cardinal Francisco Barberini, who commissioned the painting.

That reminded me of a visit to the Barberini Palace in Rome, where you can find the bee-laden heraldic devices carved in stone on the walls. I love the Barberini because it provided one of those unexpected moments of discovery when I wandered back behind the museum and came upon a gated field. Inside the field were dozens of grazing rabbits, and cats wandering around them. It was sort of surreal. I noticed a kindly-looking white-bearded old man in a hut next to the iron gate, who indicated that it was fine for me to look around. So sweet, I thought. What a cute old man. Then I noticed what lined the walls of the little wooden hut--hard-core porn torn from magazines. The little old man didn't seem quite as cute after that...

Anyway, even if you miss these exhibits--and I'm skipping Tiepolo, because we'd been at the Frick for about four hours and had reached museum burnout--a visit to the Frick is always time well spent. Top Ten items there: Its Vermeers. The Hans Holbein painting of Sir Thomas More. The Sargents. The Rembrandt self-portrait. The incredibly rich, gilded icons. Jean-Antoine Houdon's La Grive Morte (The Dead Thrush), dated 1782. (A press release a while back noted that it was on loan from a gallery in Boston until August 2006, but it's still there, so I guess the loan has been extended?) If you love the whimsy of trompe l'oil, you'll love this marble relief. It is a small slab of white marble with the upside-down body of a thrush carved out of it, and it rests in a deep gold frame. The frame can't contain the volume of the bird; Houdon has one of its wings juts over the frame, leaving a shadow. It's a very arresting image and makes the work so much more intesting than it it were simply mounted in an alcove as a marble sculpture.

At the Frick, it's hard to pick your favorite, because there are so many wonderful things there. They also have a really great website, with MP3 audio guides you can download. There are also very good virtual tours of rooms.

Prague Museums: Part II (Picassos in Prague)

Here's a name that provokes a jarring mental image: The Trade Fair Palace. To a New Yorker, it seems akin to calling our convention center "The Javits Center Mansion."

Just like Dan Quayle was no Jack Kennedy, the Trade Fair Palace is no regal residence.

When you approach the building, you have a moment of confusion--is this an office building? Is it a sales office for work furniture, as the ground floor salesroom suggests, with its row of red, green and blue Knoll chair knockoffs waiting to be filled by budding-capitalist behinds? And what is that big, ungainly metal....thing....in front of the building? It is sculpture, my friends. Art. Kind of...ugly art.

As is, to some extent, the Trade Fair Palace, which was built in the functionalist style and originally designed in 1926-28 to hold 10,000 visitors and 4,000 exhibitors. According to "art/shop/eat Prague" Le Corbusier was one of the first visitors, and "claimed that the building showed him how Functionalism could be applied on a pioneeringly vast scale." And the vast white space, which centers around an atrium from which you can see works of art on all four Gallery floors, is appealing, though I wouldn't rhapsodize about it to the extent that "art/shop/eat Prague" does.

The fact that I didn't particularly warm up to the Trade Fair Palace is partly because I'm used to lavish Western museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick, the MOMA. I'm spoiled by being surrounded by well-funded museums with well-paid curators who have actual budgets to work with and pay great attention to how the works are displayed. The Frick, one of my favorites, even has a full-time horticulturalist on staff, who has been with it for 30 years and arranges gorgeous flower displays, which currently include red peonies worked into Christmas wreaths. (He may be the subject of a future posting.)

The Trade Fair Palace is officially called the Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art 0f the National Gallery in Prague. The lighting is basic, the partitions are basic, the floor is speckled linoleum. But it does have something on Western museums--you can pay just for the floors you want to visit. And the 3rd floor has some very good 19th and 20th-Century French Art. Favorites from a number of the floors: the van Gogh; the small Moore sculptures; the stylized paintings of Jan Zrzavy; the two Munchs; Klimt's "The Virgins," and the collection of Picassos, especially the one with the cubist frame by architect and leading theorist of the Czech cubist movement Pavel Janak. Here are a few of his designs you'll probably recognize (and can learn more about and even perhaps buy (well, some of them!) here).



