Oh No! My child vomited on my brand new laminator. What cleaning supplies should I use and what punishment is best for the child? Spanking?

(-Final Entry-) This, as you may have guessed from the parenthesized title, is my last entry for Siena. In which, not only will I be summarizing all of my feeling towards Italy and this program in which I am currently enrolled, but also one artist of my choosing. Exciting.

Ghada Amer is ridiculous. Full on unbelievable. There’s a reason I have seen her work three times in the last month an a half. Once in Seattle. Once at the Bienalle. And one final time at the MACRO gallery in Rome. Their was a lot of it in Rome. A whole floor of the place. Four rooms. More work than I could shake a fist at. Not that I would want to.

The initial draw comes from her recognition of canvas as a fabric. Her lines are stitched not painted (excepting of course those lines that are painted). Repetitious, patterned, images turn the canvas into an embroidered blanket that reads like a painting. The excess of thread ends hanging from the paintings make sure you know what you’re looking at. There’s no attempt to make the thread look like brushwork. Because, well, it’s thread. Why should it look like anything else? The sexual imagery of the works is contrary to the method of their production. We are forced to reconcile the imagery with the very apparent means. Despite all of these things, her work is so good that I have a hard time putting my finger on exactly what it is that makes me like it so much... and not just because of the security guard eyeballing me the whole time.

I have a hard time saying her work is anything but good. It is solid, put together, thought out, ridiculous. Good. Undeniably some of the best work I have seen in the last... ever.

On the whole the last month has gone fairly smoothly. Collaborating with 16 other people was a little work. The first half of the trip established a nice base for the group to work from. For the group as a whole to experience so much contemporary work at the Bienalle was helpful in giving everyone a similar background. As with my other collaborative experience of this size it opens up possibilities that would not be executable individually. I’m really looking forward to seeing how the work comes together back in Eugene. I got to make the poster for the gallery show. I was excited. Very excited. I think the text still needs some tweaking, but this is where it’s at right now.

Know your rubber, stamp horror stories.

(-Article-) The “stories to be told while walking,” I feel were the best indicator of the change of our spacial conception of the world. Where Aborigines try to keep alive multi-generational traditional walking stories, that require days to fully tell, while travel time is reduced to a small fraction of the appropriate time. The stories are still told while traveling, but rapidly sped up, condensed, and harder to grasp to an outsider.

The only way the stories are kept in their original form is at night, while they are recited in order for them to be remembered. The reverse here, where the traveling has become less real than the recitation of the old stories, has taken place over a relatively short period of time. In such a short period a culture cannot change as fast as new forms of transportation or systems of roads take to implement. There is a trade of speed for culture. A trade that doesn’t seem ideal by any means.

Paper of the week. Flower patterned!

Rome was good. Unfortunately a little too big to experience in two days. It was full of very large things. I’m still a short of an explanation for the Pantheon. It’s an aberration of epic proportions. How that thing is two thousand years I have no idea.

Also, thumbs up, no one was stabbed or stepped on a hypodermic needle. The area around our hotel had several large trees. That is to say, it was shady. Like a red wood forest. Don’t get me wrong, I could have spent a lot more time in Rome. I just would have needed to work on my dodging skills.

Why permanent marker is really the only marker choice you can make.

(-Sistine Chapel-) The Sistine Chapel is a little overwhelming. Unfortunately, this has very little to do with the paintings. Walking into the sistine chapel is like making the mistake of jumping into a crowded wave pool. Imagine though that the shallow end you’re being pushed towards only has one small ladder to exit. People keep jumping into the deep end because they’re just so excited. Everyone is screaming the whole time. OH MY GOD THIS CHAPEL IS SO MUCH FUN. They’re smashing into you. Elbows are flying, some old man loses his toupee, and the life guard is blowing his whistle for everyone to stop yelling because this is a Holy Wave Pool. I hope you’re having fun.

The frescoes are nice though. Michelangelo certainly knew what he was doing. It’s interesting to look from one end to the other. Stylistically they’re very different. A small stiff man on one end is paired with a gigantic, moving (not literally), man and his very large fish. The fish alone is more interesting than the small man. I guess as you paint the entirety of a ceiling of the course of years your paintings would change. His shift to exaggeration nearing full on mannerism is presumably preferable to a shift to sloppy.

This says something about his methods as well. The architectural elements of the painting reflecting the architecture of the room, creating a sort of grid that runs the length of the ceiling, leaves no doubt that it was considered before the changing characters. These differing stylistic choices fit into place because of this pre-planning. The most important choices were made while the figures were still not considered.

How to protect your most valuable possessions (scrapbooks); a review of fire/water proof safes.

