Category Archives: Art and Culture

Art and Culture

Contemporaries and Art

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Imbolc                                        Waxing Wild Moon

Into the Walker today to pick up doggie meds from Mark O. who brought them back from Mexico last week.  He’s a wounded traveler, struck down by a bug and a bum knee.

Mark went with us on the first round of our tour.  Grace Jiang-Goggins gave us a tour of the Walker’s new installation of its permanent collection.  Ginny Wheeler, Morry, Allison, Bill, Jane McKenzie and Merritt were along.

Grace has such a nice, unassuming way of treating the art, her knowledge and the participants in her tours.  We began with a multi-colored object that looked like wooden cylinders 4-5″ high strung on a long central shaft.  Which, it turns out, was essentially what they were.  What a great story Grace told about them.  This guy, I forget his name, couldn’t break into the art world.  He was self taught and made these walking sticks, working the patterns in permutation after permutation, always putting in a mistake, just like the ancient Greeks and their architecture.  Anyhow, he’d wander around with these sticks through various cities in Europe, go into museums and then leave one behind.  You gotta love this guy.

Next we saw a German artist who loved white and nails.  Loved them so much that he pounded many nails into a board and painted the board and the nails white.  Trust me it looks better than I’ve made it sound.  Somehow there are patterns, waves, fields of grain, motion in this mass of nails.

Onto Andy Warhol’s Jackie.  16 portraits of Jackie Kennedy, related either to the immediacy of the assassination or the funeral.  When I looked at them, I didn’t reference the whole grassy knoll death of camelot moment, but the Marilyn Monroe multiples or the Mao Tse Tung’s portraits brightly colored.  When we got into the specificity of it, there were those layers there, but I didn’t see it at first, nor did I feel it was the most important visual aspect of the piece.

A shattered mirror, a circular mirror divided into long thin slivers all broken and replaced.  Broken images, like pixels.  A play off a vanity mirror in which the reflections are more distorted fun house than Vogue.

A Fool’s House by jasper johns.  An old broom hung on a hook.  A cup from his studio.  A canvas stretcher marked stretcher.  A towel marked towel.  The broom.  The cup.  Words and references.  Playing with proverbs?  A new broom sweeps clean.  Merritt pointed out that the hook was not named.

A complex piece by a Thai artist who taught himself English by each morning taking a marker and blacking out the words he already knew.  Then he pasted strips from these newspapers on an old bed sheet and painted over all but the a’s and p’s with a blue field.  The a’s and p’s he filled in with an orange paint. A luminous work, like stars in the heavens or Australian aborigines.

We stopped, too, at a work by an Iranian artist who lives in the twin cities.  He wrote excerpts from Rumi and Hafiz all over a large canvas, at various angles and in various shapes.  A Prayer, he called it.

The tour ended in a room with about 75 paintings hung salon style, a large portion apparently of the Walker’s holdings.  Paintings make up 20% of the Walker’s collection.  This is a great collection of works from the well-known to the obscure:  Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keefe, Franz Marc, Max Beckmann, Morris Louis, Mark Rothko, DeKooning….and on and on and on.

Seeing art with friends is a rich experience.  A valuable experience.  Reminds me of my seminary years when I would come to the MIA every Sunday with my friend David Grotrian, himself an abstract expressionist and his wife, Carol, an art historian.  It was fun then and it’s fun now.

Art and Culture, Asia, Sport, World History

Latin and Asia

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Imbolc                                   Waxing Wild Moon

Kate and I reviewed our work on chapter 5 in Wheelock this morning.  Then 2,000 words on the novel after the nap.  Workout.  Sierra Club legcom conference call.

I’ve been reading my fourth Qiu Xiaolong mystery, The Red Mandarin Dress.  These are Chief Inspector Chen novels, set in today’s Shanghai.  They are interesting mysteries, but even more, they are a window into the struggle between the Maoist era and the contemporary one, a period when revolution ruled the land transformed into one in which to get rich is glorious.  These are not easy transitions and they have happened in the blink of an eye in the long history of China.

Asian art and asian culture, especially Chinese history, philosophy and literature have, for a long time, had my attention.  In my volunteer work at the MIA I have been allowed to indulge my interest in Chinese, Japanese and South Asian art.  This has led to more and more time with asian history, especially Chinese and Chinese poetry.  A casual tinkerer in these vast domains, I have only skimmed the top of a way of life radically different from our own, Western culture, yet, even with its differentness, still more like us than not, the human experience inflected, not the human experience transformed.

