Museums

What is Mindulful Awareness?  And how do you do it?

Right now my brain thinking of a way to describe this new-age, medical concept while sending signals to the muscles in my fingers in order to type out, letter by letter, the words and eventual sentences to communicate this notion to an imagined, future audience.  Oh, and I’m hungry.  That’s Mindful Awareness: the “moment-by-moment process of actively and openly observing one’s physical, mental and emotional experiences.”

To hear more specific information about the proven health benefits of such exercises, as well as how to do them, head to the Hammer Museum at 12:30 PM this Thursday for their free weekly “drop in” session.  Leading the discussion is the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center’s Director of Mindfulness Education, Diana Winston, alongside Dr. Marvin Belzer, an expert practitioner of Mindful Awareness.

What is Gesamtkunstwerk?  And how do you sing it?

Well, Gesamtkunstwerk, pronounced ‘guess-amt-kunst-verk,’ is a term made famous by German composer, conductor, director, anti-Semite, and writer Wilhelm Richard Wagner, and it’s usually translated to mean “total artwork.”  Wagner, in all his “Ride of the Valkyries” gusto, had a vision of a kind of ‘future art,’  in which the end-result would be a synthesis for every art-form known to man (i.e. music, performance, drama, architecture, poetry, etc.).  It’s debatable whether or not Wagner actually achieved a true Gesamtkunstwerk in his work, but his deep influence and brilliance as a composer/writer of opera is hard to match, let alone perform.

At 7:00 PM on Thursday night at the Hammer Museum, Wagnerian singers Linda Watson and John Treleavan of the on-going Ring Festival LA (an enormous cultural compilation of lectures, exhibitions, shows, and conferences revolving around the first-ever Los Angeles performance of Wagner’s four-opera masterpiece, The Ring of the Nibelung) will discuss the intricacies of belting out complex tonal and chromatic changes, while still remaining a simple piece of the overall Gesamtkunstwerk.

What is the connection?  And why would you attend both lectures?

Besides the obvious similarity in setting, there does seem to be a thematic crossover between these two programs.  Both attempt to explain the whole in terms of its parts, and those parts in terms of their smaller parts, and so on.  This mode of thinking assumes there’s a greater organism at work, spinning wheels inside wheels, and what better way to get lost inside these rotations than to spend a day at the Hammer?  Either that, or write an opera.

“Mindful Awareness” starts at 12:30 PM on Thursday, March 11.  “Ring Festival: The Challenges of Singing Wagner” begins at 7:00 PM.  Both programs are free of admission, and take place at The Hammer Museum, located at 10899 Wilshire Blvd.  For more information, please call (310) 433-7000, or visit hammer.ucla.edu.

I recently found myself sitting on a couch in a dark room inside the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts at USC watching a play-test of a brand-new interactive video game.  I use the term ‘interactive,’ because it was less like your typical Nintendo or PlayStation proceeding, and more akin to one of those ‘choose your own adventure’ movies, only digitalized, intricately detailed, and not a little influenced by the likes of Spielberg or Christopher Nolan.  The game takes place in a slightly futuristic society, and at one point, the protagonist, a detective, is sitting in his beat-down, windowless office going over clues, when he puts on a pair of special sunglasses.  These sunglasses allow him, and by proxy, us, the audience, to perceive his spacial environment as a pristine mountain-top, or a Redwood forest.  The effect is novel, and provokes a round of ‘wouldn’t-that-be-cool’ comments from anybody who’s watching, yet it also brings up an interesting, modern phenomenon.  I call it the ‘it’s not to you’ syndrome, and it works like this: you’re sitting in a beat-down, windowless office, but…it’s not to you.

Don’t get me wrong, this syndrome is hardly new or original, although it is intensifying in our digital age.  And one person who’s exploring this intensification is artist Jeffrey Wells with his newest exhibit Seeing While Seeing at the Bergamont Station Arts Center, a part of the Santa Monica Museum of Art.  Wells attempts to recreate the optical illusions of everyday life—the after-image of an exit sign, the undulating intersection of two vertical walls that meet at a right-angle—using video projections.  Thus the viewer is left questioning whether or not an illusion is physical or digital.  Both are percepts, separate from what some would call “objective reality,” but only one is an intentionally manipulated percept.

What Wells—along with the interactive video game, to a certain extent—may be attempting to illustrate is the danger of the ‘it’s not to you’ syndrome.  Because how do you really know what is?  Or who’s presenting what to you, for that matter?  And as the line between what is and what is to you gets smaller and smaller, what becomes of you?

Jeffrey Wells’s Seeing While Seeing is on view until April 17th at Project Room 1 in the Bergamont Station Arts Center, a part of the Santa Monica Museum of Arts.  Bergamont Station is located at 2525 Michigan Ave, Building G-1.  For more information, please call (310) 586-6488, or visit www.smmoa.org.

When most people think of portraiture, images of aristocracy adorned in their finest medieval robes atop a crackling grand fireplace in some remote European castle probably come to mind.  When I mention that I focused on 18th-19th Century portraiture in college, people look as if they’re about to fall asleep before I can finish the sentence.  But this past Saturday, I attended a lecture at Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum presented by John Klein, Associate Professor from Washington University in St. Louis, that reminded me of the magnetism and presence of portraits. In his lecture, “Matisse, Picasso and Beyond: How Portraiture Survived Modernism,” he examined the means by which the art of human representation prevailed through an era defined by its antipathy to historical convention.  Through the study of modernist masters like Picasso, Matisse and Giacometti, Klein arrives at a universal truth: human beings will always and forever be obsessed with themselves, others, and how others perceive them.

“Damn Portraits!” began Professor Klein, quoting Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres—an abrupt and honest exclamation that served as a perfect prelude to the difficult battle that portraiture was doomed to fight once the modern age descended on a timeless artistic tradition.  Ingres, like many artists of his time, despised portraiture.

He often complained that the overwhelming number of commissions from high society kept him from focusing on “more important” subject matter.  In the 19th Century, it seemed as if the only demographic that had an affinity for portraiture was the social elite.  When the 20th Century began, many creative figures decried the art form’s declining relevance.  Portraiture posed a series of difficult questions for the artist: How does one capture the complexity of human identity? How can an inner quality be expressed outwardly?  How can a still representation do justice to a personality trait that is defined by its movement? Modernism, says Klein, provided the platform that was so desperately needed: a movement that joined portraiture with the abstraction of the avant-garde.

Through an array of examples, Klein revealed how artists like Picasso and Matisse were uninterested with the centrality of the sitter, which historically would have been fundamental.  In works like Girl with Green Eyes (1908), Matisse blended his sitters into a decorative pattern where no single component of the painting could dominate.  Picasso’s Gertrude Stein (1906), on the other hand, showcases both the artist and the sitter, serving as a visual statement of the height and legitimacy of both Stein’s and Picasso’s careers. Klein taught the audience that through the execution of her face, as was common with many of Picasso’s portraits, the artist imposed a mask-like quality that hardly resembled Stein’s genuine appearance. The primitivization of her face is a symbolic and telling mark of the beginning of an important aesthetic shift.

After the First World War, artists became increasingly cynical of humanistic values, and rapid advances in photographic technology threatened representational portraiture.  Expressive abstraction began to take hold, providing the artist with infinite ways to communicate power, status and legitimacy—and the line between art and vulgarity became harder to define.  Marcus Harvey’s Myra (1995) is an example of how modern portraiture could become a PR dream come true. Harvey’s portrait of Myra Hindley, a woman convicted of murdering multiple innocent child victims, is comprised of tiny flesh colored hands, hands meant to represent those of the children that she murdered.

Portraiture’s many levels of expression, as in Myra, have the potential for endless symbolism and emotion.  I could feel the tension in the lecture hall when Myra came on screen, and I could see that the man next to me was trying to conceal his goose bumps.

Professor Klein’s lecture was most certainly a personal highlight of my many years of studying and appreciating portraiture. Regardless of one’s knowledge of art, he was able to communicate his subject with admirable passion and vigor.  Professor Klein carried the double-barreled theme of portraiture and its modernist survival from the turn of the 20th Century through the fall of Saddam Hussein. It was quite frankly one of the most fun Saturdays I’ve had in a while, and I don’t think I was alone.  The jam-packed lecture hall’s enthusiastic applause was proof enough that nobody was falling asleep before Klein could finish his sentences.

-By Brittany Krasner

The Norton Simon’s calendar of educational lectures will certainly expand your art related intellectual repertoire.  For more information on upcoming lectures, please visit their website.

