Random Dispatches

Treasures from the Tokyo National Museum

Jul 10

lindsayrgwattHistory, Travel Art, History, kimono, samurai Comments Off

One of the stereotypes of the Japanese has been that they don’t so much as ‘create’ things as take an original idea from somewhere else and then continuously improve on it until it is perfected. Exhibits A, B & C: the car industry (American and German), consumer electronics (American) and ramen noodles (originally Chinese). Perhaps the ultimate example can be found in Toto’s magical toilets – one of which graces our hotel room.

As we explored the Tokyo National Museum it became evident that Japan is the ultimate remix culture. They’ve adopted ideas from other Asian nations and folded them into their own cultural identity. Buddhism came from the Korean peninsula in the sixth century or so. The Chinese gave Japan painting and calligraphy techniques. Heck, even ramen noodles are originally Chinese.

With that in mind, here are some photos of different sets of items from the museum. Have fun seeing if you can find other cultural references.

Japanese Painting & Drawing

The following are byobu folding screens that were set up temporarily as background decor, for privacy or to stop drafts. They’re a subset of what are called shoheki-ga paintings. The choice of subject was determined by the nature of the room (e.g., castle or temple), it’s function and the style of the times.

I also quite liked the detail in Ishibashi-Yama, Enoshima and Hakone by Kano Yosen-In (1753-1808):

This lovely lady is a ghost; the image is the backdrop of a Kabuki play: Kimonos

The museum has a beautiful selection of kimonos. Here are a series of close-ups: Samurai, Armour & Swords

The museum has an interesting description of how the Samurai’s traditions evolved:

The military elite held the political power in Japan for about 700 years spanning from the late 12th century until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Whilst taking the culture of the nobility, the former authority in power, as an example, they absorbed Buddhist- and common culture to create a pragmatic and powerful culture of their own.
The hitatare and kamishimo, originally commoner’s garments, evolved into the formal attire of the bafuku (military government) with time, the kosode kimono and dofuku short coat were also favored by the samurai.
The sword was the single most important equipment for a samurai, and was also appreciated as the best possible gift bestowed or presented to the shogun and the daimyos (feudal lords). Swords were usually worn in pairs of one long and one short type, such as a pair of a tachi with koshigatana, or a katana with wakizashi. Indoors, only the short sword was permitted. The style of sword mountings differed in accordance with the owner’s rank, or with the attire and fashion of the age. Sword mountings, armor, and saddlery were produced with the best available skills of the various genres of decorative arts, such as lacquerware and metalwork. In the Edo period (A.D. 1603 – 1868), military equipments were (sic) treasured and handed down over generations as symbols of social status and historical importance of the individual daimyo clan.

The Sixth Borough

Jun 13

lindsayrgwattNYC, Travel Art, governors island View Comments

Today Wen and I went to Governors Island (yes, that’s no apostrophe). It’s a unique place: picture a combination of old Coast Guard base, now abandoned; an ancient fort, fantastic views of the city and lots of art.

Moreover, the future of the island is still being debated, but you can be sure that it won’t look like what it currently does.  So here are some photos of what it looks like today.

Scenery

The island has stunning views of the city. I loved seeing the Brooklyn docks as looking out my window, I have the exact opposite views:

Buildings

As mentioned, the island if full of buildings, most of them abandoned.

Plants

With so many abandoned buildings, the plant life is pretty lush by New York standards.

Textures

The island sits in the middle of the harbour and gets pounded by the elements. Rich textures abound

Art

And finally, when we visited, the island was littered with art installations

DC on a Whim

Apr 05

lindsayrgwattTravel Art, photos, washington dc View Comments

Much has been made about Google Buzz and it’s privacy issues.  However, for me, it’s totally paid off for me.  Last week an old friend posted some pictures of the cherry blossoms in DC; I commented and he invited us down for the weekend.  How could we say no (especially since Wen had never been).

Here are some photos; you can easily guess what we did.  We started off on the Mall:

Here are some shots of those cherry trees; in fact, it turned out that it was the National Cherry Blossom Festival.

Here are some shots of the different memorials that dot the Mall.  Jefferson:

Lincoln.  Very popular photo spot:

The Vietnam War Memorial:

After that it was off to the White House:

Check out the beautiful walkway between Treasury and the White House.  Alas, government staffers only:

Day two was spent in Georgetown (after a night that saw a delicious dinner at Oyamel and drinks at Bourbon).  I didn’t realize that The Exorcist was shot there (and written by a Georgetown grad); here are the classic stairs:

Here are some shots of buildings in the neighbourhood:

This is where Kennedy lived when he was a senator:

And finally, a last short of Healy Hall at Georgetown.  Apparently there’s a periodic tradition where the students try to steal the hands of the clock (they’re each about six feet tall) and then mail them to the Pope.  Happens every few years-but not while we were there.