Much of the collection was acquired by the Czechoslovak State in 1923, and a big chunk of good stuff (many of the Picassos and Braques) came from Vincenc Kramar, the director of the National Gallery in the 1920s. He was "encouraged" by the Communists to "donate" his extensive collection to the National Gallery before his death--I think that's how a tag at the Gallery phrased it. "art/shop/eat Prague" puts it like this: "He was forced to donate his collection to the Gallery in 1960, a few months before his death at age 83."

The logistics: A 15-minute or so tram ride from the New Town area of Prague takes you close to the Palace--you just have a 10-minute walk up a mild hill and a jog to the right. It's pretty easy to find. There is a great creperie with a painted red front to the left a block or so from where you exit the tram. (The actual name of the place--yeah, that would be kind of helpful!--will be added to this post soon.)

Prague Museum Reviews: Part I

I can highly recommend spending Thanksgiving in Prague. Thanks perhaps (agh) to global warming, it wasn’t nearly as cold as I’d thought it would be, and rain wasn’t a problem. A cashmere sweater, wool coat, warm scarf and gloves did the trick. There are more people there than you’d expect in an “off time” and especially on the weekend, but I can’t even imagine the crush of people that would be there in the summer months all cramming onto the Charles Bridge. The only real negative, and it wasn’t a big deal as long as you plan, are the reduced hours at certain museums that go into effect in November. Oh--and this can be a plus or a minus, depending on how economical you're feeling: The souveniers are, to be blunt but accurate, overpriced crap. Truly. While the notion of one of those Russian nesting dolls housing various Simpsons-Bart, Lisa, etc., or a set of George Bush or Berlusconi nesting dolls is amusing, it's not something you're (or I'm, at least) going to fork over too many Czech crowns for.

My frustrated consumerism aside, it’s a beautiful city to wander around—you’re always finding cool little (or big) architectural elements to admire, like this door, this synagogue, which I haven't yet been able to identify (it's not in the Jewish quarter--it's closer to the State Opera), and the Hogwartsesque twin spires of the Tyn Church.









One new high-profile architectural element I did not particularly admire: Frank Gehry’s so-called “Fred and Ginger” building that is often described as "dancing along the banks of the Vltava river." Nothing was knocked down in order to make room for it; the lot stood empty for 35-40 years after the original building was hit by one of the few light air raids in the war. It’s very mod, and, in my opinion, doesn’t fit and doesn’t add anything by not fitting. You know how sometimes buildings that don’t fit can make a really great statement and you just admire them for what they are, and they make you think? The Gehry building didn’t do that for me. Here’s a picture of it and you can make your own judgment--I actually didn't view it from this vantage point--it's the building bulging out in the middle--and this actually looks better than I thought, from a distance, at least.











The museums? A mixed bag, from what I saw and I couldn’t possibly see them all in six days, because, much as I’d like to see everything, this is after all vacation, so involves taking time to really enjoy the things you’re seeing. Some of the collections, like the one at Convent of St. Agnes, which houses the National Gallery’s Museum of Medieval Art, are very well displayed, with informative writeups for every picture. I’ll start with a description of that, and in following posts, move on to impressions/info on the National Gallery pictures at the Trade Fair Palace (Veletrzni Palac), the National Museum (that’ll be brief; for me, the big thrill, so to speak, was taking pictures of Woolly Mammoths to send to my nephew. This is what happens when your last name is Woolley, although, thankfully, none of us are mammoths), the Mucha Museum, and the synagogues in the Jewish Quarter, particularly the Spanish Synagogue, which is in a (yes, you could guess this) Moorish style and is just gorgeous, and has a good, heart-wrenching museum on its second floor/gallery.

Convent of St. Agnes: Housed in what "The Rough Guide to Prague" tells me is the city's oldest surviving Gothic building, founded in 1233, are some truly great Madonna/Madonna and child sculptures. An in-depth art guide I took along, “Art for Travellers/Prague,” by Deanne MacDonald, notes that “In the 12th and 13th centuries a popular cult of the Virgin developed partially in response to the church’s traditional hostility toward women, an attitude exemplified by the vilification of the figure of Eve.” Here’s a picture of a statue that caught my eye—if I could find what I wrote about it in my notes and tell you more about it, that would be great, but…I can’t find them yet. When looking at the blue in some of the panel paintings of Madonnas, I’d think back to that great Victoria Finlay book mentioned in an earlier post on this site and the use of the very precious royal blue lapis lazuli stone that was ground up and used as paint and or a dye.