From George Washington on the Delaware, to Huck Finn on the Mississippi, to Katrina on the Gulf, rivers make up an integral part of the geographical, historical, cultural, political, and artistic landscape of the America we know.  And Los Angeles is no exception.  Yes it’s true that for the good part of the year, the L.A. River remains hopelessly barren, and provides a better bike path to Long Beach than it does a waterway.  But if you’ve ever actually step foot into that mighty concrete divider of our city, then you’d know it’s every bit as organic and symbolic as any other great river.  Whether it’s the plastic bag trees, the graffiti-worn banks, or the garbage disposal current, one would be hard-pressed to not find the same beauty that Mark Twain once described in his memoir, Life on the Mississippi, as “…a wonderful book…which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it had uttered them with a voice.”

On show until July 3^rd at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the collective exhibition entitled The Ulysses Guide to the Los Angeles River (UGLAR for short) also uses the metaphor of a book, only this one screams its secrets.  Consisting of a wide range of contemporary, LA-based artists, this unique assortment of paintings, sculptures, photographs, and illustrations all converge like tributaries into one central theme: the Los Angeles River.

One oil painting called “Confluence” by Tyson Dolan portrays the intersection of two concrete canals, meeting and opening into the space of the viewer.  The colors are muted, almost foggy, and with the installed background sounds of dripping water and distant train bells echoing throughout the room, one gets the distinct feeling of being alone and drifting through Dolan’s industrial river-basin.

Another piece, up-and-comer Rob Sato’s “Land Admiral Lefebvre’s Fleet Makes Sail”, takes a more surreal, maximalist route.  This multi-medium, ‘Where’s Waldo’ mash-up depicts an elaborate, farcical, eighteenth-century showdown between the Blue-Coats and the Reds on the battlefield of the Los Angeles River.  There’s of course no water for the huge wooden ships, so the implied Admiral Lefebvre sails upon his own ocean, with hundreds of tiny minions carrying the actual waves themselves.  Not to be ignored in this spectacle are Sato’s frequent dips into brash absurdity: slave-like giants, a monstrous fish-man-beast riding a whale like an Avatar pterodactyl, and if you look hard enough, a modern car wreck upon the bridge over the river.

The biggest work on show, however, is a mural completed by all the contributing artists.  It’s title is “The River Experiment,” and it speaks to the theme of the collection, which is one of evolution, or perhaps more accurately, mutation.  Because The Ulysses Guide to the Los Angeles River – to complete Mark Twain’s quote – “[is] not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.”

The Ulysses Guide to the Los Angeles River runs until July 3^rd at the Pasadena Museum of California Art.  For more information, please visit pmcaonline.org, or call (626) 568-3665.

It seems only natural to combine our two first loves – art and food.  Yet that combination is rarely accomplished in a tasteful manner — that is, until recently.

The artist group Fallen Fruit has pioneered a considerable effort that is changing the way we view Los Angeles’s urban landscape, one tree at a time.  Fallen Fruit, founded by Matias Viegener, David Burns, and Austin Young, mapped areas of Silver Lake that have public access to fruit trees — i.e. free, locally grown, organic food.  This project continues to connect those with too much and those with too little of that good stuff.

Fallen Fruit’s next big project is at LACMA and is aptly titled EATLACMA.  Both today and tomorrow, Fallen Fruit will be giving away free fruit trees to kick off their year-long investigation into food, art, culture, and politics.  And keep your ear to the ground as their program unfold seasonally, including the exhibition Fallen Fruit Presents the Fruit of LACMA and day-long event in November.

An apple a day never tasted so good – or so free for that matter.

For more information about Fallen Fruit, click here.  For more information about EATLACMA, click here.

During stressful weeks, it is always recommended that you check in with your nearest and dearest psychic(s) at least once if not twice.  You’ll never know how to handle your many doting suitors, luxurious travel plans, and multi-million business deals without a little help from your friends.

But, if stepping into darkened, incense infused rooms isn’t exactly your cup of tea, get a healthy dose of insight and art the next time you are in the Miracle Mile.  The Craft and Folk Art Museum just opened The Fool’s Journey: The History and Symbolism of the Tarot, an exhibition that draws together the imagery, history, and iconography of tarot cards over time.  This show will highlight the 22 cards of the Tarot’s major Arcana – from the Fool to the World — and will present historic and modern examples from stylistically different decks.  Also, plan to see how tarot cards have influenced the imagery of other works of art.