As I’ve watched the Winter Olympics, it doesn’t take a scholar to notice that its largely a northern hemisphere event.  Yes, there are the odd Australians, New Zealanders, but for the the most part it’s North America, Europe and the Asian countries.  Just another way in which we are more like than unlike.

Art and Culture, Cooking, Humanities, Letters, Sport

An Andover Olypmics?

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Imbolc                                      Waxing Wild Moon

The winter olympics could have been held in Andover this year.  If we had any mountains.  We’ve had snow and cold, the key ingredients.  Also, Lindsey Vonn and her husband could have stayed in Burnsville instead of Olympic Village, maybe gotten a few runs in at her home hill, Buck Hill.

Well, it’s the olympic world’s loss.

(Yayoi Kusama
Untitled, 1967
Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York)

Kate made my/our favorite cookies today.  She also made chicken schnitzel and a warm potato salad with sweet onions last night.  Boy was that good.  All that and she cooks, too.

Chapter 6 of Wheelock is under my belt and Kate’s working on it right now.  We’re skipping this week so she can catch up.

I don’t have a tour this Friday, but I do have a Legcom meeting on Wednesday and the docent discussion group tomorrow, focusing on how to discuss contemporary art.  This conversation will be led by an educator from the Walker, a connection made by Allison.  Should be a big help for the contemporary art exhibition:  Up Until Now, coming later this spring.

Art and Culture

An Arty Day

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Imbolc                                        Waxing Wild Moon]

The museum had lots of visitors today.  Many, the ones I toured among them, were there on a school outing.  Others, a surprisingly large number, came for the foot in the door show.  Foot in the door is an installation done by the museum every 10 years.  Any one in the state can enter an object so long as it fits in a one foot by one foot by one foot cube.  If you work meets that test, you’re in the show.

That makes for a scene like one I witnessed at the ticket counter.  An older man and his wife came up to the counter.  He said, “I’ve never been here before, but my son has a piece in the museum.  I want to go see it.”  He said that with a feeling of pride.  A lot of the people going through this show looked to me like first time museum goers.  I overheard a woman say in the gallery, “A person that knew about art could tell.  Some of these people have real talent.”  She was right.

Foot-in-the-door fully occupies two large galleries, a smaller one and still spills out over into the halls.  There is so much to see that three or four visits would only give you a first pass.  A treat.

The kids I toured today from St. Francis were a Spanish class and wanted to see Spanish art.  On both tours, though, I took them to foot-in-the-door, too.  These are living, working Minnesota artists, many young folks.  I told them if they wanted, at the next show, they could have a piece in the show.  They loved the crazy variety.  The boys were taken by the fact that there was .45 revolver entered.  They took pictures of it with their cell-phones.  Another kid liked the alarm clock.  Still another liked, as I did, a cubic foot of broken eggs glued back together.

These kids really took to cubism and surrealism, grasping quickly the rather tricky shift in artistic purpose that these two art movements put into the world.  It surprised me some, but they really enjoyed the quirky nature of synthetic cubism and the irrational nature of surrealism.  Both fit the teenage moment.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Letters

Back Into the World of Art

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Imbolc                                   Waxing Wild Moon

Kate and I didn’t get a chance to check our work before getting on line with Greg, the Latin tutor.  It showed.  Turns out doing this together has a great learning benefit for both of us.  Makes me think retirement with this gal’s gonna be fun.

The continuing ed at the MIA has left something to be desired lately.  It used to feature art historians, visiting curators, folks like that, now it’s often education staff or something related to process not content.  There’s nothing wrong with the education staff, but they did the docent training.  At the continuing ed events I like to hear outside perspectives, other modes of scholarship, punchy ideas.

Matthew Welch, the Japanese curator and the head of a curators at the museum, has those scholarly credentials and he takes great care to make his material useful for docents.  He was to give a lecture today on a piece of Japanese armor the museum purchased.  I drove in to hear him because I respect his work.  A lot.  Problem is, they canceled the event by e-mail at 10:45.  I used that time to prep for my tours tomorrow, got on the phone with Greg, then took off for the museum.

No lecture.  Turns out they had some leakage in the admin wing.  Not such a big deal in some ways, but the leaked happened onto Matthew’s computer.  He’s such a meticulous speaker and uses so many good slides that it wasn’t possible to do the lecture.  A shame.  We’ll pick it up some other time.

