Portrait of Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin is all over the news today for some reason. And somehow I came across this magnificent portrait of her in the L.A. Times, originally taken by Brian Adams for Runner’s World:

Sarah Palin - portrait, or still life?

I am not really sure why the L.A. Times chose this image for the article, but as an art historian, this photo fascinates me. The props are spectacular – check out that hideous sconce on the wall behind her head, and the fuzzy moccasins on the window sill behind her. What does this mean?! Look at the blackberry in her hand! (Wait, are there two of them?)! And the flag (omg – I think it’s plastic!) casually placed on the chair for her to “lean on.” I posted this to my FB page and my friends started to analyze too. One person pointed out that the electrical outlet near the floor has a safety cover only on one of the two plug holes. Another was nauseated by the U.S. Army banner; using her son’s deployment as a prop. If you look closely at the carpet, you can see her tennis shoe marks on the freshly vacuumed carpet. You can almost imagine additional poses for earlier frames in the film.

The image is so carefully composed, and reminds me of Thomas Eakins’ 19th-century portraits of the learned men and women of his day (many of them very peculiar), depicted at work in their professional lives. Compare her to this painting by Eakins of Frank Cushing, who was one of the first anthropologists to “go native” by living with Zuni Indians in the southwest. Cushing was a bit of a rogue–and a maverick–in his day, too. Is it just me? Or is there a freakish resemblance in these compositions? On the other hand, of you turn Sarah’s portrait clockwise 90 degrees, it starts to look like an odalisque. Ouch – did I just say that?

Frank Hamilton Cushing by Thomas Eakins

Visual Literacy for College Freshmen

At U Penn this year, incoming Freshmen are taking a twist on the old classic summer reading project. Instead of reading a novel together, they are looking at a painting, Thomas Eakins’ Gross Clinic. This painting is rich with historical and cultural meaning, and opens the door to study of many topics, from American history, to medical practice and history, to psychological studies, and oh yeah, art history too. I love this painting and spent weeks in an art history seminar in grad school (ehem) dissecting it.  The university is using the project as a way to create community bonds between the local arts organizations and the students, between campus and community.

But I love it because it foregrounds the importance of visual literacy, something that I have always felt is ignored in our culture (it’s not one of the three Rs), yet which is becoming increasingly important in our world where we’re swamped with imagery. Learning how to evaluate what you see and interpret meaning from images is not innate; it is a learned skill. Reading, in my mind, is no longer just about interpreting the syntax of  spoken and written language. It’s heartening to see a major university embracing a visual expression as a way to explore and read about larger historical and cultural issues.

Managing Expectations in Museums

Following on the Museums and the Web conference last week, Nina Simon made an excellent observation in a great blog post Avoiding the Participatory Ghetto: Are Museums Evolving with their Innovative Web Strategies?:

“Are participatory activities happening on the web because that is the best place for them? Or is the web the dumping ground for activities too messy or uncomfortable to do onsite?”

She goes on to describe the disconnect she felt when visiting the Indianapolis Museum of Art, after visiting their super-Web 2.0 Web site. It was just a normal museum, not what she’d expected from a museum with such a participatory Web site, famous for its transparency that lays bare the inner workings of the institution. There’s a great conversation in the comments to her post among Museum technologists and staff about the nature of participation in museums (it’s a good read!). I feel like we really need to ask ourselves, What do we expect visitors will do on our virtual and real world sites? Do they have to do the same types of activities in both spaces? On one level, Nina’s right. There is a disconnect. But is it fair to compare? I also have a similar disconnect between my real-world home and my FaceBook home. The real one is decidedly quiet. It’s where I study, and eat, and sleep, and play with the dog . While the FB home is really loud with tons of people streaming through, taking quizzes, and posting photos *all the time* because I have friends all over the world. I am not saying that museums don’t have anything to learn from online social media. I just ask about what we expect from these different spaces. As the comments on Nina’s post show, it is very instructiveto think this through , but is it fair to compare?

The Zine Goes Glossy

HP’s new MagCloud service allows anyone with a computer and some design skillz to publish glossy magazines. This kind of self-publishing was the realm of hand-crafted zines. (Check out the cool new NYT slideshow+audio presentation too!). View the slideshow.

