Art in different places

I did another round of Chelsea art galleries last week, and also did a MOMA visit.   One of the interesting things about going to art galleries is that what you see is guided by the instincts of the people that run the galleries; instincts that run back and forth between the need to sell art and the need to support artistic quality.  (The name of one gallery I checked out was "Guided By Invoices")   Which means that, unlike a museum, where all the works have received some sort of curatorial stamp of approval (whatever that is worth), visiting galleries can sometimes mean that you are seeing stuff that is really about making money; except that how do you actually really know?  What is the difference between a big name artist like Damien Hirst, who markets to high-end collectors, and someone who sells tacky paintings of flowers to make money?   So it is fun to wander into a space and think about what it is that you are seeing.

At MOMA I did the 1940-1980's galleries, that are organized around the official MOMA approved categories; a room for pop art, a room for abstract expressionists, etc.   I saw the newly installed Rauschenberg combine "Canyon", which includes a stuffed bald eagle sticking out of the canvas.  The eagle makes the work unsellable in America, so the family that recently inherited it was forced to donate it to MOMA.  A crazy, wonderful painting.  (My own family inherited a considerable amount of junkyard taxidermy ((a stuffed ibex, etc.)) from my father, which the IRS valued highly, but which we ended up sending to the junkyard because it could not be sold.)

Another pleasure was a room curated by the artist Trisha Donnelly, where she upends the MOMA curatorial rules.  This room featured a number of exceedingly large diagrams of microprocessor chips in vivid color and detail (donated by Texas Instruments, HP, etc. in the 1990's).  These were juxtaposed with an odd assortment of photographs, a wheelchair from the design department, an art nouveau table, etc.   Made you think...

I also revisited the abstraction show; it has wonderful stuff in it, but still seems to broad for my taste.  Including people like Georgia O'Keefe and Marcel Duchamp as part of inventing abstraction seems spurious to me.  They very well may have made art that was abstract in some sense, but that what not really what either of them was about...

Sofia Gubaidulina

On Saturday night we went to another of the Miller Theater's composer portraits, this one of the Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina.  I have heard Gubaidulina's music when she came to Vancouver a while ago (back in the days when people played notated contemporary music there).   She was born in 1931, and has lived through tumultuous times in Russian life and music.  My previous impression of her was as a Christian and somewhat mystical composer through works like "Offertorium". This concert, however, showed a more modernistic composer; one work written in the early 1970's, was serial sounding, and full of dissonant sound effects characteristic of the period.   The highlight, though, was a concerto for bassoon, with an orchestra of 4 cellos and 3 basses.   Low strings!   This proved to be extremely original and quirky, often frequently upending conventional notions of the relationship between soloist and ensemble.  Full of striking ensemble effects, it received a wonderful performance from the soloist.  Another piece, for harpsichord and string quintet, was based on a Bach chorale, and was also intriguing to hear.

When we go to these new music concerts, we are also looking carefully at the audience, to see if we find people that we might have known 25 years ago (which involves trying to imagine what they might look like 25 years later...)   We were delighted to find at this concert our old friend Leo Treitler  (who we last saw a year ago..)   So we went for a drink, and caught up.