(-Villa Borghese-) Bernini, it’s safe to say, is good at what he does. His attention to detail is so intense that it gives the figures a cartoonish exaggerated appearance. Which I like. It’s nice. That’s where it stops. His craft is top notch. Maybe even top shelf. But that’s about it.

His work is of the same thing that artists have been sculpting/painting/etch-a-sketching for well over a thousand years before him. With a few exceptions, the renaissance art we viewed progresses in terms of skill, not content. But, with something so enticing, I have a hard time saying that this is bad. In fact I’m okay that his work stops at the visual. It’s just so nice looking. There’s always one little thing left to look at.

Should you keep locks of hair in your scrapbooks? If so, how many is inappropriate?

At this point, halfway through the trip, I am starting to consider my attempts to keep anything close to a daily blog a complete failure. Here’s to the second half I guess.

First, my bag showed up the other day and I am rolling in the clothes. It was surprisingly easy to get along without. Not that I’m too upset now that I have them.

To quickly update everyone who might be remotely interested, and going in reverse order. The class spent two days in Florence this week. It’s only an hour away by bus. The first day was a trip to the Uffizi. Which, for those of you wondering, means “office” in Italian. I cannot count the number of lines that I waited in. One to get inside. One to get through the metal detector. One to check my bag. One to get to the part with the actual art work. One to move through some of the rooms with art in them. Five. Five lines. Seems that I can count.

Last week we traveled to Venice for the Bienalle. The U of O architecture class that has (or had) been over here for a month and a half came with us. There were so many of us that we got a chartered bus. My knees have never been so far into the seat in front of me.

On the way to Venice we stopped in Vincenza for two nights. I have now seen a good half of all the buildings Carlo Scarpa ever designed. This is misleading. He only designed like 12 things.

The rest of our time has been spent in Siena. Excepting one trip to the beach. Resulting in frosted flake like chunks of skin falling off my back for the last couple of days. We’re staying in an apartment just outside of Siena’s walls. It’s a walled city by the way. There are three of us in the apartment. It’s exactly what I would have thought a European apartment should look like. Look at this radiator...



It’s very European.



PS Blog world. For those wondering (Caitlin) Yoko Ono is crazy because her piece at the Guggenheim was a tree in the sculpture garden. A nice tree. Unrelated, the blog entries with this “(-entry-)” at the top, or as part of another post, are my required ones for school. Not to say they aren’t worth skimming over.

The necessity of a strong chronology in family scrapbooks.

Instinctively I know that it cannot fell good to be thrown from the back of a galloping, bareback horse. It follows that to land on another horse, bounce off, and then hit the ground would be worse. I saw this happen. In person. Yesterday.

Football is treated like a brutal sport. It isn’t. The Palio seems to be. A 90 second, three lap, horse race that happens twice a year. There are ten riders crammed into a narrow track that makes them look like sardines at the starting gate. So many riders fall, that only the horse is required to finish. Half of them fell off yesterday. Unlike the rodeo, it’s not just the rider that goes down. The horse falls too. Sometimes it goes down on top of or into the jockey. I am reminded of a condensed Nascar race. All the crashes with none of the uneventful bits. On top of which a 300,000 Euro award goes to the winner. Bribes are made between the riders at the starting gate. The jockeys hit each other when they get close enough. And there are more paramedics present than I have ever seen. This all make for a very intense minute and a half. Oh, and it’s old. In one form or another the Palio has been around for almost a thousand years. Over which rivalries have formed. My roommates and I had to stop and wait out a gigantic brawl between two of the neighborhoods before we could make it back to our apartment. It filled streets. I tried not to get too close.

They were also filming the next 007 movie during the Palio. I am told, by someone with a large zoom lens, that the small white silhouette I saw across the Piazza was Daniel Craig. So, fingers crossed, maybe I’ll make it into the next movie.

Several things about the photo.
-Not even half the spectators are there at this point (if that). No one from Siena has actually shown up yet.
-The Umbrellas are because it was so hot. They had IVs set up to re-hydrate people that were in continuous use.

Gifting scrapbooks, appropriate and inappropriate occasions.

(-Academia-) The installation of art in the Uffizi made viewing the works somewhat difficult. The installation of the David, however, in the Academia was well thought out. Walking into the main gallery the first thing you see looking to your right is the David. It seems gigantic (partially because it is). The form and depth are immediately apparent even from a distance.

The craft used to create it is emphasized through its installation. Natural light entering from the skylight lights the work in heavy contrast bringing out its form. Surrounding walls are painted the color of the marble. You see the form only because of the light and the skill with which the form is carved. The stand on which it is placed functions in more than creating a similar perspective as its intended viewing angle. The Sculpture is raised above the crowd so that there is not a point in the room where it cannot be seen in whole. This raising does a third thing. The David is raised towards the Ceiling. Much like a Christmas tree that doesn’t seem big outside, but once it comes indoors it transforms into a new larger tree, the David’s size is increased with its introduction to an enclosed space.