We also made it to The Phillips Collection, which is reputed to be one the best small museums and lived up to it.  They had a brilliant Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit which included these ones:

Red, Yellow and Black Streak, 1924:

Music-Pink and Blue No. 1:

Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow – 1923/25:

and White Sweet Peas – 1926:

Also, they’ve got a few beauties in their permanent collection.  Here’s one that caught my eye.  It’s Stefan Hirsch’s New York Lower Manhattan (1921):

Also, Rockwell Kent’s The Road Rollers (1909).  A very different way of plowing the snow:

The Fall

Dec 21

lindsayrgwattRandom Art, photography, richard mosse Comments Off

A few weeks back, Wen and I went to see Richard Mosse’s The Fall at the Jack Shainman gallery (more Mosse photos).  Mosse is a great photographer who travels to the edges of the world to capture images of catastrophe and then prints them on a massive scale.  I highly recommend reading his recent interview over at BLDGBLOG (then read the older one).  This paragraph captures the spirit of his work:

So how is the catastrophe popularly represented? Through terrorism. Terrorism is a gesture of advertising; it’s a literary act, a form of representation, before all else. Its aim is not primarily to kill, but to capture the popular imagination through killing. It’s for this reason that I’m drawn to the air disaster: there is no finer, more succinct, more international, and more culturally loaded expression of the catastrophe than a plane crash. An airliner in vertical descent is a spectacle of modernity’s complete failure.

Here are some shots of his work from the exhibit; I’m aware you’re not supposed to take photos in art galleries, but his works are magnetic and I couldn’t help myself:

Instant Admiration to Instant Revulsion

Apr 12

lindsayrgwattNYC adel abdessemed, Art, revulsion Comments Off

I ended up having Friday afternoon free (thank you Easter!) so I decided to walk home and stop off at a couple of art galleries in Chelsea.  As I walked down 19th and passed the David Zwirner gallery, I was stopped in my tracks by this:

It literally looked like somebody had turned a small flock of planes into worms and parked them inside a gallery.  Here’s what it looks like from another perspective:

This is not the sort of thing that one sees every day and I was impressed that anyone would come up with this concept, let alone sucessfully execute it (I mean, really, who is going to buy this art?  This is a gallery-only piece.  There really aren’t too many folks who have space for a 100′ by 30′ by 20′ sculpture in their living room).

I had to learn more about this artist, Adel Abdessemed, so I went into the adjoining gallery.  And that’s where my admiration quickly turned to revulsion.

Why?

Well, he’d taken a huge white room and projected a massive video on the wall.  The video consisted of a small concrete pit where he had thrown in dozens of iguanas, giant frogs, pythons, dogs, scorpions, tarantulas and roosters.  What happens?  They all start killing one another.  Last I checked, dog fighting was considered savage and illegal (see: Michael Vick), so I don’t know what inspired him to try to play god with his little cast of creatures.

Also, it turns out that Adel derives true pleasure from killing animals and photographing them.  His 2008 exhibit in San Francisco consisted of him quickly killing six animals and was cancelled due to complaints.

Here’s hoping that this exhibit gets cancelled too.  Never before have I gone from admiring to despising someone so quickly.

Rude Ink

Feb 08

lindsayrgwattNYC Art, culture, photography Comments Off

Yesteday Wen and I saw an exhibit at STUX Gallery featuring the work of the Dutch artist Ruud van Empel.  van Empel has a unique technique: he take dozens or hundreds of digital photographs, superimposes them into one impossible photo and then supersaturates the image so that it appears to jump off the page.  Here’s a copy of the flyer:

The exhibit was something of a tryptych:

• Souvenir took us through a series of photographs of his childhood home, showing the origins of his creativity
• Dawn was a series of young children in a fairy tale land of giant, digital manipulated plants (that’s the flyer above)
• Moon/World was an earlier work that also focused on young children, except it emphasize their gaze, not their surroundings

We also saw an exhibit at the Bruce Silverstein gallery featuring the work of Shinichi Maruyama.  The exhibit is called KUSHO – Japanese for “writing in the sky”.  It features 10 large scale works where Maruyama has taken incredibly high resolution photos of black ink thrown together with water.  The resulting photos feel like they should be in National Geographic:

Conjecture

Jan 19

lindsayrgwattNYC, Random Art, conspiracy Comments Off

Just down the street from us is Madison Square Park.  It’s a lovely little park that is surrounded by heritage buildings (Flatiron, Met Life, New York Life) and is home to the Shake Shack.  It’s also notable as one of the few sites in the city that promote public art.  In 2007, they featured sculptures by Roxy Paine.  I quite liked this one (Conjoined):

Right now they’re featuring the work “Untitled (Tree House)” by Tadashi Kawamata.  Here’s a shot:

Since I’ve recently been writing about apophenia (our tendency to see patterns everywhere), I thought I’d explore our tendency to see conspiracy theories everywhere.  This art consists of tree house by an artist who likes to wrap things in pieces of wood (check out the link above).  But why tree houses?  And what if they weren’t really tree houses, but meant to be duck blinds?  After all, this is a park and it’s got pigeons and they’re the rats of the sky and nobody likes them…

So now we’ve got a park full of duck blinds.  But who’s going to go hunting?  Well, the timing of this installation just happens to overlap the inauguration of Barack Obama – and the end of the Dick Cheney era.  And everyone knows that Dick Cheney is a great hunter, so maybe the park is celebrating that Cheney’s out of office by creating this installation.  So now the trust running this park hates all Republicans and is a tool of the Democratic party.

