Give me a hell yes!
Trip Start
Nov 14, 2009
1
7
13
Trip End
Dec 02, 2009
New York City, New York, United States
Friday, November 20, 2009
Can I hear a hell yes - New Museum
The second floor was covered in a wall paper that was a gradient from deep pruply black through to a strnage pale purply brown. Fischer had apparently come in and photographed each square inch of the gallery and then used these images fused to wallpaper this room. On the longest wall there was a small torn hole and inside was a remarkably well constructed simulation of a human tongue. It was so real it was disconcerting kind of amusing that the artist was poking 'his tongue' at all of us as we looked at the work. In the middle of the room there was a piano and piano stool that had been cast in plaster (I'm pretty sure it was plaster anyway!) but the whole object looked like it had been sitting under a heatlamp for too long, it was melting at strange angles, it looked like it might just drop before your eyes.
The third and final floor was taken up with large, dark silver globules some hovering just above the floor, most sitting at awkward angles. The domination of the objects really left you feeling so small and diminutive, inconsequential. The objects as still as they were felt dynamic, they really inhabited the space.
Walking downstairs from the three floors of Fischer's strange, hallucinatory world it took me a moment to orient myself back in the here and now. I stopped and sat for a cup of tea at their wee coffee shop on the ground floor. The table I sat at was against a glass wall looking into Nikhil Chopra's installation, a city sky line drawing on the longer wall (really just a sketch but v beautiful) and various 'scenes' laid out - the remnants of a meal on an old fashioned table, suitcases being unpacked, a shaving table. All looked as though the human players had just popped out momentarily
Hell Yes - New Museum
. After my cup of tea, I went to explore it a bit more closely, being inside the glass wall almost felt like a zoo cage as the room looked over the foyer so people were comign and going and milling in front of the glass wall.While I was in there, a tour was being lead through the exhibition and I was rather taken with an anecdote that the guide related about a time when Nikhil Chopra was drawing on one of the islands near NY. Apparently while does these drawings he doesn't talk or engage with people as they stop and look. A young boy came up to him and said 'Nice drawing' and when Chopra didn't respond he said 'don't you talk? Why don't you talk?'. After a moment the young boy then said 'maybe you don't talk because you think I don't exist.' and after another moment he said 'No! I get it! You don't exist!'. How's that for some young existentialism?!
To clear my head I decided to take my time and walk around SoHo a bit more as it was a beautiful day with the sun out and the autumn leaves looking like jewels swinging from the trees. There are so many pretty streets in this area with rough cobblestones and trees lining the street. I was particularly taken by some graffiti that had taken a copy of Diane Arbus' image of a young boy holding a grenade and had stuck it on a door with 'Army of One' sprayed next to it
Wobbly cobbled streets
.Afterwards I went back to the apartment to meet up with Simone as we were going to go up to the Whitney to see the Roni Horn exhibition. We had decided to walk so made our way up 5th Ave again this time stopping occasionally to look in a store or to admire some building. I had forgotten that the sun sets so much earlier at the moment so it was dark before we had made it far. This city looks so good at night and I know my images aren't doing it justice which is incredibly frustrating - digital doesn't do low light terribly well and my camera is getting on in technological timelines.
The Roni Horn exhibition was great, it was so exciting to see the works irl (in real life) after having stared at them in a book for so long. Roni Horn uses space in really interesting ways so it was v important to me to see them and be in and around them. Unfortunately there were two works that I don't think were hung or placed in a way that made sense with the exhibition - the gold sheets which just being placed on the floor near the potographs rather than in context with other object works lost any sense of materiality or weightlessness, and a large piece with multiple images of a clown face that has been overlaid each time hung in 3 rows for the entire length of the wall, but because you couldn't step back from it it was hard to get a sense of the piece as a whole. On the other hand, seeing You are the Weather up lining the walls of a room really brought together the piece for me - the rhythm and the relationships between the images was really inspiring in terms of ways of displaying and creating relationships.
Her images of the Thames which are footnoted with thoughts and details were tender and lovely, and I was amazed by her drawings which were so much better irl than in a book
SoHo
. It is hard to describe them but she hangs to pieces of paper and on each with pure powdered pigment draws the same line or shape. She then cuts them up and reassembles them. However they aren't cut in squares, there are odd shapes and cut lines going of at angles and in amongst the angles she has also included squares. The whole requires huge amounts of precision and planning in order to integrate the two into one. Stepping back they looked cartographic but coming in closer I really appreciated the work and process.Roni Horn's work left me really inspired and I've got some new ideas about approaching my own images. By the time we got back to the flat it was late so we ordered from the cafe 'Snack' at the bottom of the stairs (really great Greek food) and ate in.
