the most perfect way to piss off the French

Is by placing Jeff Koons' art in Versailles.   This represents possibly the most fabulous melding of ridiculous contemporary art and exhibition space EVER.  Michael Jackson and Bubbles surrounded by rococo decor?  Perfect!  The setting endows the work with a deeper irony than it had before--and with Koons, that's saying a lot.

third time's a charm

This blog has attained the lucky third strike of unintentionally offending people I actually like, so it's time to wipe the slate clean and start over, blog-wise, that is.

However, I rather enjoy my cozy little family of 11 regular readers, and I think the simple act of blogging is good for me. What's not so good for me is being embarrassed by the content of previous posts. Unfortunately, this sometimes happens despite my best efforts to prevent it--for about a month over the summer, this blog appeared when someone searched my full name, even though I had very assiduously removed all instances to my full name over a year ago.

For the reasons cited above, I've decided to shelve the old blog and all its pesky google-cached archives and start afresh, with a brand new mission statement and everything! This way, when someone from a museum googles me and I don't know if it's an old professor or one of my friends who's got an internship there, I feel [mostly] confident they won't run into any unflattering posts. I may transfer some of the completely inoffensive/unembarrassing-in-any-way posts over in a few days, but the archive thing... there are four years of annoying archived posts that I just can't deal with "draft"ing.

So welcome again to my blog of random observations on New York, art, grad school, and the absurdity of my everyday life.

-G

what does an art history grad student do all day?

Mask with Encircling Horns
Wood and kaolin, L: 62.5 cm. H: 42 cm
Collected by Aristide Courtois, Ex-coll. Josef Müller
© Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva
Inv. BMG 1019-15
Photo P.-A.Ferrazzini

Well, I'll try to give you an idea. Today, after waking up and deciding what to wear, a somewhat involved process as I am one of the world's most indecisive dressers and I seem only to own uncomfortable shoes these days, I will go to [my grad school]. There I will have lunch with other students in our lovely marble lunch room before sitting in on a class on classicism/anti-classicism in European art between the wars--a friend of mine is giving a presentation on Nazi architecture, and I remain interested in pretty much anything German and potentially dealing with Berlin from about 1900-present. [I lived in Berlin for a few sweet months in the spring and summer of 2004. It's a truly amazing place.]

After the presentation (during which I will hopefully NOT fall asleep), I will go to [redacted world-famous museum], where I will look at the Kwele mask they have in storage. What do I mean by "look at"? Basically, I will try to do with a physical object what literary folks do with a book: analyze the crap out of it.

Pipibudze Mask
Wood and kaolin, H: 25.4 cm
Ex-coll. Tristan Tzara
© Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva; Inv. BMG 1019-80
Photo P.-A.Ferrazzini

What does the mask look like in person? How are the paints applied? What does the object tell me about the people who made it? How does it inform what I already know about the type of object it is? Does it fit neatly into the corpus, or is it a problematic inclusion? More importantly, what does it look like?

Gong Mask
Wood and pigment, H: 55 cm
© Musée Dapper, Paris.
Photo M.Carrieri

What can we say about the masks I've posted here? Well, they all exhibit bi-lateral symmetry and polychromy. Several of the masks have protruding elements like horns (on the first and last masks), teeth (on the gorilla, third), or trunks (on the elephant, fourth); despite this, they generally remain two-dimensional--what does it mean that this is not exactly true for the elephant? There is a strong preference for heart-shaped faces--are there similarities to other masking traditions in the area? I'll probably spend a few hours trying to find the answer to this question--and it's this sort of inquiry, my friends, that keeps me in the library until the long hours of the night.

It's not that art historians simply look at an object and then write about it, no no no: you have to figure out WHY it looks like it does. This is always a crazy big question, because it means that you have to think about what else looks like your object, why does that other thing look like that... How do all aspects of your object inform what it looks like--and how does what it looks like inform what you know about the artist, the patron, the society, the religion, the artistic practice in the region, etc. etc. ad nauseam. And then you have to go back and look at the object again before you forget what it looks like. It's like a great big three-dimensional web in a dark room, and you've got a dinky little flashlight.

