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oiran Saw art today.
I have whined muchly in the past about the lack of art here. And, really, there isn't much. This area is much better represented by what tends to get discounted as "craft," i.e., useful things that are also aesthetically excellent. There's a huge craft fair here every spring that usually features things like blacksmithing/iron-working, glass-blowing, lathe turning, etc., and is a great opportunity to see (and buy) beautiful, well-made things. Galleries around here are usually full of half-assed, poorly-informed crappy paintings by permanent amateurs. So, you know, I've got an opinion about it.
We don't have an art museum, per se, but we do have the Frist Center. The Frist family are bazillionaires, and Dr. Bill Frist is a Senator as well as the founder of HCA, the gargantuan healthcare conglomerate. When the Frist Center opened a few years back, we saw a traveling show of second- and third-rate paintings by well-known artists that were crammed into the gallery spaces with no real flow or coherence to the curation. There was a secondary show of what appeared to be the random attic emptyings of local "big name" families. At the time the Center opened, there were numerous articles run in the local papers about How to Behave in a Museum. There were helpful hints about not putting your grubby paws on the art, not smoking or eating in the galleries, and not letting your children climb on or around sculpture. These sorts of civilizing articles both amused and depressed me for what are probably obvious reasons.
We hadn't been back to the Frist since that first visit, but Mr. Glove really wanted to see the Red Grooms exhibit before it closes next week, so we went today. I was steeled for an incoherent mess, and also walked into it thinking that I didn't really like Red Grooms' work. I was happily surprised on all counts. Red Grooms is a printmaker, painter, sculptor, performance artist, and multimedia collaborator who was born here in Nashville, spent his art-formative years in Chicago and New York, and has been back down South for a number of years. He started out at the same time as Warhol and the rest of the Pop Artists, but something (perhaps the cheerful air in all of his work) kept him from achieving the marquee recognition of the others.
There's a big carousel on the downtown riverfront that Red Grooms designed. It seems like there ought to be a lot of pictures of this online, but I'm not finding any. The local public TV station has a page for it related to a video they offer here, but it's hard to get a sense of the thing. It's BIG, and it's very fucking colorful. It's lurid, actually. I have not personally ridden on it because I get dizzy even on a merry-go-round, but I'm sure it's just as lurid from a passenger's view as from the outside.
Despite being reproduced on virtually all possible surfaces, his work really looks best seen in original format. However, here you can find some examples of Red Grooms' work that look pretty good. The Frist show was made up entirely of prints and die-cut print sculptures. Mr. Glove is a painter and fine-art printmaker, and he loves prints for both the aesthetic factors as well as the technical. Despite having never made a print myself, I am semi-well-versed in various printing techniques and can at least recognize when a variety of methods have been used in a single print (aquatint, etching, spit bite, etc.) because of the effects seen in the final result. We both used to make paper sculptures - I used to build entire, furnished paper towns when I was young (and, obviously, friendless and otherwise unoccupied), as well as making paper models of ordinary things (shoes were a favorite for a time) - so we both really liked the paper sculptures in the Grooms exhibit.
There was also a really fascinating show of American paintings from the mid-1930s through the mid-1940s which all had a very liberal protest theme. I need to do some research on this show before I can comment intelligently, but there were some paintings that struck both the Mr. and I as being particularly arresting. A piece called The Incumbent by William Gropper was one we found particularly effective/repellent. Apparently, McCarthy called Mr. Gropper before the House Unamerican Activities Committee to question him on the content of his paintings. Eee! That kind of thing fills me with outrage and...effervescent bubbles. Subversive paintings! Blah blah power of art, etc., etc. Anyway, it's a traveling show called Coming Home and the paintings are from something called the Schoen Collection. None of the painters were anyone we were familiar with (and, when speaking of Mr. Glove, it's rare that he doesn't know something about a painter), so it was really exciting and interesting to see a really good show of completely unfamiliar works.
Additionally, we both came away with a deeper appreciation of Red Grooms and the Frist Center both. Not only was the art much more than we expected, but the Center itself seems to have matured a bit. The galleries flow together smoothly, the curation makes logical and thematic sense, the art has enough space to show to best advantage...so, yay! Frist! Mr. Glove was so pleased with the exhibit and the exhilarating feeling of artistic inspiration that he spent a lot of money on two Red Grooms books.
We are also going to go ahead and get a membership to the Frist, seeing as how one of my favorite painters EVER had a show earlier this year and I missed it because I was being a snob and didn't even know it was going on.
