Wired

My last project before my art class ended for the semester had to do with using string in a three dimensional format.  I had a cigar box which I painted with many coats of black paint.  I then unsuccessfully tried to tie string in different configurations around the box keeping it very taut.  Frustration quickly set in.  I was unable to adhere the string tightly enough even after using all kinds of glue.  I then trashed that idea.  I decided to substitute wire for string and instead of wrapping the box, I used plastic stands taken from a children's board game and bent wire to fit into the slots.  I liked the idea of incorporating one yellow stand.  I finally glued all the pieces to the bottom of the box creating a minimal abstract design.

Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde at the MOMA

"From the mid-1950s through the 1960s, Tokyo transformed itself from the capital of a war-torn nation into an international center for arts, culture, and commerce, becoming home to some of the most important art being made at the time. Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde provides a focused look at the extraordinary concentration and network of creative individuals and practices in this dynamic city during these turbulent years. Featuring works of various media—painting, sculpture, photography, drawings, and graphic design, as well as video and documentary film—the exhibition offers a story of artistic crossings, collaborations, and, at times, conflicts, with the city as an incubator. It introduces the myriad avant-garde experiments that emerged as artists drew on the energy of this rapidly growing and changing metropolis."

The above quote is taken from the Museum of Modern Art's website.  I viewed the exhibit the other day and was very surprised at how little I knew about the avant-garde movement in Tokyo at that time.

The work I saw was very political and experimental.  There were many references to the atomic bomb, repression, the war, history etc.  Above is an example of a surreal painting of a samauri overlooking what appears to be an american west landscape.

This is an exhibit worth seeing if for no other reason than to get a feel of what was happening during this important period in Japanese art.

A Class Trip to the Whitney Museum of American Art

After my last class for the fall semester, a small group of us went to the Whitney Museum www.whitney.org to see several current exhibits.

First up was a full floor show of an artist by the name of Wade Guyton OS.

From a review of the NY Times:


Like many artists Mr. Guyton, who is 40, is both a radical and a traditionalist who breaks the mold but pieces it back together in a different configuration. He is best known for austere, glamorous paintings that have about them a quiet poetry even though devised using a computer, scanner and printer. The show is titled “Wade Guyton: OS,” referring to computer operating systems.

Uninterested in drawing by hand, much less in wielding a paintbrush, he describes himself as someone who makes paintings but does not consider himself a painter. His vocabulary of dots, stripes, bands and blocks, as well as much enlarged X’s and U’s and occasional scanned images, combines the abstract motifs of generic Modernism and the recycling strategies of Andy Warhol and Pictures Generation artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine."

At the other end of the age spectrum an 89 year old artist by the name of Richard Artshwager has an exhibit that is tremendously diverse featuring the mediums of sculpture, painting and drawing.

From The New Yorker:


"The artist, who remains active at the age of eighty-eight, has lost nothing in the way of talent, skill, or ambition since the nineteen-sixties, when he amazed the New York art world with superbly crafted paintings and sculptures in eccentric mediums: plywood, rubberized horsehair, and, especially, Formica, which he called “the great ugly material, the horror of the age.”The work blended the essences of the big movements of the sixties—Pop art, minimalism, and conceptualism—with a sweet frisson of outsiderness, reflecting the late-blooming Artschwager’s jump into art from his first career, as a furniture-maker. "

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/events/art/richard-artschwager-whitney-museum-of-american-art-art#ixzz2ENYSXWzc

  

"Off The Grid"

My latest assignment was "Checkerboard" utilizing a 2 dimensional collage.  I had saved many calendars that have been either mailed to me from various organizations or given to me.  For this project I used a calendar focussing on quilts.  I glued the shapes onto a polka dot background still being inspired by the artist Yayoi Kusama (see Sept. 13th. blog).  I then added more polka dots and cut out the interior spaces of some of the squares allowing the background to peek through.  Finally, I added 2 women cut out from an old photo that I found at an antique store.  Perhaps there is a story here...women being the quilt makers.  Below is the result: