NYC Gallery Hopping: Skarstedt Gallery

Last week I was in New York and as I was strolling down Madison Avenue from the Guggenheim, I kept seeing banners for a gallery show featuring Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georg Baselitz. I had a little time, so I looked up the address for the gallery, which is called Skarstedt. I had never been there.

Well, the gallery is quite spectacular, in a beautiful building--a mansion, really--on East 64th Street.  When I opened the door, I was so awed by the imposing architecture that I timidly asked the young women at the front desk whether the gallery was free for viewing. They said yes, so I entered and wandered about, flanked by a friendly security guard the whole time.

I was most delighted by the Basquiat paintings. His painting Early Moses especially amused, with Passover is coming up.

Basquiat's work has long intrigued me with its combination of apparent messiness, glorious color, frequent humor, and persistent interestingness. I found the Baselitz work only moderately appealing in comparison, though I could see some commonalities.

I haven't spent a lot of time browsing galleries in New York, but I may do it more in the future.  So many treasures!

Great Andrew Yang exhibit at MCA

Andrew Yang's current exhibit at MCA Chicago is both beautiful and thought-provoking. It is one of my favorite kinds of contemporary art--both intellectually stimulating and aesthetically pleasing. Yang has a background in science as well as art and holds positions at both the Field Museum of Natural History and the School of the Art Institute, His work combines these dual interests, which many would find mutually exclusive, in explorations of cosmology and natural history that remind us that human beings and our culture are also part of the universe studied by scientists, whether we're studying (for example) chemistry, geology, or astronomy.

In one piece, Stella's Stoichiometry (all things being equal, 6 lbs 3 oz.) (2012), Yang beautifully arranges substances representing the chemical composition of his newborn daughter in glass receptacles. In another, A beach (for Carl Sagan), Yang represents the Milky Way with a scale model made of piles of sand--seven tons of sand; one grain for every star (assuming 100 billion stars, a low-end estimate).

Yang's work tends to juxtapose items that we generally don't think of together (like lava flows and human placentas, as in placenta/lava (2011), so we notice similarities we might never have looked for, and wonder about their coincidence. While we have likely studied geology and biology separately in school, some unspoken relationship between the two seems apparent here.

Similarly, in the installation the Way within (2016), Yang has arranged a large quantity of collected stones, shells, fossils, and manmade objects. Confronted with this miscellany, we wonder about the relationships between these objects--why they belong together, or don't.

The exhibit opened yesterday and closes 31 December.  I look forward to returning frequently.

What's So Great about Google Art Project?

Google Art Project is one of my favorite things. You can virtually visit more than 150 museums around the world, although you are just looking at a subset of each museum's artworks. All together, though, there are more than 30,000 works of art to discover, and many of them are in super-high-def (gigapixel) format.  In other words, they are really beautiful. Also, via Google Street View technology, you can virtually "walk" through many of the galleries, so you can get a feeling for the setting of the artworks.  Of course some of the museums, like the Palace of Versailles, are arguably more interesting for their architecture and interior design than for the artworks they contain.

Endeavors like this put us on the path to an idealized future, where all the world's knowledge and cultural capital is freely available and accessible online.  We can't all travel everywhere we would like to visit. Google Art Project offers the opportunity for really rich encounters with art and the institutions that house it.

Jason Salavon, Computational Artist

At the University of Chicago yesterday, Victor and I attended an interview with Jason Salavon as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival day in Hyde Park. This artist's work is amazing. He transforms digital information into aesthetically pleasing and often fascinating works. One piece, Field Guide, is a copy of "the entire 2007 IKEA catalogue, leaving only color and structure." Another piece turns shoe manufacturing data into a hypnotic, psychedelic animation. Golem is a generator/printer of very convincing abstract paintings reminiscent of Hans Hoffman and Richard Diebenkorn.

This is art with brains and beauty, satisfying on multiple levels.

Olafur Eliasson: Take Your Time

We had an opportunity to take a docent-led tour of this exhibit by the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. A conceptual artist, he explores how art audiences participate in the aesthetic experience, and the installations he designs target all the senses. There's a wall of reindeer moss (very fragrant--even pungent); a whirring fan that seems to track its observers; a wall of volcanic tile shingles that begs to be touched. Eliasson seems to have a strong interest in kaleidoscopes--a couple of installations give you the impression of being inside one.

I most appreciated, though, installations that appealed to the visual sense; especially a round room suffused with color (the colors change every 40 seconds). Another striking exhibit is a wall of mist installed in a dark room; the light shining on the mist creates a gorgeous rainbow. And if you go around to the back of the installation, there's no rainbow, but you feel exactly as if you were standing behind a waterfall.

Which you are.

It's really quite a wonderful exhibit, worth multiple visits. I am not sure when I last enjoyed an MCA Chicago exhibit so much--probably it was Massive Change, a few years ago.

Obama's Inauguration Speech

Graphically.

Milwaukee Treat

For Victor's birthday, we took a train up to Milwaukee, and visited the Milwaukee Museum of Art. We were so delighted with the place, and so sure we'd return, that we bought a membership.

Aside from the gorgeous building, MAM has a very impressive and eclectic collection, spanning decorative arts, ancient artifacts, and classical, modern, and contemporary works. Recommending we visit, our friends particularly praised the soon-to-close Act/React installation and the ongoing Sensory Overload exhibit, which also features relatively recent work. Both of these exhibits were interesting and impressive, but we found ourselves struck by the strength of the MAM's permanent collection as well as less flashy exhibits such as the naturalist art of Mark Catesby and his influence on subsequent artists including Audubon, and a small selection of the work of JoAnna Poehlmann, which I found tremendously charming. Eager to see more work by this artist.

Mata Ortiz Ceramics @ the Field Museum

A couple of years ago, the Art Institute of Chicago presented a fantastic exhibit of Casas Grandes pottery--beautiful stuff from more than 500 years ago, unearthed in Northern Mexico.

Until the end of next week, the Field Museum is hosting a small show of Mata Ortiz ceramics--a newer pottery tradition very much inspired by the Casas Grandes example.

Highly recommended, if you can find a moment to get out there.

The Exquisite City

Chicago is just full of people with fabulous, creative ideas. The Exquisite City is one of these. In a riff on the Surrealists' exquisite corpse technique, diverse artists were asked to create a city block out of cardboard and sundry other materials, in their own style; the result, arranged in grids in the dark interior of the Viaduct Theater on Western off Belmont, is a dreamy concoction--part fantasy, part nightmare.

One of those exhibits you just have to experience--complete with Chicago sound effects and huddling hipsters. It's open through 12 December.

If you miss it, perhaps it will return. Certainly, the show's worth repeating.

Site Unseen 2008

After hearing about the Chicago Cultural Center's annual festival of site-specific installations and performance for at least three years, I finally made it for its fifth iteration, last 12 November.

There is something especially exciting about the specific and ephemeral. The festival lasts only one evening, and its components are designed for execution only in the Cultural Center's particular space during that particular evening. By its nature, video is less ephemeral, and so I found myself not so interested in the video installations scattered about the building, but rather drawn to the performances.

All of which demonstrated some degree of oddness, humor, eclecticism, and spectacle. The freedom to come and go from the various performance events makes typically challenging work less intimidating and more approachable. (You're not committed to witnessing some incomprehensible weirdness for hours.)

A very worthwhile commitment by the Cultural Center, and an event I look forward to revisiting in the future.

Hopper/Homer

We finally made it to the Hopper and Homer shows at the Art Institute of Chicago a few weeks ago, after a couple of failed attempts. There are constantly lines out the door to see these exhibits!

And they are totally worth it. Some art can be appreciated pretty well in reproduction and some art is a revelation in person. I would never have thought seeing Hopper's stuff in person would be so amazing, but that's because the reproductions capture his achievement so poorly. In reproduction, I had loved Hopper's work, but for what I felt as loneliness and alienation portrayed there. I never had a clue about what he achieved with light.

In person, the light is almost all you see. The paintings seem to contain their own light, and even the most familiar (like Nighthawks at the Diner) are much brighter than you remember them. This was a phenomenal exhibit, and the Homer exhibit was a beautiful complement to it, for of course Homer, too, is all about light, though his effects show more clearly in reproduction.

Very beautiful work. So happy and proud to have the opportunity to see these exhibits here in Chicago.

Artropolis

We made it to ArtChicago a couple years ago, when it was paired with the Antiques Fair in the Merchandise Mart for the first time. But we missed it last year, which was the introduction of Artropolis--even more art. I think this year was bigger than ever, with five shows in one weekend: ArtChicago, the Antiques Fair, Next, The Artist Project, and the Intuit show.

We spent hours there yesterday. Of course, it was enormous and overwhelming. But wonderful to see so many beautiful things. And since there are such big crowds, you don't feel self-conscious just looking, as you may when gallery hopping. Some of the galleries represented were displaying amazing stuff: Chagalls, Renoirs, and other work by artists perhaps not so famous, but wonderful to see. And unlike at museums, you can get as close as you like (though I imagine touching is still out of the question).

But while the ArtChicago show was impressive, some of the most interesting stuff was in the Intuit Show of Outsider Art.

Hyperbolic Crocheted Beauty

At the Chicago Cultural Center right now is a remarkable exhibition of work created or curated by the Los Angeles-based Institute for Figuring. Fiber artists have managed to use crochet needles and yarn (as well as other materials such as discarded plastic) to recreate the forms and colors associated with coral reefs.

It sounds like a corny idea, I know, but this work is startlingly beautiful.

The only drawback of the exhibit is that you can't touch.

Fine Field Exhibits

Been to the Field Museum of Natural History a couple of times in the past few weeks and was able to see two excellent exhibits. One, in a small, new gallery, showcases manuscripts and other texts from the Field's collection, and includes a letter with Darwin's signature, a journal in John James Audubon's hand, and lots of other cool stuff.

The other is part of the vaunted 2007 Chicago Map Festival, and is full of really interesting objects, such as a map of ocean swells made of sticks, used by native Marshall Islanders; the London tube map (remarkable for its eschewal of accurate scale and angle in favor of navigational clarity); early maps of "the 4th part of the world" (North and South America; called fourth after Europe, Africa, and Asia), and narrative offering useful distinctions such as navigational v. network maps.

We plan to return to see the map exhibit again this weekend, as we didn't spend as much time there as we'd have liked; perhaps we'll also get a chance to see the Darwin exhibit.

We have such great museums. Was sad to realize I missed the Richard Misrach show (ended this weekend). No excuse for that.