I'm Going Down To Electric Avenvue
Clio's Word of the Week:
Machead (n): A fan or otaku of Macintosh computers.
So! I once heard that some art movements thought that the more disturbing the piece was, the more effective. Well, I'm sure those guys would have been proud of some of the artists i saw yesterday....XD
Ok The whole reason i went up to SF MOMA was to check out their permanent collection of photography, mainly Dorthea Lange and Pirkle Jones, who both did a series called the "Death of a Valley". "Death of a Valley" was a photo docmentary of the town and valley of Monticello being abandoned, leveled and destroyed so that a dam could be put in place (and if you ask me, this seemed very Fatal Frame 2, as the same thing happened to All God's Village. Maybe Monticello also had vengeful spirits? XD;;) A lot of pix werer of the leveling, or abandoned buildings, tho most were of the last Memorial Day these people would have in this town, and their subsequent last visitation of the Monticello Cemetary before the bodies would be interred and moved to higher ground.
It was a sobering series, showing the destruction of such a small and pretty valley town, and it made me wonder about human developement...but musing like this will be used for the paper I have to write so no more brooding. Onto the rest of the museum day!
Dio: You forgot to mention the one thing that all museums do.
Oh yes. For anyone who decides to see a museum during a break of some sort, remember that all museums open at around 11 am. Dad and I headed up to the city and were there at 9 am...freezing and getting wet.
Loki: Its sucked, esp. since the Metreon opens at 10:30. XP
We wandered about Sf streets for abpout 1/2 and hour, stopping off at Urban Outfitters at 9:30 to grab my sister's Sally and Her Bitch Shirt. XD Love those Urabn Outfitter shirts....anyone wanna get me a I Love Jewish Girls shirt? ^^;; They're overpriced, UO, but they have great clothes.
After that, we wandered over to the San Francisco Central Shopping Center where we basically wandered....I got earrings, since 'm wearing them more often now. ^^ I got butterflies! ^^ Anyway, but the time we hit he Apple Store, it was only 10, so we browsed and I got some tips to make my music sound less crappy on Garage Band. ^^;; They had iPod skins, the rubber covers to make your iPod different colors....they had a set of 3 (blue, cleear and green) for $30 but I decided to buy them online cuz they had a better color selection.
Anyway, we get to the Museum, w/ tons of elementary and high school kids miling around it, so we stop off at a nearby sushi place for lunch. While we were eating, a scraggly pigeon wandered in looking for food. It was kinda cute in a scruffy puppy sorta way. Only in Sf, my friends...^^ And maybe NY. Finally, we make it into the museum around 11:30, and hit the permanent photo exhibit. Then we mosied over to the Romare Bearden exhibit (Dad wasn't as interested I'm sorry to say), where I had a visual feast of collage and color.
Syndelin: Hey, the Henri Matisse exhibit was closed for reinstallation. We had to make do w/ temporary installations.
Bearden's work w/ collage was really cool. He had a good way of balancing out the composition and media. A lot of his work was of civil rights, conjour women of the south and classic stories, as he was a great story teller. His Odyssey series was really neat; there was a sort of African spin on the old Greek myths in the presentation.
We went up stairs to the Pop Art exhibit, which featured revered artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Ed Ruscha. The comic style ones were pretty nifty, but some of Ruscha's artwork were pretty neat as well, esp. w/ his use of interesting medium (like gunpowder and his own blood). We saw Warhol's screenprints of Elvis and a young Elizabeth Taylor (standard issue Pop Art, you know); there were plenty of interesting pieces on display for me to just melt. I love Pop Art, it just r0x0rs my box0rs. ^^ I really enjoyed Wayne Thiebaud's "Display Cakes"; I like the use of color that gave the candy and cakes this whimsical childlike quality that most kids will imagine when gazing at a bakery display (or Tsuzuki ^^).
Robert Arneson's Typewriter and "Amended Version" were pretty intersting, and disturbing sculptures I managed to see. Typewriter's keys are, upon closer inspection, nothing more than fingers and orange fingernails, whereas Amended Version's typewriter is a melting, smashed machine w/ a bloodied hand emerging from the paper slot, and destroyed keys that spell HELP out on the grotesque keyboard. Yeah, it was kinda creepy, yet cool at the same time. Call me morbid.
After the Pop Art Exhibit, we marched up to the last floor to check out Supernova, a collection of 1990's art from the Logan collection. A lot of this was just plain odd and overall pretty damn cool to see. The 90s was a time of booming technology and new art perspectives.
Ihna: -_- What??
I have no idea, I'm just reading the website's description of it. If you ask me, it was a collection of weird and cool things. I think I saw Largo's cool thing in there somewhere...XD
I saw an all yellow piece w/ butterflies (real ones) glued on, called "Do you know what I like about you?" It was really pretty, tho i wondered why the artist chose to paint over the butterflies' wings. There were some cool paintings, like Yasumasa Morimura's "Monna Lisa" series, which depticts the Mona Lisa in her original painting, then her pregnant, and finally her w/ a cut away view of her pregnacy. It was interesting, esp. w/ her backgraound changing w/ her pregnacy (crumbling buildings at pregnacy, and a cave-like darkness in the cut-away).
Yet whilst browsing the floor, my eye caught a sculpture, shown here Took one look at her and said outloud: "Hey, I saw her in a hentai once." Yet no one around me understood the remark. T_T The sculpture was of a young, anime type girl w/ pink hair, wearing nothing but a teeny tiny bikini top in the act of jumping or moving. She has no...um, nether regions (think a Barbie doll, the old-school ones before they started coloring that area the color of panties), and it looks like she's grasping her nipples and spraying some sort of white substance around her, something akin to a jump rope. This sculpture, Hiropon, by Takashi Murakami, illustates a new movement called Poku (pop+otaku). I wasn't sure what to think other than, "My God her breasts are as big as basketballs", but the comment on how otaku's dream women are so far-fetched and malformed that all they can wish for is an ideal that will never come to be. Kinda like Persocoms, but that's a whole 'nother thread to be ranting.
Ok, that somes up Supernova in about a paragraph. XD We also dipped by a video installation by a (German) artist named Pipllotti Rist called Stir Heart, Rinse Heart. She played with scale and convention by (in one installation) placing a tiny monitor of her calling out to you in the floor. Its really tiny, making you actually look around the empty room for her. In the 2nd room, she hung various objects liek plastic containers, paper doilies, and clear tubes from the ceiling, and projected a film reel of...well, i wasn't sure, but it looked like medical shots of things like bacteria and stuff, and trippy blobby lava-lamp like visuals over it, creating this odd shadow theater of light and shadow. In the 3rd room was 2 film reels overlapping on a wall. The first was of the artist's native land (overhead helicopter shots) w/ (again) medical footage of things like brain scans and colonoscopies (well, i assumed that, they could have been from the esophagus). On the other reel was of (presumably) the artist walking around, blessing ppl w/ her menstration blood like some sort of holy figure and walking around this busy street. The imagry and symbolism made my head hurt so we shuffled out and decided that 5 hours of walking around was too much, and headed home. And that was my day at SF MOMA.
Dio: And let us say that symbolism and shock value are things that we her at Random Lunacy fully endorse.
Syndelin: Unlike Happy Tree Friends.
Dio: Yes, unlike that.
So, I'll leave ya'll w/ the knowledge that I intend to beat Inuki senseless for cutting his hair this close to Fanime....Yamino's sooooooo grounded. Ja ne, Lunies!
*Til next time Lunies!*
Labels: museums, San Franciso
