Arts Day Off

Today was the first time I could take advantage of one of the Kennedy Center's membership benefits: a free pass to the working rehearsal for the National Symphony Orchestra. It's a 10 a.m. start time (with a be-there-by-9:45 seating deadline), which is fairly undoable in the middle of most weeks. Anyway, I decided to shuffle or defer what duties I could, and go make myself cultural.

The featured performer for tonight's concert is Emanuel Ax, which is perhaps why this morning's rehearsal was a mob scene. I was told when I came in that the upper levels would not be available, but by the time the rehearsal began, those upper tiers were required.

Emanuel Ax, uncredited photo, via Kennedy-Center.org

The first two pieces worked on by conductor Hugh Wolff were Dvořák's Symphony No. 5 and Albert's Rivering Waters, about which much more is probably in the program handed out to the mobs who pay.

Ax didn't come in until the third piece to be rehearsed, which was Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2. The funny thing was, he started warming up and playing during the intermission; people weren't paying any attention to the guy on stage, because, as you'd expect at a working rehearsal, all the musicians were in working clothes--they all looked like us! Somehow, that made it all so much more human and approachable. Ax could have been your favorite professor meeting you for coffee.

I overheard someone behind me during the intermission say that it must have been his encore piece that Ax was rehearsing just then. I didn't hear enough of it through the chatter to tell what it was--only that it wasn't the furniture mover playing it. And then, when the real rehearsal began, Ax's light, lyrical, commanding touch on the Chopin piece was simply thrilling, especially the more familiar second movement. (That's the one people will be humming along with. Stupid people.)

I also didn't hear enough of the Albert piece to make much of it (bad ushering; some of us thought there was an intermission after Dvořák, and we got locked out until Wolff paused the orchestra). (And speaking of bad ushering, they need to go all Metro announcer on people and force them to move to the center of the row. In the unreserved seating scheme, the aisle seats were prime targets.)

So that was the morning's share of my cultural day. When the mobs were released into this bright, cold cherry-blossomless April day, I decided to skip the line waiting for the shuttle to Metro and hiked on up to the Corcoran Gallery of Art. It wasn't a bad walk at all, up through the GWU campus and various other institutional structures - American Institute of Architecture, Organization of American States, etc.

The Corcoran has been going through some hoo-hah about its future and all that, but I received the members' e-mail yesterday announcing some pretty sturdy plans: a partnership with the University of Maryland to keep the education side running and an agreement with the National Gallery of Art to display modern and contemporary works from its collection while NGA's East building is renovated over the next three years. 

The thing I like about the Corcoran is the mix of old and new, familiar and the startling. The "Next" exhibit, which I presume is the current graduating class's work, wasn't available today--I think it opens on Saturday. But I got to peek in through the door. There was this cool interactive sculpture (force-sensing resistors, micro-controller, and speaker) called the Heptachord by Gabriel Mellan:

But what really says "Corcoran" to me is my favorite sculpture, the Veiled Nun by Guieseppe Croff:

And more "sight for sore eyes" from Washington Colorist Gene Davis in Black Popcorn:

Davis's other painting on display in the grand staircase is Junkie's Curtain, and it offered this sweet sculpture an interesting backdrop:

The Sons of Gods Saw the Daughters of Men That They Were Fair, Daniel Chester French, 1923

Love, hosaa
encultured

Corcoran, Close, Renwick, and Rockwell

Back from the Corcoran and Renwick galleries, so also catching up on the Norman Rockwell exhibition I saw earlier in the week. Corcoran is an independent institution, while the Renwick is part of the Smithsonian's American Art Museum, which hosted the Rockwell exhibition. I like pairing Corcoran and Renwick because they're only a couple of blocks apart; Renwick is off the mall-beaten path for most Smithsonian goers and so less densely populated with tourists.

Today was Corcoran's last "free Saturday" of the summer, where the doors are open for the public to sketch live models in the lobby. Fortunately for me the Chuck Close exhibit was extended, so I got to participate in art and see the exhibit.

This was my first taste of the open sketching event. I like to doodle wherever I go, but my skills were far behind those who attended today, so I gave up. I enjoyed the view of other participatants much better.

In addition to sketchers, there were singers: a performance by the Washington Revels was going on upstairs, just outside the galleries containing the Close exhibit.

The Chuck Close prints exhibit was interesting to me because I hadn't studied his work since college, which at the time would have stopped with his photorealism work. After that, he began experimenting with materials and techniques, from paper pulp to his own fingerprints.

This work would seem to me to fall more into the realm of craft, which is what the Renwick specializes in.

The Renwick's permanent collection features paintings that most of us would consider art, but also pieces that showcase the skill (craft) of working with materials such as clay, glass, fabric, and wood.