Spent three hours getting ready for my first tours since mid-December.  A group from St. Francis high school, just up Round Lake Boulevard about 7 or 8 miles from home.  They want Spanish art.  As it happens, I got assigned to start on the third floor on the east side of the building which means our Goya is the first painting I can use.  That means I move from Goya to the cubists and from the cubists to the surrealists, then onto the mannerists and, if I get that far, end in the baroque.

(El Greco’s Burial of Lord Orgaz)

Going that direction I discovered (for me) an interesting relationship between cubism and surrealism, major art movements at the turn of the 19th century into the 20th, and the mannerists, a style situated between the high renaissance and the baroque.  The two more modern movements used Cezanne and African masks to jump away from illusionistic realism, that is, realism with perspective that attempts to fool the eye into thinking a 2-d image is 3-d.  Cubists took reality apart and put it back together from different perspectives, often using geometric shapes.  Surrealists wanted to peak inside the unconscious and  splay it out on the canvas.  Turns out the mannerists pushed off against the high polish and perspective of the High Renaissance, such masters as Raphael, Michelangelo and Da Vinci.  They turned away from vanishing point perspective, went for spiritual intensity (the unconscious?) and used elongated figures and asymmetrical composition to distinguish their work from the preceding period.

Someone else noticed this a long time ago, I’m sure, but it was fun to put it together.

Aging, Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Literature, Woolly Mammoths

Turning 63

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Imbolc                            New Moon (Wild)

“Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”- Franz Kafka

It’s not an especially significant birthday in the way of things.  63 is a lull between OMG I’m in my 60’s and 65, the all purpose retirement age in former times.  The lack of symbolic significance and its very ordinariness makes me happy to turn 63.  I have no expectations about life at 63.  So far, the 60’s have been kind to me.  I’ve lost no friends, no family.  With the exception of Kate’s back trouble, no one I know has a serious ongoing health problem.  Frank Broderick who at 77 is now in his 15th year after his first heart attack manages his cardio problems, proving that even yesterday’s fatal condition can now fit into a long life.

(Rembrandt self-portrait at 63)

Turning the prism one more  time 63 astonishes me.  Why?  Because of its very ordinariness and because of its lack of symbolic significance.  Not so long ago, say when I was in my teens, folks my age had begun to teeter toward a time of serious old age and disability.  That point in life is still not on the observable horizon for me.  In fact, it’s possible some number of us reaching this age will be relatively healthy and able until our final days.  Quite a change.

On a personal note I have made my peace with the world in terms of success.  What I’ve had, little but some, will do.  I enjoy the love of a good woman and five dogs here at home and the circle  expands to nuclear family and extended family and friends like the Woollies, the docents and the Sierra Club folks.  My days have meaningful labor that changes with the seasons.  I live in a country I love, a state, and a home.

Intellectually and creatively, it seems, I’ve just begun to come into my own, which means there are satisfying frontiers still ahead.

Then there is Kafka.  Kafka.  What an odd and yet appropriate quote from  him.  He knew with fine detail the absurdity of modern life, yet he  found aesthetics central to a life of real engagement.  Me, too.

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, News of the Strange, Weather +Climate

Holy, Water. Bathman

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Winter                                              Waxing Cold Moon

Namaste.  The restaurant.  Where we ate lunch and discussed Stealing the Mona Lisa, an impenetrable book most thought, a romp in psychoanalytical language cursed with the stodgy background of Freud rather than an expansive peyote fueled Jungian.  We entertained ourselves with a good two-hours of conversation on the nature of art, whether art exists when we don’t see it, whether any of us made art and bollocks.

It’s always a good experience to be with these folks, some idea gets knocked loose and rattles around, sometimes settling down as a learning.  Next month the Walker.

We’ve had snow, more of the nuisance variety than a real street and artery clogging invasion.  The temperature stays down though so we may continue to get snow for a while.  I hope so.

Here’s a headline you don’t see every day.  In today’s Washington Post.

117 Russians in hospital after

drinking holy water

Art and Culture, Family, Travel

Leaving Denver

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Winter                          Waxing Cold Moon

The decompression has begun.  My suitcase awaits only my dopp kit to be ready to go.  A shower, final packing and I’ll be ready.  Ready, that is, to drop off the rental car before noon then spend three hours at the Denver Airport before my 3:00 pm flight back to the Twin Cities.  When I arrrive around 5:45, I’ll still have one more leg to go:  Super Shuttle, in a ride on which I will be the last one delivered home.  All in all it will probably be between 7 and 8 hours before I get home after leaving the hotel.

