Wac6arts

Worlds Overlapped

My arts blogging these days has been subsumed by my daily blog, Counselor @ Law, over at wac6.com.

Recent posts there that might have been here, or at least a couple in that category that come to mind, are:

• A write-up, with some decent pictures, of a hurried tour of Frank Gehry's Stata Center on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Mass. As you know, I love Disney Concert Hall, where the LA Philharmonic plays. So if you liked my pieces here about Disney Concert Hall, you may want to check out the wac6.com post about Stata Center.
• A reflection on a large public sculpture at the San Jose airport.

I'm still here! I'm just over there!

Powell Street Cable Car Turntable Turnaround Dance

At the end of the Powell Street run, two cable car workers turn the car around while a boombox on the street sets a beat. This video from last night. Beautiful evening walking weather.

The Sacramento Airport - 20th Century Charm

I like how "old school" the Sacramento airport is. Like the one in Palo Alto, the scale is right. The fact you use it to jet from state to state in a matter of hours is taken casually.

And yet, old as the structure is, everything is California current. Out on the curb, waiting for my mom to pick me up, the guy on the recording warning people to not leave their cars unattended finishes with a flourish: "believe me, the tow truck guys work fast!"

As in Palo Alto, it looks like a new terminal is being built here. I doubt it can replicate the low-key nature of the existing structure. It isn't complete, but the steel frame is already up, towering high, supporting a cascading, vaulted roof. More of what people think airports should look like these days, I guess. Does anyone think about the acoustics of such places?

Spelunking Disney Concert Hall

My brother Tim and I went to Disney Concert Hall last night to see Gustavo Dudamel perform in his debut weekend there as Artistic Director of the LA Philharmonic. The music was great; the sound was unbelievable. They played Mahler's First Symphony, and the marriage of composition with musicianship (the two elements of musical performance that you can copyright) was every bit as fraught with power and genius as the performance Burge and I saw of Bob Dylan and his band in Seattle earlier this week.

I may try later to embad in this post an iPhone video of the accolades Dudamel received at the end of the show, accolades to which he responded by walking into the orchestra and calling out the sections and principal players who performed the piece brilliantly. I'll reserve comment on Dudamel himself, except to say that I now more nearly understand what a conductor does. A metaphor that comes to mind is of the visiting representative of a civilization from another galaxy; although his technology is far, far advanced, everything in the complex craft transporting him can be thrown into motion from a simple joystick, or the natural gestures of his organic form (the opposite of the instrument panel in a jet, or the cascading nav bars of newer versions of Microsoft Word).

But my chief purpose here is to book-end my "Hiking Disney Concert Hall" post, about an earlier traversal of the exterior of this extraordinary building. Last night, my brother Tim and I got to explore the inside!

The above is of a lecture (and small performance?) area which before we were only able to look down upon from an exterior window (see the last picture from my prior post). The rectangular panels that look darker in the picture above appear so because they are drilled full of holes; this has something to do with the acoustic performance of the space (the main performance hall has the same thing going on).

We took a tour for new subscribers before the show, and the guild told us that the HVAC system was encased in Douglas Fir. To the right is a picture of part of the system from the level of the main floor.

Below is a picture where you can see the steel inside the wood.It is an incredible building.

The only thing in Seattle that is comparable, as elegant on the outside and as hospitable, ennobling and civilized on the inside, is the downtown Seattle Public Library.

Here is a pic I tweeted last night, of Dudamel and the orchestra bowing to the back of the house at the end of the night.

"Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea"

The best art show I've seen in years -- among the best I've ever seen, possibly destined to rank in my memory with Matisse/Picasso at the MoMA when MoMA was in Queens, or last century's Mondrian retrospective at MoMA  -- is one featuring 12 relatively young, commercially-savvy artists from Korea, now running at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The show is called "Your Bright Future," and as you view the work the three-word title resonates by turns as propaganda, pedagogical imperative, corporate insinuation, sarcasm and earnest sentiment.

I've been wanting to blog about this show ever since seeing it with my brothers at a member's preview in June (I had to join the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to get in; I'm glad I did). But I've been stymied by the facts that (a) I took no pictures of the show (signs said I shouldn't, and each exhibition space had an attentive guard equipped with an unobstructed view), (b) every image I saw had prominent copyright notices attached or embedded, and (c) the LACMA (there, I've given in to the museum's marketing department's acronymic branding; it is convenient) website, initially, didn't show anything other than the flash animations of YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, specially commissioned for the show.

Circumstances have changed, a bit. For one, I've recently reviewed the fair use doctrine and feel more confident about my mission here on wac6arts.com. For another, the LACMA site now has videos and photos posted -- a ton of them, almost as many as there were works in the physical show -- and not every photo is immune to a right-click to a new window that can be copied.

The photo above is of Haegue Yang, but she is not in the show. Rather, her work, Storage Piece (2003/2009), also pictured here, is. The artist is sitting at the corner where you enter the show at LACMA -- it is the first exhibition space to the right of the entrance lobby. Yang's work is about the practical problems an artist has when a gallery show of her work closes and the work that does not sell is returned to her. Rather than unwrap the returned work, though, this time Yang leaves it packaged up, and exhibits it that way. It is a brilliant turn. The stylized arrangement of warehouse pallets suggests to me that the work is destined always to be in transit, or even that its status as art derives from it being always imminent without ever being consumed or revealed. (I do understand, however, that the artist will make one or two appearances at LACMA, and that some of the pieces may be unpacked; I'd like to get down there again to see one of these events.)

This second photo is of the second room you come to in the show, just after the exhibit space for Storage Piece. This next room, and the one that follows it, exhibits sculpture and video by Gimhongsok. Gimhongsok is also a writer; the wall texts that accompany his pieces (even the video pieces) are perceptive, arch, funny and accessible. The piece that interests me most in the room pictured above, and perhaps in the whole show, is the box within the plexi-glass box on a stand off the left wall. The writing on the wall to the left of the box tells its story, which is of a conversation between Mao Zedong and Richard Nixon that secretly took place in Switzerland in the early1970s. The CIA, the story goes, captured the conversation and secured it for posterity within two boxes, one of which was given to the Chinese government but has since been lost. Thankfully, the box in the show is known to survive. The piece may be known as Mao Met Nixon, but I am not sure and I don't know what year to attribute to it.

There are other things you must see if you travel to this show. These include Jeon Joonho's digital animation, The White House (2005-2006), an extended portion of which you can currently access on the LACMA site. (I can't give you a direct link to the video; you'll have to scroll right to get to the column about Jeon Joonho. In the physical show, the video is much more dramatic, as it is projected onto a wall that is probably some 30 feet wide.)

Another must-see is Kimsooja's "6 channel video projection," A Needle Woman (2005). One wall of Kimsooja's piece, as projected at LACMA, is pictured above. (Again, an excerpt of the work can be accessed on the LACMA site. This excerpt shows better in the smaller web-video format than does the excerpt of Jeon Joonho's piece.)

In the last exhibit space in the show, before you return to the entrance lobby, are two very dramatic large scale architectural models by Do Ho Su. One of the works, the extraordinary Home within Home (2008-2009), pictured below, was commissioned by LACMA for this show.

Hiking Disney Concert Hall

I have not yet had the chance to explore the interior of the Disney Concert Hall, apart from the lobby, into which, at 5:30 this past Friday afternoon, my brothers and I escalated from the parking garage below.  The place had the feel of the end of a day, but was active:  Hall staff seemed to linger; security guards directed case-carrying musicians; fathers and daughters assembled for a private reception.  But we were told that it was too late for the public to access other areas within the building.

So I went outside, thinking I would at least circle the famous structure and try my luck at photographing it in the late afternoon sun.

The Hall is set off a very busy street, with no park or human-friendly facility directly opposite (the street functions as some kind of overpass on this block); but the sidewalk running outside the front of the Hall is wide, and functions more or less as a plaza.

That much seems like good urban planning.  What I did not expect to find - was delighted to discover - was how the exterior of the building, above street level, was designed to be traversed.  If I'm remembering correctly, I accessed the "alpine trail" at a flight of stairs tucked between the curve in the steel wall and the corner of the glass "storefront," pictured just above. 

Some portions of the trail are sheer ascents.

Other stretches are almost like switchbacks.

Elements of a complicated landing near the center of the building look like they come from a naval vessel.

At one point along the trail, glass runs like an alpine waterfall . . .

. . . and at other junctures, permits glimpses deep into the interior of the hillside.

Cover Art for Westways Magazine

Passing through the Santa Ana / Orange / John Wayne Airport this morning, I came across a nicely realized survey of a century's-worth of orignal magazine cover art, done for the member publication of the Automobile Club of Southern California (known since 1934 as "Westways," the exhibit placard says).  There are dozens of them; many struck me as very fresh.

The above is credited to Gordon Brusstar, titled, simply, "Golden Gate Bridge."  It is gouache on board, and was for the cover of the February, 1952 issue of the magazine.  Hopefully some of the vibrancy of the color comes across in the photo above.

The piece just below is credited to Rex Brandt and is titled "Lassen Volcanic National Park."  It is watercolor on paper, and was for the cover of the March, 1950 issue.  My two photographs here are terrible; I did the best I could, given that the pieces are framed under glass, and I had to deal with reflections (you can see a plane on the tarmac in the glare below).  

According to a press release I found by typing the name of the magazine into Google Chrome, the exhibit opened at the John Wayne Airport last month and is to be on view throught October 19, 2009.  The space for the exhibit is called the Vi Smith Concourse Gallery, in honor of the former Chair of the John Wayne Airport Arts Commission.