~~~
Copying music from CDs to hard drive. I've got a box with about a hundred disks that I thought I had already uploaded, but which I had merely made folders for, and got to the Bongwater disks. Bongwater is hard to explain. It's performance art/rock from the late 80s/very early 90s. Lyrics are bizarre, whimsical, or simply recountings of convoluted dreams. Ann Magnuson shows up in TV shows (that always get canceled), movies (that don't make any money), and writes a colum for Paper magazine called L.A. Woman (or she did last time I checked - it's probably going to be canceled), and she may or may not still do really great live performance pieces that are very funny... Anyway, this song seemed somewhat relevant to the day I had, and the lyrics go like this:
And, should you wish to hear it: Bongwater - Obscene and Pornographic Art
Also, a tiny (49 second) song about Japanese bondage porn: Bongwater - Women Tied Up In Knots
I don't know that I'd recommend Bongwater, per se, but it's an interesting...cultural artifact, let's call it. And I have fond memories...
~~~
boom: Yay! Functional speakers in my car! The last set - a superspecial pair of Nakamichis that Mr. G had been "saving" for some reason or other, were so old that the cones disintegrated at the first thud of bass. The new ones are probably not as good as the Nakamichis would have been, but I just want something I can sing with, and now I have it. I want to drive everywhere playing music loudly. I feel the need to compile something for the occasion...
I've got work I should have done today (betas!) but instead I played (see above) and watched Lost in Translation again with Mr. G.
Oh! And we watched Once Upon a Time in Mexico last night! I loved it, which was especially nice since I pretty much always really, really dislike the movies that everyone on LJ goes crazy over. Now, the craziness over this one was relatively low-level, but that I enjoyed this so immensely makes me feel like part of the squad anyway.
I have whined muchly in the past about the lack of art here. And, really, there isn't much. This area is much better represented by what tends to get discounted as "craft," i.e., useful things that are also aesthetically excellent. There's a huge craft fair here every spring that usually features things like blacksmithing/iron-working, glass-blowing, lathe turning, etc., and is a great opportunity to see (and buy) beautiful, well-made things. Galleries around here are usually full of half-assed, poorly-informed crappy paintings by permanent amateurs. So, you know, I've got an opinion about it.
We don't have an art museum, per se, but we do have the Frist Center. The Frist family are bazillionaires, and Dr. Bill Frist is a Senator as well as the founder of HCA, the gargantuan healthcare conglomerate. When the Frist Center opened a few years back, we saw a traveling show of second- and third-rate paintings by well-known artists that were crammed into the gallery spaces with no real flow or coherence to the curation. There was a secondary show of what appeared to be the random attic emptyings of local "big name" families. At the time the Center opened, there were numerous articles run in the local papers about How to Behave in a Museum. There were helpful hints about not putting your grubby paws on the art, not smoking or eating in the galleries, and not letting your children climb on or around sculpture. These sorts of civilizing articles both amused and depressed me for what are probably obvious reasons.
We hadn't been back to the Frist since that first visit, but Mr. Glove really wanted to see the Red Grooms exhibit before it closes next week, so we went today. I was steeled for an incoherent mess, and also walked into it thinking that I didn't really like Red Grooms' work. I was happily surprised on all counts. Red Grooms is a printmaker, painter, sculptor, performance artist, and multimedia collaborator who was born here in Nashville, spent his art-formative years in Chicago and New York, and has been back down South for a number of years. He started out at the same time as Warhol and the rest of the Pop Artists, but something (perhaps the cheerful air in all of his work) kept him from achieving the marquee recognition of the others.
There's a big carousel on the downtown riverfront that Red Grooms designed. It seems like there ought to be a lot of pictures of this online, but I'm not finding any. The local public TV station has a page for it related to a video they offer here, but it's hard to get a sense of the thing. It's BIG, and it's very fucking colorful. It's lurid, actually. I have not personally ridden on it because I get dizzy even on a merry-go-round, but I'm sure it's just as lurid from a passenger's view as from the outside.
Despite being reproduced on virtually all possible surfaces, his work really looks best seen in original format. However, here you can find some examples of Red Grooms' work that look pretty good. The Frist show was made up entirely of prints and die-cut print sculptures. Mr. Glove is a painter and fine-art printmaker, and he loves prints for both the aesthetic factors as well as the technical. Despite having never made a print myself, I am semi-well-versed in various printing techniques and can at least recognize when a variety of methods have been used in a single print (aquatint, etching, spit bite, etc.) because of the effects seen in the final result. We both used to make paper sculptures - I used to build entire, furnished paper towns when I was young (and, obviously, friendless and otherwise unoccupied), as well as making paper models of ordinary things (shoes were a favorite for a time) - so we both really liked the paper sculptures in the Grooms exhibit.
