New York - A.k.a WHERE THE STORMS LIVE.



New York - Of course it was blazing sun - The day we LEFT!!!!



Home from our trip to New York yesterday. Holy holy camoleole.... ART-ARCHITECTURE-FASHION-CULTURE-BIG MASSIVE SANDWICHES AS BIG AS YOUR HEAD. We stayed in Chelsea in Manhattan (A neighbourhood made cheerful by hundreds of gay pride flags), in the Chelsea international hostel where I met such characters as D(xyz)ave (the xyz is silent), an aeronautics student from Denmark. Also Aries who gave me an earth magnet bracelet that I was instructed not to let children swallow, and Brett the hipster.

Mike and Sylvia did their best to lead our bedraggledy little group through the maze that is the NYC grid. We had to overcome subways, endless blocks of pavement, countless flights of stairs and dozens of stand up comedians.

A taste of the Cheaslsea Gaybourhood

The main galleries we visited were -

The Metropolitan museum of art (The Met)

The Whitney (The Whit)

The Museum of modern art (Moma)

The museum of contemporary art (this one has no nick name, it doesn't deserve one unless you are a huge fan of George Condo!!!)

The first thing that hit me about the Met was the sheer size of the place, we were there for about 3 hours and I still barely saw half of it. It displayed historical artifacts as well as classic and contemporary art work. I loved the armoury and the totems from Papu new guinea. I also got my first look at Koons, Giacometti, Warhol, Lichtenstein and some masters, Renoir, Degas Ingres and so on in that fashion until the reader loses interest! Sadly disaster struck halfway through the visit, my camera fritzed out and ill be lucky if I can retrieve the photos.




The Whitney was having an exhibition of Edward Hoppers work when we visited. Hopper is probably my favourite painter and I was off my head with excitement, no nighthawks sadly but i did get to see Gas in all its dusky glory! Also a really cool selection on the top floor.




Another Exhibition in the Whit was by Glenn Ligon and dealt with the origins of black identity in America.



Moma was the undisputed champion of all the galleries we visited.

Reason the first - Upon entering the first exhibit I saw was entitled "Looking at Music". LOOKING. AT MUSIC. Music and art are what make my life worthwhile, and now you are combining them into one interactive exhibit!?? It was fantastic, it looked at album sleeves, music videos, music magazines, and works that had been inspired or derived from music.

Some album jackets - Salt n Peppas in there on the left!

 Reason the second - It was the only museum to feature an exhibit solely devoted to graphic design. The museum actually owns several fonts that it decided were worthy of archiving, Wim Crouwels New Alphabet and P. Scott Makelas Dead History.

Hoefler & Frere Jones - Gotham



Stefan Sagmeisters corporate identity for Casa da Musica



Milton Glaser -  I ♥ NY

Wim Crouwel (the gridnik!) - New Alphabet

Neville Brody - FF Blur

Reason the third - They had an exhibit about the kitchen! Music? Check. Art? Check and Check. And now food??? Oh please you are too good to me!

Warhol - Boxes

John chick - Flux Food

Henry Dreyfuss - Josephine Anthropomorphic

 Reason the fourth - Everything else about the place!!



Felix Gonzales Torres - Untitled (USA today)



YEAH I DID.

A helicopter?? In a Museum?? PREPOSTEROUS!

Louise Nevelson - Sky Cathedral (and a really cute wee school tour group!)

Cenzig Cekil - I am still alive today (That's what the stamp says, he filled a diary for a year with this stamp each day)

Yoko Ono - Wish Tree (One of the wishes near the top read: I wish the beatles were still together)

Sadly Moma was followed by the disappointment that was the museum of contemporary art. To be fair I did like Lydia Benglis' Glowing UV blob forms but other then that I am not impressed. For the same admission as the hoard that was the Met they gave us Two featured artists and one half opened exhibit on the top floor. Also, The second featured artist was George Condo, who I can't sat I'm a huge fan of. Well they did have one massive lift... I enjoyed that!



Big lift... Goodtimes...

As well as the major galleries we saw countless small galleries. Mike and Sylvia have a system, a quick scan to gauge the exhibits worth, if its substandard we move on. If its good you have 15 minutes top to soak up whatever we can before the herd moves on, with or without you! Some of the most memorable stuff included a project that explored the cases of a woman who became possessed, the artist came to the conclusion that she herself was the reincarnated ghost who possessed her subject. Another were the Huge bronze animal statues by Tom Otterness and the visual trickery of  "Playing with Lights" by Ivan Navaro, who created never ending black holes using fluorescent lights and mirrors.