After the Madonna statues, in the main part of the gallery, the pictures were displayed on gunmetal gray metal sheets bolted onto the wooden floor—this is in an old stone and brick convent that’s in the Gothic style, so high vaulted ceilings—and somehow this very contemporary treatment really works. It allows the Convent to show many more paintings in the space than they could with thicker regular walls, too, I imagine, and keeps the feeling of the room light. There are all sorts of gorgeous rich paintings of saints and such and you can play your own little private parlor game of picking out symbolic details (goldfinch=”ancient motif that was a pagan symbol of the soul later adopted by Christianity. A legend grew that the goldfinch acquired its red spot when it flew down to remove a thorn from Christ’s crown on the way to Calvary, and so it was seen as symbolizing Christ’s role as savior and martyr and became a popular attribute in Italian art” (thank you, Deanne MacDonald), a window frame ”symbolizing [in the painting of the Madonna of Most] that through devotion to the Virgin, the faithful would see into the Kingdom of Heaven,” etc., etc.)

My only wish there was that the writeups had occasionally gone into the materials and techniques used in the paintings; there was some heavy sort of patterning in gold paint that occasionally went all over the background of the painting and over onto the frame and I would have liked to learn more about that.

Student earthworks projects

What do the nation's students come up with when they go out into nature and emulate environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy? A project I'd like to do in my spare time is to compile examples of such work. One Christmas five or so years ago, the Austin Art Museum paired a Goldsworthy show (photos of a project he'd done for a wealthy family in Texas) with a Goldsworthy day at a park and also invited museumgoers to create their own earthwork arts and send in photos. It was a great way to draw the community into the museum.

What would emerge if NYC artists were asked to work with their native materials, whatever they considered them to be (okay, I'm thinking of the Goldsworthy faux-project I wrote about on this site earlier, using cigarette butts, metro cards, entrance tags from the MET, etc.) and then a show was built around their works? If Goldsworthy himself would work with "urban" materials it would be even more fascinating. Here's a recent story on student work from the Dallas News:

Students create art from nature at Arboretum

11:29 PM CST on Sunday, November 12, 2006

By ELIZABETH LANGTON / The Dallas Morning News

Their gallery was a secluded, wooded area of the Dallas Arboretum. Instead of clay or metal, they sculpted with leaves, flowers, branches and rocks.

They worked all day, creating more than a dozen pieces.

NATHAN HUNSINGER/DMN

Rose Martin arranged flowers around a spiral column of mud at the Arboretum on Nov. 8.

And then they left, abandoning the art for nature to reclaim.

"I prefer it that way," said student artist Laura Hall of Carrollton. "Because I know later on I won't enjoy the piece as much as the instant I made it."

Laura and 44 other students from Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts participated Wednesday in an experiment.

Students enrolled in Advanced Placement 3-D design were tasked with creating site-specific art using only materials indigenous to the arboretum. Painters and photographers assisted with construction and then documented the work.

Their abstract creations hung from trees, balanced atop rock piles and sunk into the earth.

"I really liked it, getting out into nature," said junior Judge Rucker of Old East Dallas. "It helped me create pieces I thought I could never do."

The field trip culminated the students' study of the earthworks art form and artist Andy Goldsworthy, who is known for creating landscape-sensitive outdoor sculptures. Though some of these works are meant to be permanent, others last only as long as the weather conditions.

Judge said he felt no remorse about the eventual demise awaiting his sculpture of cornhusks, bamboo and flowers.

But he wonders how Mr. Goldsworthy can leave every piece he makes.

"If I did this every single day and all my pieces were like this, I wouldn't be able to do it," he said.

This was the first time the school attempted the project, which the Junior League of Dallas supported with an innovative teaching grant. Art teacher Paige Furr said they hope to make it an annual outing.

