Summer Museum Tour, Stop #2

I was not a visual arts student, but I will say that I have an appreciation. I don't always feel I get the deeper sense of what an artist is trying to portray or what their influences may be, but I do have visceral appreciation for their artistic endeavors.

Today I decided to make a date with myself. I hopped the bus and decided to just go see some stuff. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art [LACMA] is free after 5, so I figured I'd end my date there. I grabbed some lunch, did some window shopping and around 5 I was wrestling with the decision to go to the museum or to just go home.

I'm so glad I went! For those of you who live in LA, you have to check out this exhibit by LA based artist Tim Hawkinson. It was brilliant! I was amused, amazed and awed by his work. To your left is part of an installation that took up the entire room. There are twenty of those little men, all attached, connected or sitting on branches of this tree like structure. My mouth was wide open when I walked in the room, but then I realized that each one of these little men thumps the tree with one of his body parts...like a drum. One used his ear, one his toe, another his knee cap. The tune was very unstructured, but still musically beautiful. It was so freakin' cool.

This is another of his pieces. It's a school chair with a machine sitting in the seat. As a roll of paper is fed through, the machine writes the artist's name then clips it and it randomly falls. The pile of signatures on the paper wasn't as huge as it is in this picture, but I can see it getting there eventually. How monotonous...it reminded me being younger and spending hours and hours and hours practicing the writing of my name [or those girls who practicing their first name with their boyfriend's last name...you know you did it, I never did, but I'm sure all of you did...].

This is the last picture I have to share. It's a color photograph of the artist's hand, with each finger growing an arm and so on and so on. It was so cool. To me the extended fingers looked like modern dancers stretching and contorting their bodies. Just so visually cool! It just gave such a strong sense of movement...

There are some other pictures of his work on the Whitney Museum website [check out the sideshow] and you can read about the exhibit on the LACMA Press Release.

So if you live in LA and can make it over to LACMA before the 28th, definitely check it out. It's free after 5! It seemed like the portions of the museum that held the permanent collection were closed, but you can check out the visiting exhibits. Also, as an added bonus, they have jazz concerts on Friday night [you can even buy some wine to enjoy with the music!].

Tomorrow, I want to check out the Basquiat exhibit at The Museum of Contemporary Art [MOCA]...the museum stays open until midnight and they have special movie screenings and cocktails [!] and music and spoken word...very cool. I'm going to miss summer!