Sunday, June 30, 2013

traditions of consistent heresy

Yesterday I went to the Intendence Film Festival, a little film festival that helps support emerging Colorado filmmakers and international filmmakers. Some of the films were made by professional filmmakers. Others, apparently, were made by amateur filmmakers, while others were made by college, or even high school, students. I'm not sure whether this was the festival's first year. I couldn't even tell from looking at the website. But I'm assuming it was the first year.

The festival took place in a few different locations in a part of the Denver suburb of Arvada known as Olde Town. Olde Town is one of those lovely little districts that's kind of like a small-town Main Street nestled within a modern city or suburbia. It has some lovely cafes and bars and shops and a nice, new library. The sidewalks are often paved with red bricks. The store fronts all have an olde feel. And there are even some old buildings, like an old flour mill, scattered throughout the district.

I only attended the first couple screening sessions on Saturday, the final showing day of the festival. The shows were in a big community room in the library. But throughout the length ofnthe festival, there were also screenings in the Arvada Tavern, which had been transformed into a nice, big, screening room, and the Festival Playhouse, which I didn't see.

In the library, at least, the screening quality was problematic. The films (videos, actually) played on a small screen in front of a much larger screen. There were problems with getting the films to start one after the other, and there were sound problems. The attendance was about in line with what you'd expect it to be after, apparently, only having been advertised in the windows of one shopping district in town. But this was all, as one of the audience members put it, a part of the excitement of a new (was it new?) film festival. I don't think I would have changed any of it.

The only thing I seriously would change, I think, is the name of the festival. If it's staying in Olde Town, then I'd call it the Olde Town Film Festival. It's much clearer, and people are familiar with the concept of Olde Town as a place where events are held.

The first screening I attended was all short films. The second was one short film and one feature-length film. The films in the first screening mainly seemed to involve themes of loss and regaining. The first film was a neat, little story called "Beyond Primary." It was made by a Colorado high school student named Stephan Chaikovsky. I thought it was pretty clever. It's about an old man, maybe a homeless man, who seems to be obsessed with figuring out a Rubik's Cube puzzle. The man figures out the puzzle, but then loses it in an accident. Then, in a state of desperation, he thinks he finds it again.

This film was followed up by another short film called "Color Fade," which was made by Matthew Krekeler and his classmates at the film school at -- I think -- the Santa Fe School of Art and Design. The film is about a young man in some oppressive school/society in an apparently monochrome world. The kid has has troubles with his printer one day while he is trying to print out a homework assignment. The kid hits the printer, and the printer starts printing out red sheets of paper. The kid is inspired by the color of the paper and tapes the paper all over the walls of his dormitory building. But the police, who enforce conformity, beat the kid and take all the red papers away.

The next film was called "Confessions of a Child Talent Agent." It was about three women running a children's talent agency in Denver. The main story kind of involved the first round of auditions for a cereal commercials, the agonizing wait for callbacks, and then all the frantic back and forth activity surrounding the logistics of actually getting the kids to callbacks. The film had a kind of reality show style. And there were some funny moments, like when of the agents, stressing out over the callbacks, stuffs her face more than full of York Peppermint Patties.

After that was a very short, one-gag (though the line after the gag was funnier than the gag itself) cartoon called "Killer App."

Then came an interesting film called "Edge of Destruction," by a Hong Kong artist named Fei Xiang. The film is about a young man who works as a tour guide and security guard, of sorts, at a traditional temple called the Small Goose Pagoda. The Small Goose Pagoda is legendary for twice having been wrecked and then having somehow healed itself.

One day the young man finds two people inside the Pagoda after hours. When he pursues them, they shoot at him with futuristic guns. A pretty girl protects the young man with a futuristic gun of her own. The young man and woman run out into the town to escape the thieves, but they end up cornered. Right when they are about to be killed, the young man mysteriously teleports himself and the young woman to a different part of town.

The young woman then reveals that she and the people in pursuit are actually from an alternate dimension. The Small Goose Pagoda is like a portal between the dimensions. It basically breaks and heals whenever there are collisions -- I think -- between the two dimensions. But the next time there is a collision, it could destroy this dimension.

The young man, it turns out, is an Alpha, a being who can travel freely between the dimensions... or something like that. The people pursuing the young man want to kill him because he also has the ability to stop some process involved in the collision of the dimensions. So the young man and woman have to evade and fight and evade the pursuants until the young man can perform his magic ritual to stop the collision of the dimensions.

The story was pretty straightforward. And I liked the special effects. I thought the style was kind of like the style of some of the semi-satirical Japanese action shows, like the live versions of Cutey Honey.

