1/7/2011
12.00am Well, I made it to New York in almost one piece. The plane flight was long and tedious as I expected. But my neighbours were nice and we got chatting through the night. I got to LA air port, they call it LAX, and discovered that I don’t deal well with sleep deprivation at all. Managed to get confused and go off in the wrong direction and miss my connection. I won’t go into too much detail, but what gets me is how unfriendly everyone has been during the whole process. You would think that they would be nicer to you because A, you have just been through this arduous journey and B, their country is in a full on recession and the tourist dollar is probably the most important thing there is right now. Any way all was ok when I made it to NYC, Merryon was at the airport to meet me, we took a Taxi to Manhattan. And I saw the city lit up. Amazing. Today I went to The Whitney Museum, tried to go to the Guggenheim but it isn’t open on a Thursday, what’s that about. An odd thing I am noticing is all the Security Gaurds are African Americans but the face of the place was these three young white hipsters, and all the patrons were white as well. Then I went to a grocery store and all the checkout chicks were African American. Maybe it is just the area I’m in but they all seemed to be in the menial jobs. Just a thing I noticed. The Upper east Side is full of "Stuff that white people like" though, very gentrified. At the Whitney there was a lot of old stuff and two really great shows of Contemporary art. The first was a large solo show by an artist named Cory Arcangel, who uses al lot on technologies in his works. The center piece was a video game work that of coarse was going to get me excited. He (with help) has created a chip that is wired into the controller of a video game and presses the buttons and makes them play them self. So he had collected Bowling video games from over the last 30 years starting with the Atari and working through to the Nintendo Game cube. And in all the games the bowler is throwing gutter balls. All of his work had a sense of humor about it that was in line with my own sense of humor as well. While the show upstairs ‘Singular Vision’ was a collection of artworks mainly installation, from the last 50 years and invited quiet contemplation by giving each work its own room, rather than a sensory overload like Cory’s work induced. It is an interesting juxtaposition of shows I thought. http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/SingularVisions I should go to bed and attempt to get my internal clock in tune with this place.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorArtist, curator, teacher. Archives
June 2012
Categories
All
|