Mask with Trunk (Elephant)
Wood and pigment, H: 76.2 cm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Michael C.Rockefeller Memorial Collection,
Gift of Nelson A.Rockefeller, New York, 1964. 1978.412.292
© 1989 The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Anyway, these masks are quite striking, aren't they? Seeing them in person is so great--but then, art is always better in person.

After looking at the mask and taking as many notes as I can about as many different aspects of it as I can, I'll spend a few hours at the museum's library, taking yet more notes on a PhD dissertation about the BaKwele ("Ba" = people). [This is why I developed tendonitis in my thumb, people. It sucks.] Then I'll go home and prepare to tutor SAT tomorrow. Excellent!

Antelope Mask
Wood and kaolin, H: 38cm
© Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva.Inv. BMG 1019-49.
Photo P.-A.Ferrazzini

An important note: the masks I've posted here represent a selection of all the Kwele masks out there, not that there are a lot. I tend to prefer the ones with protruding elements and high contrast values, so those are the ones that I've chosen to post on my blog--but they are NOT really that representative of the corpus of Kwele masks. For that--or if you're just interested in the masks I've posted--you should look at Louis Perrois's article on Kwele masks at Tribal Arts, "Art of the Kwele of Equatorial Africa: Ancestor masks, bush spirit masks." It's where I got the images for this post.

A caveat about the article: though Perrois is a well-respected scholar of other African art forms, he has not done very well on incorporating accurate ethnographic information into his formal analysis of these masks. Though his article is not very scholarly and rather informal, it does, however, provide a much more rounded selection of images than this blog post does.

Originally posted April 23, 2008.

up a creek with half a paddle

I have an enormous art crush on John Singer Sargent and don't particularly like Renoir (who, unfortunately, is the subject of my seminar). So I've got to connect them somehow; I'm thinking through Orientalism and exoticism (studio orientalism and the aesthetics of transformation? The fantasy of the [exotic] woman in nature?), and the trick is going to be figuring out a way to connect the images below (and about 50 other images). Presentation is on Tuesday, have written about one-third of a page. Situation dire. Eek.

Renoir, (1872) Parisian Women Dressed as Algerians

Renoir, (1870) Odalisque-Woman of Algiers
Sargent, (1907) Dolce Far Niente (It is Sweet Doing Nothing)

Sargent, (too tired to look up the date) Egyptian Girl

Courbet, (1856-7) Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine in Summer

Nude woman (photograph after Ingres) [comment: rrrrow!]

Sargent, (1880) Fumee d'Ambergris

I suppose I can just throw a lot of Sargent pictures up and wax rhapsodic. Mmmm.

Stay tuned for next week when we explore the incredibly poorly-researched and documented BaKwele masks of equatorial Africa!

In other exciting news: QPs have been approved by first readers. I have only to receive approval from the second readers by May 7th and I'll have my masters. Sweet.

Originally posted April 20, 2008.

Graduate Student Success Refreshments

I just got an email titled, "Graduate Student Success Workshops, Refreshments." I rather wish that there were such things as Graduate Student Success Refreshments. Just a thought.

Originally posted April 16, 2008.

ersatz self-sufficiency

I claim self-sufficiency almost everywhere outside of a kitchen (and other obvious places like airplane cockpits). Need to hang that picture? Build that shelving system? Prepare for a standardized test? Navigate a foreign city? Read tax code? Entertain oneself on a weekend night using only a cat, a paperclip, and a stick of gum? I'm your woman.