This film was followed by a film called "Worth," by an Australian filmmaker named Nic Barker. The story is about a man and woman who kidnao the daughter of a bitter, wealthy man. The man and woman demand a ransom of $50,000 from the father. They then hole themselves up in a hotel and wait until the man is scheduled to meet the father and exchange the ransom money for the daughter. In the meantime, the man does a number of things to reveal what an abusive jerk he is.

The man goes to meet the father, but he never comes back. It turns out that before the daughter was kidnapped, she was actually lovers with the woman. The father got angry at the daughter for being a lesbian, and the daughter ran away. But now the woman and the daughter are on their own, lovers again, and on the run.

The next film was "Isabella's," by a New York filmmaker named Daniel Vallancourt. The film is about the last day of business in the hair salon owned by a woman named Isabella. The woman has some final encounters with customers who have come to be like family to her. Then, just as she is about to close up for the night, a young man comes in and asks for a haircut. The two talk for a while about the history of the shop.

The final film in the screening was "Hecate," by Colorado filmmaker Kascha Fauscett. It was kind of a horror story about a group of girls at a slumber party who find a book of spells the magical agent of which is the ancient Greek goddess Hecate. One of the spells draws one of the girls into a parallel dimension, where horror awaits her.

The opening film of the second screening was called "Mosyö," and was made by a Turkish director named Kagan Olgunturk. The film is a documentary about a man in who has an antique and curiosity shop in the Turkish shopping district of Hergele. The man took up the profession of antique dealer after having retired. Now he collects more than he sells -- on purpose: he can't bear to part with any of his goods!

The man is called "Mosyö," a kind of Turkish corruption of the French "Monsieur," because he's known as being a bit of an intellectual, and because he dresses in what his friends think of as a French style: kind of long hair, a tweed jacket and maroon sweater, and round-brimmed hat. He's also a bit of a renegade in his community: unabashedly atheist and unafraid to speak his mind.

The film has two parts. The first part is in the antique shop, where the man repairs and plays with his antiques and curiosities. The second part takes place in a bar, where Mosyö eats and drinks with his old friends. I like the second part of the film a lot.

The second film of the screening was a feature-length documentary called The Keymaker, by a Colorado-based filmmaker named Jem Moore. The documentary is about Patrick Olwell, the legendary maker of Irish flutes. Olwell's flutes are played by Seamus Egan, Michael Molloy, and other famous Irish flautists throughout the world. Some of the best Irish flautists argue that Olwell's flutes are the best flutes in the world.

The film has three interweaving stories: how Olwell's career as a flute maker developed; how Olwell actually makes his flutes; and the opinions of the people who play Olwell's flutes.

Olwell began making flutes in the 1960s when he saw another young man at his university selling bamboo flutes at the student union. Olwell saw that that seemed to be a pretty easy way to make money. So he had the young man teach him how to make bamboo flutes. He then began selling bamboo flutes in the student union as well.

After college, Olwell moved down to a small town in Virginia and took out out an ad as a maker of bamboo flutes. The demand for bamboo flutes was great. But somehow Olwell also got involved in making Irish flutes. He became intensely involved in all the intricacies of making a good flute. He learned the good points and bad points of flutes. He replicated the construction of flutes. He mastered old techniques for makinf certain kinds of flutes. And he eventually learned to use all of these lessons to make flutes with all of the good points of the old flutes, but none of what he perceived were the bad points.

There are a lot of really interesting themes in the film. One of the biggest seems to be the difference between an artist and a craftsman. Olwell says at one point that the difference between an artist and a craftsman is that a craftsman is an artist with children. In other words, a craftsman is an artist who uses his skills to make a living. But the real question underlying this joke is, what should be considered a work of art? Flute-playing is art. But is a flute a work of art? And is flute-making artistry? Or is it crafstmanship? One person seems to compromise when he calls Olwell an artisan.

Another interesting statement made in the film is that Olwell is a genius -- has to be a genius -- because he creates such consistent, and consistently good, instruments. I don't think I've ever heard consistency listed as a criterion of genius.

When flautists speak of why they love Olwell and his flutes, they generally give threefold reasons: first, the responsiveness of the flutes, which is better than that of any other Irish flute; second, the range of the flutes, which is apparently incredible; and, third, the fact that Olwell strives to give his clients flutes that match them individually, so that their flutes really are, in a sense, extensions of their bodies.

There is also an element of dumb luck in Olwell's story. Not once, but twice, did Olwell make commercial inroads with world-famous flautists by giving the flautists his own flute after their flutes had been stolen. And I think that in both cases, the flutes were stolen from cars. Both times Olwell gave the flautists his personal flutes, the flautists fell in love the flutes and never wanted to play in anything else ever again.