Grand Salon, Renwick Gallery

Blanket Cylinder Series (1984) Dale Chihuly

The featured exhibition at Renwick was "The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 1942-1946." The objects in the collection were largely made of found materials--scrap wood, metals, shells, and other pieces.

This demonstrated an impulse to create that transcended the degradation to which humans had been exposed. It would be the same impulse that led Chuck Close to continue to create and experiment and express his vision despite physical disabilities.

Returning to the Norman Rockwell exhibit, "Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell. From the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg," I'm drawn to the "realism" of his technique, much as I was to Chuck Close's earlier works. Whereas Rockwell's realism was more idealized, Close's was more hyper-realistic. Both forced an idea of reality onto the viewer that is actually quite artificial. One did it with whimsy, carefully casting his scenes with real actors and constructing the sets, and the other with a startling focus on that most intimate of subjects, the face, decontextualizing it through sheer scale.

Before I even decided to see the Rockwell exhibit, I'd read a review (rant, actually) that lambasted this art as propaganda for an idealized America that never existed. Rockwell was a commercial illustrator; of course the images were selling something. I've never felt that diminished the work as art. My favorite piece in the collection, showing a writer dreaming of Daniel Boone, was an ad for Underwood Typewriters.

Back over to the Renwick, I loved the objects in the permanent collection, though I have to say I am bitterly disappointed to have bought a book from the gift shop that featured only one of the objects I saw today (Chihuly's glass cylinder; see above). The book, it turns out, was published in 1998. That's like a century ago, right?

Anyway, the most popular piece today was this glass dress by Karen LaMonte.

"Reclining Dress Impression with Drapery" (2009)

I say it was a popular piece because I had to wait about 10 minutes to get a clear shot of it. There were three women who took turns taking photos of each other with their heads sticking up out of the neckline of the glass dress.

Actually, it made me smile to see that. What started over at the Corcoran a couple of hours earlier--a day of people experiencing art at a very personal level--was just being carried over by these ladies enjoying a work of exquisite craft.

It is why we create, is it not?

love, hosaa
observing observers of life and art

Credit: All photos by C. G. Wagner

Quantum Art

Yesterday at Clayversity we were having an interesting discussion about Art. (Not "Ahhhhrrrrt" that the Spamalot French Taunters loved so.)

The question was about Clay Aiken's masterpiece, "Lover All Alone," and whether or not it was more moving now that he is out of the closet. Were the lyrics really about what he was experiencing, and is that what made it Art?

For all I know the feelings
And the picture that I
tried
So hard to find
Isn't mine.

I was frustrated because I was trying to say that the song is art not because it was a true and accurate description of Clay's feelings but because of the way it makes me feel. If all an artist does is tell us what he feels, I don't give a shit. If the art work makes me feel something, then that's why it is art. It communicated something to me.

I realize that isn't completely true. Unless the artist also felt something in the creation, then making the viewer or listener feel something is flat-out manipulation. Those old telephone commercials that had us all reaching out and touching someone - that wasn't art. That was commerce.

So I am revising my statements. It's art when the artist makes you feel what he feels.

A friend asked me about #11 on my Random list, why did "Starry Night Over the Rhone" make me cry? What it came down to was that being in the physical presence of that painting (not looking at a picture of it) took me to the time and place where Vincent was.

In a sense, this is time traveling, but in the quantum mechanics sense of entanglement (I think the New Age term is synchronicity.)

At Clayversity, I snarkily mentioned that I would be attending the Corcoran Gallery's Member's Preview tour of the Maya Lin installation, "Systematic Landscapes," and said maybe someone there knows what art is. Of course that would have been a stupid question, so I didn't interrupt the curator doing the hour-long tour of the five rooms of Maya's landscapes.

(I couldn't help asking one stupid question, though - how the wire-frame grid depicting the undulations of a mountain managed to stay up on the wall. The depiction of the Potomac River using nails as pixels was easy to figure out - NAILS - but I couldn't see anything holding the grid up. It turned out that the end pieces pierced through the wall, clutching it.)

Maya's art consisted of breaking apart the landscapes she experienced into component pieces and systematically reconstructing them. Her vision is so encompassing, it is hard to imagine how it can be broken apart. She brings landscapes indoors where people can look at them and experience them as objects. This changes the way we look at things.

On the way to work, I was looking at the systematic landscapes I pass every day - the stones in the low walls surrounding the property of an office complex, the patterns in the bricks in the sidewalks.

Art is communication and transportation. It's interactive. It makes you see and feel things you hadn't seen or felt in quite that way before. This time-travels you to the heart and soul of the artist and establishes that quantum connection, even for a brief moment.

Here are some photos I borrowed from the Internet. Just Google Image search Maya Lin:







This last one is from the Systematic Landscapes exhibition. The peak of the tallest mountain is probably about chest-high, and the viewer is invited to walk through the landscape.

Once again, I look at art and marvel at what human beings can do.

Love,
hosaa