dispatches

High art at low resolution

There’s something new happening in the way people use images. I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this afternoon. I looked around, and three people simultaneously were taking pictures of paintings. With their phones.

I saw this happening at MOMA yesterday too. Seeing that I thought, hey, a Rothko as the background image on my phone would be pretty cool. It was only the second time I used the camera on it (he first time was, of course, when I opened the box. I still have the accidental first photo of my patio as my background image.) I’m still technically ignorant of what to do next with these photos. I am unwilling to sign up for a service. There’s no one I need to share them with. I don’t know if there’s anyway to get them out of my phone and onto my computer.

The rest of the world, apparently, is way past me on this one. I’m interested in the kind of engagement with art, the capture of the experience that this picture-taking with a cell phone represents. Is this the image of a work of art that is going to be their touchstone of the encounter? Is it a lazy substitute for actually experiencing the work? Are they going to have any memory of the original work? Reproductions are notoriously misleading ways of understanding art. There is no substitute for standing in the thrall of the work itself. What does taking low resolution photos, that you see on a postage stamp of a screen, suggest for the future of artistic literacy? I wish Susan Sontag were still around to say something trenchant about this phenomenom.

The new MOMA

The guard was standing in the corner of a 4th floor gallery in the Museum of Modern Art. She was keeping a watchful eye down the length of a wall of Jackson Pollack paintings. "You’re ready to pounce on anyone who gets too close, aren’t you," I said. (I just saw this happen upstairs, in front of Van Gogh’s "Starry Night" which was framed under glass.) "I let them get closer here," she said. "People want to see the texture. But I have my limit." I said, "Yes, these paintings are really different when you get close to them."

I had never properly appreciated Pollack before. We all know his drip paintings from the endless reproductions. They hadn’t ever struck me as powerfully as the other abstract expressionists, like Motherwell or Rothko. I’ll swoon in front of nearly any one of those any day. I stood a foot away from a large Pollack  painting, and I felt I was floating in dense, deep space full of glittering bright strings and glowing nebulae. The work is wonderfully complex, and each painting has its own story to tell. You practically have to stick your head in one to hear it.

The new MOMA works, with its bare, cathedral-like atrium, six stories high, and intimate galleries of indeterminate sequence. It’s cold though, off-putting in the blankness of the spaces, and I miss the old MOMA. I haven’t visited the museum since before they gave back Picasso’s "Guernica," so my judgement may be tinged more by nostalgia than memory, but nonetheless I am not hopeful that this structure is going to age as gracefully.

I sat by the window in Café 2 (on the 2nd floor, get it?), facing the wall of townhouses on 53th, sipping my coffee and losing myself in that calm reverie that descends on me anytime I visit a good museum. In an instant the reverie was broken, by a bird. Was that a Peregrine that just flew past? I reviewed the field marks I had just seen, playing back the memory of the sighting—the black moustasche mark on the head, the lightly barred breast (Goshawk maybe? No way! It’s wings looked rounded though). Then it flew back the other direction. The second sighting just made me more confused, as I was trying to observe and process at the same instant. Now I don’t know what I saw.

Weird art

Today I saw one of the weirdest exhibitions of art that I’ve ever visited. The weirdness, I’m afraid, was unintentional and not ironic.

DoubleTake, selections from the art collection of Seattle’s weirdest billionaire, Paul Allen, is on at the Experience Music Project. It is apparently an entry-level art history show to demonstrate relationships between disparate groupings of art. Renoir paired with Lichtenstein, for example. Or Manet with Jasper Johns. Thought there are some very nice works in this tiny (28 paintings) exhibit, the concept is heavy handed and simplistic in execution.

The show comes across as formalist sensibility run amok. Here, see the vertical elements in this painting. Now, aren’t they just like the vertical elements in this other painting, done a hundred and fifty years later? As per the EMP mode, you trundle through the exhibit with an audioguide (I don't think you are permitted to enter without one), unfortunately narrated by the curator, Paul Hayes Tucker. He is over-the-top enthusiastic about the most obvious surface attributes of the work. History, context, or meaning are beside the point and rarely touched upon. The room was full of the muffled sound of dozens of copies of his voice from all the audioguides pasted to the heads of the visitors.  Everyone, it seems, was busy having someone else’s experience of the work.