Olwell has a lot of interesting catch phrases. But his most interesting one is "actually plays." When applied to flutes, it means a flute of high quality. A flute that "actually plays" isn't a flute that makes noise and pretty much is in tune. It's a world-class flute. And the term applies equally well to performers. A musician who "actually plays" isn't competent: he's of an elite level of talent.

Olwell also sees himself as capable of having been good at other professions. He likens his profession to engineering and waxes on aboutnhow he might have been good as an engineer or an R&D guy. He talks about the precision required for drilling holes in flutes, and he winders whether he might have been a good dentist. One of his good, old friends wonders the same thing, which is a little strange.

But Olwell, despite being seen as the Stradivari of flute makers by some, is also seen as a bit of an outsider and a renegade. He even calls himself a heretic. He doesn't make classical, baroque flutes: he only makes Irish flutes. And he doesn't charge high prices for his flutes. He doesn't advertise himself, doesn't (or didn't?) have a website. And he lives far from Ireland, down in a small town in Virginia. But he's an endearing person, loved by his family, friends, and clients.

Today I headed down to the McNichol's Civic Center Building to see the Zhang Xi exhibit DNA of the 21st Century. The McNichol's Civic Center Building is run by Denver Arts and Venues. It is basically a free museum, with three floors of changing exhibits. I've been to McNichols one time before, and I loved it then, too. The space is really wide and open. The buiding is massive! And the artwork is new, edgy, and captivating.

Zhang Xi is a Chinese artist who now lives in Denver. He was born in 1984, so he's pretty young. But his art is terrific. The art in this exhibit has three main styles. One style is kind of saturated in images and iconography of technology, with a foreground of humanoid characters whose flesh seems to be melting off, often in searing oranges, yellows, and reds, as if they are burning in the fires of passion. Another style is like traditional Asian ink and paint drawings, like scroll drawings and paintings. A lot of these are done on gold leaf. And the final major style is a faded, washy style of oil painting depicting ritual and community scenes of various kinds.

There are a few other styles employed. The painting right by the title and exhibit notes is a relatively realistic painting of a woman's head and shoulders -- except that superimposed over the right side (the woman's right) of her face is a skull with an eye in the hole corresponding to the woman's right eye.

On the wall near the wall with this painting are two interesting paintings of pairs of women. The women are painted before backgrounds of color. In one painting, two women wearing black head coverings stand shoulder to shoulder. They stand before a background of yellow which blends into a vivid green toward the center. In the other painting, two women are holding hands and running. It's like the two women are lovers on the run. But in both of these paintings, the women's forms sort of have holes torn in them, like Swiss cheese. Through these holes can be seen the backgriund of blended colors.

The technology-themed paintings use and expand upon this idea of mottled, disintegrating bodies. One painting shows a woman surrounded by three men. The woman definitely seems to be fighting with the man directly in front of her, as if she and he are lovers. It's hard to tell if the other two men are the first man's friends, ganging up on the woman or goading the man on, or if they are something like phantoms and demons, lending to the violence of the man against the woman.

But the woman and the men all have faces dissolving into bright yellow and orange flickers, like flames. The men and women are surrounded in something like blue curls of smoke or electricity. And the bodies are coated in blue and red scales, like lizard scales.

Behind the woman and the men is some dark cityscape, partly like a modern city and partly like a traditional city of pagodas. But the city is actually made up of what appears to be electronic messages. There are images that look like statistical information off of dating websites. And in the very foreground are video game images, such as energy indicators and a sign at the bottom prompting a "player" to press "OK" to start the next game.

A painting next to this painting uses the same video game start-screen theme, only this one is prompting the "player" of a lonely man walking in the street to begin the next hour of his life. Bleak! The lonely man, a completely mottled body, appears to be a veteran soldier. A floating image from a news show implies that war has ended. But a computer-like menu of options at the bottom of the screen gives the man the option of returning to war.

Next to this painting is a painting with a deep black background, against which is splattered layers of red, orange, and yellow paint which eventually separates itself into three or four different heads. The heads all seem to be in pain, as if each head has been shot, and all the other heads have been formed from the splattered blood and brains of the shot head.

Another painting against a dark backrground is of a beautiful woman, her face and hair a fiery swirl of bright colors. Behind the woman, etched into the deep black background, is a cityscape in dim, but vividly colored outline.

Beside this painting is a painting called "The Unborn Tears." The background is, again, deep black. In the foreground is a mass of people who look like a mix between soldiers, rioters, babies, and zombies. The figures are outlines, with mottled faces and bodies filled with paint like out of a Jackson Pollock painting. The painting is extremely sad and frightening.

