Archives for May 2010

Food has long been a subject of art, and drink, too. But what are we to make of EAT LACMA?

Billed as a year-long festival in collaboration with an artists collective called Fallen Fruit, this series of shindigs is being funded by a grant from the MetLife Museum and Community Connections program, and others. The events are supposed to fuse “the richness of LACMA’s permanent collection with the ephemerality of food and the natural growth cycle.” 

That’s because food is “a common ground that explores the social role of art and ritual in community and human relationships.” The exhibition part — June 27 through Nov. 7 — is being organized by Fallen Fruit’s David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young and LACMA curator Michele Urton.

OK, I’m with you, so far — especially because of the stated emphasis on the permanent collection. I popped “apple” into a search of LACMA’s collection and found 25 works of art, including the one at right of The Holy Family, by Thomas Willeboirts.

But back to the festival, which includes these elements:

Show Us How You Eat — “a participatory online video project, 2010, and is seeking your videos of eating, up to 60 seconds in length” on YouTube, where it currently has 50 members and 29 videos. Some of them will be part of that exhibition, Fallen Fruit Presents The Fruit of LACMA.”

Plant the Perimeter Fruit Tree Giveaway, which took place in February, provided fruit trees visitors could take home to plant in their neighborhood.

Tomato Hootenany, an outdoor event that took place last Saturday, is described thusly:

Come pick up a tomato seedling plant, square dance with caller Susan Michaels and the old time string band Triple Chicken Foot, and take part in a Mortgage Lifter Tomato Workshop with artists Anne Hars and Stephanie Allespach.

The best article I found about the whole enterprise was on a website called Treehugger, which also mentions a “Fruit Foraging Tour” in February — and provides a video of it.

So what’s the bottom line here? Is it all art? No. Is it enough art for a credible museum enterprise? Or is it a waste of time and resources, meant to attract people who’ll never come back for the art alone?

I’m buying. Not everyone who attends a food-related event, and I doubt The Holy Family will be making it into the exhibition, but the connection with art is there, and seemingly strong enough to be legit.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of LACMA

 

Is this a prototype for the museum website of the future?

The Getty Museum just posted a web feature about its Augsberg Display Cabinet, made circa 1630, a centerpiece of its newly redesigned Medieval and Renaissance sculpture and decorative arts galleries. It uses “augmented reality” to allow online visitors to explore the work. A two-dimensional image would have fallen flat, so to speak, for an item described this way:

Each of the four sides of this cabinet opens to reveal an unexpectedly complex series of drawers. Collectors from the early 1600s would have used cabinets of this kind to store such rare and exotic objects as medals, gems, or shells.

The cabinet, however, was conceived as a work of art in its own right. Various masters would have executed the cabinet’s diverse decoration, although only one can be named: the Dutch carver Albert Jansz. Vickenbrinck signed several of the fruitwood reliefs on one side with his monogram, ALVB. Each drawer is richly embellished in a variety of techniques and materials showing biblical, allegorical, historical, and mythological subjects. These include the symbols of the Passion, Judith and Holofernes, the contest of Apollo and Marsyas, the deaths of Cleopatra and Lucretia, and two Renaissance-style portrait medallions. The number of subjects in which women figure prominently may have served a cautionary or moralizing function, while the religious themes express a concern for Christian virtue.

Part of the website display is traditional. Choose an image you want to see from a list of ten on the right, click on the image, and you go to a close-up view. 

The new website feature is interactive, and was developed by the Getty:

The AR feature allows users to experience the Augsburg Cabinet via a 3-D object overlay on a live video feed from the viewer’s webcam–in this case, a simulation of the cabinet. The model spins, tilts, and responds as the viewer interacts with it, creating the sense of participation. This experience is caused both by the viewer’s presence in the live video along with hand-eye engagement used to control the cabinet’s movement.

The result is a step forward, no doubt, though it feels a bit primitive to me — kind of a first step to what will be possible.

Well, the last statement there was a misfire, because despite exploring the Getty site, I hadn’t found the augmented reality link. Please see comment below. Unfortunately, when I went to try it, it appears I need a webcam, which I don’t have.

