Category Archives: art

General arts and culture posts

Exhibition Opening Saturday: Making Masters 2014

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The writing is on the wall, literally. This weekend a group of artists from UGA’s MFA program and I drove down to Madison, Georgia to install Making Masters 2014 at the Madison Museum of Fine Art. The ten artists in the show work in different media and themes, so it was exciting to bring their pieces together and see how they responded to each other. As the curator I had tried to imagine how the artworks would look in the space for weeks, so it was really satisfying to see them on the wall.

We also had our first visitors. A small school group appeared just as we were putting on the final touches, and the children got to ask the artists questions about their work, such as “Where do you get your ideas for an artwork from?” or “How do you know it’s good enough to be in a museum?” Going right for the jugular! More questions like that are heartily welcomed. The exhibition is open to the public this coming Saturday, September 27. Even better, join us on October 11 from 4 to 6 pm for a reception.

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High Art, Public Art, Garden Art: Koon’s Split Rocker at Rockefeller Center

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Jeff Koons, Split-Rocker, 2000; Stainless steel, soil, geotextile fabric, internal irrigation system, and live flowering plants; 446 7/8 x 483 1/8 x 427 5/8 inches. Edition of 1, plus 1 AP. Installation view at Rockefeller Center, New York City; June 25 – September 12, 2014; © Jeff Koons. (Photograph mine)

Summer is over, but I was reminded of some of the public art I saw in New York City this summer when I reread this great article on Hyperallergic discussing Kara Walker’s Subtlety and Jeff Koon’s Split Rocker and how both use the monumental forms of public art. Split Rocker, a mammoth topiary riffing on childrens’ toys, has an illustrious visitation record, being shown at Versailles before its recent incarnation this summer at Rockefeller Center in New York City. In both cases, Koons takes advantage of the long public vista to create a dominating perspective for the eye to stare down and, secondarily, a sense of irony when the playful bearer of the eye is considered. In Versailles, the vegetation referenced the history of the gardens surrounding the palace and its carefully pruned hedges. Amid Rockefeller Center’s towering buildings and hard asphalt, it seems equally light-hearted but totally vacuous.

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This piece is named Split-Rocker because it takes the two different rockinghorse models and splices them together, the disjunct most clearly seen in the metal edging when viewed from the side. The playful irony continues by presenting the blown-up children’s toy  where one might expect a monument or heroic statue.

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In a nod to the season, the surface is made up on flowers, which will grow and blow at different points through the summer, giving it some amount of variability. In Koon’s work, this superficial layer of vegetation is just that: superficial. Although artists have done interesting works that change because of natural growth over time, this piece is carefully maintained to always bloom and be colorful.

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Tellingly, when I saw Split-Rocker in July, I was strongly reminded of a recent trip to the Atlanta Botanical Garden. The plant-covered sculptural installations there greatly resemble the Koon’s piece, but they certainly do not function in the art market at all like one, nor are they considered high art.

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Oliver Laric’s Versions at the Hirschhorn Museum, Washington D.C.

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What do two Disney scenes have to do with Photoshoping missiles being fired? Or, for that matter, with a clearly computer-generated chair design and a white porcelain sculpture of a curiously bedecked man’s head? Ostensibly nothing, and I think that remains the case even after viewing Austrian artist Oliver Laric’s video Versions at the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington D. C. several times. The linking thread in the chain of images in Versions is the accompanying female voice. In doing so, the artist makes the point that the linking thread of many contemporary cultural products in the remix culture of today are works of just such an amalgamated sourcing.

Oliver Laric Versions 2012 from Seventeen Gallery on Vimeo.

With the utmost professionalism and authority, the voice expounds on the philosophy of images, image-making today, and copies through such examples. Perhaps surprisingly, such a theoretical topic does not become boring, and if heavy-handed, pointedly so. Just as the images are created and remixed to tell this story, the words are also largely a remix. Taking from both high and low culture, Laric quotes from Borges but also James Brown, thus mimicking the same questions of authenticity and originality that he is tackling.

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To quote the video: “It’s the real thing. Hybridize, or disappear.” On view at the Hirschhorn through October 5. More information available here.