See Faith's journal for awesome Meow Mix car
I've been pretty sleepy these past few days. Faith took me gallery-hopping in Chelsea on Wednesday. The most interesting one was a group exhibition called Money Changes Everything at Schroeder-Romero. I can't find any good pictures of it online, and I'd tell you to go check it out if it wasn't ending today. It had some of the most incredible art -- sculptures, tapestries, collages -- made primarily with dollar bills. Political intentions aside, I really like the way these artists poke fun at the worship of currency. Cash is a material object, one of the most common, but how many of us could bring ourselves to destroy a dollar bill? Yet, here are countless bills thrown away, turned into huge ladders, bowls, mats, self-portraits. One of the most interesting projects involved scratching away at the surface of a bill, gradually erasing some features and leaving others -- so that the bill loses its normative printing and only the word "LIAR" remains.
It may sound like an odd connection, but I think the new Richard Serra exhibit, Rolled and Forged, does something very similar. It takes another common base material -- steel, that big ol' symbol of industrialism -- and turns it into high art. Unlike the money exhibit, though, Serra's work makes these symbols even duller and plainer than before. It seems like he's commenting on the banality of our surroundings, imprisoned as we are in walls of steel:
One work, Elevational Mass, could resemble either a cityscape or a bookshelf, but I soon realized that any likeness I could think of was still going to be just another kind of "elevational mass." I dunno. Maybe Serra is a dumb postmodernist who thinks his art can be nothing but what it describes; still trying to deny symbolism. But as far as I can tell, it seems like he's mostly interested in this format as a way of re-creating an architectural space, a space that we can walk through and touch; but a space that at the same time shakes us out of our habit and makes us reflect back on what we're seeing. We're far from the days when Mayakovsky rhapsodized about the wonders of Brooklyn Bridge. All progress and innovation eventually become blasé.
"Our taverns and out metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly... Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye--if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man." (Walter Benjamin)
It may sound like an odd connection, but I think the new Richard Serra exhibit, Rolled and Forged, does something very similar. It takes another common base material -- steel, that big ol' symbol of industrialism -- and turns it into high art. Unlike the money exhibit, though, Serra's work makes these symbols even duller and plainer than before. It seems like he's commenting on the banality of our surroundings, imprisoned as we are in walls of steel:
One work, Elevational Mass, could resemble either a cityscape or a bookshelf, but I soon realized that any likeness I could think of was still going to be just another kind of "elevational mass." I dunno. Maybe Serra is a dumb postmodernist who thinks his art can be nothing but what it describes; still trying to deny symbolism. But as far as I can tell, it seems like he's mostly interested in this format as a way of re-creating an architectural space, a space that we can walk through and touch; but a space that at the same time shakes us out of our habit and makes us reflect back on what we're seeing. We're far from the days when Mayakovsky rhapsodized about the wonders of Brooklyn Bridge. All progress and innovation eventually become blasé.
"Our taverns and out metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly... Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye--if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man." (Walter Benjamin)