So, readers, you try it, and post your reviews as comments.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Getty Museum

Talk about exposure! Artist Molly Dilworth has just won the competition to paint Times Square — that is, the five pedestrian plazas created as a test about a year ago and now made permanent by the Bloomberg administration. 150 artists entered, according to WNYC, the public radio station.

Dilworth, whose entry is called “Cool Water, Hot Island” and is based on NASA-heat maps of Manhattan (rendering, looking north from 43rd St. is at right), also won $15,000.

Dilworth doesn’t seem to have a high profile; her website has but one image.

But in February, the New York Daily News wrote about her attempt to paint NYC rooftops with her abstract images, in hopes that they would be seen by satellites and captured by Google Earth. She’d done three buildings at the time, including the Hendershot Gallery’s W. 27th St. property. 

The News quoted her as saying: “I choose the brightest colors that can be seen from outer space, basically.” She buys leftover house paint on Craig’s List or from other organizations to keep costs low, and she uses a roller. Here’s a link to the News story.

UPDATE, 5/22: You can see Dilworth’s work as part of the upcoming Atlantic Avenue Art Walk — and perhaps equally interesting, Dilworth is making the piece with students at the Brooklyn High School of the Arts, where she has  teamed up with SPARK, a drug prevention program. Read more about that here. 

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the New York City Department of Transportation (top); Hendershot Gallery (bottom)

Paris wasn’t the only scene of a major art heist this week: In Greece, two farmers were apprehended and arrested just as they were loading onto a truck a rare pair of twin, newly-discovered 2,500-year-old marble statues they allegedly planned to sell abroad. The two Kouros, found in the Peloponnese region in southern Greece, are reportedly in excellent condition, though parts of the lower legs are missing, and they were apparently gashed at some point by a plow or digging machinery of some sort. 

The farmers, according to the Associated Press, had plans to sell the pair for 10 million euros.

Here’s the description:

They stand 1.82 meters (5 feet 9 inches) and 1.78 meters (5 feet 8 inches) high, and were probably carved by the same sculptor out of thick-grained island marble between 550-520 B.C, at the height of the archaic period of sculpture.

“They are exactly the same, with a slight variation in hairstyle and a small difference in height,” said Nikos Kaltsas, director of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens where the finds were temporarily housed for conservation and study. “The artist may have wanted to produce two similar figures that would form part of a group.”

According to published reports, the two statues were dug up about eight months ago, and were recovered by police in a sting operation near Corinth, close to the area where they were discovered.

The Kouros are now on view at the Archaeological Museum, the two farmers are in jail, and one — possibly the mastermind — is wanted.

Photo Credit: Courtesy AP

 

An article in today’s Wall Street Journal reminded me to check in on the fate of the Fresno Art Museum, which — like the Fresno Metropolitan Museum — was having financial difficulties earlier this year. The Fresno Met, of course, had to close, leaving a metropolitan area of 1 million art poor for anything but contemporary art, which is FAM’s territory.

The WSJ story, which was about museums’ forging partnerships with universities, brought us up-to-date on the Fresno Art Museum’s discussions with Cal State, Fresno, on a possible link-up. I expressed worry about that, given California’s budgetary problems, and it seems that the museum’s board has come to the same conclusion. “We were concerned with turning over our art collection to the sate system with no guarantee that the art would stay in our community,” Tom Speck, chairman of the museum’s board told the paper.

And there’s actually better news than that. The Sacramento Bee recently reported that the museum had hired a new executive director, Linda Cano, an art historian from Cal State-Fresno who has been serving on the museum’s board.

A more recent Bee story reported that the museum has broadened its mission beyond contemporary art, including earlier periods to make up for the loss of the Fresno Met. And the Journal reports that the Fresno Art Museum has increased its board from 12 to 26 members; I hope it has a robust “give or get” standard for trusteeship.

The museum also made peace with the director it dismissed earlier this year, memberships and donations are said to be up, and — maybe — the city’s arts scene has at least stabilized.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Fresno Art Museum