"It's a creative problem-solving experiment," she said. "It's an assignment that colleges do a lot. And they are doing work of a college level."

Once arboretum officials understood that the students had no plans to cut flowers in the garden, they got excited about the partnership, said Amy Winkelmeyer, who works in the arboretum's education program.

"It's fascinating," she said. "I was over there several times today. I'm just amazed at the ability and imagination they have to have to even come up with the ideas."

Senior Amber Campagna of Old East Dallas said she felt intrigued by the concept of making art from materials that surround her every day.

"It's not a piece of artwork that you can sell," she said. "It's something you just create for people to enjoy."

Leaving the art to nature makes creating it more interesting, said senior Alex Hamrick of Old East Dallas.

"It changes the sculpture but it doesn't change the quality," he said. "You can't take it out of the environment, so that makes it easier to let go. But if we hadn't gotten pictures of it, and I knew right now it was being washed away, I'd be thinking 'Oh, no.' "

Junior Suzanna Weeks of Old East Dallas, a painter, was intrigued by the idea of art abandonment.

"In a way, it must be really freeing to do a piece and leave it," she said. "When I do paintings, I come back later and say, 'I should have done this or that.' "

The students worked in an area off-limits to arboretum visitors. But they plan to exhibit the drawings and photos in the spring at school and next fall at ArtScape, the arboretum's fine arts show and sale.

Arboretum officials call the garden a living museum. ArtScape, held for the first time in September, draws on the link between nature and art, Ms. Winkelmeyer said.

The student project solidifies the connection, she said.

"It's a perfect marriage and it was an accident," she said. "They didn't even know we had an art show."

--end--

Director of "Rivers and Tides"

The Google Alert I have set for environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy sends me all sorts of stuff about stray Andy Goldsworthys around the world--have to work on that--but also provides some stray Goldworthy-related stuff that sends me off in unexpected Goldsworthian directions. A case in point is the item below that mentions a new and very different effort by Thomas Riedelsheimer, director of Goldsworthy's "Rivers and Tides." You can find the full writeup on this site (sorry, but you have to scroll down a bit to find it). Apparently there's a film festival in San Fran this weeekend, the 3rd I Film Festival, and the film mentioned below is just one of a host of interesting films, including a great-sounding one from Sri Lanka, that the site describes. The Riedelsheimer one (if I have to type that name again, and type it wrong five times again, I'm going to scream) is not the most interesting one described, in my opinion, but Riedelsheimer's work (AHHHHH! Sorry. It's been a long morning) on the Goldsworthy documentary was so amazing that it seems worth checking out other work he's done/does, Anyway, here's the writeup:

"Originally, I wasn't planning to see Between the Lines: India's Third Gender. Over the years I've seen a number of features and documentaries about the hijiras of India (most of them at the Frameline festival), and thus wondered if I really needed to see one more. Between the Lines, however, happens to be photographed and edited by Thomas Riedelsheimer, director of the exquisite Andy Goldsworthy documentary Rivers and Tides. So yes, I do need to see this one, too. Praised by Variety's Jay Weissberg as representing "the best view to date into the world of the Indian eunuch," Between the Lines casts its focus upon three of these marginalized beings as they guide renowned photographer Anita Khemka through their singular world."

Belated D.U.M.B.O. Arts Festival photos

This bit of art consisted of a number of faux half crows (you know, you're rummaging through your junk drawer, finding old pennies, bent nails, old photo frames, and, oh!, there's one of those half crows I forgot about! How fortuitous!) glued onto a window so it looked as though they'd flown smack into it. Interesting, yes. The point? Don't quite know. And while the lady in pink wasn't my favorite bit of sculpture, you cannot deny that she has presence. Are you going to mess with her?!? She's pink, and she's proud!

Reviews of art reviews

Every week, I get The Week, which describes itself as an aggregation of "The Best of the U.S. and International Media." It's basically a cheat sheet to what's been going on in the world in the past week. Their Arts page highlights three exhibits, two of which sound enticing. There's Courbet and the Modern Landscape at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MD (through Jan. 7); Yayoi Kusama at Robert Miller Gallery in New York (through Nov. 25; warning: you have to click through a couple of screens to get to see images of Kusama's work); and Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005, at the Brooklyn Art Museum, NY (through Jan. 21).

