Sunday, March 7, 2010

Constantly, even when I get out of it

THAT'S FROM GILMORE GIRLZ.
(Kirk is trying to sell Lorelai bathmats for the inn and asks her "don't you ever slip in your bathtub?" and she says no and see says that it's not fair if you answer it like that and she says... "Constantly, even when I get out of it" which I think is funny)
Anyway SO I'm home sweet home now AND WHATTA JOURNEY IT WAS

So it started at the Whitney, well really at Tyler at 7:45 (yes, that's in the AM) and I set off to the NYC with my embarrassing suitcase and a bunch of upperclassmen. I planned on shooting off after the Whitney to take a bus home, but everybody else was just packed for the day AND older and cooler and beards. I am so glad my excellent friend Morgan came along (as pictured in line for the Whitney above) otherwise I would have been sad and lonely. ALSO she would not have tactfully insulted Cleaveland (she's from PITTSBURGH and aparently that's a thing or whatever_). This man is sneakingly photoed below.

I never seen one like that before! Um so anyway he was all- I'm from Cleaveland and who the f are you?!?! And she was like I'm a Steelers fan. I think that was it.
So we saw the BIANNUAL at the WHITNEY and it was pretty really great.
There was this one video (hey I'm usually not into video art, but there was a lot of amazing videos!) by this woman Marianne Vitale on a screen at the end of the room and she shouted nonsensical orders the whole time, saying things like "the tightwad in the back, you know the one that carries the bathroom around with them, you can leave the bathroom at home if you know it's name do you know it's name?" Giving elaborate orders to guide everyone (she kept addressing the audience as "patrons") in some kind of dance or something. Even though the plaque said she insists on all orders being followed exactly, nobody was doing it. But that was real loud so I had a headache the for the rest of the day. OH there was this amazing series of photographs taken by Nina Berman of this general or something who was a victim of suicide bombing or something and after going through dozens of rounds of reconstructive surgery remained severely disfigured. The artist tracked his wedding to his high school sweetheart, they divorced a few months later. The pictures are heart breaking, not solely because of his disfigurement, but because of the way the rest of the world, especially his fiance interacts with him. There is a moment she snapped while they were getting their photo taken, and the alienation between the couple is stark and sad. In the room next to the one with the photos there was this great big drawing of several different views of a room. The artist is Dawn Clements and it was exquisitely drawn in ballpoint pen on large skin-like crinkled sheets tacked and taped on the wall. She blurb said she deals with how the home is a sanctuary and a prison in her work, there were also several small pieces of writing which looked like to do lists, phone numbers, reminders, and ideas she jotted down while working on this piece. It's INCREDIBLY detailed and I liked it a lot. Okay so then Morgan and I moved up to the next floor and spread across the entire facing wall was a BBT (big beautiful TAPESTRY) of cigarette smoke spreading up into the air. Morgan was just like WTF is that anyway? And I said CHILL BRA it's a tapestry... and I was right (tapestry woman is Pae White btdubs)
The next work WE WALKED INTO, NO LIE. There was a sign to the side of this big giant box with sliding doors all around it and it said "Please watch your step inside and outside this artwork" which I think is so great. So we get inside the big old box and it's all dark with a few boxes around to sit on with a rotating picture of JFK with flames on either side.... basically stupidity. But if you waited a while, the boxes had projectors in them and these amazing moth bitten black splashes appeared on three of the four walls. They switched every few seconds and slowly merged into more colored and sharper shapes WHY KEEP TALKING ABOUT IT WHEN THEY'RE RIGHT HERE? lookatdat


There was some blahblahblah annoying explanation on the plaque WHICH WE WILL IGNORE
Alrightalrightalright there was this crazy lady who did this piece discussing famale identity OR WHATEVER. So basically she was just inside this column in a polka dot dress, scratched and crawled her way out, and made a vid. This is a secret pic I took while the security guard wasn't looking I AM SO BAD.
There was an incredible video REALLY MORE LIKE A MOVIE called H.M. by Kerry Tribe which was this amazing story of H.M. who suffered from epilepsy as a child and in 1953, at the age of 27, he was reccommended for an experimental procedure where the center of his long term memory was removed from his brain. His condition improved but his short term memory would only last for twenty seconds. He exists soley in the 3rd demension, only in his interaction with the world, with no relation to time or memory. The film (it was on actual film with projectors and everything) was shown on two seperate screens, each playing segments of 20 second length which overlapped and wove in and out of eachother to echo the fragility of human perception. AND TWO DOORS DOWN was this completely stupid video by Alex Hubbard called Annotated Plans for an Evacuation, it was just him doing stuff to a car like spray painting it and putting spackling on the hubcaps and putting styrafoam on it and driving it around and then that was it. HATRED. You don't want to hear about any more video art? WELL TO BAD. There was this one by The Bruce High Quality Foundation (as in Bruce Nowman or whoever trying to be funny) called We Like America and America Likes Us. It was like a half an hour video of this woman doing a monologue representing America as lover, or a parent, or a child, accompanied by video clips from pop culture PROJECTED ONTO A HEARSE. It was really great and here's a quote "We didn't recognize her anymore, but maybe we didn't recognize her from the beginning" SO GOOD (I know because I watched the whole g-damn thing). OKAY one more. A series of photos by this woman Stephanie Sinclair of Muslim women with self-inflicted burns who had suffered such abuse from their husbands that all they could do was light themselves on fire.

This is a funny sign that I saw at the Grocery Store when I went with my dadd-o when I got back to montclair. Wow that was the longest blog post EVER but go big or go home that's what I always say! TIME FOR THE OSCARS bye.

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