Tom Otterness - Animal Spirits



Ivan Navaro - Playing with lights





Playing with lights

 
 

And of course I crammed in all my touristy crack - Shopping, Time Square and Broadway, The Disney store, Toys R Us (with the life size animatronic t rex and an in store Ferris wheel!) and a Willy Wonka department, the M&M store (where I spent $20 on exclusive coloured m&ms), Chinatown, Madison avenue, central park, I had a pretzel and a hot dog from a street vendor, I drank kool aid, I had a stuffed pizza (which I am still full from!). It was incredible and I'm so grateful to Mike and Sylvia for taking us, we never would have managed without them. I have to go back someday, with warmer clothes!

In a classy shop in Soho, being classy as you-know-what (there was a puppy behind the counter)

  

Toys R Us -I ain't scurred, lookadem lil arrrms!!



Wonkas Chocolate Factory - Sweet Divine.



Chinatown - EYH DOLLA EYH DOLLA!! Ah no thanks, I'm grand.... OKOK FI DOLLA!!! Sold!





 





Sculpture.

Sculpture. Oh God. Somebody, please, a brief?? Yes I know we had a brief but I NEED RESTRICTIONS!! I need walls to bounce off!!!!! In a word I found it slightly overwhelming. That is not to say that I didn't actually enjoy the elective, two weeks of exploring and discovering was refreshing after two design subjects.
Anyhow, down to the brief, we were given the starting point of the senses and/or vital signs. We brainstormed each of the senses and vital signs, then from those brainstorms we drew out associated verbs. We then took the verbs and began to develop our individual ideas. I started to look at - to manipulate, thinking about how I could manipulate and control the vital signs and senses. I pared this down to just looking at one vital sign, pulse.

I began researching pulse and heart rate and started to find facts on bpm averages for humans and animals, heartbeats in relation to life expectancy and most interestingly, in an article by the professor Emeritus of History and Engineering at the University of Huston, John H. Lienhard, pulse in relation to the individuals perception of time! He wrote:

"Gauging life in heartbeats or breaths reveals, once more, how deeply subjective time is. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that we experience time moving only from past to future. That's because the world we perceive is statistically irreversible. And the rate at which we see time moving in only one direction, is dictated by our hearts and lungs."

That freaks my mind on a massive scale, I have an amaturish interest in physics and I remember reading about how time "bends" around the mouth of a black hole. Based on Lienhards logic we have the time warping capabilities of a black hole in our own bodies, or at least in our minds, the only place where time actually exists!

 So I started looking at animals with contrasting hear rates, a mouse and a whale for example, a mouses bpm is 500 while a whale has just 20 bpm. Imagine how they would perceive each other in terms of speed and time? I also contrasted a dog and a rabbit, would a rabbits elevated heart rate cause it to perceive a hunt as lasting far longer then the dog would? Lastly, a hen and a chick, baby animals have higher heart rates then their adult counterparts and this made me wonder did this account for my slower perception of time as a child?

From there i began looking at heart rate as a measure of time. The average person has 2.21 billion heartbeats in a life time, so I took a basic life expectancy test which calculated I would live to be around 84 years old. I then factored in the 19 years of heartbeats I've already had and illustrated this information on a scale of 100:1 (because I'm not made of money yknow!).

I started to think about other ways to observe and document time. So for one day i kept a heart rate diary. Using a stethoscope (from the early learning center!) I listened to my heart and drew a basic cardiogram to record how fast or slow my pulse was. I then took this information (e.g my pulse is high when I'm stressed or active and low when I'm relaxed or still) and tried to fill in on a calendar what my pulse would have looked like since the start of the year.

I also wanted to work with the sound of my heart beat. It was too faint to record from the stethoscope so I listened to my heart at different points during the day, and beat out the rhythm, clapping, clicking, tapping my feet or tapping on surfaces. I recorded 7 in total. I was sure we must have some sound editing software on the computers hear and I was right, I toyed with adobe sound booth until I had made a track of the 4 clearest heart beats, building up together, then layered for a few moments, then individually receding. While I was working with the sounds I discovered that sound booth creates a visualization for each sound you work with. I took screen shots of each heart beat and assembled them like a photo album. I did this all on the day of my birthday so I now have a unique memento of that day!

Finally I wanted something to show that the heart was at the center of our perception of time. So I made a list of time based compound words e.g. time line, time trial, time bomb, and replaced the word time with the image of a human heart. I'd say Mike Canning may not have liked this one, he said he doesn't like sculpture he understands entirely, he likes to ponder!

Just like fashion I'm glad I tried sculpture, I certainly learned something and at some points I enjoyed the absolute freedom to take your starting point in any direction. I'm just not sure I'm disapilined enough to work without constant deadlines! Its a question of time really...