Found poetry 31

August!

Time to change your desktop calendar.

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Art report / Hamburg 4

Two more pieces of art from the Hamburger Kunsthalle featuring fiber -- both very simple, little more than big pieces of fabric hanging flat against the wall.

Franz Erhard Walther, Three Wall Pedestals, 1980-1 (detail below)

Well, this has a little bit extra added onto the big pieces of canvas, with extensions that are arranged on the floor, and on two of the pieces, to the top and sides.  The left-hand and central panels have strapped pockets at floor level, the right-hand panel has some kind of extra fabric-covered plane standing an inch out from the wall.

I wasn't sure what to think of this piece; perhaps I was confused by the translation.  The card on the wall translated Drei Wandsockel as "Three Wall Pedestals" -- but what's a wall pedestal?  Google translate gave me "Wall Sockets," but where would you plug something in? 

I asked my German friend for clarification, and didn't get much.  She wrote me back: "A Sockel is some construction on which you can present something, typically it would be a statue on a Sockel.  Probably fixed to it, and when upheaval is on, statues are pushed off the Sockel, or if you lose confidence into an idol you push that idol from a (metaphorical) sockel.  So Karl Marx was pushed off the Sockel in East Germany after 1989 a number of times. A Wandsockel would normally be some Sockel fixed to the wall with something fixed onto it, but it is not a typical German word. With the photo illustration I would think it is giving the construction a name so it is not 'no title'."

So I remain mildly impressed, by the size of the work and the technical excellence of construction (although I bet he didn't do the sewing himself), but puzzled about the meaning -- I didn't get much out of it.

I was much more taken by these two works by Sara Sizer.  Although the velvet panels look like creased pieces of fabric dramatically shadowed in oblique light, they're actually stretched and perfectly flat -- the patterning is done with bleach discharge.

Sara Sizer, Scarlet, 2017 (detail below)

Sara Sizer, Please, 2017

Having done a fair amount of bleach discharge in my artistic career, I was transfixed by these pieces -- how on earth did she achieve that photo-perfect image?  A fruitless google expedition provided no answers (note to artists -- I sure wish you would put a word or two onto your website alongside the ravishing photos).

"Demo at Landgrove 2018 3"

Nowadays, I feel I am slowing down significantly. This painting was done more than a month ago in Vermont, but I have not posted it in a timely manner. Am I overly too busy? Maybe true, but I feel mainly is my psyche is out of whack again. My mind is keeping on shutting down and refuses to take any information from outside. My brain likes a over mixed color palette. It is full of mud. At this moment, I am in my camp trailer, off the grid, and alone. I hope my chattering mind can get quiet down a little bit. Although I myself may go crazy, This painting looks still OK. I am keeping on push my art forward, even I feel exhausted.

Art report / Hamburg 3

A couple more posts and I will have told you everything about the art I found on my Baltic vacation.  Let's return to the Hamburger Kunsthalle for a collection of works by Haegue Yang, a South Korean artist who is on an artificial straw kick.  She has made three almost-life-size figures out of the straw plus other trimmings. 

At first glance I shuddered -- what on earth was this strange thing, half fat waddly robot and half explosion in a drapery showroom? 

The Intermediate -- Fan Dance around a Pagoda (detail below)

It wasn't until I saw the other two sculptures that I started to feel better; at least this artist was sticking to her theme and exploring its possibilities at some length. 

The Intermediate -- Pungmul Ball (detail below)

The Intermediate -- Hairy All Over

The third sculpture, the plainest one, was my favorite; I thought the unadorned artificial straw worked best without the distractions of other plastic doodads.  I wish the artist had given more of a hint as to what these pieces are supposed to be about.  Online statements about her work comment that her concerns include "migration, postcolonial diasporas, enforced exile and social mobility" but I can't deduce which ones are in play with this series. 

I would also like to have seen more of these figures; I know from google images that she has made many of these pieces and I think seeing a whole gaggle of them together would be impressive.  You would probably see them as people and focus more on their sheer numbers, wondering who they are and what they are doing here, than on the silliness of the craft materials.  But then again, maybe these "people" are part of a postcolonial diaspora, and they're spread out all over the world, only a few in Hamburg.