The Kusama show sounds intriguing. Here's the writeup: "Lines, dots and circles have long fascinated Yayoi Kusama, says R.C. Baker in The Village Voice. The Japanese artist made her mark and people with networks of dots and dashes. Later, mental illness limited her output. But her latest works explore old preoccupations in novel ways, fusing fiber-optic cables, reflective orbs, and silk-screened canvases into 'a river of graphic energy.' The Passing of Winter, for instance, reflects the influence of her friend Joseph Cornell--literally. Look into this mirrored box and 'your reflection is bounced around a dizzying matrix of suspended and fallen reflective balls.' Geometry has rarely seemed so appealing." For some truly out-there color photos of dotted assemblages of people and things, check out some other Kusama work here.

As a less-than-stellar student of math, and I'm being kind to myself here, geometry and appealing are two words I have never before used in the same sentence. But I'm planning to take a look at this exhibit. The link in the graf above goes to the wikipedia entry on Kusama, which notes that she left Japan "at age 27 for New York City, after years of correspondence with Georgia O'Keefe" and that "she has experienced hallucations and severe obsessive thoughts since childhood, often of a suicidal nature." It also shows a photo of her work painting trees with polka dots, which looks very striking.

The other interesting exhibit noted is the Courbet one. To quote from the review of the review by New York Times critic Roberta Smith [what's next? A review of the review of reviews?]: "By taking his palette and paints outdoors, Gustave Courbet revolutionized his art form, opening the door for everyone from Claude Monet to Jackson Pollock...The secret to his lasting influence? An 'uncanny fusion of realism and absraction that derived from the muscular way he dispached paint onto canvas." Often, Courbet disposed with brushes entirely, slathering on colors with his palette knife, fingers, or scraps of fabric."

Great art-related read

Who knew that, in Rembrandt's day, steaming piles of manure were used by the Dutch to make lead for white paint? Or that Egyptian corpses were a main ingredient in a brown pigment called mommia, or "mummy"?

Anyone interested in such fascinating factoids will enjoy Color, A Natural History of the Palette, an elegant and entertaining book by Victoria Finlay. The book came out in 2003; Finlay has also come out with a book about precious gems that is in this same travelogue style.

The writer’s fascination with color began when she was a girl standing in Chartres Cathedral, when her father told her, as she watched “the blue and red lights dancing on the white stones….that the stained glass had been created nearly eight hundred years ago, and ‘today we don’t know how to make that blue.’”

Later in life, Finlay’s interest was rekindled when she picked up a book and opened it at random to read “INDIAN YELLOW: an obsolete lake of euxanthic acid made in India by heating the urine of cows fed on mango leaves” and “EMERALD GREEN: the most brilliant of greens, now universally rejected because it is a dangerous poison…Sold as an insecticide.”

That is just a small hint of the discoveries to come as Finlay travels the world to track down the origin of pigments. It’s a travel narrative, a history of paint, an education about colors and how we see them, a glimpse into the mind of artists throughout history. It will make you look at paintings with a new appreciation for the colors.

To learn more about Finlay's travels and what she missed being able to include in the book ("Had I had more time I should have loved to have met the Twareg nomads of the Sahara, (whose skin is blue with indigo dye)," read the author interview here. And for some excerpts, you can go here.

Museumgeek Mom's Top Ten*

Having a very well-traveled mother brings big advantages--like being able to corral her to submit items for your blog. Since she's been to many places farther afield than me--Russia, Morocco, South Africa--she has a much more eclectic top ten list than my earlier one. Hope you enjoy it. And, um, thanks Mom!

1. Ephesus Museum, Selcuk, Turkey, has exhibitions by
local artists in a side room. Area suffered a severe
earthquake since. (museumgeek comment: The statue of Cybele/Artemis is wild. The area may have been settled by Amazons, a tribe of female warriors.)

2. Galerie Damgaard is Essaouira, Morocco. Owner of this
"museum-shop" came here, I believe, from Denmark and
never left. Promotes work by local artists. Extremely
colorful, fanciful work. Interesting article in Travel & Leisure here.