The exhibit is bookended, in a sense, by a four-panel painting called "No One's Wonderland/Form Is Emptiness." The first two panels are on one side of the exhibit, and the second two are on the other side. I'm not sure why they were separated. They would have looked better together.

But the first two panels by themselves are probably the best part of the show. On the far left side is some kind of street scene, or else a depiction of the walls of an Egyptian pyramid. Three Egyptian figures are walking across the wall. But the clothing of the figures is made to look sk ehow electronic. And the bases of the walls are made out of stone patterns from the videogame Super Mario Brothers. In addition, there is a drawing of a Super Mario Koopa turtle on the wall, as well as a realistic-looking image of Super Mario himself.

This imagery is suddenly disrupted by a room of walls which seem to have color schemes similar to that of the mazes in the arcade game of Pac-Man. But the maze on the left wall seems to be more like an Islamic geometric design, while the maze on the floor seems to be a map of city streets.

At the very bottom is a soldier character from the videogame Contra. He's shooting a spray of red bullets out of his gun.The bullets turn into drops of blood, hearts, and little babies. The babies all float up into what apparently is a ghostly, orange sea superimposed over the map of city streets. And there they swim around with Hindu-like women, or, perhaps, various emanations of Radha herself.

After this painting, the paintings change into the scroll-like paintings. Most of these paintings depict women, singly, or in groups, taking pictures of themselves on their cellphones. The way the pictures are done, you feel like you are watching from behind a mirror in a bathroom. But the backgrounds are often decorated like the interiors if traditional Asian dwellings. The backgrounds are also often taken up by traditional Asian, watercolor-esque paintings. But the wildlife in those paintings often look like the birds from the videogame Angry Birds.

The women in these paintings are often making sexual poses. Some of the women are average, maybe a little dumpy. Other women are quite fat, posing with quite lascivious looks in their faces. And some of the women are sexy women, posing in bikinis, in sexy poses, with their bottoms sticking back and their breasts sticking forward, and flashing peace signs for the camera. One woman is tattooed with corporate logos. Another is tattooed with the symbols of superheroes.

The oil paintings of the rituals aren't as ostensibly complex, but they're fiery with emotion and very lovely. One shows a rain dance, a group of blur-bodied dancers in brightly colored clothes dancing in a dark landscape of grass, apparently at the edge of a body of water. Next to this painting is a group of people preparing for something like a trapeze act or a ballet. Some people seem to be stretching. Others seem to be dancing. But some are hanging from strings from the ceiling.

Another lovely painting in this style shows a rock band playing and singing. The faces of the rock band are so washed out that they look lime masks. It reminds me a little of Pussy Riot. The guitars are also washed out, creating a really lovely, fuzzy look.

Next to this painting is a painting of a protest. There is also a painting in this style of rebels soldiers marching down a narrow street or alley, which is quite striking and frightening. There is also a painting of what appears to be young boys jumping onto a train as the train is departing. But the action of this painting is a little confusing. The young boys look modern. But the people in the trains look like they're from the 1800s.

There are also two paintings which take on the theme if Millet's Peasants. In a washy-style painting, the peasants standin something lime a covered boardwalk. The concrete railing of the boardwalk is sprayed over with graffiti. Some boys stand on the railing. They're looking past the railing, to a beach, apparently, on which some girls are running.

The other Millet-style painting is done in a blockier, Asian-scroll-like style. But in the background are some Mondrian-like paint squares, as well as comic-like frames, one showing a couple holding hands and walking through an Eden-esque garden, and another showing a couple embracing each other in a brightly colored, mystical sea. Behind the couple is an adertisement for an internet dating site, boasting how most of the one in five people who find dates online find them from this website.

Sunday, June 23, 2013

regressing toward enlightenment

Yesterday I went down to the Denver Art Museum to see Figure to Field: Mark Rothko in the 1940s. As the title implies, the exhibit traces Rothko's work from his figurative work of the 1940s through the non-objective color fields, the rectangles of plain color for which Rothko is famous.

Yesterday was a sneak preview day for museum members. As part of the sneak preview, the show's curator, Gwen Chiznit, was there to walk around and answer questions. She was there from 11 AM to 1 PM. But we all got timed tickets, and my ticket didn't let me in until 12:30 PM. As I walked in, Chiznit was standing in the middle of a huge crowd of people, giving a lecture about Rothko. I later heard Chiznit say that she hadn't really known what to do when she started walking around at 11 AM, so she'd decided to give a little tour and then occasionally talk to the new groups of people who would walk in.

