A walking distance across the bridge from LAGCC, MOMA PS1 is a complex of grey and white buildings whose entrance is through its gift store. Relatively normal looking store leads us towards a small square court where one passes an octagonal structure which keeps its exhibitions in secret. Once reached the main entrance the adventure began.
I entered a maze of hallways and spaces: big and small; bright and dark. Somehow I started from a very dark room with aquariums. However, instead of aquatic life there were miniature presentations of life in China: small people, streets, buildings, cars etc.
Made of wax and would-be touchable, if it wasn’t for the protective glass (needed for people like me!), the small worlds do give a sense of life. I could’ve imagined all those real people in China going about there whereabouts so many miles away. It represented a city lifestyle, perhaps a middle class. The only yellow light was coming from within the replicas. The dark black room forced me to give a full attention to art.
“Are you allowed to take pictures?”, my brother Tino asked me through our Skype session. “Well, yes, but it’s impossible because most of the art was behind a glass, including many paintings and large photographs”, I replied. “Could you bump into someone?”, Tino asked, my naive victim for my art interview (hehehe). “No! There was still some light coming from the well lit hallway since the art spaces didn’t have any doors. By the way, the ceiling seemed relatively normal, although once looking more carefully I realized it was high”. “Were the walls really painted in black?” “Hm, they were covered with wallpaper or something, not really sure”, I replied. “And by the way, the art is considered 3D”, I taught my brother.
I proceeded to the next room with the same concept of darkness, but this one had a big screen with a bizarre film coming from the projector. The scene was moving very slow, creating a sense of stillness of life. “Something like Zeitgeist or the film Secret?”, Tino asked. “Well, yes, kind of, but one scene took like a few minutes or so”. “What were people doing, just stood there and watched?”, Tino asked. “Well”, I replied, “there were some benches for sitting, but yes, that was the idea”, I replied. “How did you feel?”. “At that moment, which I didn’t realize at the time, was the moment when I started having this weird feeling. The experience was like a meditation, very pleasant. But sad too, a feeling how time and space pass by, and there is nothing we could do. Also, this 2D art was showing a still life in motion. It was a film of people living in a city - all made of plastic. Quite bizarre. Oh wow, now I have realized it was the continuation (pattern) of the art from the first room, but now in another context.”
I moved on to the next room; still dark, with a projector screen. The movie whose title included word zombie was showing a woman dress like a “french maid” in a hotel-like room with dark thick red curtains that covered almost entire window stretching from the floor to ceiling. She was standing on a bed and gently whipped a tied up “gentleman” who wore nothing but his boxers and socks. “Was it made specially for the museum?”, Tino asked. “Hm, good question, but no, it’s one of those “B”, but cult movies, I think made in 70s”. “What were people doing?”. “Well, they stared, like me, in total disbelief what they were witnessing! It was one of those moments when there is something morbid, and usually one would look away in annoyance, but the curiosity and fascination with a bizarre momentum kept us fixated”, I replied. “So what happened then?”, Tino asked. “Nothing. This took a while. A young asian-looking lady took her time to gently whip/caress the “guy”. Everyone in the audience looked as if it was a documentary of ladybugs”, I said. “Hahahaha”, my little bro exclaimed. I know!
The next very well lit room (finally) exhibited wax sculptures/figures of people. Some clothed, some naked, most of them bizarre. There was a naked man upside down. Others looked like mannequins in department stores. “Like the movie where plastic dolls in clothing store would come to life after midnight in twilight zone?”, Tino asked. “Yes, exactly, the room did give an impression everything could come to life”, I answered. But I simply loved sculpture of two women embracing in hug. They looked like a grandma and granddaughter hugging. Very sweet and so realistic. A “grandma” sat on a chair while granddaughter leaned towards her. “Was the chair also made of wax or whatever the material?”, Tino asked. “No, it was a normal chair, which I think is weird. Maybe to give it a “real” touch. Also, I read they were a mother and a child, the artist’s version of Madonna and a child”, I elaborated. He also went on asking if I touched anything. Well, usually I am a bad boy, but this time it didn’t occur to me. I guess I was taken aback by all that awe that came from art.
