You Know It’s Almost Summer When…

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  • you arrive to work sweating
  • your eyes are glued shut by allergies
  • suddenly on the subway arms and toes are bared
  • people seem happy
  • even the glaring sunlight can’t entice you out of bed because the longer days somehow make you stay up much later than you intended

Based on the above signs, I’m guessing it’s summer. While this is a much anticipated change, my head seems stuffed with cotton balls. I will try to blog properly at some point over the next six months. Honest.

In the meantime, check out these very cool video effects and play ‘guess the famous painting’ game. I’m going to try to find a tissue and caffeine.

Human Carriage Gets Applause

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Ann Hamilton created the site-specific Human Carriage for the recently closed Third Mind exhibition at the Guggenheim, and I wanted to share it with you because it was absolutely delightful. Her formal description of human carriage reads “Installation of cloth, wire, bells, books, string, pipe, pulleys, pages, cable, gravity, air, and sound.”

It was a playful and fun installation. It was also affecting: viewers clapped every time the book finally dropped. Every time. Once it got stuck, and I stopped in my tracks. What would happen now? (A museum worker with a pole pushed it along.)

The Guggenheim Museum described its working thus: “Hamilton devises a mechanism that traverses the entire Guggenheim balustrade, taking the form of a white silk ‘bell carriage’ with Tibetan bells attached inside. As the cage spirals down along the balustrade, the purifying bells ring, awakening viewers. The mechanism is hoisted back up to a post at the uppermost Rotunda Level 6, where an attendant exchanges weights composed of thousands of cut-up books that counter the pulley system that propels the mechanism itself.”

Picasso at Gagosian: Go now!

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As you know, if you read yesterday’s or the day before’s post, I had a great list of galleries in Chelsea that I wanted to go see. Yesterday was beautiful outside, so I biked up to 20th Street. Overall, I had a mixed reaction, but one thing stands out as being an incredible show and opportunity for any art lover:

The Picasso exhibition at Gagosian

It’s amazing to see Picasso in a smaller, intimate gallery setting. This is Gagosian’s new space at 522 W. 21st St, and it’s beautifully lit. The sheer number of works in the 4 large spaces is dauntingly fun, and it really helps you make sense of Picasso’s late period during the 60s and 70s, from which all the works were drawn. Called Mosqueteros, due to an abundance musketeers, cavaliers and prostitutes in these later works, the show comes mostly from private collections that are not accessible to the public. So Gagosian’s exhibition is an unprecedented chance to see this grouping.

The artist in 1971

Gagosian‘s business acumen is amazing: rather than focusing on lower-priced works in these economic times, he is marshalingl his resources to create shows like the Pierro Manzoni retrospective and this one to generate buzz and excitement at a time when it’s hard to generate sales. The exhibitions themselves have been wonderful.

I felt within the Mosqueteros, there was certainly an uneven quality to the grouping. Some paintings were great, others very great. The paintings themselves were jarring, ruthlessly honest, and aggressive with haunting eyes. If the exhibition shows you anything, it’s that Picasso remains fresh and relevant today. It’s on view until June 6, so go see it while you can.