3. Musee de Marrakech, Morocco, temporary exhibitions on
contemporary art and heritage museums. Hosts concerts,
theatre, films, etc. Musical instruments, hamman,
workshops, library, cafe.

4. Sculpture and theme gardens around back side of Table
Mountain in Stellenbosch, Cape Town, South Africa. Garden
for the blind, water pathways garden, sculpture
garden. Takes all day. Concerts held.

5. The Drostdy Museum, Swellendam, Western Cape, South
Africa. The Drostdy was built by the Dutch East India Company in 1747.

6. Jewish Museum of Greece in Athens, on a winding
street. of apartment-like housing. It may have a # on
the building, but is hard to find. A gem. Spiral
staircase goes up 5 floors, 3d is the Holocaust part.
Upstairs 4 & 5 to establishment of Israel. Very well
done, just a counter or two to shop; a prayer corner,
just so well done. tele. 47.73526568.

7. I thought I remembered a Holocaust Museum in an old
fort near the water in Oslo where you wound thru a
horrific underground museum, but all I can find on the
internet is the Jodiske Museum in Trondheim, and it
looks just like a large building. ????

8.Back to Greece, Athens - The Ilias Lalaounis Jewelry
Museum. Yes, it would be nice to link to something in order to see the jewelry, but the links are being persnickety.

9. Villa Imperiale, ancient Roman villa at Casale at
Piazza Armerina. Sicily. Incredible mosaics, room
after room. You follow a "boardwalk". Lightly visited,
but so gorgeous. Makes you feel you were right there.

10. A marvelous and refreshing modern art museum right
next door to the Galleria Regionale della Sicilia,
Palazzo Abatellis Museum, Palermo, Sicily, in a large
square. Everyone else in our group went to the big
museum; I found this jewel by the chance opening of a
door.

11. Newark Museum, NJ. Great collection of Chinese art,
beautifully painted Tibetan Temple blessed by Dali
Lama; Japanese art, American art and traveling
exhibitions, like the Aztec ball park; also the
restored Ballentine home, Victorian (just like my
Nana's house).

*Okay, like mother, like daughter. She listed 11. Now I will do my daughterly duty and try and find links for those entries!

Slide show of San Cristobal, Mexico - Intersecting Walls

Get Your Own! | View Slideshow

And now for something completely different...

As an alum of the Time Inc. magazine empire and of the Time-Life Alumni Society, I get an occasional newsletter with news of what ex-Time Inc.-ers are up to. A recent newsletter noted that a former person from Time magazine's editorial side, Ina Saltz, has published a book called Body Type: Intimate Messages Etched in Flesh, which is described as "the first book on typographic tattoos." (Hey, it's still art, just of a different sort. And on skin. Hmm.) The item also mentioned that she signed books at the "Inkslingers Ball," the world's largest tattoo convention. As a financial journalist, I know all about The Predator's Ball, the book by Connie Bruck, (who has a great article about microcredit in this week's New Yorker), but this event sounds far, far more interesting, if, perhaps a little scary for a non-tattoo type, whatever that means. If that isn't worthy of a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece, I don't know what is!

Thanksgiving in Prague

A friend of mine has started a brilliant tradition of taking international trips every Thanksgiving. Last year it was Vienna, the year before it was Berlin, and this year it is Prague. Work permitting, I may join her and report back. Does anyone have favorite museums to recommend, large or small, or churches with art of sculpture that blows them away? Any great outside urban art that shouldn't be missed? Smaller art/photo galleries that you like?

What are your Top Ten (or Twelve) museums?