I’m reading a book called Stealing the Mona Lisa, discussing it comes next, at a gathering of docents, dining at the Namaste Restaurant.  I would describe it as a difficult book, written by a psychoanalyst for whom style seems an afterthought and clarity a bother.  Having said that though, it is a profound book, digging deep into the meaning of art and, surprisingly, into the meaning of art’s absence.

Why I mention it this morning is an aha from the section I read over breakfast.  In describing psychoanalytical attitudes toward drives the author, Darian Leader, makes clear that sublimation is NOT a replacement for the act of sex, fucking as he so baldly puts it, rather it is an expression of the individuals need to fulfill the same desire as sex fulfills, that is, in Freudian terms, a return to the pleasure of direct bodily manipulation, pleasures lost as we adapt to cultural definitions of who and what we are.

Also, and most interesting to me, for Lacan, drives are an attempt to get to the state Freud describes as pleasuring the body, but Lacan describes as The Thing, a vast emptiness that exists just outside our capacity to reach.  Therefore our drives are attempts not to fill this emptiness, but to reach it, to find it, to discover what was lost when we became creatures of culture.

Lacan’s emphasis on emptiness as the defining state for our humanness, and as a state forever beyond our reach, yet felt and desired in every moment, struck me as a link to both existentialism on the one hand and Taoism on the other.

In existentialism we admit the reality of this emptiness, admit it’s definition of life as meaningless, then proceed to construct our life both in spite of and because of this emptiness.

In Taoism, we recognize the creation of the universe to have come from emptiness, the Tao, and we also recognize it as a vivifying impulse behind each moment.  It may be that Lacan’s more tortured and dark view of emptiness as The Thing exactly misses Taoism’s great point about emptiness as the very reason for a door, a cup, a vase.

There is, too, one other important thread that I don’t find so far in the book and that the is the realm of rationalist philosophy.  In this idea we construct our reality through sensory data, but our sensory data is not reality in the same way that a map is not the territory.  This means, according to Kant, that we can never know reality, the ding an siche, the thing-in-itself.  Sounds pretty Lacanian to me.

Art and Culture, Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

Art and Nature, the Nature of Art

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Winter                                          Waning Moon of Long Nights

In to the Sierra Club for a meeting about legislative work.  The scope of the Sierra Club’s work is impressive, including legislative work at each session of the Minnesota Legislature and scrutiny of the government’s stewardship of our natural resources in between them.  There is litigation work, the primary one right now being the Stillwater Bridge.  There is also the regular work of educating members, the working of the Issue Committees and regular outings.  Perhaps most important of all is the attention of thousands of members to both the particulars of environmental work in all parts of the state and to the developing field of issues, e.g. climate change, renewable energy, efficient public transportation, green planning, work with labor unions for Green Jobs, even climate mitigation strategies to help position Minnesota well when climate change happens.

After that I went over to the MIA to check on my mail box, nothing in it.  Good.  After I went in there I began to wander through the museum, as I used to do in the days before Collection in Focus, before Docent training, just wandering.  My first stop was the wonderful collection of Chinese paintings that have been up for a while.  Taking them in and meditating on Taoism as I looked, I began to muse about a work that might have the theme art and nature, the nature of art.  Some interesting ideas there.  My favorite collection remains the Japanese, and within it the works on paper:  ukyio-e especially.

It felt good to be in the museum without a task at hand, or a purpose, other than spending time with the objects.  I could do more of that.

Art and Culture, GeekWorld

connections

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Winter                        Waning Moon of Long Nights

One of the reasons the web continues to fascinate me, and it does, lies in its capacity to surprise me.  I read an article in the Economist about Internet Archives.  This is an astonishing effort spearheaded by one man to make the worlds information available on the web.  You may have heard of the Wayback machine, a way of finding lost or neglected websites, but this project has so much more.  It has a lot of live music, an especially active Grateful Dead collection.  It has moving images, including commercials, a quick entre to marketing and cultural cues of the near past.  It also has an incredible number of texts, complete and free.  Worth a look.

I’ve not had a tour since mid-December.  While I enjoy the down time, I do feel disconnected from the museum.  There’s a tendency, living this far out, to hunker down, particularly in bad weather.  I’m not as comfortable as I used to be heading out in snowy, icy conditions and that contributes to the hibernation.  As I’ve written before, this all helps the writing, getting into a rhythm, focus.  That’s true, but I miss the connection with both the art and my fellow docents.  They have become an important part of my life, one of the social pillars for me.  So, I look forward to getting back at it in February.