I caught Chiznit as she spoke about the "automatist" style of painting. From what I understand of what Chiznit was saying, there were a few different styles of modern art. One style, the most famous, maybe, was Cubism, which was very measured. Another was Surrealism, which also aimed to make a very precise statement, but about the unconscious rather than the sense of vision. But automatism was based more in letting the unconscious speak for itself by letting the hand paint freely, allowing the hand to bring forth whatever forms it would from the unconscious.

However, Rothko was very much influenced by archetypal imagery, especially Judeo-Christian imagery and Greco-Roman mythology. This imagery often showed up in Rothko's figurative work. And where it didn't show up explicitly, it provided a very conscious ground for the work.

Chiznit said that Rothko's work in the 1940s was also very influenced by his work with the otber great artists around him. These artists, Chiznit, argues, all worked together toward something like the same artistic ideal during the 1940s. So, during the 1940s, the styles of some of the artists might be indistinguishable from the styles of other artists. Or the style of one artist might be completely different from the style for which that artist is now well known. For instance, a Pollock painting might be much neater and more figurative than one would imagine, while a Mark Tobey might be in a style much like that for which Pollock is now famous.

But in the 1950s, the artists all kind of went their separate ways, so to speak, and developed their own distinctive styles. Rothko's distinctive style was the color fields.

After Chiznit finished her lecture and the crowd dispersed, I read a little bit about a couple paintings that intrigued me. One of the paintings depicted two eagles and a hare, symbolic of the prophetic vision of Troy's defeat. The caption also mentioned something about Rothko's efforts to use mythology to try and get at a sense of truth in his artwork. If the ancient Greeks, for instance, used their mythology to express their understanding of the universe, could Rothko adapt the deeper meanings of those mythologies to express modern man's understanding of the universe?

The problem, however, seems to have come as a result of World War II. It seems that that war made Rothko question whether there was a real truth at all.

Suddenly, I thought of the Jungian development of personality. In the archetypal sense, the journey towards personal integration starts -- I think -- with a massa confusa, a kind of indiscriminate, jumbled mess. That separates itself into problems which are stated in kind of personal archetypes, like mythological figures. When the problems are resolved, sometimes in the mystical wedding or mysterium coniunctionis, the archetypal figures are replaced by a mandala figure, something more like a geometric diagram, which is a whole statement of the psyche.

But it seemed to me that the color fields of Rothko, rather than being mandalas, were more like the massa confusa. I wondered if Rothko had become, perhaps, too perplexed over the question of truth for modern man, in a modern world which seemed to be plunged into chaos. Did Rothko regress into the chaotic massa confusa? Or are his color fields actually a kind of mandala?

I wanted to ask Chiznit this question. But Chiznit was busy answering a question which must have been very like my own. Chiznit was talking about the difference between abstract art and Rothko's color fields. Chiznit said that abstract art is based on the external, on breaking down the components of the external world into their purest elements. But Rothko's non-objective color fields were about finding an inner world, an inner truth. Rothko distilled and distilled his style until he found, in pure color, a pure statement of his inner self.

With this in mind, I walked through the show. The show begins with a painting in something like a Gaugin style with Pisarro colors. It then moves tk a series of figurative paintings based very much on Greek mythology. These paintings all depict human figures. But the figures are all broken up, and they all have multiple heads and torsos and way more than two arms and legs. The warms are all piled up, like shelves full of spare arms in a store. And the legs seem to be stepping all over each other. If I were to guess by the heads, which are delineated in a mock-Greek style, I'd say the biggest influence on these paintings would be Picasso. But the style isn't Cubist. It isn't deconstructivist, either. It's dismembered, fragmented, and multiplied.

The pinnacle of this style is a kind of crucifixion scene. But the crucified body is dismembered, its limbs packed into compartments set into a brown block, like drawers in a chest.

After this dismemberment of the body, the paintings take on a much less human, slightly less figurative, appearance. One painting shows two (or one?) birds before a triple-layered background of grey, blue, and purple. In the top layer, which looks like a purple sky, are floating a figure like an eye and a couple of blue butterfly or hourglass shapes.

The next shape is based on the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac. Before a layered background of maroon and pink-red is a peach-orange shape like a lamp or an urn. On the left side of the lamp is a figure that kind of looks like shears or a sacrifical knife. On the right is some hanging shape that looks, to me, like a brain with a spine hanging down from it.

Near this painting is another painting that looks like a brain and spine, with a curtain of nerves, or maybe gore, hanging down from it. The figure is a cloudy, almost inky, black mass of paint. But its floatiing before a hazy background of pink and green. The pinks and greens alternate in a blur, almost like some checkerboard that has been run through a time warp.

