It's very SIMPLE, but very COMPLEX

Wolfgang LAIB

POLLEN from Hazelnut

Josef Albers / Homage to Square

Collecting pollen is a surgical operation.  It takes patience and expertise.  Wolfgang Laib has been collecting pollen from hazelnut trees near his home in Southern Germany for the last twenty years.  It is this collection of pollen that Laib  used to make his Pollen from Hazelnut installation currently in the atrium at MoMA.  There is a hidden aspect to this work.  Everyday Laib ritualistically goes to MoMA to clean the pollen of dust or dirt.  "It has to be perfect."

On Wednesday, Laib talked with Agnes Gund about his work.  Gund is a fan and a collector of Laib's work.   In her introduction, she mentioned an aspect of making the work, which the viewer is unaware of: the tapping sound of Laibs' fingers make  as he sifts the pollen through a piece of muslin.

When I go to these type of events, I think that the artist will shed some light on his/her intention.  Laib did not.  No matter how many times Gund posed the question or the different ways she tried to get at what it was all about, Laib resisted any "art speak." 

Instead, we were treated not only to a overview of his work over the last thirty years, but a look at the three places he lives: a 17th century barn in Southern Germany, a house in Southern India and his apartment in New York.  Included in this personal tour, was a photograph of his parents 1950's glass house on the same piece of property where he now lives.  Laib tried to relate how all of these environments contribute to his art practice.  In a nod to MoMA, Laib talked about how he felt about the atrium at the museum. He loves the space, especially for his piece.  You can view his piece at eye level, and you can also ascend the next four floors and look down on the piece, which changes it.

The most Laib would say about his work and repeated many times, "The work is very simple, but  very complex".  Although a very soft-spoken man, with a buddha-like appearance, Laib spoke passionately about his role in creating any artwork.  "I am not a creator.  I am just a participant. The pollen is the artwork."

At the end of the conversation, there was a question and answer period.  

Q:  How does MoMA intend to store the piece?

Laib:  I want all the pollen back.  I will sort it and sift it again and make another piece.

Curator of the show:  If we don't give it back, Laib would have to live to be 600 years old to make other pieces.

That's what I call real recycling.

Tick Tock Tick Tock

I thought  after 15 minutes of watching Christian Marclay's The Clock, I might be bored.  Watching time go by is more interesting than you might think. 

Three years

six assistants, 

ten thousand clips 

more than $100,000
and Christian Marclay

I watched 1/12 of Christian Marclay's The Clock on Saturday at MoMA.  I could have stayed longer, but it was time to eat dinner.  I was unprepared for the "venue."  I knew MoMA had taken one of the large galleries and converted it for this installation; I thought it would be a large room with folding chairs, instead carpeting and a room full of comfortable sofas.  Incredible as it sounds, it would be easy to stay for the entire 24-hours, if your bladder would cooperate.  

 

The critics call  The Clock, a tour de force and I can see why.  The 24 hour sequence runs in real time.  After seeing, The Clock the phrase what time is it, takes on new meaning".  On one level you are conscious of time, after all it's on the screen almost second by second,  in real time.  On another level, (i don't know what to call it) the installation, the art piece, the film... works on a number of levels that makes time irrelevant.

There are the visuals, cutting from black and white to color,  incredible sound editing, challenges to the film buff,  the clocks themselves (it's a catalog of makers of wall clocks), the history of the watch (from pocketwatch to wristwatch to digital phone), the humor associated with our obsession with time, cataloging of the thematic uses of time (planes, trains, cars, war, sports, etc.) and those are just a few.

I don't know if this is a rare chance to see The Clock.  It is a chance to experience time travel.

Christian Marclay - The Clock is shown in the Museum's Contemporary Galleries during public hours throughout its run and is free for members and with Museum admission.
Entrance to the installation is on a first-come, first-served basis, with no limits for viewers.

The Clock will be shown in its entirety during three weekends in January.

Friday January 4, 10:30 am - Sunday January 6, 5:30 pm

Friday January 11, 10:30 am - Sunday January 13, 5:30 pm
Friday January 18, 10:30 am - Sunday, January 20, 5:30 pm

The Contemporary Galleries will remain open during all of the after-hours screenings.
________________________________

(I wondered if clips would unconsciously influence your state of mind.  For instance, if you went to see The Clock between 10pm and midnight... the clips would be about going to sleep, would you begin to feel drowsy and want to get into your own bed?)

