I got the chance to stop by the Hirshhorn Museum today with my mom, during a short trip to the northernmost part of Virginia. Right now on exhibition are many of Louise Bourgeois' sculptural pieces, with Guido Van Der Werve in the Black Box theater, and a grouping of figurative pieces curated from the Museum's collection.
I was first introduced to Bourgeois' work from a feminist standpoint, but her work draws out a lot of other connotations, especially in the realms of surrealism and conceptualism. Her sculptural forms lend themselves to anatomy, and she seems to explore the body in the context of memory. She uses the images of spiders, hands, enclosed spaces and obscuration, mounds, etc., to work and re-work through her dreams and rememberings. The museum displayed much of the expanse of her work, showing off the many media she has worked with, from small sketches with quasi-enigmatic phrases to immense cast-bronze spiders. To my delight, they also had her Art:21 episode looping on a monitor in the main stairwell, with her chatting romantically about some of her work.
"Strange Bodies" was the name of the exhibition downstairs, consisting of figural work. Varied works from Magritte, Freud, Giacometti, and Guston (to name a few) sprinkled the gallery. Ron Mueck's "Untitled (Big Man)" cowered in the corner as Andy Warhol posed for a painting by Julien Schnabel. What hits me as so interesting about figural work is the way that artists are able to produce a kind of human that is innately that artist's brand of human. The human form becomes at once representational and abstract, as if they were somehow that artist's vision of a different creature. I'd like to see artists stand side-by-side with their work, in the hope that perhaps the figures will look like distant cousins to them, no matter how outlandish. Perhaps if John Curren happened to possess the curves of his coquettish figures. This a point which hits home with Gillian Wearing's photographic "Album", where she transforms herself into family members, distorting her own image, using wigs and make-up (above).
I was first introduced to Bourgeois' work from a feminist standpoint, but her work draws out a lot of other connotations, especially in the realms of surrealism and conceptualism. Her sculptural forms lend themselves to anatomy, and she seems to explore the body in the context of memory. She uses the images of spiders, hands, enclosed spaces and obscuration, mounds, etc., to work and re-work through her dreams and rememberings. The museum displayed much of the expanse of her work, showing off the many media she has worked with, from small sketches with quasi-enigmatic phrases to immense cast-bronze spiders. To my delight, they also had her Art:21 episode looping on a monitor in the main stairwell, with her chatting romantically about some of her work.
"Strange Bodies" was the name of the exhibition downstairs, consisting of figural work. Varied works from Magritte, Freud, Giacometti, and Guston (to name a few) sprinkled the gallery. Ron Mueck's "Untitled (Big Man)" cowered in the corner as Andy Warhol posed for a painting by Julien Schnabel. What hits me as so interesting about figural work is the way that artists are able to produce a kind of human that is innately that artist's brand of human. The human form becomes at once representational and abstract, as if they were somehow that artist's vision of a different creature. I'd like to see artists stand side-by-side with their work, in the hope that perhaps the figures will look like distant cousins to them, no matter how outlandish. Perhaps if John Curren happened to possess the curves of his coquettish figures. This a point which hits home with Gillian Wearing's photographic "Album", where she transforms herself into family members, distorting her own image, using wigs and make-up (above).***
I came upon an duo, who called themselves cabinet de fumisterie appliquee, which I colored clever to say the least, with cheeky, child-like, or possibly romantic photographs of themselves in invented images. That is to say, many of the photographs depicted the two in different scenarios, with a playfully simplistic aesthetic. I imagine two little girl-soulmates who grow up and still play dress-up on the weekend: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cabinetdefumisterieappliquee/
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I had a weird dream about boxers today. The athlete, not the garment.
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