This painting is surrounded by some interesting ink works, which also have traces of Picasso, as well as, perhaps, Kandinsky, about them. One scene, including some green paint, is like swallows floating and flitting up and down in a mystical sky. Another is a scene of boats and ship-sized angels. Another scene, with a lovely, all-pink background, seems to be of a jazz club.

But the paintings seem to take on a more and more gruesome appearance. The dismembered body parts of the human-figure paintings seem to be further fragmented, until the paintings themselves seem to be of chunks of flesh and bone, floating before color-layered backgrounds which give the vanishing perspective sense of an ocean or a Dali-desert landscape.

The figurative paintings finish with a Kandinsky-esque ink-and-paint picture of a universe full of worlds split in half and black, sputtering vortices.

In between the figurative paintings and the non-figurative paintings is a room of paintings by some of Rothko's contemporaries. If I were to guess the theme of this room, I wouldn't guess that it was that all these artists were working toward the same goal: I would say that they were working under, and working to break free of, the influence of the same person: Picasso.

The next room begins with a beautiful painting which takes the background style of the figurative paintings, but adds nothing to the foreground. It is a wonderful blending of grey, white, and purple patches, sprayed here and there with highlights of yellow-green.

Next to this painting is a pinting with a color scheme like the clouds or sky in a Velasquez or Zurburan painting of the Assumption of Mary. But there is no Mary. There really aren't any clouds or sky, either: just the color schemes of those things.

Then there is a painting of a lovely red background of orange-red with rectangles of color scattered about, almost like people -- or phantoms -- or, really, like the broad-shouldered, triangular men of the ancient petroglyphs. These characters seem to be more whole than the actual "men" of the first paintings; but they have sunk into, almost dissolved into, the background.

Another painting seems to be plainly figurative, with characters almost like limbless stick figures, with obvious black heads and black bodies, floating, it seems, in sockets of color, although a couple are also outlined with a red-orange of a brightness worthy of Crayola.

Next to this painting is a painting which seems to me very plainly to be a portrait, almost like Pollock's self-portrait during his black-and-white phase. This painting has a green background, and then a figure very much in the center and foreground, of a head and shoulders -- all together, in one piece, not fragmented, not multiplied! But the figure is all square, all black scribble, with no discernible features at all, and with a drab yellow shining through from behind the scribbles.

Across from this painting is my favorite painting of the exhibit. The center of the painting is a square of bright orange squiggles, all surrounded by a pale sky blue. All around the blue run rectangles and swatches of purples, pinks, and peaches. Some of the purples develop into blotches of a deep pink-purple the color of orchids, or of passionfruit sorbet. I just wanted to lick it!

Finally is a room of beautiful color fields. The painting that is the cover-painting for the exhibitis probably my least favorite. It is a yellow and white rectangle atop a big, red square. It like the red square: something about it seems industrial to me. But I hate the yellow and white rectangle: it reminds me of a sunnyside-up egg.

But there are some really nice ones. There is one with an orange-red rectangle and a pink rectangle surrounded by a hazy, orange field of color. There's a beautiful one of, I think, a big, orange square, a bright, pink band, and a cobalt blue rectangle. It's so vivid. I love it. And there's one of a yellow background with stacks of color built up before it: black, purple, and a green wit glimmers of orange shining up from beneath it.

Then today I went to the Sakura festival in downtown Denver. The traditional Japanese festival is held at Sakura Square, which is a Japanese shopping and community center that also includes the Denver Buddhist Temple. I had gone to the festival last year. But there weren't very many people. This year there were a lot more people. There also seemed to be a lot more booths than there were last year. And the booths seemed to be more interesting than the ones from last year. For all I know, they were actually the same exact booths. But something about this year seemed a lot livelier.

One booth I really liked was a booth called Pomegranate Designs, which showcased the washi paper art kf Michele Yamaguma. Imagine scroll-format works of art that mix together origami, collage, nature pressings, and painting, to depict fantastic landscapes or traditional Japanese figures like koi or cranes.

Another booth I liked showcased the paintings of an artist named Joe Molina. His paintings are very colorful and vivid, showing branches of cherry blossoms before almost rainbow-like skies -- blue skies, but rainbow-like, somehow. He also has sime cherry branches before deep red skies, which are very dramatic. And he has some gigantic close-up blossom paintings, which are great: a pink blossom before a white background, and a white blossom before a pink background.

I went inside for a while and listened to one of the temple priests talk for a while about the Denver Temple. The Temple is part of a sanga, or community, which has been in Denver since 1909. The Denver Temple observes a Mahayana denomination of Buddhism called Jodo-Shinshu, which means something like "The One Pure Land." This denomination was founded by a monk who believed that not all men can take the purely meditative path of the stricter forms of Buddhism.