See?  Isn’t it already making better sense now?  At least you have part of your weekend plans squared away.

The Fool’s Journey: The History and Symbolism of the Tarot will close at the Craft and Folk Art Museum May 9^th.  Please click here for more info.

The job of a film archivist is a relatively new one.  It sounds silly.  (If my friend Pete has a massive DVD collection, is he suddenly considered an archivist?)  But what a lot of people don’t know is that film is a kind of living organism.  It decays quite rapidly over time.  And as depicted so graphically in the latest Tarantino venture, Inglorious Basterds, most of the movies made in the silent-era were shot on an ultra-flammable cellulose nitrate film base.  Due to this highly unstable stock, as well as the recklessness of early studio storage, a great many of the films made in America before 1920 are either lost, or have turned to dust.  In fact, no type of truly durable film base was even introduced into the movie-making landscape until the early 1990’s with the popularization of polyester.

Enter the heroic film archivist, whose job it is to preserve the ever-growing, ever-decaying amount of film stock from the grips of its natural demise.  Mark Toscano of the Academy Film Archive is one of these heroes, who most recently co-curated the REDCAT screening of Now You Can Do Anything: The Films of Chris Langdon.  This series of fourteen short, experimental films were all made within the period of two years, from 1973 to 1975, and would have easily been lost were it not for the efforts of people like Mark Toscano and fellow filmmaker/Angeleno, Thom Andersen.

Yet Langdon’s shorts, interestingly enough, seemed to work in spite of preservation.  The magic was in her apparent disregard for such preciousness.  Her film “Bondage Boy,” for instance, featured 16mm shots of a guy in a basement dressed in a woman’s slip and bound with ropes in various positions, all to the soundtrack of an uppity 1950’s swing tune.  “Picasso,” another one of Langdon’s works, was, in her words, “the first post-mortem documentary” of the famous painter, fully completed in four hours for a little under $5.

Langdon, who was present at the screening, addressed the audience afterwards.  And it was clear that her main motivation behind the 83 minutes of film we had all just sat through was simply to film something.  One piece was a joke, another was a bet, and one was just to get over the plain fear of wasting money through a camera.  In a sense, she was fueling the need for future experimental film archivists like Mark Toscano.  Because without artists with the courage to waste film, why would you need someone to preserve what’s special about it?

The Redcat is located Downtown at the Roy and Edna Disney/Calarts Theater in the Walt Disney Concert Hall.  For information about upcoming screenings and performances, please visit www.redcat.org, or call (213) 237-2800.

Yesterday, I journeyed to the center of the Earth.  And by the center of the Earth, I mean Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, an exhibition at the Fowler Museum.  The whole experience wasn’t too strenuous and it provided a welcomed break and plenty of inspiration into my day.

Upon entrance, there is a huge bear made out of striped sweaters standing on its hind legs.  Welcome to the show, ladies and gentlemen.  Your journey has just begun.  In the same room, a three-panel screen showing different videos sets the tone of the show because they depict Nick Cave’s Soundsuits in resonating action.  Soundsuits are elaborate, labor-intensive costumes, or “suits,” made out of household materials.  The name of each suit is the sound each costume makes when worn.

Marching straight out of a hallucination, the 35 Soundsuits on display boggle the mind because they are part ritualistic garb and part Alice in Wonderland with a touch of Liberace.  They range from knitted bodysuits patched together from afghans to intricate headdresses turned body-based sculpture covered with sequins and video tape.  Considering the sculptures are to be worn, one can start to think about the notions of performance whether in terms of art, ritual, or art and ritual’s intersection.  Furthermore, just imagine wearing one of these suits.  Not only would you need a team to help you put it on, but also you would need to relearn how to move and learn how to be this character.  There is only room for one personality when wearing a Soundsuit.  And I think the Soundsuit would win.

A close inspection of the suits’ materials dazzle the mind.  Materials include remnants of cozy sweaters, sequin jackets, kitsch bird sculptures, vintage toy tops, and buttons galore all stacked on top of each other or sewn right next to each other.  You start to wonder about the life of each material before it was placed onto this sculpture.  Each button was once sewn onto a shirt.  Each afghan warmed families on their couch.  The sheer amount of found materials is astounding.

Furthermore, the show’s installation was a treat.  Instead of following the works-on-white-wall model, brilliantly colored walls and screens lead the viewer throughout the exhibition Wild Toad-style to examine the Soundsuits in the round.