Pure Immanence

"A life contains only virtuals.  

It is made up of virtu-alities, events, singularities.  

What we call virtual is not something that lacks reality, 

but something that enters into a process of actualization 

by following the plane that gives it its own reality."

Pure Immanence
Essays on A Life
Gilles Deleuze

MoMA
Saturday, October 20, 2012
Marron Atrium, Second Floor

JEROME BEL
The Show Must Go On

I sit on the floor.
There are no chairs.
The performance is suppose to begin at 3pm
It's now 3:15 pm and nothing.
Suddenly
Members of the audience get up, walk to the front of the room,
line up and stare at the me.
Pause
The music starts.  It's the Beatles.
The "dancers" begin to move.

But are they dancers?
In some cases, it is easy to tell by their body type; 

in other cases I am not sure.  

Again stillness.  

The music begins again; 

This time Private Dancer sung by Tina Turner.  

The dancers begin to move to the music

Each doing their own thing.  

Unchoreographed,
but aware of each other.  

Again silence.  

The DJ plays Ballerina Girl by Lionel Richie.  

The men step out and 

the women perform their individual idea of ballet steps.  

Silence.
The performers leave.

The DJ steps into the performance space.

He dances.

He leaves.

Everyone comes back to the performance space.
The Macarena plays.
All performers dance to it.
The performers leave the space and come back.

Each person has an iPod and headphones.

Silence.

Some performers occasionally sing part of the song they are listening to.

Some move to the music they are listening to on their iPod.

Laughter in the audience.

The performers leave.
Applause.

This was the first week of a three-week program of dance performances by contemporary choreographers at MoMA.  Afterwards,  choreographers, Jerome Bel and Steve Paxton (performance took place on Wed), Sabine Breitwieser, Chief Curator, Dept. of Media and Performance Art and Ralph Lemon, guest curator and choreographer talked about the two dances.

Randomness, improvisation, humor, irony were all part of this performance.  

Jerome Bel "You work on a dance for maybe 5 or 6 years.  And when you perform it in a space like this, the audience can come and go, play with their iphones, tweat, whisper, rock their babies, watch from the sidelines and the floors above.  There are no expectations.  I don't know how to come to terms with that".

"He went on "Dance is activated by the performer.  Even though a dance like the Macarena is ready-made, each performer does it differently".  

It didn't matter.  But nobody left.  Whether it was the music that made it accessible or comfortable or the idea that you didn't know what would happen and you wanted to find out; the performance was transfixing.  There is something similar in the way meadows develop:  choreographed and yet unchoreographed.  They evolve depending on the conditions.  I only wish a meadow could be as engaging as this performance.

ABC

EY  BEE

CEE  DEE

EEE  F  DJEE

EITCH  AI  JAY KAY

EL  EM  EN  0H  PEE

KIEW  AR  ES

TEE  YEE  VEE

DUBBLYEW  EX

WAI  ZEE

How To Spell the Alphabet

Tauba Auerbah

Gilbert Apollinaire

As a  child, one of my favorite things was to open the cedar closet, which stored my mother's seal coat and run my hands up and down the nap; changing the color from espresso to fawn.  I enjoy this same luxurious sensation when I glide my hands over handset type. I know this is weird.  But if you've ever set type, you  know what I mean.  You can feel the letters.

The current show,  Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language at MoMA gave me goosebumps.  I experienced the joy of letters and words and the deconstruction of words taken away from meaning.

The Robert Smithson piece, A Heap of Language composed of 152 words in a pyramidal form collapses language.  "A word outside of the mind is a set of "dead letters".  The mania for literalness related to the breakdown in the rational belief in reality.  Books entomb words in a synthetic rigor mortis, perhaps that is why "print" is thought to have entered obsolescence." 1957 R.Smithson

The artists in this show (those shown for historical reasons and those working today) have taken content and turned it into something visual.  There is wallpaper made of words, constructed photographs of letters, a floor runner by Ferdinand Kriwet and numerous collections of objects called Found Fount by Paul Elliman.  All of these pieces have one thing in a common; an uncommon joyful spirit.  As Smithson pointed out over fifty years ago, print may be dead, but playing around with words is not.

Talk to Me And apparently you can!