Now of course all of this is crap.  It’s just a piece of work by an artist in the park.  But I’d like to think that this is how conspiracy theories begin…

Best Photos of 2008

Jan 03

lindsayrgwattNYC, Random Art, best, photos View Comments

If you know me, you know that I love taking photos.  Since I’ve wasted a lot of people’s time by making them pause to take photos, I thought I’d share some of my best shots from 2008.  Here they are in roughly chronological order.  Note that Wordpress seems to be doing some sort of horizontal compression, so you my have to click through to each photo for the full effect.

This one is the only ‘best’ photo to come from my iPhone.  I’m hoping that in 2009 there will be more great iPhone pics:

The following image was taken at Fort Tryon, at the cafe in the park. It’s a beautiful place for brunch and they get great light:

One of my favourite New York activities is walking around the town.  If you make it down to Red Hook, there’s a scrapyard just between the BQE and the Gowanus Canal.  The five year old boy in me could spend hours there just watching:

This is Tom Savage ripping it up at Whistler.  It’s hard to tell, but he’s wearing a beautiful negligee as it was his stag:

While walking around the Robert Fulton houses near our apartment, I happened to catch someone feeding the rats of the sky:

If you visit New York (as you can tell, it’s kind of my muse), you should head over to Long Island City and take a look back at the city:

Last year I went to Dublin to see my bro graduate from medical school and was mesmerized by the city at sunset:

One of the artistic highlights of last year was seeing the Olafur Eliasson exhibit at the MOMA’s PS1.  He had erected a giant rotating mirror in one room; this kind of captures the effect:

Right around the corner from there you find the graffiti haven of 5 Ptz:

On the Fourth of July I snapped this pic while watching the fireworks.  It was raining, so take a close look at the tops of each of the buildings – everyone is holding an umbrella:

I’m trying to get better at macro photography.  Here’s a shot of a lily:

I tried to take an HDR shot of some flowers I had, but it didn’t turn out.  However, one of the shots was following:

While visiting the New Museum I leaned over the railing and noticed this little scene below on one of the adjacent tenement rooftops:

One day Wen & I set out to walk the entire length of Broadway (we started at the Bronx and made it to 85th).  In Washington Heights we went past the High Bridge water tower, and it just happened to be open to a few photographers that morning.  We tagged along and I got this photo of the Heights and the GWB:

And finally, one last photo.  The Guggenheim reopened this year and here’s a shot of their entrance way:

New York Daze

Nov 15

lindsayrgwattNYC Art, Chelsea Comments Off

Sometimes New York pulses with an energy unlike any other city I’ve seen.  Today has been one of those days.

Wendy and I got up this morning and went to our local cafe, Le Bergamote, for the best ham & cheese croissants in town.  The place was packed and the weather outside was furious – the wind was literally whipping the leaves off the trees:

We decided to hit up some galleries, starting with Pace Wildenstein to see the Richard Avedon exhibit.  The exhibit was almost exhausting in its scope: it contained photos of a shocking number of influential people from the 20th century.  From Bob Dylan to Marilyn Monroe to Dwight Eisenhower.

Literally, across the street the Matthew Marks gallery was exhibiting the latest work from Andreas Gursky.

Two blocks away, on 24th, Fredericks & Freiser had a show by Zak Smith.  If you’ve never heard of Zak Smith, I suggest you take a look at his portfolio.  It bursts with colour, detail and creativity; one wall of the gallery was covered with dozens of minute detailed drawings characterizing his history (which, by the way, is as colourful as his art).

A second room in the gallery contained all the drawings from On The Road of Knives – a project between Smith and two other artists whereby they mail drawings to one another in an ongoing story (check out the link for the chronology).

A block further, on 25th, the Yossi Milo Gallery was showing Lise Safarti’s retrospective of photos she took in Russia while living there from 1991 to 2000.  It’s a complicated mixture of decaying factories, traditional wooden architecture and homosexual boys.  These may sound like three things that should never be juxtaposed, but Safarti creates a touching portrait of a nation going through profound changes post the collapse of communism.

As if this all the art wasn’t enough to overwhelm, there was more going on outside.

Underneath the High Line, a 3 ton steel sculpture you could walk through had just been installed.

The sky was clearing, meaning that fog could be seen tearing across the rooftops of building.

And on the corner of 24th and 10th, the largest crane I’ve ever seen was being used to take down a the crane and it looked as if the construction workers were literally walking in the sky:

Like I said, sometimes this city just crackles with energy.