Jodo-Shinshu Buddhism empathizes with normal human beings and posits the existence of the tear-eyed intercessors for man, which also, apparently happen to be 84,000 aspects or avatars of the Buddha himself. These spirits, or sambogha-kaya -- I think -- are also creators of the "Pure Land," which doesn't quite seem to be a heaven, but something more like a spiritual realm of forgiveness or tolerance, created to offset the waywardness or foolishness of man and his actions.

The priest gave a story of the Buddha which is a little different from the (likely distorted) one I have in my head. The priest said that Buddha had been born as Prince Siddhartha. A priest told Siddhartha's father the king that Siddhartha would grow up either to become a great king or a great spiritual leader. So the king, hoping to influence Siddhartha to become a great king, kept Siddhartha sheltered in the castle allowing him to see only good things, so he would want to stay in the castle forever and become king.

But when Siddhartha was twenty-nine years old, he got bored and had a charioteer ride him out of the castle. On his way out of the castle, Siddhartha saw a sick man, an old man, a dead man, and a monk. Siddhartha had never seen any of these things. He asked the charioteer what they meant. The charioteer said that the sick, old, and dead men showed the inevitable suffering of all men. The monk, said the charioteer, was a person making an attempt to transcend that suffering.

Siddhartha decided to take the monk as a teacher. And Siddhartha went on to live a very ascetic life. But -- I'm not sure how -- Siddhartha decided that the ascetic path was wayward, just as the indulgent path of royalty was. The best path, Siddartha concluded, was the middle path.

So, at the age of thirty-five, Siddhartha was near enlightenment. To get closer to enlightenment, he sat down and meditated beneath the boddhi tree. After a while of meditation he attained the highest enlightenment the Buddha can attain in a human body, and he began to be called Buddha.

Buddha realized all suffering is inevitable; that all suffering is based on the fact that existence is impermanent and that there is an endless chain of causes creating the world, while men insist that there must be some permanence and ultimate being somewhere; that man can transcend suffering and attain nirvana; and that this can be done through right moral action, right livelihood, mindfulness, and meditation.

As I remember the story of Buddha, the Buddha went off to find enlightenment. But no teacher he worked with could ever give him enlightenment. So, in frustration and despair, he sat down beneath the boddhi tree and resolved to sit there and, basically, go on a hunger strike against the universe. But, right as he was about to die, he attained enlightenment.

I thought the contrast between the story from my memory and the priest's (correct) story had an interesting parallel with my conception of Rothko's artistic development and Gwen Chiznit's description of Rothko's artistic development. It's interesting how I invest both the story of the Buddha and the story of Rothko with a sense of universal frustration and nihilism. It obviously says more about me than it does about the Buddha or Rothko.

The priest herself is a very interesting person. She is a blonde, white, young woman with short hair and black-rimmed eyeglasses. She told me that she grew up coming to this temple. She said it's very strange nowadays to have the same women who shooed her out of the kitchen in the mischievous moments of her childhood now calling her sensei, or teacher. She said she just finished with seminary a year ago and was assigned to the Denver Temple. She said it was strange that she'd been assigned to her home temple. People are usually not assigned to their home temple for their first assignment. But she was happy she was assigned here, since the people here were so dear to her.

I had been really interested to hear that the community had been in Denver since 1909. I asked the priest if there were any good books about the Japanese community in Denver. The priest to, d me that the Temple bookstore was selling some books just outside, and that there should be a couple good books on the history of the Japanese people in Denver. I went outside and found and bought a good-looking book called Colorado's Japanese Americans from 1886 to the Present, by Bill Hosokawa.

I then sat down for a little while at the performance area at the far end of all the booths and listened to a band called The Arlene Hattori Project. The band consisted of Arlene and two men. Arlene sang and played guitar and keyboards on some songs. One of the guys sang backup and played guitar and keyboards. The second guy played drums. Almost all the songs were originals. The music was good, polished, relaxed, kind of soulful. Arlene's voice was kind of like Stevie Nicks. I really liked the band.

I wanted to spend some time talking about all the people I saw while I was at the festival, too. But I'm going to have to cut myself off for the night.

Sunday, June 9, 2013

shapeless shapes and invisible bodies

I don't know what it was -- both yesterday and today I went to see some art exhibits, and on both days I spent a whole lot of time looking at only a little bit of what I wanted to see.

Yesterday I went to the Arvada Center, where there are three interesting exhibits going on. But I only saw one: the work Perception: Color | Line | Pattern, which is down in the main floor gallery of the center. The exhibit basically explores abstract work from the last few decades.