Read the article at NYT.com.

Art in the Crack of the LAC (MA)

Went to LACMA’s late Night Art event last night. They made very good use of the space between the Ahmanson and BCAM buildings, behind the Urban Light installation—a space I started to call the “crack in the Lac” with my friends. DJs pumping out the German techno and outdoor seating with bar created a very pleasant outdor hangout space. The best part though was behind the projection screen, where some LACMA staff (perhaps education staff? They always have the most fun) were there with art-making supplies for making puppets and photocopies of Franz West’s face for mask-making, and a mini installation of liquor bottles plastered a la Franz West (hidden treasures for sure).

The art was a bit difficult to see due to the crowds, and the readings in the galleries, which sometimes blocked the art from those of us who didn’t want to listen to the spoken word. Franz West was not for me (except as a cut-out puppet I made), but the Art of Two Germanys exhibition was quite impressive. It was huge though, and although the art was a bit depressing, you got the sense of something that must be important. Highlights included some great still photographs of performance events, including artists like Josef Beuys and Nam June Paik; and some monstrous Anselm Kieffer paintings. In one room, a chocolate sculpture by Dieter Roth proved how experiencing art through unexpected sensory information can make you take a second look (see object on left in image below). I had dismissed it on first glance, but then smelled chocolate and had to find the source of the smell. Those little terracotta monkeys are actually chocolate (and lions). One well-placed performance inside the gallery was a musician playing a leaden sounding composition on a double-bass in a room with a glasnost-era oil painting of Ronald Reagan looking skyward, and a red carpet leading away from him across the room.

Gallery installation shot of LACMA’s The Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures.

Elias Sime :: eye of the needle, eye of the heart

Made a quick visit to Santa Monica Museum of Art yesterday to visit a friend who works there and was taken aback by their wonderful exhibition of work by Ethiopian artist Elias Sime. It’s presented like an installation, with stuffed and decorated goat skins, and thrones carved from wood and animal horns arranged around the floor of the room, which they opened up to one big room with the high warehouse ceiling opened up.

Elias Sime at SMMA, image from http://micheleguieu.blogspot.com/

I was reminded of Ethiopia, probably because of the colors and materials. The brown and earthy tenor of the whole room, highlighted with bright colors of plastic and threads within the larger pieces are the colors of Ethiopia, where mud and rocks prevail. The goat skins and thrones, along with mud and straw sculptures of monkeys in one corner, are made from the materials traditionally ised forbuilding traditional tukuls ( before eucalyptus was introduced in the 19th century!). A video in the back room, narrated by an enthusiastic Peter Sellars, gives a great view of the artist’s life within his community in Addis.

Although the goat skins and thrones dominate the room (I love the wooden carved feet emerging from some of the thrones!), the stitched canvas paintings hung on the walls are surreal and impressive in their craftsmanship. The imagery is pure modernism–heroic and masculine, but every line is stitched into the canvas (by hand? I think so.). You get close and you can feel the tenacity required to manually create the broad strokes of color one 1/4-inch stitch at a time.

My favorite part of the installation is video that you can control, taking you through the streets of Addis. They simply attached a camera to a car and drove around. It really gives a sense of this city, which my dad calls an “overgrown village.”

Check out this blog, which has loads of great photos, including Peter Sellars’ gigantic face from one of the the videos.

See some of my own photos from Ethiopia, and read about my travels there by choosing the “Ethiopia” tag on this blog, or visit my Flickr page.

Katie Lewis :: Drawing Room

For Katie Lewis’s first one-gal show, she drapes a room in colorful squiggling lines that emerge from holes in the ceiling, pile up on the floor, and loop along on the baseboards. They are meant to be non-words, cursive letters strung together that evoke thoughts—or perhaps the act of associative thinking, meandering from idea to idea. But they also remind me of sculptural yarn tangled (think Nicola Vruwink), the endless doodles I made in class high school, or the curly electric wires of Christmas lights.

Giant Robot Post-It Show

This is a brilliant idea for an art show: commission a slew of local artists to create little drawings on Post-It notes, stick them to your gallery wall, and charge about $20 for each. It’s Cash-and-Carry–when you buy it, you take it home. It’s a great way to make original works of art affordable, makes a really fun exhibition to explore, encourages the artists to have fun and experiment, and exposes your audience to a whole bunch of new artists all at once! I love it.

