Yikes on that last post. All's well, just drank a bunch one night.
Backstory: I took a day trip down to Miami with the fine arts students, hoping to further rub elbows with the intern program coordinators at the Rubell Family Collection. The bus left campus at 8:30am. I'd stayed up the night before working on paintings, then also, skateboarding around (I ordered a skateboard from online, and have been blissing out, like finding a long lost friend) until late. SO I got on the bus and ate a doughnut, as provided, then napped, and we stopped at a rest stop, where I peed, then ate another doughnut, then napped, and then we were in Miami, where we got off the bus and promptly ate lunch, provided to us by a corporate deli. I had a chicken salad, much as I usually go vegetarian, I've been on a high protein thing, which, eh. I'm closer to veg again now. Went into the De la Cruz collection, where I saw a few Peter Doig paintings. One of them excited me. Also a sculpture by Thomas Houseago. The fine arts students promptly went up to the third floor to see Torres's (or 'Felix's') pieces: a pile of candy, and a pile of papers with printed sentences on them, yikes. Felix is a museum legend, and I'm down, (look up his work if you don't know it- Alex Felix Gonzales Torres), but the campy attitude which my knuckle-dragging compatriots ate it up was bothersome, and I (perhaps as an oppositionist first and foremost) could not line up to take the candy, or a printed paper, as granted permission by the artist. It so happens that the candy represents the body of a deteriorating human (plagued with HIV). It's a statement piece about how we all participate in the undoing of these unfortunate individuals, which is so so literal, right? SO here's a bunch of fine artists in the museum space, having eaten doughnuts, and driven down on a private coach, and lunched, and cookied (provided by the museum), and topically involved with Felix's work, and they trounce up and take the candy! I know they're not hungry. Whatever, I couldn't. Here I've talked more about the whack piece than the Doig's, because the Doig painting (with a ferris wheel) speaks for itself- it's queer and plain, and subtle and honest. It is whole in itself, and interesting. So I left that gallery/museum with a bad aftertaste of pot-shot post-modernism, and a good memory of a Doig.
Then we went to the Rubell, where I'd been just two weeks prior. Things went well- I spoke with a Lauren, and the internship prospects seemed bleak but not impossible. The paintings were mostly the same since the last time I'd been. We moved along to the PAMM.
The PAMM is the Perez Art Museum of Miami. I'd also been there two weeks prior, but this time there was a lecture by Sarah Oppenheimer, a Yale graduate who installed these architectural sculptures that were tied into the PAMM building itself, and moved- they're hard to describe. I ask her eventually whether or not there was anything to be 'seen', actually, (as the conversation had that far been regarding tons of theory). I wanted to know if the photo-documentation, or video, would suffice in conveying what the piece was, or to what degree would it communicate its eventness. (like in painting, or graffiti, it kind-of is all about the 'fick'. So I wanted to know, and I said this part too, "if there was anything to be seen). She replied, and I was slightly embarrassed to look her in the eye- she was honest and direct in her answer. She looked me in the eyes and didn't break contact- like she was imprinting, or programming into my brain a great insight. I don't know if I got it all to be honest. She made the case more cunningly that I feel capable of expressing, that in fact the sculptures, in their construction of two planes of glass, and the air space in between, revolving about an axis, suspended by their steel frame, acted as windows, or viewfinders, and in their abstraction (that is, in their making-planar-of-what-beyond-is-real) they are in fact perpetually generating images.
I sat in bewilderment, thinking of what a brilliant idea, and how eloquently she expressed it all, it was, she did, and I realized that she did not answer my question, and the guy next to me wanted a shot at asking her something (which he turned out to be oratorically challenged), and I passed the mic.
I left the museum and it was time for pizza. The Fine Arts students ordered a slough of expensive (presumably- it looked very designed) pizza. I ate two slices, as we had an overabundance and were encouraged to put it away. We got on the bus and went back to Sarasota, wherefrom I went straight to the bar and drank to forget, and drank with new friends- thespians it would happen, who made for entertaining company, and refreshing quips. I went to bed after closing the bar down and had a rough night, vomiting (thank sweet God, to get some of that food back out from overeating). Then in the morning, more roughness, more vomiting, and again. Fuck fine arts.
I read Jung's Man and His Symbols recently, as well as Ringworld and Babbit.
