on the young side of the old people now

as of today, i embark on a new decade. it was a great day. colleagues offering congratulations all day, good wishes pouring in on facebook and instagram and via text and email, a gathering for drinks & snacks at the end of the day that ended in thoughtful gifts, some kinda crazy gifts and much laughter. a big bouquet from husband. and a trip to louisiana, that landmark of modern art, with a friend in the evening. it was a great start to this new phase. my friend mentioned a colleague who said he was super happy when he turned 50 because he was a youngster again - being on the young side of the old people now, rather than on the old side of the middle. i like that thought. another friend said, "if you haven't grown up yet, now you don't have to." i like that as well. i'm weirdly ok with it. it's the next logical step. i started a new project today as well - i'm going to do a daily video for a whole year and put them together, one second each, thereby having a video record of my 50th year. the child gave me the idea. i think it's going to be interesting to think in video. i'll continue my daily photos as well, as that's now completely ingrained in my way of being. happy birthday to me.

museums :: the new selfie central

the wonderful louisiana museum of modern art is open 'til 10 p.m. on week nights. so, after work today, i decided to pop up there and see the kusama exhibition that's on at the moment. polka dot explosion and precisely what i needed after starting my day with a rather nasty email from that infamous deficit person i've mentioned before (more fodder for that novel that i need to get to writing). kusama and a solitary, but not lonely, dinner at the museum was precisely what i needed to shake it off.

in the kusama exhibition, there are several places where there are mirrors and which invite one to partake in today's selfie culture.

ok, it was kind of a lot of places. lots of mirrors and many, many polka dots. kusama is an amazing woman. i sat for a long time and watched a film with her. she's got quite the ego, actually, but i suppose at this point in her life, she's earned it. and she does, after all, live in an insane asylum and has for many years, of her own choice. you may think it's all just polka dots, but it's much more than that...a kind of search for but obliteration of the self in endless repetition. much deeper than it may appear on the surface. and she has enviably lived her art as a way of life.

and it got me thinking about these endless selfies we take these days. are we also searching for who we are? or are we obliterating ourselves in the repetition?

and what does it mean that we see our own reflection (quite literally) in the art we obsessively photograph as we go around the museum - like me in this rothko?

or the ghost of me against william burroughs in this mappelthorpe? maybe it doesn't mean anything other than that i really should put away my phone and just be there with the art. but those polka dots do make an excellent screen background on my phone(s).

the view from sunday night

doodling in my art journal and pondering both the week that's gone and the week ahead. i love how art journaling stimulates the meditative thoughts.  my thoughts return again and again to the germanwings plane crash. authorities seem to have rather quickly jumped to the conclusion that the co-pilot intentionally flew the plane into the alps, killing himself and 149 innocent people. i do not envy those who listened to the recording from the flight data recorder and came to that conclusion. i find the articles and op-ed pieces, laying the blame on depression quite alarming. it seems to me that what merits a closer look is the practices of low-cost airlines that would cause a young pilot to hide his medical condition and not use a note from his doctor, excusing him from work on the very day of the flight. did crewing personnel from the airline bully him into flying anyway on that day, perhaps even threatening him with firing if he didn't fly? knowing what i know of crewing department bullies in the shipping industry, i wouldn't be a bit surprised if that wasn't the case. and i hope that person has a very guilty conscience right now.

today marked the switch to summer time (daylight savings time to my american friends) here in europe. it was a grey, rainy, dreary day and we didn't much notice the switch, other than that the day seemed to fly by all too quickly. i have to wonder if we still need these time changes. wouldn't it be best to just stay on the summer version, so that light is always extended into the evenings? people want the extra light when they get home from work, don't you think? shouldn't we just stay on this time instead of switching back again come autumn?

i find myself still thinking about the enormously provocative exhibition of photographs and a video installation by richard mosse we saw at louisiana last weekend.  mosse is an irish photographer who uses infrared film developed in the 40s by the american military to expose camouflaged landscapes. it makes everything that's green a bright, vibrant pink. mosse used it to photograph the forgotten (by the world) war in the congo and the effect is sobering. it took several hours for emily and i to shake it off and it has lingered in my mind for days. it's a bit of a gimmick, using such film, but the candy floss landscapes of horror it creates definitely make you think about war anew. we are so numbed by horrible images today, that it takes such a jarring shift - horrible scenes in bright, surreal pinks - to make us notice it afresh. he somehow really does achieve an art of war. they had posters there that you could take, featuring a couple of the striking images and we took them before we had really looked at the exhibition. i don't think i can bring myself to hang it on the wall. google his images and you'll see what i mean.

and now, to shake it all off again...i'm smiling to myself about...

~ bacon and eggs going for a scooter ride between showers.
~ pairing husband's socks all wrong. it started off as an accident and now it's a little game i play. 

~ how my sis and i saw aziz ansari at a comedy club in nyc and i had no idea who he was. it seems he's a rather big deal comedian at the moment.

~ the gentle wisdom of mma ramotswe. i needed some comfort reading and so i'm rereading the no. 1 ladies' detective agency series of books. it seems several more have come out since i last read them, so i've just ordered them up from the library. mma ramotswe is so gentle and wise and there is much to learn from the old botswana morality.
~ getting a rather larger bonus than i expected and how these things often come exactly when you most need them.
~ doing a job where i can learn a lot and not have to have any emotional investment or anguish about the intrigues going on around me.

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creations somewhere between toys and art by the sucklord.

perhaps moving us towards an answer of why adults today still want to play with toys?

i don't know yet.