As you walk out of the exhibition, you might be wondering where you could see one of these Soundsuits in action.  If you keep your eyes and ears open, you will.  Nick Cave is partnering up with UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures to create a series of impromptu performance-interventions around the city called Soundsuit Invasions.  Just keep tabs on the Fowler’s Twitter and Facebook feeds for the details.

Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth closes May 30, 2010.  Please click here for more information.

Here’s what I think about Michael Cera: I like him, I believe he chooses his work carefully, he’s consistent in his sense of subtlety, and he starred in one of the best movies and one of the best television shows of the past decade (Superbad, Arrested Development, respectively).  But he needs to grow up.  As of right now, the Michael Cera we know, or rather the character of Michael Cera is an asexual, pre-pubescent, morally humbug man-boy, despite whatever sperm he may have donated to Juno.  He has survived thus far, but in my opinion, he has hit a crossroads in his career.  On one hand, he could try and milk his youthful looks and dry wit for the next ten years or so, until he’s forced to squander his fortune on a series of unfortunate plastic surgery operations.  Or he could try and follow in the footsteps of fellow actor and doppelganger Jesse Eisenberg, accepting roles such as Walt in The Squid and the Whale, thereby challenging himself to look beyond the purely adolescent, and start pondering the existential; basically, become a real actor.

This Thursday, January 6, at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, Cera may just make this leap.  It’s the sneak preview of his newest film, Youth in Revolt, based on the book by the delightful absurdist, C.D. Payne, and directed by Miguel Arteta.  The movie certainly contains all the elements of a passage into adulthood.  There’s the suggestive title, first of all, which seems to insinuate a mutinous yearning for independence.  Then there’s the movie’s source material, the popular series of novels that revolve around the intellectual Nick Twisp as he discovers love and sexuality outside the realms of his family or fantasy.  Sounds like typical Cera territory, but then again, it is from the mind of author C.D. Payne who’s probably best known for his other work of twisted, teenage fancy, Civic Beauties, which was the literary inspiration for the darkly inventive Drop Dead Gorgeous. Last but not least is the film’s director, Miguel Arteta, who essentially specializes in stories about child-like, outsider males forced to deal with their own psycho-sexual leanings, be it in Chuck and Buck or The Good Girl.

Both Arteta and Cera are set to be present at the Hammer screening, and I can’t help but liken the occasion to a Bar Mitzvah of sorts–the young actor and director standing side by side at the podium, not all that dissimilar from a student and rabbi.  I only hope I can approach Cera at the end, and wish him a well-deserved Mazel Tov.

All Hammer Screenings are free of charge and take place inside the Billy Wilder Theatre.  For more information, call (310) 443-7000, or visit www.hammer.ucla.edu.

This year, museums are the new nightclubs.  Trade table service for drinks with dinosaurs because the Natural History Museum’s First Fridays program makes its return.  First Fridays is what you wished your science classes were like back in college.  They combine music and drinks with some science so you can learn a little between sips.  And even better, you won’t have to insist at the door that your name is on the VIP list with your friend Mr. Benjamin Franklin.

This season, the theme incorporates six local scientists’ work concerning issues pertinent to Southern California.  This month, spider is the word.  Don’t start to feel itchy yet.  Wait until you’ve met some eight-legged friends with Brent “The Bug Guy” Karner on a curatorial tour called Meet the Silk Makers.  Or if being up close and personal with spiders doesn’t strike your fancy, MacArthur fellow Dr. Cheryl Y. Hayashi will be there to discuss the mechanic properties of spider silk — one of the strongest and toughest materials on Earth.  You’ll start wishing for some Spidey powers of your own.

After awakening your long-forgotten case of arachnophobia, knock back a few with DJ Spider spinning an eclectic, genre-skipping mix of cuts to ease the anxiety.  After you start feeling good, Atlas Sound, the solo project of Bradford Cox who is the vocalist for experimental indie rocker act Deerhunter, will take the stage.  And the Tune-Yards, an electronic-folk, one-woman show featuring Merril Garbus, will close the night.  When you walk back to your car, you’ll be pleased you didn’t rack up a bar tab bigger than your last paycheck like last time in Hollywood.

The Natural History Museum’s First Friday is this Friday, January 8, 5:30 – 10:00.   For more information, please click here.