More interesting to me than the David was a plaster mock-up by _______. In an oddly self referential choice the sculpture’s arm is wrapped around a bust. The position of this head clearly defines it as a bust. It is lower to the ground. Were it to be a full person it would have to be the main figure’s conjoined twin. The figures both seem a little jovial for this to be true. That there is emotion at all in the figures is strange when compared to almost any other piece of the time. I have to wonder if it was created as a joke or some inside studio project. Even stranger if it were a marble sculpture somewhere. It feels like a joke postcard. One that I would buy.

(-Carlo Scarpa-) This building is from our trip to Vicenza. I apologize for the cellphone photo. You’d think that I didn’t bring a real camera on the trip. The building is a castle that Carlo Scarpa gutted to insert a very modern museum. Much like he was replacing a bad heart with a pig’s heart. Imagine though that he didn’t just find the heart but carefully constructed it from the aorta down to the tiniest detail. Including the stands for the paintings.

Scarpa’s full involvement in his project was a necessity for the remodel to be successful. Already there is medieval castle that contrasts with the modern architecture. Had there been variances within the new architecture it would have distracted from the meeting of old and new.

The use of modern materials. Steel. Cement. Combined with the geometric stylings of Scarpa all helped to create a new looking building. Modern certainly. But, I feel it is more important that it is a new building. Where Castelvechia’s blocks are weathered, rounded. The newly incorporated architecture’s harsh angles stress their recent construction. So that when combined with a modern style we see a new building inside an old one. Where the new architecture highlights the old not just itself.

a short, quick, guide to embossing.

Marcel Duchamp is a monster. A real beast of a man. Think Antonio Banderas in Desperado. How you can create something like one of his paintings is beyond me. Or, for that matter, create almost anything in the Venice Guggenheim without also being able to rise up and crush a city. That museum reads like an art history book for the first half of the twentieth century... granted, a very small book.

Those pieces were finished pieces. Everything about them considered. I didn’t feel like I saw this as much as I would have liked at the Biennale. Don’t let me see the nuts and bolts of your piece if that’s not what you want me to see. Cover that up. But, if it is, by all means pop the hood on this installation and let me check out its horse powers. I just don’t want to be stuck under the hood of a Chevy Nova when I’m really supposed to be looking at the knitted seat covers.

However, my biggest gripe with the Bienalle (which, by the way, was excellent) is this... who went and made projectors the default choice for the contemporary artist. That doesn’t just get my goat, it sacrifices it to a pagan god on a bloodied stone altar. Your projector is distracting me. It’s the dragging muffler on your car. I don’t mind if you use one in a theater setting. I expect that to the point where I might be weirded out if there wasn’t a projector. Anywhere else though I really like to see a reason why there’s something that isn’t your piece strapped to the ceiling across the room. Not like there aren’t other options. Moving on...

(-Country Pavilion-) To go back to a previously used metaphor -- wow, Shih Chieh Huang of the Taiwan pavilion, I could look under your piece’s hood all day. If a 2nd grader had been there he would have suggested that I try and marry your art. And, by god, I might have tried.

When it really comes down to it, Huang’s installation was all under the hood. And there was a lot under there. A repetitious use of relatively simple technological components in non-standard ways created machines with moving limbs made of plastic bags inflated with computer fans. It was similar to looking at deep sea pictures of strange pulsing animals or being miniaturized and sent through someone’s intestines on a fantastic journey. Looking closer it became clear that the machines were creating these organic feel through a very mechanical/technological means. A TV showing a movie of eyes would be read by a light sensor over the pupils that could cause water to flow, TVs to turn on and off, and bags to inflate. A hundred small Rube Goldberg machines.

Twist ties, plastic bottles full of green fluid, zip ties, and extension chords kept the aesthetic unified. Things manufactured by Huang’s hand were kept out of the installation. The pieces were crowded together much like the components that they were composed of. Thematically the work carried itself from the smallest piece to the entirety of the installation. Transforming the inorganic into the organic. Creating a space that felt like something new.

The Taiwanese pavilion itself dealt with culture. The five different artist included all represented their own cultural influences (with Huang the technological) that come from a similar area. The Artists were selected because of their diverse work so that Taiwan can depict its own diverse culture.

other things:
-Peggy Guggenheim is buried with about 20 of her pets (including Sir Herbert)
-I may have accidentally eaten a brain sandwich
-Yoko Ono is crazy
-My bag showed up and I'm going to throw away the pair of socks I have been wearing