Author: AgnesG

This past Saturday, I was originally planning to check out the Japanese prints exhibition in Toledo. I’ve studies for my exam ahead. I’ve found a car and a friend who could drive me there. And I’ve informed everybody around me how excited I was to finally be able to see this exhibit…but, wait, Helicon was gonna present a student art exhibit on the same day! And I definitely should help out to set up! Fortunately, my benign friend promised me that he would drive me there during Thanksgiving break, so sorry to disappoint you guys, but let’s just put those Japanese prints aside for one more week. And, here comes the coolest art show, presented by Helicon: Incognito!

Different from the one we held last year at the Warren Robbins Gallery in Art & Design Building, this year’s exhibition took place in a lovely house. This little compromise in location (cuz it was too late for us to reserve any campus gallery spaces) turned out to be a huge success. Artworks, music, a constant stream of visitors, and a more relaxing atmosphere—that’s all we could expect for a remarkable night.

One of the most eye-catching and interesting pieces of the exhibition—trust me, all of them are just fantastic!—5/13, is a installation featuring a collection of jars. Each jar contains certain liquid that represents the artist’s mood of a certain day in May 2013, which is indicated by the date on the label on the cap. It impressed me at first glance because I’ve seen an awesome installation which also featured a series of jars in MOCAD (Museum of Contemporary Arts, Detroit) last year during a field trip with Helicon kids. The artist was Kristen Pieroth, and what she did was putting the residual liquids of boiled books into jars. All books that were boiled were the big names like Huckleberry Finn’s Adventure and Pride and Prejudice (I remember? Not sure…).

Anyway, let’s look at these “diary jars”. Jasmine tea. Chips immersed in water. A paper calla lily. It’s enjoyable to see how the artist’s subtle feelings are embodied by liquids of different colors and transparency. And since he/she doesn’t tell us the actual emotions, we could only guess or try to interpret the meanings of the liquids by our own cognition, and there are no correct answers. Moreover, some of them got opaque or volatilized over the past several months, and the objects inside either shrank or corroded. To be honest, this straightforward and candid presentation of the passage of time thrilled me.

The past weekend I visited the Exhibition called Toulouse-Lautrec and His World in Flint Institute of Arts. The art history group I am in had been planning on this field trip since several weeks ago, and we were choosing between this Flint exhibition and the exhibition of early modern Japanese prints in Toledo Museum of Art. Although I love French modern art and the artist Toulouse-Lautrec, I preferred to go to the Toledo one because I was always intrigued by those delicate Japanese prints and Japonisme ( the great influence of Japanese arts and culture) on impressionism. Also in terms of the museums themselves, TMA is better known and it held the super awesome Manet exhibition last year, so I had a higher expectation for the quality of its exhibition. However, after visiting the Flint exhibit, I have to say I was amazed and impressed by the exemplary posters and lithographs of Toulouse-Lautrec.

At the entry wall of the exhibition, there’s a black life-size silhouette of Toulouse-Lautrec on the wall. I felt as if I was standing next to the actual artist. I was really impressed by this lovely design not only because I found the height of Toulouse-Lautrec less than 5 feet ( he ceased to grow after he injured his thigh bones), but also because the silhouette was so typical to be associated with Toulouse-Lautrec’s style, which endowed me a sense of familiarity with the artist and his artworks before I actually walked through the exhibition later on.

    

The most representative works of Toulouse-Lautrec, without doubt, would be his posters and paintings depicting Parisian nightlife. The posters he made for the can-can dancers and cabaret singers elevated the stature and increased the popularity of many rising performers, such as Jane Avril, Yvette Guilbert, May Belfort, and la Goulue. The exhibition showcased posters he made for these female performers, as well as Aristide Bruant, the best-known male carabet singer in Paris back that time. When making portraits, he often captures the most prominent features of the figures, and he prefers to paint the contours and silhouette of the figures. These later developed into logo-like images that could be easily identified as certain performers. An anecdote I read on the label was that Yvette Guilbert was unsatisfied with the portrait Toulouse-Lautrec made for her because he made her seem ugly. However, this “ugly” portrait proved to be a huge success which made her famous. The image below shows Yvette Guilbert performing on stage, wearing her signature long black gloves.

