lordy rodriguez
February 23, 2009
opened a solo show at the austin museum of art. “states of america” is the culmination of a 10-year project in which he re-mapped the united states. each of the 55 maps is hand-drawn in ink on paper. in addition to the 50 states you know (all tweaked to fit rodriguez’s perception of the place), there are 5 you don’t – internet, hollywood, monopoly, disney and territory. how did such an ambitious project begin? people asking “where are you from?”
check out the videos on the austin museum of art’s website: http://www.amoainteractive.org/lordyrodriguez2009/
above, detail of “texas.” below, “internet 2.0″ and “california.” all works are ink drawings on paper.
very impressed
February 21, 2009
by the modern art museum in fort worth. completed in 2002 and designed by tadao ando, it joins phillip johnson’s 1961 amon carter museum and louis khan’s 1972 kimbell museum. an embarrassment of riches.
i’d seen beautiful photographs of the building and admit i was a disappointed by the facade. sleek, nice proportions – yes. but more about shutting you out than drawing you in… inside, the building immediately opens up and is lovely. there are 5 concrete pavilions, arranged around a very large (1 1/2 acres) pebble-bottomed pool. 40 ft high curtain walls enclose the concrete building and provide natural light, lovely small exhibition spaces that seem to float over the water and circulation around the pavilions.
i always wonder if you’re supposed to take a candy from a félix gonzalez-torres piece in a museum… i didn’t.
the polished concrete is really beautiful. austere. temple-like.
practically the entire museum was devoted to permanent collection when i was there. an installation of greatest hits. literally nothing that wasn’t immediately recognizable. but almost all of extremely high quality. when your blue chip trophies are this good, maybe that’s ok…
andy, ed & donald…
there were two gorgeous martins and too much keifer. and an unfortunately large gallery full of sean scully. for me the epitome of if you’ve seen one… i never need to see another.
didn’t know who to feel worse for… tada ando or roxy paine (that is his sculpture of metalic trees on the lawn beyond the pool). the new buildings across the street really wreck the view. someone needs to plant some timber bamboo just the other side of that wall.
“indian summer”
February 17, 2009
by alex von tunzelmann is a fantastic read.
in the beginning, there were two nations. one was a vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organized and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swath of the earth. the other was an undeveloped, semifeudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. the first nation was india and the second was england. the year was 1577…
in “indian summer,” the 32-year-old author spins an abbreviated history of british colonialism in india, then a fairly complete, terrifically researched and fantastically readable account of the end of the british rule there. part of the reason her book is so compelling is her description of the personal as well as political lives of key individuals. as sharon said, “it’s juicy!”
jawahar nehru (above left) and mohandas (mahatma) gandhi (above right), liaquat ali khan (below left), jinnah (below second left), viscount (dickie) mountbatten of burma (below center), fatima jinnah (below second from right) and (edwina) lady mountbatten (right), are the key players in the turn-over and von tunzelmann explores their personalities and relationships as a way of understanding the partition and its aftermath.
dickie, born his serene highness prince louis of battenberg, was a great-grandson of queen victoria. though “not especially wealthy” and “firmly in royalty’s second class,” he was handsome and extremely charming. he married the honorable edwina ashley. she was extremely rich. they spent 25 years in an unhappy marriage (dickie occupied sinking ships under his commanded and getting the soldiers in his charged slaughtered and edwina having scandalous affairs) before dickie was offered the viceroyalty of india and became responsible for terminating the raj.
though blundering, dickie comes off as a well-intentioned and honorable man. nehru is portrayed as a tireless and fair-minded visionary, whose fatal flaw was his blinding personal interest in kashmir. but it’s edwina who ends up the most interesting character in the story. her not-so-behind-the-scenes diplomacy was critical to self rule for india. her humanitarian and human rights efforts were inspirational. her love affair with nehru was honest and deep.
this is a really good story. insightful. tragic. beautiful. read this as an introduction to salman rushdie’s masterpiece “midnight’s children.”
mexico city – mueso national antropologia
February 15, 2009
wow. astonishing. you could spend a week here and not see everything… the 1/2 million square foot facility was built in 1963/4 and designed by pedro ramírez vázquez . an enormous courtyard, is surrounded by pavillions containing the collections. at one end of the courtyard is column with an otherwise unsupported capital shading the space. water pours from around the capital, cooling the air. cascading water echos throughout the museum.
the aztec pavillion – the centerpiece – the “stone of the sun” – used to be thought to be the aztec calendar. they now know it was a platform for gladitorial contests.
my kind of dogs.
a bowl in the form of a monkey holding his own tail, carved from a single piece of obsidian.
nothing like being in a city of 20 million people, looking at brilliant work made 2,000 years ago to make you feel insignificant.