On view at the GR2 store/gallery on Sawtelle in West L.A. through January 14. But hurry! They are disappearing fast! They should do this again!

Giant Robot GR2 Post-It Note exhibition

Museums & the Web 2008 Sound Bytes

A few of the great things I have heard here in Montreal at the Museums & the Web conference. Apologies if I got some of these attributions wrong; I can’t read my own handwriting.

Re: IP and Fair Use: “We in the non-profit sector need to talk the talk and walk the walk. If we want a robust public domain, we need to treat it as a true public domain. —Michael Geist, opening plenary

“Objecthood doesn’t have a place in the world unless someone is making use of it.” —Olafur Eliasson, as quoted by Peter Samis who went on to cogently point out that this statement calls into question the very basis of value in most museums, the object.

Re: a blog SFMOMA created for the Olafur Eliasson exhibition, which invited contributions from users: “We invited the public into the room, asked them to tell us what they think, and then we left the room.” —Peter Samis

“Demographics are descriptive, not predictive.” —this was a comment by an attendee in the session Engaging Museum Audiences.

“People coming to museums are feeding their own idea of who they are by going to a museum. They are testing out identities.” —I believe this was Gabrielle Trépanier

Re: standardizing data for sharing: “It’s good enough.” —Frankie Roberto

“When you look closely at all the organization of our systems, it’s actually a mess….Mess is good….How do we smoosh it all?” —Seb Chan

“We sell experiences in the leisure market, not just information. People can get information from Wikipedia. What we offer is an experience.” —Seb Chan

“Scarcity vs. Scale: In the old model, the value of an object is determined by it’s scarcity. In the new model, scale and proliferation may be where value lies.” —Mike Ellis

Blogging in Museums (as discussed at MW2008)

It’s been a while since I have posted (long enough for me to not notice WordPress updated their interface – ack!) and what better inspiration to get me writing again than a blogging workshop at the Museums & the Web conference! I am at the conference in Montreal and participated in this great session hosted by Brian Kelley and Mike Ellis. What made it great? Mostly the discussion with colleagues from other museums from all over – mostly North America, the UK and New Zealand. We shared our experiences with blogs, got some great ideas about how to make them successful, and whether to do them at all. One participant, arkrausehardie, posted a great summary of the sessuion on the M&W Conference Blog: Blogging with Master Bloggers Mike Ellis and Brian Kelley.

For me, the best bits were the brainstorming and advice about how to promote the benefits of blogging in museums. This largely amounts to quelling fears about opening up the institution to comments from “anyone.” But it seems clear that the building-community potential of a blog is huge. The opportunity a blog can offer for a museum to be open and honest and build trust with an online audience should be embraced, not feared (easier said than done). I also liked that Mike pointed out that a blog can help you maximize what you already do. And Brian and a few participants in the session made the point that if you’re not going to embrace the spirit of the blog — with non-institutional language, allowing unmoderated comments, and a simpler workflow for approving posts than most publications in museums have — then you should just not do it.

I agree. And yet, many of the most successful blogs I have seen are peer-to-peer blogs. Museum staff writing about our work, “thinking out loud” as Brian said it, to our peers. I am still wondering what makes a successful blog for our visitors? And I am still wondering who is going to write that blog? Maybe most of the blogs coming out of museums now are about technology in museums because the people inclined to blog at the moment are the technologists in museums? (Indeed, most blogs out there are peer-to-peer. Most bloggers write for themselves, don’t they?) I think a blogger needs to feel the compulsion to blog, to write. How do we tap into the great voices in our institutions and get them inspired to write…in their own voices?

The other thing that really struck me in the session was the advocacy for starting blogs about your institution, or associated with your institution, on your own. This is the spirit of the Web, right? To do so,  Brian and Mike advocated for clarity about ownership of the blog and stating clear policies about posts. This just opens up, for me, the huge Pandora’s box of personal vs. professional activities. Where do you draw the line? I am starting to think that in this day and age, the line is decidedly dotted.