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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!)

What makes movies so intriguing to people? Why do people like them?
If we were to and make a list of all the answers to these questions, the list would probably never end. Tapping into the inner 4-year in every person, one would simply answer that “The pictures move!” Movies move, and this is what inherently intrigues us about them. Movement in films is not restricted to the literal ‘movement’ on the screen- the viewers are ‘moved’ into the world that the film creates and become emotionally ‘moved’ through the illusion of ‘movement’ that the technical weaving of still images creates.
Because movies are technically a sequence of still images, it’s easy to credit photography with being the direct predecessor of cinema. Though in the technical aspect this is largely true, the establishment and development of cinema as a cultural product stemmed more from the theatrical aspects of magic shows. The first movies were literally parts of magic shows, played in makeshift tents on circus grounds, and to the people watching them, these moving images were nothing short of magic. Cinema, much like magic performances, enthralls its audiences and gives them a sense of wonder. As viewers, we get lost in the artificial ‘realism’ within the screen- and this concocted realism leads us to willingly suspend logic and lose ourselves within the realm of the film.
One notable technique used in these early films is ‘rotoscoping.’ Though the term is now more heavily associated with hand-drawn animation techniques, it can refer to the general frame-by-frame manipulation of movies in any genre. Rotoscoping in early films often refers to the hand-coloring of single shots in order to make a ‘color’ film. This technique and the ‘magic’ of the cinema is well shown in the first science fiction movie ever made- Georges Meilies’ A Trip to the Moon (1902). The hand-colored version of the movie was restored completely and played at the 2011 Cannes film festival.

watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4dTVfSJoj04

*One thing to note here is that the soundtrack is NOT part of the original film- it was composed by the French band Air and inserted into the remastered version of the movie. The original (and better known) version of the film is the silent black-and-white film that is played with a spoken narration by Meilies himself.
Another technical aspect of this film is the frame rate, which is 16 frames per second (the standard fps of the time). To modern audiences, this low fps rate is what makes the movie look ‘choppy’- we are used to seeing video played at 24 fps and higher, and the frame rates are getting higher as technology progresses.
And now, for your viewing pleasure, is the full-length clip of Georges Meilies’ Le Voyage Dans le Lune. The science in the movie is surprisingly accurate in some parts and just pure fiction in others. But it is nonetheless an endearing film…
Le Voyage dans la Lune Original

By now, everyone knows who Banksy is. Well, everyone knows that nobody knows, at least. We’re familiar with his playful and sometimes sharply poignant street art, ranging from simple stencils to elaborate installation; we’ve probably heard of his critically debated documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop. And if we keep up with the Times, we may be aware of his current stay in the Big Apple, described in his own words as “an artist’s residency on the streets of New York” (banksyny.com). It’s titled Better Out Than In, and he’s promised to procure one piece of street art for every day of the month this October. That leaves us 28 artworks in, having witnessed the true variety of Banksy’s creative language. We’ve seen his classic layered stencils, plain stencils, stencils that span across cars and walls, stencils for sale in Central Park; a garden growing in the back of a truck, sad stuffed animals trapped in the back of a different truck driving around the meatpacking district, and a 1/36^th scale model of the great Sphinx of Giza made from smashed cinderblocks. He’s even published an article in the New York Times as a replacement for an op-ed column. In essence, the city has been Banksy’s for the past four weeks – as a temporary shelter, hideout, workspace, and playground all at once.

I could talk all day about Banksy. Everything he does challenges the very function of art in today’s society, as well as the role of the artist. He’s an outcast and likes it that way; he’s clearly not in it for the fame or money (neither of which are honest representations of creative success anyway), and he lets the work speak for itself. This is evident in the way he’s gone about “practicing” art in his own distinct, playfully intelligent manner, as well as how he’s acted upon and publicized this self-imposed exhibition. It’s the exact opposite of a traditional “residency”, wherein the artist applies for a position in a studio or university and is either accepted or rejected based on whatever criteria are set by the institution. In this case, the artist is in control of his own fate, avoiding every formality that has come to follow an academic approach to creative work. The only price he has to pay is that of the law, which is easy to forget when we’re talking about street art these days.

Amidst all of the creative bounds that Banksy has leapt throughout his career as a vandal, it seems as though he’s on the verge of a new transformation. While the majority of Better Out Than In has still been expressed in his native tongue, the weight of the exhibition rests on the sculptural and performance-based installations like the trucks and mock gallery spaces. In fact, more than one of his posted stencils had me wondering if they were really his work – they seemed as afterthoughts, sentences left hanging in bits across town. They feel like the filler for these larger “happenings”, in a sense, which one would assume require a larger amount of planning and preparation. What can we expect next from the most famous tagger to date? A spectacular finale on the 31^st? The grand unveiling of his (or her, just so we’re clear) identity? One thing is for certain: the city will miss the attention when (s)he’s gone, if (s)he was ever really there in the first place…