art days...the new museum...HELL, NO.

i was excited to go to the new museum.  i had never been.  i was eager to see new work that i had no knowledge of.  sadly, i was pretty let down.  upon approach, i liked the unbalanced aesthetic design of the building despite that fact that it unsuccessfully made me feel like it as going to topple.  hopefully that wasn't the intention...

i was even somewhat amused by the off-centered "HELL, YES" regardless of the fact that it was rainbow and i disliked the type-face.  i do like that it minimally appears as the only text on the facade of the building...

however i felt the work inside didn't evoke as much as excitement as this text conveys.  at this time, i think it should read "HELL, NO" as the title of this post insinuates. i wish i saw this if it still exists...

inside i saw the work of 3 artists.  the first of which was black panther artist emory douglas.  the vast majority of his works were offset lithography prints. they were bold, graphic and showed the in justices again african-american people of that time...like we've seen so many times before.  that's my issue with this work. it wasn't new.  it wasn't different.  it's been done.  i immediately got the message and only continued onward in hopes i would see something different with no avail.  one of my companions on the day, alan, was totally correct in saying that the mural wasn't even exciting by the time we got to it. unfortunate. the blurb printed on the wall said, "they are pictures, and they are meant to change the world." i don't see how that's possible with how redundant this subject is.  one of the few things i found interesting was the portrait of malcolm-x.  it was the only hand drawn piece of the show.  what's interesting to me is that it portrays a highly idealized subject in a technique that appears to be much more labor intensive than the prints. i felt this was intentional within the works that were selected for this show.

second was the work of david goldblatt.  his photographs depict different areas of south africa starting after the apartheid.  the oldest works were black and white prints that depicted a lot of indigenous people.  they were shown going about their daily lives in a manner that makes them seem kind of content despite their circumstances.  this was a nice contrast to the strong views of emory douglas.  there were a great deal of old and new photographs juxtaposed to show the evolution of a specific area or other relationships.  this was sometimes successful but more often than not it was hard to see the relationships.  overall this work is still something that we've seen before and became excessive.  the presentation and the sheer size of the prints was nice.  so was the mimic jail cell installed in the wall as you climbed back stairway from the third level to the fourth.

finally i saw the work of dorothy ianonne.  it's her first show in the US and her work illustrates the gender paradigm.  she often uses herself and her lover as her subjects and a loose first-person narrative.  all of her paintings showed scenes of sexual encounters and were big, colorful and stylized.  the work places emphasis on the act and contains some kind of controversial phrase. this work was fairly refreshing after the monotony of the previous two artists.  if i had to pick a favorite of the day it would be this. maybe that's why i have the least amount of commentary about it.

overall...not worth the price of the discount student admission.

unfortunately it was raining the day i traveled with the good brothers alan and matt so i was not able to bring my camera to document the excursion myself. so for now i'll leave you with this clever art humor that most of you have probably seen before...