Talk TO Me:
Design and Communication
between People and Objects 

 MoMA

Someone recently told me that nothing that happens digitally would surprise them.  This might be true, but the Talk to Me exhibition at MoMA will definitely blow your mind.  You have to go back a couple of times to take it all in.  I decided to focus on the pieces that focus on  nature -  as we don't know it!

BOTANICALLS (photograpah above) it might look like a guitar, but no.
Robert Faludi
Kate Hartman
Kati London
Rebecca Bray

"Botanicalls gives voice to our voiceless everyday companions:  house plants.  Mositure sensors in a plant's soil trigger messages that are sent to a human caretaker over a wireless network.  The messages are broacdcast via Twitter or read aloud by a recorded human voice over the telephone: the plants are polite enough to send both distress calls and notes of thanks. 

Botanicalls enables just one form of interspecies communication, but its fresh use of sensor technology has a wide range of potential applications." MoMA text

TREE LISTENING

Alex Metcalf, Royal College of Art, UK

At the MoMA show the headphones are below this photograph.  You put them on and listen to the tree.

"Metcalf's Tree Listening installations in various locations around the United Kingdom reveal what happens inside a tree, where water and nutrients ascend from roots to leaves through a complex hydraulic system of xylem tubes.  To create a sensory glimpse into this system, Metcalf designed a solar-powered listening device that is place on a tree trunk, linked to an amplifier, and connected to a series of headphones that hang from the branches.  Through the headphones, passerby can listen to a tree's inner workings....

Tree bark is figuratively stripped away, revealing a unique soundscape." MoMa text

Hello World
Bernhard Hopfengartner

"Hello World! is a giant Semacode mowed into a wheat field near limenau, in Germany's Thuringia region.  The code is formed by a pattern of light (cut wheat plants mixed with dirt) and dark (mature wheat plants) squares, eighteen across and eighteen down, that when decoded reads "Hello World!" in keeping iwth the tradition of christening any new coding experiment by programming it to produce this cheerful declaration.

The installation, now captured in Google's Earth's global database of images, marries high-tech medium while also making reference to crop circles and the ancient language of runes.  The human need for expression continues at a global, even planetary scale." MoMA text

As part of the exhibition there is a pyramid, like the food pyramid. 
This graph represents "Distractability." 
At the top of the pyramid DARK NIGHT, DIGITAL PAIN. 
Next in line = IPhone and Mobile Phone call.
After that = email, twitter, text message
etc., etc., etc.

I recently experienced (briefly) digitally pain.  I now understand, how addiction, can sneak up on you and withdrawal is painful at first.  Then you realize the sun is still shining, it's a good day for a walk!

Participants and Caretakers

 Nocture of the Limax maximus

Paula Hayes

MoMA

MoMA has always been a haven for me; sometimes it has been a kind of heaven.  In High School, we used to cut class, hop a train and roam around the galleries looking for the antidote to our prescribed lives.  Years later I followed  film-buff boyfriend to the basement auditorium of MoMA to watch vintage films.  When I worked around the corner from the museum, I often spent my lunch hour wandering the galleries  looking for inspiration.  MoMA has always been a second home.  

The new show Nocture of the Limax maximus by Paula Hayes is a mini-show and some may question what it is doing in the museum.  Paula Hayes makes terrariums, small and large, from blown glass in amoeba-like shapes.

Hayes tell us in her MoMA blog that "The Limax maximus - the Leopard slug referred to in the title of my commissioned installation on view in MoMA's lobby - is a "simultaneous hermaphrodite" that is not capable of self-fertilization."

"...The areas that fascinate me most are the comparisons of female roles in not only art as an object, but in the practice of art making itself.  

...Living art literally involves the attentive and continuous role of participants and caretakers in all aspects of the continuum of its manifestation and life; this reality is at its core - a core that is performed by humans along any point in the spectrum of gender."

Viewing the two installations in the lobby of MoMA, I have no idea what the connection is between these intellectual theories and the terrariums.

What I understand  is the immediate response one feels to this world of begonias,  ferns, and  tiny tropical plants. It's hard to walk past and not pay attention to this green world.  It's a special kind of garden.

Ann Temkin, chief curator of the museum's department of painting and sculpture,  says of Hayes' work "...you don't need a Ph.D. in art history to get."

 I agree you don't need a degree to enjoy the work, but I feel you do need a translator to understand what Hayes means when she says "It is the essential that there be an internal, collaborative maintenance of the life of the work so that it can exist as an artwork."