The argument of the exhibit seems to be that the artists of these works were trying to create works without any visual direction. Art leading up to the modern phase was based on a cultured sense of vision that had the ability to read, say, a landscape painting the same way a literate person could read a novel. Modern art, the exhibit argues, if I understand it correctly, is an art without the visual cues that previous art had been informed with. It's art that doesn't have a visual narrative, or even a visual direction.

I'm not sure I agree with that idea. But I love the art at the exhibit. The selection and arrangement of the art is wonderful. Some of the pieces have a style like weaving or sewing or embroidery, like the works of Charlie DiJulio, in which ribbons or threads of color are painted across a wide canvas, or some wonderful yarn staircases done by Andrew Higgins.

Another set of works I like are by Jen Pack. These works use rectangular cushions arranged in wide, shallow v-shapes. The cushions are sewn over with wide strips of chiffon. These strips feel like mosaic tiles, in a way. In this sense, the work is kind of complemented by the work of Adam Holloway, which utilizes imagery like mosaic rectangles and pixelation.

Some of the work employs basic shapes. One interesting painting by Charles Richert is of colorful circles arranged in tight patterns before a white background. The patterns could be cell patterns or molecular or atomic organizations. The color schemes almost reminded me of the color schemes in the paintings of Lee Krasner.

There is a whole corner of the exhibit devoted almost entirely to the work of Marty Jaquis. His work is devoted to painting and making sculptures using brightly colored squares and cubes. The cubes, even in the sculptures, are often only two-dimensional. But they feel three-dimensional, often giving an interesting sense of space-distortion.

Another set of works I really liked are by the artist Vance Kirkland. These works place paint dots, of various sizes and densities of spacing, against fading backgrounds. The variations in density and size of the paint dots create an illusion of bubbles swelling up on the canvas. But something about the dots and colors also looks like it would belong on an ocean fish or a sea anemone.

There is also a lovely interactive work, but I can't remember who it's by. It's on an LED screen. It looks like a cubist/abstract painting. But it's in motion. Cameras nearby track nearby movement and color and allow those movements and colors to affect the patterns on the screen. I had a few different colors on me, so I could play around a lot to see the colors change and patterns shift. It was a lot of fun.

But I spent so much time in this gallery that I didn't have time to check out the other two exhibits. I did the same thing at the Denver Art Museum this morning. I went to see the exhibit of Sojourn, a collection of work by the Chicago artist Nick Cave. I had been planning to see some of the exhibits of the DAM's Spun program as well, but I spent so much time in the Nick Cave exhibit that I couldn't go see anything else.

The Nick Cave exhibit is really interesting. It's divided into two selections of work, basically: his "soundsuits" and his garden-like bead sculptures. The bead sculptures are dense pilings of chains of beads, all gathered onto metal frameworks of branches. Then, inside of these dense branches of beads, there are placed scluptures of things like birds and fruit, leafs and flowers. The feeling of density reminds me, not of abundance, but of overgrowth, like a tree that has been overgrown by vines. Some of these masses of branches and bead-vines grow over couches or chairs or stools. Sometimes life-size sculptures of dogs are sitting on the furniture. In one case the bead structure is gathered over the head of a mannequin in something like a knit or crocheted bodysuit.

The soundsuits are kind of similar to the crocheted mannequin. Apparently Cave came up with the idea of soundsuits after having watched television footage of the beating of Rodney King in the early 1990s. Cave felt a desire for some kind of protection against the violence and hatred of the world. He ca e up with the idea of soundsuits.

This makes sense. The soundsuits are kind of like gaudy shells made to go over the body. Some of the soudsuits have tall, thin, steeply arched spikes going up over the head, like the scabbard for a sword. These "scabbards" can extend downward over the body like a skirt or dress. Other soundsuits may bemade of brightly colored "fur," like something on a Sesame Street character. Other soundsuits might simply be of crocheted bodysuits, but with things spiking our of the suits, like steel branches with tin noisemaker toys, or globes, at the ends of them. One room is full of soudsuits in all different varieties, but with a constant of being made almost entirely of shiny, white buttons.

The soundsuits all have a cconstant style of being reminiscent of traditional dress -- like traditional Latin American or Caucasian or Asian or African dress. But there is also a feeling of the suits being a kind of astral body or an aura-egg. This wouldnt be so surprising. A soundsuit could be thought of as an "aural" suit. So an "aural" suit and an aura-egg wouldn't be too different.

One last room of the exhibit is devoted to videos of people actually performing in the soundsuits. The performances of the people dancing in the furry soundsuits are my favorite.