Category Archives: installation

Eating in MoMA’s Contemporary Galleries

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“Untitled” (Placebo), Felix Gonzales-Torres, 2001

I highly recommend it right now. I went to MoMA slightly hungry, battled the crowds and opted to tour the contemporary galleries rather than face the masses in the permanent collection or new Diego Rivera exhibition. I chose well. In the shimmering installation by Felix Gonzales-Torres, visitors are invited to take a piece of candy from the pile which is eventually replenished. It is slowly depleted, to be refilled later, and was created after the artist’s partner died of AIDS-related complications in 1991.

Continuing on, the art gets better in terms of fullness. Not only did I get a piece of silver-wrapped candy, but I was next served green curry.

Curry from Untitled (Free/Still), Rirkrit Tiravanija, 1992

Yes, that’s right. I stood in line for a bowl of very decent green curry in a section of the gallery turned into a room-like space by a plywood frame and temporary walls and furniture. Rirkrit Tiravanija’s piece Untitled (Free/Still) first went up in 1992 at 303 Gallery, and the museum recently acquired it. You can check it out from noon to 3 p.m. most days through February 8.

Food as a medium in an installation or performance is something I feel I’ve seem more of in the past few years. Jennifer Rubell for instance has done some notable performance/installations involving food, like thecheese head at the Brooklyn Museum of Art or the more recent Art Basel Miami breakfast. However her works never seem nearly as appetizing as what’s at MoMA now.

Also check out: Five for Friday: Works that Look Good Enough to… for more of the museum’s edible works.

Radcliffe Bailey’s Ships and Sea

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In the Garden, 2008

Atlanta has this interesting past that makes you want to dig deeper and understand what was once there, even though it may be covered…Sherman burnt down the city. They say when you want to get rid of something, you burn it, but you don’t really get rid of it. I can look out my back door and see a lot — Radcliffe Bailey via NY Times

Radcliffe Bailey’s work Seven Steps, above, was on view at the Georgia Museum of Art when I went recently, and I love the layered colors and use of materials offset by the sepia photograph. It was recently part of an exhibition at the High Museum in Atalanta that I just missed, Radcliffe Bailey: Memory as Medicine, showcasing the Atlanta-based artist’s work on its biggest level yet. Bailey uses a variety of materials to explore history both personal and collective, and he engages memory as a device to encourage healing through art.

Tricky, 2008

Bailey is maybe better know for a layering of imagery, culturally resonant materials, and text that began when he was given some old family photographs to work with. But looking at the images from the exhibition, I was really drawn to some of his more sculptural pieces, like Tricky, above. A textured black surface juxtaposed with the jaunty tilt of the hat encase a slave ship. In The Antelope, he again presents a black ship, this time encased in glass like a fossil and sailing over white cloth/paper. 

The Antelope, 2010

The large installation Windward Coast creates a rolling ocean of piano keys harvested from some 400 pianos, suggesting the oceans traversed in the slave trade and in their midst a lone black head, the same glittery texture as the ship in Tricky, appears.

Detail view of Windward Coast

The artist does not consider his work to be solely dark or only about slavery however (as you might not realize by the pieces I’m showing here). Regarding Windward Coast, he told the New York Times, “I think about all the music that was probably played on those keys. An ocean is something that divides people. Music is something that connects people. Duke Ellington or Thelonious Monk — it’s a different sound that takes you somewhere else. It’s also about being at peace.”

Installation View, Memory as Medicine at the High Museum

More about the exhibition here and images of the artist’s work here.

A “tilted” view of DUMBO: Isidro Blasco at Smack Mellon

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Tilted by Isidro Blasco, at Smack Mellon during the DUMBO Arts Festival, was a large wooden framwork installation that sprawled out across the first gallery, dividing the space into little rooms covered in photographs. The photogrpahs themselves were of local neighborhood, but cut and pasted into and around each other in a way that created its own 3-dimensional, and tilted, space. They recreate the DUMBO streetscape and the Smack Mellon gallery itself. 

Blasco is Spanish artist with a background in architecture. That comes across clearly here: the bare sticks of wood at odd angles suggest deconstructed-construction.

It’s rather like taking apart the pieces of something to figure out how it works, except in this case rather than a toy or an engine, it is a nieghborhood, and more specifically a gallery in a neighborhood. One of the more interesting and visually-stimulating pieces I saw during the DUMBO Arts Festival, Tilted really succeeded in taking over and interacted with both the space and the viewer.

For a view of some of the artist’s earlier work, checkout James Kalm’s video walk through of a early 2011 show at Black and White Gallery.