the museum’s website:http://www.mna.inah.gob.mx/
mexico city / casa luis barragan
February 14, 2009
the home/studio of pritzker prize winning architect luis barragan 1902-1998 shouldn’t be missed. unfortunately, visitors aren’t allowed to take photos inside. too bad – i could have taken much better ones that these — which i lifted from the website. built in 1948 and located in a working class neighborhood (14 general francisco ramirez, colonia ampliacion daniel garza), the facade is nondescript. you enter though a small, yellow entry hall tiled in volcanic stone. there is a single thick pine plank bench cantilevered from one wall. it’s monastic and claustrophobic. through a door you enter a beautiful vestibule with one wall painted signature pink and a rail-less stair flooded from above by the light of an over-sized window reflected in a gold-leafed panel.
you can access the entire house from the vestibule, but the tours take you first to the”estancia” with the famous wall-sized window (that’s really more like the absence of a wall). the floors are plank, the the room doesn’t feel modest because of the soaring ceiling with timber beams. the yellow “albers painting” is really a piece of textile he bought and had stretched and framed.
this view of the same room is shot from the corner, directly in front of the window. behind the pigskin screen is the door to the vestibule. behind the 1/2 height wall is the library. the low (8 ft) wall was added by barragan after he had lived in the house.
the library is dominated by a wall of probably 9 ft high bookcases of heavy planks – very beautiful – and on the other side, the famous cantilevered stair. i regret that i can’t show you an image of it from the side. it’s like a line drawing on the wall. austere. elegant. and more than a little scary. really fabulous. we were assured that it’s quite sturdy – the planks extend into the wall 30 cm – though you aren’t allowed to walk on it. the bottom of the stair is whitewashed. the shadow of the stair is violet.
the furniture is handmade and designed by barragan. it’s heavy and just this side of unbearably clunky. the furniture and woodwork are dovetailed and pegged. the pulls are small wooden cubes or square holes of same dimensions as the cubes.
this is the “white” or “afternoon” room. barragan entertained his numerous female guests here. it is the only room in the house without religious art in it.
notice the mercury glass ball in this room and the room below. there are reflective balls like these in many rooms. the story is that they were positioned so that barragan, when seated in his favorite place in the room, could see what was going on behind and all around him. in the dining room, two of the spheres provided him with views of the backs of his guests and allowed him to monitor them for amorous activities.
and this was his tv room. really. the door on the left is a stair that leads to the roof terrace. the back of the wall you are looking at is painted yellow.
barragan is sacrosanct here. and the house is pretty astonishing. i’m not sure if the vibe i was getting in it was due to being someplace so famous – like being at the taj mahal, or the austerity, or all of the religious paraphernalia piled around. or maybe barragan’s theories of architecture creating a spiritual environment were working on me.
i found that often the execution of his ideas was less elegant that the idea. that was bothersome. details lacked refinement. yellow, as helen will tell you, is not my favorite color — and man is there a lot of yellow. liliana and maria jose found the upstairs stuffy and not nice. i wanted to pull up the rugs, get rid of most of his objects (i might keep one or two of the mercury balls) and re-decorate a bit. the garden — intentionally overgrown with banksia and english ivy – needs a really good pruning. but i could live here.
we did all come away disliking barragan, the man, intensely. a control freak in the most unappealing ways. and probably a misogynist.
the roof terrace is surrounded by high walls to give you privacy. i found it poetic — a precursor to turrell. liliana and marie jose hated it… they felt manipulated and hemmed in. it might have been low blood sugar and tired feet.
the signature pink. i had dinner last night with an architect who knew barragan when she was a child. she says the walls have been many different shades of pink. that he frequently tried a new ones. perhaps the problem with casa barragan is that nothing changes any more…
i’m in mexico city
February 13, 2009
for liliana porter’s exhibition at museo tamayo de arte contemporaneo http://www.museotamayo.org. the museum was mexican painter rufino tamayo’s gift to the mexican people. designed by teodoro gonzalez de leon and built in 1981 it houses a small but very nice collection of work that tamayo collected. ostensibly that work shows what influenced him. it also contextualizes him in a most favorable way. probably 15% of the exhibition space is devoted to changing exhibitions of the collection. the vast majority of the very beautiful museum is devoted to contemporary exhibitions.
the exterior of museo tamayo (admittedly, from the back) makes reference to meso-american pyramids. ok, and it’s a bit bunker-like. but the interior is nice. challenging exhibition spaces, but challenging in a good way, i think. nice light. nice scale. central atrium:
similarities to the berkeley art museum and the whitney.
liliana lived in mexico city in the 1960’s. her last solo show here was 35 years ago. this is something of a homecoming…
with liliana and maria jose at casa luis barragan
we’re staying in hotel camino real, designed by ricardo legorreta in 1968.
a view down a hall…
the screen that makes the hall look pink…
“one morning”
February 9, 2009
think the judgment of paris. adam & eve. atalanta & hippomenes. the eleventh labor of hercules. snow white. and one a day… happy valentine’s.
“one morning “ a photograph by crystal liu and tim sullivan. 20 by 20 inches. this is a copyrighted image and may not be reproduced without written permission of the artists.
our new website is up
February 3, 2009
check it out: http://www.hosfeltgallery.com thanks to jay and derek http://www.xlcrdevelopment.com and dianne and lea. it represents months of effort…
installation photo/collage by david stroud
