Every now and then, I might interrupt Coffee with a Stranger's regular programming for something decidedly un-coffee and un-stranger. Yesterday, for example, I went to the California College of the Arts' MFA exhibition. Here are some of the things that I saw. All pictures taken by Nicole. Click to enlarge.
Scared silly by Crystal Gonzalez:
Solemnly agreeing with Sean Leake:
Preparing for the conclusion of this "mortal ebb" with Maggie Simpson:
Contemplating the possibility of collapsing boxes with Matthew Waldbillig:
Sometimes with James-David Mericle, a garage door isn't really a garage door:
And last but not least, Eduardo Gomez taps into one of my childhood obsessions: baseball cards!
5 comments:
would love to hear those rhymes... don't lead us on.
I drop rhymes like you drop dimes!
Assuming, of course, that you drop a lot of dimes....
so this ties into this conference i went to by fedric jameson about postmodernism. he talked about (and later was called out on oversimplifying, but for the sake of this post a comment box simple will do) how the post-modern implies a lack of time and an over emphasis on space. or, as he said, no time, only space. one of his examples was precisely this kind of art exhibit that can't exist outside of the present, it only is, never was nor will be. (if his 3 hour conference was simplified, imagine how simplified i just made it...but the idea is there). his main point being how that affects our ability to understand time as a linear continuum where things happened to us, and things we do now plus those past events will make the future. without that linear vision we are unable to make future social or political (or economic) plans...
i think a lot of post-modernism is taking a good idea too far. i got on a real Dada kick last fall, and i think they were really effective. they showed their disgust with WWI by ridiculing and destroying everything that the established norm held sacred - gender, beauty, nationalism, etc. and they showed this disgust and ridicule by creating some fantastic, ridiculous art that wasn't supposed to last, because they didn't want it to be thought of as beautiful and stuck in some museum for "posterity".
the trouble, though, is that they tore a lot down without building another ethos up. so what happened? we're now stuck celebrating "deconstruction", without giving much of an alternative. and when tearing things down gets boring, that's when you know you're in real trouble....
with that said, i loved this show. it was tons of fun.
interesting turn. you're right. the spanish and french surrealists were - most of them - revolutionary communists, and their art had a decidedly political aim. but it's strange how - especially in the us i feel - even talking about building things is somehow not "worthwhile." im talking about a radical political program (building something really different, not an extension slightly changed of what we have now). today everything is just that one moment, like you said, we had fun right then, it was an "experience," and now it's over.
jamesom's thesis is more that we live in a postmodern world where art makes the world and the world makes the art (if you know what i mean).
the dadists were living when proust and joyce were writing (both with a very serious feeling of time). . . i dont think deconstruction per se started til post wwII (poetry after concentration camps, etc. adorno)
besos
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