Here is a Museumgeek Top 10*

1. Borghese Gallery, Rome
2. Villa Farnesina, Rome
3. The Frick Museum, New York
4. The Peggy Guggenheim Museum, Venice
5. The Metropolitan Art Museum, New York
6. The Barnes Collection (in its original building)
7. The Victoria & Albert Museum, London
8. Musee d’Orsay, Paris
9. Topkapi Palace, Istanbul
10. Museum of Modern Art, New York
11. The Getty Museum, Los Angeles
12. And since I’m already over my limit: The American Visionary Art Museum, in Baltimore, MD

*Okay, it’s 12. And it’s certainly not in order because I love them all for different reasons. The list is inevitably shaped by facts like—I have only been to Barcelona in Spain (loved the rooftop sculptures at the Miro Foundation) and so have not seen the Museo Nacionale del Prado, and the last time I went to the Louvre was far too long ago. Same for San Francisco, which might qualify with its modern art museum. Also, this is missing many great Washington, D.C. museums like the Renwick Gallery, the National Gallery, the Phillips Collection, and so on, but I had to be ruthless. Please write in with your Top Ten (or Twelve).
Next up: Top Ten Museums Yet to Visit

Goldsworthy in Gotham

Here is the tongue-in-cheek Goldworthy story I threatened to throw up here in my latest post. Be forewarned that it's a little long, especially because I'm doing something wrong with the paragraph breaks. Please write back with your own ideas for urban artworks a la Goldsworthy.

"Good art keeps you warm." -Andy Goldsworthy

"...I prefer works that are fashioned by the compromises forced upon me by nature, whether it be an incoming tide, the end of a day, thawing snow, shriveling leaves or the deadline of my own lifetime." -Andy Goldsworthy, in Time magazine

Earthworks artist Andy Goldsworthy has been called the Christo of the woodlands. The Scottish artist with the engineering background is a master at framing the world around him in new and inventive ways. But in some ways, he is also the anti-Christo, relying on natural materials near at hand for his transformations of the mundane into the marvelous. Rather than lobby for 10 years to wrap the Reichstag in burlap or to outline an island in pink nylon, Goldsworthy uses a day to painstakingly create an elaborate layored whorl of twigs on a riverbed, only to see the sculpture/structure lifted up and carried away hours later by the rising tide.

It takes a unique talent to do things like fuse icicles into shimmering loops using nothing but your imagination, cold hands and warm breath. But as an earthworks artist, Goldsworthy has it kind of easy. When you live in a quiet Scottish town, as he does, natural materials are abundant. Find a pile of twigs and you're set for the afternooon. Have a yearning to get creative using sheep's wool? Just walk on down the road to your friendly neighborhood sheepfarmer.

What if you're an earthworks artist in Manhattan? Sure, there's Central Park, not to mention nature preserves in the outer boroughs. Even there, though, the forces we contend with when we want to create Goldsworthy's kind of art in Manhattan--the Police, Central Park groundskeepers, the occasional potential mugger, aggressive vagrant or simply obnoxious passerby--are more intrusive than tides, and the consequences can, unlike Goldsworthy's often ephemeral creations, be lasting (say, resulting in an arrest record, injury or long-lasting hit to one's wallet via a fine).

That said, we have our own abundant resources to tap in our great city. Here is one urban earthwork artist's plan to make use of the natural abundance of objects found on New York streets and subways.

Abundant resource No. 1: Those circular metal Metropolitan Museum of Art entrance tags. Over years of visits, of having friends give me their tags and of picking up fallen tags in and around the Met, I have 120 tags in colors ranging from deep red to seafoam green.
The canvas: The grand staircase leading into the Met, of course. But 120 tags don't go as far as you might think, since they're less than an inch in diameter. With no natural fixative at hand to glue a parade of tags in a solid line up and over the steps I simply place the tags, one on each stair, in a stepping pattern--one on the right, then on the left on the step above it, and so on. I follow the color spectrum, with navy tags first, then the greens, the pinks, the oranges, the bronze, and on through the final light yellow tag.

Like Goldsworthy, I start early--my tags are in place by 8:00 am and I've photographed my work for posterity. It is now time to watch the human tides sweep my art away as visitors climb the steps to the museum.

Abundant resource No. 2: Cigarette butts, the urban equivalent of leaves.
The canvas: Central Park's Great Lawn, where the butts will be placed end to end to create a giant spiral, perhaps reminiscent of whirling smoke, or snails, or of curling into a protective fetal ball.

