Zee: Don’t Panic

Posted on October 28, 2009 by Linnea

I held tightly to the rope with one hand while with the other I pulled my shirt over my face. The smoke was making me cough, and I could hear others around me coughing too. I couldn’t see them through the thick fog. I noticed how it changed and brightened into yellow. I held the rope tighter because I couldn’t see anything except a blinding kaleidoscope of slowly shifting light colors. As the waiver I had so blithely signed advised, I did not panic. (Luckily nor did I go into an epileptic fit.) When the guides told us we could walk around, I let go of the rope and started walking in slow motion through the colored light that changed in tune with the ambient droning.

If you have ever been on a boat in fog, you can approximate the disorientation this installation, Zee by Kurt Hentschläger, creates. In 10 minute intervals, small groups go into this immersive light and sound experience from which the artist hopes to create a mental landscape. It reminded me very much of Christopher Saunder’s Whitenoise Suite No. 3, left, partially because the performance ended with the same dense orange fog. It successfully unmoores you from your surroundings. Coughing from the smoke is distracting, but overall it plays with perception beautifully. What would be really interesting, and I think meditative, is to experience it for a longer period of time.

While toying with perceptions and light can create a beautiful enviornment, I find this kind of work to lack- how shall I say?- content. Or subject matter. Or a point. To experience an installation like this one is fun, but it is hardly a revelation. We know fog and lights can be manipulated. That larger caveat aside, it is fun, and it is being performed at 3LD Art & Technology Center through November 15.

Terrible Tuesday

Posted on October 27, 2009 by Linnea

I’ve have not discovered the antidote to Terrible Tuesdays, in which one is plagued by rain, catastrophe, and nincompoops. Hot chocolate doesn’t cut it. However, pictures of teacup pigs come pretty close. Teacup pigs are the cutest housepet ever. Full stop.

Apparently they make great pets, as they only grow to about 30 lbs and can be litter trained. They are intelligent, live 18+ years, and are very loving. So loving in fact, they recommend you get a pair so that they are never alone. Unfortunately, they cost about $1,000, I’m not sure that they are available in the States, and there is a law in New York City against farm animals that extends to mini versions. However, they are almost cute enough to make me forget that I am wet and cranky right now.

My new desktop picture–desperate times call for desperate measures.

A Visit to the Eccentric Gardner Museum

Posted on October 26, 2009 by Linnea

The first thing I gravitated toward after paying the entrance fee at the door of the Venetian-style palazzo was the flowering inner courtyard that rises four stories up. Around the courtyard on the first level and from the windows above, people were all poking their heads out to view the Spring-like garden. After all, this was Boston in the Fall rather than Autumn in Italy. Perhaps Isabella Stewart Gardner intended to provoke such wonder when she left her art collection to be displayed almost exactly as she left it when she died in 1924.

A willful widow in a prim Victorian era, Mrs. Gardner was an avid art collector, who left a lovely but idiosyncratic collection in this house museum. Medieval Gothic carvings and Chinese screens hang on the walls alongside tapestries and late 19th C. paintings. On one had, this is a fascinating place to explore. On the other, the way the objects are displayed–behind staricases sometimes–can make them seem merely decorative. The museum motto is “C’est mon plaisir,” (It’s my pleasure) appropriately enough. Be warned there are some Draconian rules in place–no photography of any kind (the courtyard image above was posted to Flickr from a postcard) and you must not hold your coat. I was asked to either wear it or tie it around my waist.

However, there are some stunning pieces in this strange, eclectic house. Mrs. Gardner had a close relationship with John Singer Sargent, whose large El Jaleo hangs prominently in the Spanish Cloister and who did the portrait of Mrs. Gardner above right. We followed the stairs up and wandered through some Victorian rooms filled with distinctly un-Victorian Renaissance paintings and Chinese bulls and mock altars of devotional paintings. Then we happened upon a small room with large racks of drawings by Impressionist masters to Matisse. It feels like a treasure trove flipping through rack after rack of them.

By far my favorite room was the Dutch room on the second floor. There was this stunning early self-portrait of Rembrandt hung high on the wall, diagonally across the room from Ruben’s Earl of Arundel , and a lovely portrait of a woman by Van Dyck. Not to mention a strange silver ostrich built around a ostrich egg. At that point, I didn’t mind wearing my coat or the little ropes.

Visiting is an immersing, fascinating experience. Only with such a polyglot, unlabelled collection could you have such fun playing ‘guess the painting.’ It’s incredible to realize a fantasy as closely as Isabella Stewart Gardner did with this museum.