“You took the same picture twice, or at least that’s how it appears”, Tino commented once I moved to another room. But he was wrong. The theme of the whole room was to find differences in relatively two same photos, just like in the learning games in kinder gardens. However, in this context the missing objects or people/creatures gave me the feelings of mystery, deceit, and fear. Prior observing them I felt joy and amusement. The light in this room was normal.
Throughout the museum many hallway walls looked crooked. On purpose though, as to implement a sense of aging. Even the staircases were pure art, simultaneously binding next to each other giving an illusion as if it was a single staircase. Not to mention that each staircase was placed inside a cage-like fence. I felt like in prison when going up or down. Also, a couple of times I ended up going through the same hallways thinking I was walking through them for the first time.
In the basement, I was under impression the museum workers left one door opened in negligence. I didn’t give it a second look the first time since there was nothing but dirt, ground, and boiler like equipment in it. But by the end of my museum exploration I realized it was another art: the whole space turned into excavation-like site. This time the purpose of the illusion was to give us an exclusive free ride into a world of archeology. It mimicked an abandoned building which hid a beautiful black marble sculpture for many ages. But the golden-like machinery tricked me into believing as if I were inside of Jules Verne’s submarine, 20 000 leagues under the sea.
The lit bed in another museum’s dark room represented the ultimate place to relax for Chinese workers during the industrialization after a physically very hard day in a factory. It was their sanctuary, utopia.
In a room that looked like a store, with glass shelves and sounds of birds I felt as even I was a plastic doll at this point. Randomly scattered items represented our life, all at one spot. It was an overwhelming display of a material world, “screaming” at us to pay attention to life (sound of birds - life) and stop spending so much on things we don’t necessarily need.
The dimmed room that had a circular counter with several black and white televisions playing movies from “ordinary” life, followed the pattern of all the art from other rooms: square geometrical shapes; art that was many times behind the glass, with the message of our obsession with material lifestyle where we are all drones whose souls slowly fade away. In this room I found one great photograph: people in the shopping bags.
"Ok, so let me tell you how we learn to analyze the painting, just the way someone analyzes a movie or a book", I introduced the main purpose of this interview to Tino and he nodded of course. The style of the photograph is abstract, surreal. Its message is that even people have their price: people have become the items. Furthermore, it doesn’t have vertical nor horizontal lines per se, but square shapes, so therefore its message is neutral: the artist doesn’t take any “sides”. It is simply a reflection of life in western world where we are all obsessed with buying things. This is supported with the fact that the boy in the first bag in foreground as well as the girl in the middle ground don’t have any emotions. The photograph has just a few colors, predominantly warm; red and green, giving it a happy tone after all. The fore ground is all red, while the background is pure bright green. However, the girl’s red flower, and her blueish/greenish bag with red edges make a nice transition from foreground into the background, especially the bag, in a monochromatic sense. The contrast is minimal; there is only a small dark area coming from within the red bag created by boy’s body. It is successfully overpowered by the rest of the photograph. My emotional response stays positive since the message is to think about life and our choices, but nothing’s lost just yet (contextual analysis). "Any questions?", but Tino got bored at this point. However, my brother found it very entertaining and shared it on Facebook. Surprisingly it wasn’t covered with glass so I was able to take a nice shot. I thanked my brother for the interview (I never revealed my motif until once I finished) and decided to start doing similar projects more often. The biggest problem in teaching was just like retelling a comedy sitcom: people prefer to see it themselves. The second problem was a small language barrier due to new vocabulary even for me. My brother speaks english very well so it helped big time.
Very creative writing- but what about the teaching part? What work/elements/notes did you choose to "teach" someone about?
ReplyDeleteThe way i described the painting professor is exactly how i explained it to my brother. I guess i wasn't too clear on the last part, i figured it was implied, sorry.
ReplyDelete