There was also a really fascinating show of American paintings from the mid-1930s through the mid-1940s which all had a very liberal protest theme. I need to do some research on this show before I can comment intelligently, but there were some paintings that struck both the Mr. and I as being particularly arresting. A piece called The Incumbent by William Gropper was one we found particularly effective/repellent. Apparently, McCarthy called Mr. Gropper before the House Unamerican Activities Committee to question him on the content of his paintings. Eee! That kind of thing fills me with outrage and...effervescent bubbles. Subversive paintings! Blah blah power of art, etc., etc. Anyway, it's a traveling show called Coming Home and the paintings are from something called the Schoen Collection. None of the painters were anyone we were familiar with (and, when speaking of Mr. Glove, it's rare that he doesn't know something about a painter), so it was really exciting and interesting to see a really good show of completely unfamiliar works.
Additionally, we both came away with a deeper appreciation of Red Grooms and the Frist Center both. Not only was the art much more than we expected, but the Center itself seems to have matured a bit. The galleries flow together smoothly, the curation makes logical and thematic sense, the art has enough space to show to best advantage...so, yay! Frist! Mr. Glove was so pleased with the exhibit and the exhilarating feeling of artistic inspiration that he spent a lot of money on two Red Grooms books.
We are also going to go ahead and get a membership to the Frist, seeing as how one of my favorite painters EVER had a show earlier this year and I missed it because I was being a snob and didn't even know it was going on.
~~~
Copying music from CDs to hard drive. I've got a box with about a hundred disks that I thought I had already uploaded, but which I had merely made folders for, and got to the Bongwater disks. Bongwater is hard to explain. It's performance art/rock from the late 80s/very early 90s. Lyrics are bizarre, whimsical, or simply recountings of convoluted dreams. Ann Magnuson shows up in TV shows (that always get canceled), movies (that don't make any money), and writes a colum for Paper magazine called L.A. Woman (or she did last time I checked - it's probably going to be canceled), and she may or may not still do really great live performance pieces that are very funny... Anyway, this song seemed somewhat relevant to the day I had, and the lyrics go like this:
Mr. B is out of town, and I can't find anyone to have an affair with, so I just mosey on down to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at all the satyrs with hard-ons.
They're over there, next to the medieval armour, flexing their bronze muscles under goat fur loincloths, vibrating that little, bitty Richter-scale-looking thingy box that sits in the corner of the controlled environment behind the cold hard glass.
I sit on an imitation neoclassical chair and wait and wait and wait. I look into a gilded full-length mirror and see my greasy, stringy hair and think, "Hef won't like me like this!"
Then I check out that chick Leda with the swan pecking at her pink egg tempera nipple. Hey, what that swan be doing? And why? And how 'bout those plump maidens, those hot cherubic babes being presented to Apollo, Dionysius, Neptone, or one of those other well-hung gods? What about them stripped, bare-ass naked like the day they was born, with their hands bound by garlands of wet, dewy, budding blossoms, ripe and tender to the touch, just like the lesbians in that 16th century tapestry--the one over the harpsichord--looking like California blondes?
Just then, three suffragettes descend from the sky on an old fashioned, wooden deux ex machina singing:
I ain't wearing any underwear
I ain't wearing any underwear
I ain't wearing any underwear
I ain't wearing any underwear
I ain't wearing any underwear
I ain't wearing any underwear
I ain't wearing any underwear
I ain't wearing any underwear
Oh, plumes of molten rock, risking from Venus' mantle, solidify on the crust as plateaus!
That guard looks cute. He has a look of studied melancholia and distraction that reminds me of my old Greek boyfriend, the Al Pacino look-alike I called my "subtle gigolo" who broke my heart in a hundred places and caused my nervous breakdown that resulted in an unsuccessful suicide attempt involving 42 phenobarbital where I slept for two days, but woke up and luckily lived long enough to reach my sexual peak.
I wonder what happened to him?
And, should you wish to hear it: Bongwater - Obscene and Pornographic Art
Also, a tiny (49 second) song about Japanese bondage porn: Bongwater - Women Tied Up In Knots
I don't know that I'd recommend Bongwater, per se, but it's an interesting...cultural artifact, let's call it. And I have fond memories...
~~~
boom: Yay! Functional speakers in my car! The last set - a superspecial pair of Nakamichis that Mr. G had been "saving" for some reason or other, were so old that the cones disintegrated at the first thud of bass. The new ones are probably not as good as the Nakamichis would have been, but I just want something I can sing with, and now I have it. I want to drive everywhere playing music loudly. I feel the need to compile something for the occasion...
I've got work I should have done today (betas!) but instead I played (see above) and watched Lost in Translation again with Mr. G.
Oh! And we watched Once Upon a Time in Mexico last night! I loved it, which was especially nice since I pretty much always really, really dislike the movies that everyone on LJ goes crazy over. Now, the craziness over this one was relatively low-level, but that I enjoyed this so immensely makes me feel like part of the squad anyway.
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Date: 2004-09-06 08:43 am (UTC)