We started with MAD. They ended up having half of the museum floors closed for installation, so the price to get in was also cut in half, the work we saw was well worth the price. First we saw a show about the Japanese aesthetic, which was surprisingly inspiring. There were many different media in the show, but in particular some of the ceramic forms were screaming at me to investigate making some new shapes for printed surfaces, something more elegant and less about its useable function. An Akio Takamori piece featuring the inside of the figure's head was a favorite in the show.
We then went down stairs to a show entitled "the Korean eye," which featured many postmodern and post-postmodern works from korea. This show was very well put together in that it really gave a sense of Korea as a hip, electric, plastic, pretty and fad oriented place, but the art work was very strong and accessible from mechanical insides of fish to a mass of tiny smiling brightly colored molded foam figures traveling up the walls and around the staircase. One piece in particular was quite moving. A piece by lee leenam called "Ming and Chung dynasty paintings: cross over." The work featured 5 ancient Korean/Chinese scrolls side by side on 5 LED TVs. Over top of the images the artist had animated the changing seasons as thoughtfully and subtly as the scrolls themselves ending with winter falling into a moonlit night. We had to wait to view the work however, as the asshole docent stepped her group of morons right in front of our first attempt to interact with the work, sparking an apology from one of the tour participants. But it was well worth the wait.
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| Hong Young In, Procession, 2010 acrylic, embroidery, scenic fabric |
We then trekked down a few blocks for our annual trip to hale and hearty for lunch, then hopped a cab to the gugg.
Arriving at the gugg we were greeted by a block-long line in a bitter cold wind, but it moved relatively quickly and we were inside in about 15 minutes or so. Once inside the place was so crowded it was hard to move around with out running into people, so I simply stiffened my shoulders and went where I wanted to go. I'm an asshole like that in overcrowded places. The show was Maurizio Cattelan, featuring his entire body of work hanging from ropes seemingly haphazardly in the rotunda. WOW. What a fun way to view a retrospective show. We started at the top. Mindy took the cramped elevator to the top. I took the twisting walkway, because there is no way in hell I'm packing myself into an already packed space. So I met her at the top in front of a horse's ass (part of the exhibit not a person). We made our way down the ramp and saw new things at every angle. It really was a genius way to look at all this work. Cattelan's cheeky humor and political satire were quite evident and despite the masses of morons in headphones listening to what someone wants you to think about art, we really enjoyed the work. I tried drawing some of the show in my sketchbook, but the gugg has such weird perspective and angles I ended up making mostly a mockery of it on the page. It was beginning to get dark when we left the museum, so we walked down to Lexington and hopped a train back to the west village.
We made reservations for a poorly yelp-reviewed place on bleeker called the mussel pot. This is why you can only half trust yelp reviews. The food was wonderful, but then mindy and I both love mussels. It was a bit pricy but we left full and happy. So, to anyone reading yelp reviews: mussel pot is good. Eat there.
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