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love the dear data project!

i found out about it here.

it makes me want to do a snail mail-based project with someone.

anybody got an idea?

photographic taste and other mysteries

i don't really know what to make of my taste in photography. i love these shots of nirvana and courtney love by anton corbijn and i love the subject matter of these shots of a siberian science facility by mexican photographer pablo ortiz monasterio (tho' i question how much skill they took with such subject matter). but i was completely provoked by conceptual artist jeff wall's exhibition that i saw at louisiana last weekend. whatever you do, only watch this video of him talking about his work if you would love to hear a pretentious git talk about himself to the dull masses.

but what is it that provokes me about his work? perhaps it has something to do with the fact that louisiana is displaying a photo of dirty rag being put into a washing machine (those yellow streaks are because i took this with my iPhone and it was in a kind of light box and possibly also because i sent it from my phone to iPhoto on my computer via airdrop, so it came out a bit strange). but seriously, this is worthy of one of the best museums of modern art in the world? really? and i am provoked because concept art, with all its pretentions, makes you think that you're the one who is too much of a rube to understand it. whereas i think i get this piece loud and clear...and i can hear mr. wall laughing all the way to the bank, smug that he convinced the world that this is "art."

i personally think this iPhone shot of his badly-framed boring street with power lines (supposedly painterly-composed) is improved by my own reflection like a window in the middle of it. a clear window onto the soul of his pretentions.

i think you can tell that wall's work provokes me and maybe that's what makes it art. art should provoke us, make us think, make us look at the world anew. but i also want it to be somehow aspirational. i don't want to look at it and think that i could have done it better. and frankly, i think my own shot of powerlines in manila is more interesting:

but i will grant that it's possibly because i'm not really a very good judge of photos...

painting selfies before selfies were a thing

as a birthday present to myself, i went to louisiana, denmark's wonderful museum of modern art, on saturday. a member of husband's family is a curator there and she gave us a personal tour of the paula modersohn-becker exhibition that she had put together.  modersohn-becker was a german artist who died entirely too young, at the age of 31, in 1907. but she managed to put together an incredible body of work in her short time. she was revolutionary for her time - running off to paris to paint, hanging out with rainer maria rilke and painting loads of self-portraits long before the selfie was a thing. i hadn't heard of her before, but her work was fascinating and she was so revolutionary - painting ordinary people, mostly peasant women and children from a nearby poor farm, and painting nursing mothers. and painting them in a very naturalistic, non-posed manner, exposing their humanity in the process. oh, and she did a nod to matisse as well - actually, she may have inspired him, since this was painted in 1906 and he didn't paint his goldfish until 1912.

i often come away from visits to art museums thinking that i'm not doing enough with my life and wondering why i've never really hit upon something that would drive me to do it the way paula was driven to paint, even leaving her husband to go and live for a time in a garret in paris, painting and painting, just because she couldn't help herself. did i just miss that thing would have done that for me? or was i not listening when it called to me? or was there really nothing for me that would give me that kind of drive? is it too late? or is it still on the horizon? or am i destined to just live out an ordinary life?

i think that we always insert ourselves somehow into the things we view...bringing it back to our own experience, filtering it through our own lens. the art we see becomes entangled in our own perceptions and we assign meaning and emotions and feelings to it that are largely our own. more on that soon with regard to a couple of the other exhibitions i saw at louisiana.

edited: hmm, maybe it's not too late for me. 

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small vignettes of the lives of immigrants in the uk, in their own words.

100 happy days :: day 21

that magical feeling of infinity in yayoi kusama's gleaming lights of the souls at louisiana. if there hadn't been a long line outside of it, we'd have stayed in there much longer. it's utterly magical.

theosophic works: hilma af klint

youth - #3, group IV, 1907

adulthood - #6, group IV, 1907

adulthood - #7, group IV, 1907

adulthood - #8, group IV, 1907

there are ten works in this series, these were just my favorites. they represent the phases of life, from infancy to old age. they are enormous and dominant works. they were painted on paper using hand-mixed tempera paints. they had been rolled for years in an attic (luckily dry), since hilma af klint's will specified that the works could not be shown for 20 years after her death. she believed she was painting the connection between the physical and inner worlds we inhabit. she believed the pictures came to her from a higher consciousness, which conveyed its message through her. she created a whole symbolic language with which to convey these messages. it has yet to be fully decoded, despite her leaving behind extensive journals, documentation and notes. scholars are only beginning to give her work the attention it so richly deserves.

the swan, #16, group IX/SUW, 1915

the swan, #17, group IX/SUW, 1915

the swan, #17, group IX/SUW, 1915

in af klint's symbolic language, blue represents the feminine and yellow the masculine. i find that quite appealing and feel it underlines how today's pink for girls and blue for boys is a more modern construct and just that, a construct, not something inherent in the colors themselves. although the works try to convey a spiritual message from another plane of consciousness, they are very rigorous and quite scientific in their discipline. every color and line is laden with meaning.

alter work #1, group X, 1915

there are three large paintings in this series and i'm not sure why i didn't photograph the other two, as they were marvelous in the whole they presented, the three of them hanging together. it makes me want to go back, tho' there isn't much time, as the exhibition closes june 6.

i find these abstract works to be thought provoking and evocative. despite the crowds and that we were in a bit of a hurry that day, i found they triggered something deep in my solar plexis, something indefinable and which i can't yet put words to. perhaps she really did capture something of a higher consciousness and tho' i don't consciously understand what it's saying in so many words, it felt like they were actually communicating to my soul.

you can read more about hilma af klint here.