Surprisingly, the exhibit also juxtaposed two Japanese wood-block prints with Toulouse-Lautrec’s May Belfort to show how Japanese prints affected his art style. I’m glad to take this bonus.

If you could have a superpower, what would it be? For me, I always wish to be able to stop time, when all my surroundings would freeze and only I could move. And this wish periodically gets stronger when it is the last minute before my exams or before due dates of my papers. Just kidding. Nonetheless, freezing time is definitely a cool superpower to have. As you can expect, just like my other childhood fantasies, the existence of superpowers also got denied by my science teachers back in primary school as I grew. However, an exhibition that I saw in 2012 by the Chinese sculptor, Zhan Wang, made my wish come true by showing the freezing moment of the explosion of a rock.

The exhibition was called “My Personal Universe” and it was held in Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. When I entered the gallery, I was surprised to find myself surrounded by floating and shimmering rock fragments, which were hung from invisible wires. On the ceiling, the ground, and the four walls in the gallery, there were six large screens showing video-clips of the explosion from six different angles. I felt like entering a space where time stopped; however, the videos continuously played in super-slow-motion on the screens kept me aware of what was happening around me.

According to the artist, by suspending rock fragments throughout the gallery, he was trying to recreate the birth of the universe. The explosion reminds people of the big bang theory. To do this, the artist did record the explosion of a boulder on-site from multiple angles. After that, he brought all the fragments back to his studio and made stainless steel replicas of these fragments. He installed these replicas in the gallery in a way that each fragments moved along its own trajectory, and finally formed this fascinating scene of the explosion.

I was amazed by the idea of recreating the start of the universe, and the beauty of the destruction itself. I felt as if I was experiencing the explosion, and I could imagine the tension between all the rock fragments and me. They were moving toward me. They were about to smash my face. However they stopped before they got too close, leaving me standing in the middle of the rocks adrift in the space and marveling at the beauty of this apocalyptic moment.

This Sunday, five of us visited the Detroit Institute of Arts during a Helicon field trip. Our original purpose was to check out the Caravaggio piece, Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, which is currently on loan from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. DIA creates a mini exhibit of Caravaggio by displaying this painting next to Martha and Mary Magdalene, another Caravaggio’s work owned by DIA. Standing in front of these two paintings, I was surprised to realize that I’d seen both of them ten months ago in the Caravaggio exhibition held by Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This evocation of my personal memory turned out to be a prelude of the theme of our visit, because the notion of memory reappeared several times as we further explored the museum.

An exhibition of ofrenda altars caught our attention immediately. The exhibition is associated with the Day of the Dead, a Mexican holiday which is celebrated on October 31, November 1 and November 2 for people to commemorate family members or friends who have passed away. Traditionally, people would build ofrendas, which are basically private altars, to honor the dead. The exhibition consists of ten installations, each of which are dedicated to different people, animals, events and even ideas. One of the altars is for a former baseball player, which is evident since there is a huge poster showing a skeleton in a baseball player outfit, with a baseball cap on his head and a baseball bat in his hands. Another altar serves to remember the deceased pets, on which people put lovely photos of puppies and kitties, stuffed animals, canned dog food to show their long-lasting love and care for their former pets. There are also ofrendas to honor the Mexican American soldiers or to bless emigrants who have died while traveling.