However, when it comes to feeding myself, I am woefully both under-educated and under-motivated: most of the time, I live on variations of baked french fries, frozen broccoli, ground turkey, chicken breast, and cheddar cheese. If I'm feeling especially epicurean, I'll make my big specialty: Annie's white cheddar macaroni and cheese, to which I add grape tomatoes, zante currants, and ground cardamom (seriously, it's really good. ...But it's also basically toddler gourmet).Thankfully, I also manage to choose roommates who either love to cook or love to eat out and pay for my food, so it's never really been a problem. My current roommate, however, has the unfortunate habit of leaving the city for extended periods of time, leaving me chefless and hungry. This morning, the lack of milk preventing the consumption of muesli (and the ill-advised purchase of premade Hollandaise sauce last week during a fit of hunger shopping burning a guilty hole in my penurious conscience), I decided to make Eggs Benedict, because, hey, if you're going to fail, FAIL LARGE. Behold my masterpiece, the most ersatz Eggs Benedict ever created ...though I suppose glommed together might be a more accurate description of what happened:The English muffin was reheated from frozen, the Hollandaise sauce was purchased (but reheated in an ersatz bain marie consisting of smaller bowl in a bigger bowl of hot water!), the bacon was microwaved, but the egg... THE EGG WAS POACHED. BY ME. And it was good, too.

I poached an egg!!

At this rate, I just might make it to 30 after all.

Originally posted April 12, 2008.

I am art historian, hear me roar

After about a full week of working for about 12 hours a day on it (and during my Spring Break, no less), I turned the first of my two qualifying papers in yesterday. Thank goodness.


P.S. Tigers are pretty darn cute. Especially this one:Seriously, that is the cutest picture of a tiger EVER.

Originally posted March 26, 2008.

what you should be looking at: Barnaby Barford

Barnaby Barford.

I was reading about him in Departures Magazine two and a half weeks ago and couldn't remember his name. It's been driving me bonkers because I loved what I saw, but Departures is one of those snooty weirdo AmEx things that you have to have a card to get, so I couldn't even look at the tables of contents and have just been typing in random permutations of "ironic humorous ceramic porcelain figurines art london" give or take a few words. Anyway.

Barford's stuff is very, very funny and I am slightly obsessed. As someone with a well-documented fondness for Monty Python and Steve Martin, the absurdity in both the construction and the titles just makes me melt. Witness:

Nobody fucking move.Table, Year: 2006. Dimensions: H 75 cm x L 50 cm x W 50 cm. Porcelain, Earthenware, Painted wood.

Plan for World Domination No.116. Pair of Tables, Year: 2006. Dimensions: H 70 cm x L 50 cm x W 50 cm. Porcelain, Earthenware, Resin, Glass, White Gold Leaf, Painted wood.


Struggling will only make it worse. Chandelier, Year: 2006. Dimensions: H 100 cm x L 75 cm x W 75 cm. Porcelain, Earthenware.

You sexy bitch. Mirror, Year: 2006. Dimensions: H 65 cm x W 60 cm x L 15 cm. Porcelain, Resin, GRP, Convex Mirror.

I just had to post this many items because I find them all so funny. Can't you just picture You sexy bitch right next to the door of someone's powder room? Awesome.

Originally posted October 17, 2007

what you should be looking at: emerging artist edition

Originally posted October 12, 2007.

After rain date after rain date, I finally got to meet up with a friend. Sadly, our rain date was actually on a date when it was raining. A lot.

We began the evening by going to a gallery opening at a gallery downtown, where a classmate of mine works. The show is of Adam Stennett's work, which I saw for the first time last night and which I thought was very interesting. Stennett's paintings (no, they're not photographs he's traced or anything) remind me of Corot for some very odd reason--in the painting in this post ("Drink") there's something about the handling of the paint around her face. And don't you just love that the color of her eyes matches the color of the label? To give you yet another reason to dig this painting, consider that the title of the show is "Use Only As Directed" and it shows people doing exactly the opposite. (Hmm. I'm thirsty.) I really, super duper adore his work.

what you should be looking at: Punt research edition

You should be looking at stuff about Punt. Incredibly, Punt has never been found--it's a lost civilization that we know only from ancient Egyptian references. That top picture shows an Egyptian naval expedition to the land of Punt sponsored by the Egyptian Pharaoh/Queen Hatshepsut (from the 18th Dynasty, in case you're curious)--but where the hell was it? What did it look like? What were the inhabitants like? Mysteries! What fun!

Originally posted October 5, 2007.