new jersey delli

CHRONICLE OF A DEATH (OF CAR COMPANIES) FORETOLD

Inopportune: Stage One, 2004, Seattle Art Museum, Sept. 2008

On my most recent trip to Washington State, I visited the Seattle Art Museum purposely to see Inspiring Impressionism. Now, SAM isn't the MOMA, but it has character and surprises uniquely its own. 

And surprised is exactly what I felt when I first laid eyes on it. I vividly recall how my attention was immediately drawn to this symphony of cars and lights as I walked in.  In the lobby, I looked up on it, mesmerized ; on the second floor atrium, I gazed down on it, magnetized.  Only after I had lengthily deliberated the artistic merits and tectonic risks of cars suspended from the ceiling did I walk away, quietly.

A project by Chinese artist Cai Gou-Qiang, Inopportune: Stage One, 2004 consists of nine identical white cars and multi-channel tubes with lights emanating from them in perfect choreography.  The work is awe-inspiring, with its scale encompassing the entire lobby - a whole city block - of the newly renovated SAM in downtown Seattle.  It is politically charged, too, as the seven cars suspended in mid-air and in various stages of rolling over seem to portray a car in various stages of explosion. 

In an interview, the artist said: Ever since September 11th, the idea of terrorism is always on our minds. It’s ever so present. And while car explosions have been around for a long time, they have a heightened sense of reality in our minds. "Inopportune" obviously has a direct reference to these conditions that we live in now. But making an installation that is so beautiful and mesmerizing that also borrows the image of the car bomb already has inappropriateness in it..."*  

Reading - and watching - the headlines, I can't help but be reminded of the Inopportune. Though created in reference to the events of Sept. 11, the work is noteworthy for its relevance to the issues of the day.  It is noteworthy, again, how the artist had utilized American cars on this particular work, a tiny detail that wasn't lost to this observer.  

Looking back, could Cai Gou-Qiang have predicted the downfall of the Big Three?  It is interesting what the artist might come up with this time. Inopportune: Stage One, 2008, Cadillac Hearse? 

*Source

MOMA-RY GLANCE AND VINCENT'S NOCTURNAL EMISSIONS

 

Photo capture: Pipilotti Rist's Pour Your Body Out

I find the MOMA most fascinating. Considered to be the greatest repository of modern and contemporary art in the world, it never fails to amaze. Never a fan of classical and medieval art, I easily get lost, literally, in the cavernous yet claustrophobic galleries of the Met and often find myself bolting for the exit. The MOMA while grand still retains a human scale by building vertically and, as such, is more pedestrian-friendly.  

While I marvel at the masterpieces of Cezanne, Monet, Picasso and Van Gogh, I poke fun at the advertisements of Warhol. 

Fingering Warhol, by Ivy, September 2007.

NOW SHOWING: Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out

This is not a multimillion-dollar Hollywood production, though it might be a multimillion-dollar production. 

The sound coming from the darkened hall piques your curiosity. The colors draw you in. You allow yourself to be led inside.  You remove your shoes before you step on the white carpet*. The twenty-five-foot-high moving images projected onto the three walls of the second floor atrium envelope the visitor in explosion of colors so lush they are tactile - almost. You lie down on the giant sculptural round bed/sofa. Sleep. Dream. Romanticize the pert nipple. Fantasize about the wild pig. Oh what a delicious exotic dish it would make. 

*I didn't. MRSA! yuck!

Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out (7354 cubic meters) 

VINCENT'S NOCTURNAL EMISSIONS

Van Gogh and the Colors of the NIght is a masterfully curated exhibit of nighttime paintings and letters that catalogs the entire career of the Dutch artist.  This is groundbreaking as it is a once in a lifetime chance to see the Starry Night Over the Rhone and the Starry Night together. 

On a limited run through January 5th, 2009, this marvelous collection of over two dozen masterpieces from some of the greatest museums in the world including the Musee d'Orsay, is a living testament to the genius of Van Gogh, and a tangible proof that most of the time the darkness draws forth the brightest of ideas. 

HIGH POD: CHANEL MOBILE ART

I don't know much about Chanel.  A bag. An outrageously expensive hand bag, that I know.  It's a scent, too.  A number. A 5.  It's a lifestyle most New Yorkers dream to live that only Park Avenue denizens can.  And, oh, that it's created by size zero Karl Lagerfeld.  

Zaha Hadid is larger than life - literally and figuratively. That she's the toast of the architectural world speaks volumes.  She wouldn't exactly fit in a couture Chanel - we'll leave that to Karl - but she did fit inside her building the biggest Chanel quilted bag ever created.  

A traveling exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary of the iconic bag, Mobile Art launched in Hong Kong in April 2008 and will make its final stop in Paris in February 2010.  Now on a layover at the Rumsey Playfield in Central Park, the futuristic pavilion funded by the luxury brand Chanel and designed by Iraq-born and London-based Zaha Hadid features the interpretations of the bag by some of the most prominent (installation) artists of the 21st century. 

The mp3-guided tour takes you on a voyeuristic 35-minute ride, nah, walk through the ritzy and kitschy, and for added touch, raunchy.  A female voice, unmistakably old and not-so-oddly French-accented, keeps you company all throughout.  She leaves you sometimes, of course, to self-explore.  Suddenly, she returns, catching you unawares with your hands on your wares so to speak.  

Beyond the hilarity of flabby Caucasian women scrambling for, fighting over and bodyboarding on a Chanel bag, the very pubic display of Asian women, unmistakably Chinese, provides a mons-trose counterpoint to an otherwise predictable art of gaudy furniture pervasive in one cubicle.  An homage perhaps to Chanel's biggest market at the moment. But come on now. 

And Yoko Ono's wishing tree? Seriously!

SENTIMENTS DELLI: FINGERING WARHOL

No matter how much I digest this, I just can't stomach the fact that this is considered modern art.  That it is in the hallowed halls with the Monets, Van Goghs and Piccasos makes it even more unpalatable.  It is nothing but a glorified advertisement for a can of soup, and an enduring testament to materialist and capitalist America: you know, the more the merrier, the cheaper the better.  Either that or during an overdose of coke (the drink, silly) - of which he also made an advertisement - Andy made this, and proclaimed:  THERE! IT'S ART!

MOMA, Sept 14th, 2007

MOMA VIA

The museum of modern art is also a museum of movement art.