Romantic Detachment

PS1 MoMa
The British artist - David Blandy who is invited by ‘Romantic Detachment’ group exhibition showed ‘The way of the barefoot long pilgrim’. He traveled in New York playing old soul music record in his old portable phonograph. He said he wanted to find and match his imagination when he listens to the soul music which includes the title related to a location name in New York. The soul music “Hell up in Harlem” which he likes and listens to often dragged him to real Harlem in New York. During his pilgrim, he didn’t wear shoes and wear an orange color uniform of Kung Fu for pilgrim. However, he was disappointed that the real place in New York didn’t match with his imagination when he listened to the music. Through this pilgrim, his journey made him find his identity even though his journey hasn’t finished. This is related to finding the identity of his country and his culture. His country, England, experiences confusion of their identity because recently England followed America’s line opposite way of French, German, and other Europe Countries about Iraq war. It was very interesting that he matched the goal of his artwork and situation of his country.

Katharina Sieverding: Close Up

PS1 MoMa, October 24, 2004 – January 23, 2005
Sieverding firmly believes that the responsibility of the artist is to act as a politically engaged being, absorbing, synthesizing and commenting on the rapid advancement of our technology-driven age. Sieverding's choice to focus on photography justifiably brings to light questions about the medium's attempt to document, reproduce and represent. Her oeuvre includes monumental photographic portraits that appropriate the scale of movie screens and billboards, while their abstract forms- the result of manipulation during the developing process - create images that transcend race, gender, and age. Her photographic works are endowed with a symbolic sense of presence and the ability to command a space, and thus embody a simultaneous commitment to the observer and the observed.

Narrative of montage

I went to exhibition "The Art of Romare Bearden" at the Whitney Museum. He usually uses collage and photomontage techniques to express his religious concept and landscape of North Carolina and Harlem in New York. In his painting, collage and photomontage tell various stories. Each photo or image in his painting has a unique story and these pieces together create whole story of his painting. His painting has numerous stories and conveys more meaning than just message of the title of his painting. So, we presume that his montage is a non-linear story on two-dimensional space.

Here is more information about the exhibition ...

The Art of Romare Bearden
on October 14, 2004 – January 9, 2005
Peter Norton Family Galleries, Floor 3, Whitney Museum
A much-heralded retrospective of Romare Bearden’s work, this exhibition includes the brilliant collages and photomontages for which he is best known, as well as his vibrant watercolors, monotypes, and book illustrations. Bearden and his fellow African-American artists created art based on their own unique experiences, and his visual narrative takes us from the rural South to the industrial North, from Harlem to the Caribbean island of St. Martin.

fending off walking to the sky!

The sculpture “Walking to the Sky”, which was installed in front of the Rockefeller Center, was dismantled last Friday October 18th. It looks like the figures which walk upward to the sky through a 100-foot tall stainless steel pole being dissembled. The pole tilts at a daunting angle, but several figures have undertaken the climb, striding purposefully upward, among them a little girl with pigtails, a man in a T-shirt, a business woman, an older man and several others. Three people stand at the bottom, looking up along with the rest of us.

Why does the artist of the sculpture choose to travel to the sky? The Sculpture is, the artist Jonathan Borofsky says, a “celebration of the human potential for discovering who we are and where we need to go”. However, to me, it seems to relate with the religious belief of heaven and the anxiety of the social hierarchy.