I had to aggressively ignore the clunky curatorial arrangement of the exhibit, and try to focus on being in the presence of some of these great works. There was a very nice Rothko in the show, but it was circumferenced by this modern, bright white frame that completely overwhelmed the subtle, spiritual sensibility that resides in the best of Rothko’s work. It was tragic how it ruined the piece. Much of the work in the exhibit was cruelly presented in these modern frames. Others, queerly, were left in their period 19th century gilt frames.

I left with a sensation I don’t think I’ve ever had from visiting a museum. I felt cheated.

LA Dispatch

Our elevator has a button marked "Earthquake." Does it start one or stop one?

The weather report casually includes, "There’s a flash flood warning for the Burbank burn area. That means you’re having a flood. You other burn areas just have a flash flood watch. High today 62, showers ending tonight. Back to you Pam."

Mayhem and disaster are unremarkable in this city. So is excessive grooming. This is a place where serious income is devoted to hair care.

I saw the Robert Adams show today at the Getty. My photographer-friend Claudia said, "You like his work? It’s really boring. And the printing isn’t very good." Claudia is not a landscape photographer. I would tag her "Romantic-Conceptual," and she is getting a bit of a name for herself lately. She is the antipode to Robert Adams and his cool, formal, dense landscape work of altered, and often decimated environments of the Colorado Front Range. I adore it. I thought the curation was a bit odd, with bits and pieces of bodies of work over 25 years, not particularly well synthesized, and scattered in non-contiguous galleries. The print quality is fine. There’s tons of shadow detail if you look deep, but the lighting in the galleries is too dim to really see this work. I think his prints reflect a sympathy for the harsh, overwhelming light of his environment, and an homage to 19th century landscape tradition, particularly the spare landscapes of Timothy O’Sullivan.

The other show on at the Getty was of the French landscape painter Courbet. The critics all think of him as a harbinger of modernism, his abstractions of rock forms and compression of landscape elements paving the way for Cezanne and his like. I looked at his paintings and thought, this is naturalistic and keenly observed. When you look hard at a landscape it really does look all abstract and broken up. That would be the hallmark of modernism -- the full and hearty embrace of the world as it is perceived.

Honda Civic Ad

This is what they want me to do. Be a viral marketing agent. I don’t care. I keep watching this commercial again and again, deconstructing it, parsing the technique, yet each time I am more deeply filled with marvel and wonder, and, yes, joy. I know, at a commercial. The imagery is Early Photonica, and the sound, well, the sound is the point. My favorite part is the raindrops. Turn your volume way up.

http://www.honda.co.uk/civic/

(Directions through this site—let the Flash intro do its thing, then click on the "Watch Civic" on the upper left. The movie will start on its own.)

Where Heaven Touches Earth

It’s funny how the art that is meaningful to me at any given time will change, for no good reason. Such was my experience today at the Art Institute of Chicago. I am on a location shoot here for the next few days.

I searched through the galleries for work that would stop me in my tracks and make me fully absorbed in its transcendent reality. I visited familiar paintings in the museum, like the vast walls of Monets and Manets and Renoirs, admiring them but not much more. I waded through the muck and mire of the Surrealist galleries, holding at bay their distressing visages, to get to my favorites in the small room of Abstract Expressionists. They have two Rothkos, not his best work, and a very nice Franz Kline. But even these failed to grab me like they usually do. I searched out the Matisse that so haunted me last time, but I had passed it three times before I found it, opposite the Picasso Blue Guitarist. It just wasn’t reaching out to me like it did before.

So I walked back in time to unfamilar works. In a room of early Italian work I was stopped in my tracks. In this transition between Medieval and Renaissance, things just look weird. I don’t know the cultural context, the history, or the dense symbology in this work, so it looks as Surreal as anything from the 20th Century—angels and cupids hovering about haloed women in strange layered perspective renderings. Then I got to the great Venetian painters—Tintoretto and Titian, and this time they made sense to me. Well, maybe not sense, but they made something jingle in my spine that made me want to be with these paintings, to be in their thrall. It was only a little bit the abundant nudity in this era of painting—we’ve cancelled HBO and Showtime, and so my cultural life has been devoid of bare breasts lately—but there was much more than titillation at work. It was the density of story, only a little of which I could decipher, that held me. I knew I was in the presence of greatness and depth in this work, and that I could spend a lifetime getting to know more. But it also grabbed something much deeper in me. It was, in some ultimate, inexplicable sense, a spiritual connection with the work. "Art is where heaven touches earth," someone once told me. I visit art museums because I seek to stand in the afterglow of that encounter.