My favorite one is Women’s Song for the Water, by Catherine Peet. This ofrenda memorizes the creatures that died when 200 million gallons of crude oil flooded the gulf of Mexico in 2010. The altarpiece is in the shape of a container, with glass doors that allow people to see what’s inside. Two sea birds stand on top of the container, bending forward as if they are two receptionists presenting this work to the viewer. Around the container are various sea creatures, such as sea shells, sea snails, sea snails, octopuses, turtles, and sea plants. Inside the glass doors, there are lovely fishes and beautiful corals. However, this pleasant scene of harmony is overturned if one looks further inside, where skeletons and skulls occupy the inner space, implying the underlying dangers and threats. This visual commemoration of the event definitely calls for people’s attention to the protection of environment and ecosystem.

Another awesome exhibition on view in DIA is Foto Europa, on European photography. Not a big fan of photography, I’ve never taken any classes on it and I’m always too lazy to take photos while traveling. I was wandering around idly in the gallery when suddenly a photo series caught my eyes. It was L’album de Photographique de Christian Boltanski (the photo album of Christian Boltanski). In the photos, the photographer recreates scenes from his childhood memories such as birthday parties and favorite games by entering the original settings with an adult body but act like a 4-year-old. In one particular scene, around-35-year-old Boltanski is sitting on one side of a seesaw and next to him are several kids playing on another two parallel seesaws. I learned from the description of this photo that when he was little, Boltanski’s favorite game was to play on a seesaw with his grandpa. In another photo, the grown-up Boltanski is presenting a puppy to the camera with a big smile, and the description goes like, “This is my sixth birthday and I get a puppy as a gift. It’s so cute. I really love it.” In another scene, he is playing a set of chess (probably? Can’t remember well) he used to play a lot when he was little with his nephew. All the descriptions are written in simple and childlike sentences. However, upon reading them along with the photos, I couldn’t help but start this melancholy mood and reminisce about my own childhood memories. Maybe I was just emo, but who doesn’t want to go back to his/her childhood? All grown-ups were once children. Boltanski is playing the 4-year-old him, but around him are the real 4-year-olds. Nobody could go back to his/her childhood; however, there are always children in the world, just like there are adults. Here, childhood never ends.

(Just a side note: for people who are taking history of photography with Professor Fay, coming to see this exhibit could get you extra credits for the class, so you should definitely check it out!)

Last night when I was sorting the photos taken during the weekend when I went kayaking on Huron River with my friends, a really interesting one caught my eyes. In the picture, there is a boat in the middle of the river. My friend and I are sitting on the boat, taking a break from kayaking, effortlessly holding the paddles and turning our heads to look at three swans floating on the river. In the distance, there are trees with beautiful foliage of vibrant colors like red, yellow and green. Above the trees is the blue and cloudless sky, which is mirrored in the water, along with the reflections of us and the trees on the river bank.

This image immediately reminds me of the painting, In the Norwegian Boat at Giverny, by Claude Monet. In the painting, three girls in white dresses are boating on the Giverny river. Well, obviously they are dressed more elegantly than us, but the pleasant environment and the leisurely mood are quite similar with what we have in our photo (and we got swans lining up in the background!).

The idea of unconsciously recreating paintings in real life fascinates me. After all, the painters get their inspirations from reality. When I was studying abroad in Paris this past summer, I visited Auvers-sur-Oise, the village in which van Gogh spent his last two months of his life, on a Saturday. The little village keeps most sites that appear in van Gogh’s paintings unchanged over the past decade, and there is even a map that marks each site so visitors can take a themed tour of van Gogh. I went along the route. I saw the église (church), the wheat field, and Dr. Gachet’s house, and I was trying so hard to find the perfect angles in order to capture photos that are exactly the same with the paintings.

However, after I came back, it was this picture I randomly took that immediately melt my heart:

I didn’t even remember when I took this picture. However, it is definitely a perfect recurrence of the touching scene of parental love shown in van Gogh’s First Steps.

Some people describe Auvers-sur-Oise as an eternal village because it has little changed over the past decade and every corner is as beautiful as a painting. However, it seems that sometimes real life could be even more beautiful than paintings.

Awwww…cutest thing ever.