Wednesday, October 01, 2003
Spent the day at the Art Institute of Chicago - obviously I am aging as I didn't RUN to the Contemporary/Modern galleries. Meandered very leisurely through European Painting ... and took in loads of Manet, Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Cezanne, Degas, Van Gogh ...Bartolomeo Manfredi's "Cupid Chastised" was really awesome. Mars, the god of war, beats the crap out of Cupid for having caused his affair with Venus, which exposed him to the derision of the other gods.
Seurat's "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" was spectacular. He is surely the ultimate pixel pusher.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's Moulin Rouge renditions were very bizarre and intriguing. Lucian Freud's "8 Legs" was a bit weird and disturbing. A naked figure poses awkwardly on a bed holding a dog. Another pair of legs protrudes from under the bed. The dog is asleep, but the man holding her is awake and staring away from the viewer. Huh?????
Got a super surrealism fix - Dali, Duchamp, Magritte - loved Dali's "A Chemist Lifting with Extreme Precaution the Cuticle of a Grand Piano".
Marc Chagall has done a fantastically huge tribute to America in stained glass and celebrates the greatness of the United States and acclaims it as a country of freedom, liberty, culture and religious tolerance. Good thing for Chagall that he's dead and doesn't have to suffer through what America has now come to represent.
Quickly raced through an interesting exhibition - Intimate Encounters: Paul Gauguin and the South Pacific which marks the centenary of Paul Gauguin's (1848 -?1903) death by celebrating the Art Institute's recent gift from a Chicago collector of 40 drawings and prints by the great Post-Impressionist artist. Represented are works created during his first Tahitian sojourn (1891-93), the Paris interlude (1893-95), and his final years in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands (1895-1903). This body of work reveals the artist's search to put a face on the South Pacific culture he encountered during his last years.
Warhol's giant portrait of "Mao", nearly 15 feet in height was very powerful. Andy Warhol strove to examine every aspect of mass culture through silkscreened images of products, celebrities and political figures.
OK. The art in the museum is phenomenal. However, at no moment in time did I have a sense of where I was and where I could potentially go next. It was a totally disconcerting maze and I nearly missed the modern/contemporary galleries altogether. I could never decipher the Floor Plan and as a result was drifting from one space to the next like a lost soul. For years, we have, as creators of interactive virtual realities, striven to reproduce the museum experience. WELL, as an Information Architect, I was constantly conscious of the complete lack of Info Architecture in the Art Institute and longed for a navigational structure of some kind, breadcrumb trails, You Are Here, sensible cross-selling, contextual links ... I also really believe that sometimes less is more and the hugeness of all things American really boggles my brain.
Will hyperlink images to the above references at some point.
Cheers!!
:-)
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