Art Blog

Infinity Mirrored Room – Let’s survive forever, 2017, Rubell Museum, Miami

Narcissus Garden from 1966. Composed of 700 stainless steel spheres, that flow 200 feet along the Rubell Museum’s central gallery, creating an ever-changing river of reflection.

Yoyoi Kusama - Rubell Collection, What's it all bout?

Everyone is familiar with Yoyoi Kusama’s repetitive dot filled designs, giant flowers and pumpkins. She has been doing art her entire life in a variety of mediums from painting, sculpture and installations to film and fashion.. This Japanese artist born in 1929 who is now 95 years old is nothing if not prolific. I generally find her work fun. However, the Infinity Room at the Rubell Museum frankly leaves me saying, OK, but it’s gimmicky. And I once felt ripped off by having to pay $10 to enter it for a few seconds. Does it make me contemplate the idea of infinity? For a second. Once you see it, does it leave you wanting to think about it ? Not really. 

"The Narcissus Garden from 1966. Composed of 700 stainless steel spheres that flow 200 feet along the Rubell Museum’s central gallery, creating an ever-changing river of reflection" are festive. You look at your distorted image and smile, but really what is all the brouhaha about since she created all these infinity series in 1965?

I loved, loved Marguerite Humeau’s solo exhibition “\*sk\*/ey-” at the Institute of Contemporary Art. The title comes from a term that means “shedding or splitting”.

I had never seen any of her work. This French artist who is only 39 years old, graduated in 2011 in experimental design from London’s Royal College of Art. Since her graduation she has had countless exhibitions around the world using an array of materials, from latex, silicone, nylon, glass and sound, and she is partially deaf.

At the ICA exhibition her abstract forms echo other worldly beings. While these apocalyptic, futuristic “creatures” are a bit spooky at first sight, on close examination they are so imaginatively and intricately made that they draw you in. She uses wood, rubber, hand blown glass, silk, waxed felt and raw wool. And she does so in such an expert way, that each material blends seamlessly into the other as if they were actually meant to be joined or metamorphosed like that. The muted colors, the elongations and twists and turns are magical. They are grounded or float above but these creations develop from research of spaces, science and materials.  Did they start out as plants or insects? I don’t know but I was amazed by them. Unfortunately the photos don't do them justice.

Broken Pots series, 1977-1981 Ceramic, manganese -(We Day Patch AM, 1979; Omen, 1978; Gbese, 1979)

Miwon Kwon’s article takes us through the evolution of site specificity, from the museum setting to the actual location where the site completed the sculpture. Then site specific art expanded its role into the realm of social, cultural and historical problems with the goal of redressing social wrongs or bringing awareness to serious matters like ecological problems. So from a fixed location art it is now fluid through space and the “public role of art and artist has been redefined.” Site specificity has now changed again into a more nomadic experience as artists set up the same installations around the world where the social impact of a particular site may differ or be lost. 

Balance, counter balance

If reading Oscar Tuazon was meant as a stepping stone for us to come up with our own “structure within a structure” I merely took the idea of creating a structure within a structure literally. I began by looking for metal pieces that appealed to me. So like Tuazon, I scavenged my materials. Once I had  a good portion of materials that spoke to me, I began to work intuitively like I often do. Putting them together into a cohesive whole was a challenge that I enjoyed immensely. While my sculpture did have square geometric structures, my geometric odyssey incorporated a seesaw, triangles within circles and a sort of double eight meant to reference infinity. So the piece became a sort of game to balance each piece with a similar one that was its doppelganger. Hence the title: "Balance, counter balance", the game we all attempt to manage in life.

The requirement of a second material threw me off kilter. I originally meant to incorporate a magnyfying glass, but in the process of thinking about a second more obvious material I drove myself crazy and forgot I already had it in the metal encased magnifying glass.

 At one point I decided I would do a performance piece by wearing a homemade aluminum foil costume, then discarded that and opted for simply incorporating “wooden flowers” on or near the sculpture. In the end discarding the wooden flowers was better.

QCQ #3 Structural Tension

Where is sculpture going?

Oscar Tuazon’s work according to the article falls “between art and architecture”.

His art lets his sculpture collapse to “destabilize architecture”.   He “builds a structure that does not look like but simply is”. So there is no illusion in his work I guess what one sees is what one gets. I honestly don't understand his work nor does it grab me, but I did hear a talk he gave at the New School which though disorienting and inconclusive was kind of poetic and interesting, though still confusing. So after reading this article and others to attempt to understand his work, I am left with many questions: 

-What really is sculpture today?

-If sculpture, like Duchamp’s urinal, has been turned so upside down in the 21 Century, does meaning matter anymore?

-If a sculpture can be so deconstructed that it may just look like a pile of rubbish, or a mere briefcase on the floor or a stick propped on a wall can be considered a work of art, which without the artist’s  explanation, no matter how far fetched, leaves one wondering and fails to arouse much feeling... then what is the purpose of sculpture? 

-Does it no longer have to appeal aesthetically or emotionally?

-Is it just an intellectual exercise?

If  Heidegger (who was adamant about building dwellings that took our surroundings into account so that we “spared and preserved” the earth), were here today to witness the state of climate warming and its effects on our world,  he would die all over again. 

Climate warming from methane and the burning of fossil fuels is causing flooding, more rain and intense hurricanes, catastrophic fires, and unbearable heat. In fact, the 2023 summer was the hottest ever recorded on earth, with temperatures in China reaching 126 Fahrenheit according to the Washington Post. The melting of glaciers and ice sheets is causing sea level rise, which in turn causes erosion of beaches, flooding and the intrusion of saltwater in our aquifers. Our oceans can help trap carbon but they are overwhelmed. They have lost oxygen and acidified. Many islands and coastal cities are threatened. Climate warming has reached emergency proportions around the world. 

With my teeter totter project, I hoped to visually draw attention to the problem of climate change, in particular that of rising seas that threaten our cities around the world. The  balance still lies in our will to push back from the brink. We must stop global warming and balance sea level rise before we self-destruct.

Spiraling down

The reference of the Black Forest farm for him further develops that idea in that building should also be  “designed for the different generations under one roof the character of their journey through time.”

I found the assigned reading interesting and this  quote very meaningful in that the farmhouse in Black Forest, constructed over 200 years ago, was built not only in the appropriate location on the wind sheltered side of the mountain near a spring and with a large sloped and sturdy roof that could withstand heavy snowstorms. Most importantly it was built with the different stages of life in mind and it withstood the passage of time as it sheltered many generations. For Heidegger ``building is dwelling”  but “at peace with nature” so that  dwelling is more sensitive to human needs and preserves nature. 

A Room: Life Transitions

Coming home to an empty house, filled with things but, devoid of the people that once shared that space with us is the lonely reality many people experience as they age. The void left by life transitions, as family members die, as children grow and leave home, has to be filled with new encounters with  people, activities and desires to discover new purposes. The alternative is to condemn ourselves to a mummified present by living in the past.