Like Goldsworthy, I am working against time. My foes: Central Park groundskeepers in golf carts, insistent and indignant would-be athletes, and vagrants who appreciate my efforts but appropriate the larger cigarette butts. That, however, is part of the natural decay of the sculpture and thus fitting. It would just be nice if they'd wait until I was done. At 9:00 pm, when a large crowd of rowdy young men assemble around me and the sculpture I decide that an oncoming tide would be far more reassuring than an oncoming wave of hyperactive teenagers and leave the park.

Abundant resource No. 3: Advertising inserts from the New York Times. These, it seems, are a growing resource. With the help of a few of my new homeless friends and one of their large wheeled canvas laundry bins, I quickly acquire a prodigious mound of inserts.
The canvas: Again, Central Park's Great Lawn, but this time the stand of majestic elms that line the lawn. Using water from the pond beneath Belvedere Castle mixed with the backwash left in soda and beer cans found throughout the park, we create a paper mache meduim with which to cover the bottoms of the trees. The liquid left in the cans and bottles is human sap; the inserts are being reunited with the form from whence they came. It is a beautiful thing.

Alas, the Central Park groundskeepers do not see it this way. Nor do the policemen who ask about permits. My helpers have scattered like the wind, so I alone disassemble the work--again completing a cycle of life and death.

Abundant resource No. 4: Abandoned plastic subway Metrocards
The canvas: the Metropolitan Transit Authority river. Yes, there is a river that snakes its way throughout our city. It is the unsung subway track waterway, that narrow tributary nourished by rain and urban fluids on whose banks we stand every morning.

After collecting Metrocards off of the floor and from the tops of the broken card-reading machines, I use gum scraped off the 86th St. & Lexington Avenue subway station floor as a natural fixative and connect these once valuable Metrocards in a chain that I set upon the river. It is reminiscent of leaves wending their way down a river, at least for a brief moment before it snags on a wadded up gum wrapper.

This final artistic effort ends in near-tragedy. One person ventures from the river's edge into the river itself, seemingly driven mad by the beauty of my long daisy chain of Metrocards. The police arrive, confiscate the artwork and myself and introduce me to a new urban environment: a holding cell. I'm sure I'll find stuff here to work with.

Googling for Goldsworthy

A search for recent news about the artist led to artnet.com, where you can browse Goldsworthy photos, and, if you subscribe, supposedly get information about what his photos sell for. One photo of a project dated January 2006 is pretty cool--it's titled "Elm branches and mud, raining, Townhead Burn, Dumfriesshire." I guess it's good that Goldsworthy doesn't try to come up with more abstract titles for his work, which could risk sounding too precious and cute--sort of like, uh, coming up with post titles like "Googling for Goldsworthy."

Another artist an acquaintance mentioned when I brought up Goldsworthy was Mark Dion. I checked him out on artnet.com and was disappointed. He does these assemblages of household objects that in no way have the resonance and elegance of Goldsworthy's stuff. Creative, yes, but not on the same order, in my opinion. Someone also mentioned Lizzie Farley of Scotland--??

Question of the day: What other artists' work reminds you of what Goldsworthy does? And if you could create a Goldsworthy-type work in an urban setting, what would it be and what would it be made of? I'll share an idea in the next post.

Welcome to Museumgeeks

If you could quit your job today and do whatever you wanted to do, what would it be? My easy answer to that question: travel the world and discover its museums, large and small, quirky and established, roadside or mansion-sized. I want to start a site here where we can all share our discoveries on our travels, in the U.S. and overseas.

I also hope we can get creative ourselves, in mapping out and sharing our own suggested itineraries of museums. Why stick to the guided tour? We can come up with our own itineraries for tracing Diego Rivera's work and influence in New York, or for tracking Andy Goldsworthy's progress across the American museum landscape (last I saw of him was his permanent creation at the National Gallery in Washington). Or pick and map out a theme from a few suggested by a friend who will be helping with this site:

-The Top Ten Homeliest Daughters of Wealthy Art Patrons
-The Top Ten Best Pictures of Artist Mistresses
-The Top Ten Pictures that Got Their Creators in Deep *&!$%!
-Great Paintings: The Re-Dos (pictures that were rejected and had to be redone because of unhappy patrons, an outraged art world...)

Want to share an idea for a theme? Post away! And thanks!