Aug 25, 2012 | installation, MCA Chicago, sculpture
As you walk into the MCA’s architecture-inspired exhibit, Skyscraper: Art and Architecture Against Gravity, the first piece you see is Yin Xiuzhen’s Portable Cities: five open suitcases spread out along the floor.
Each contains a mini-skyline, small buildings made out of cloth – just like the clothes our suitcases carry. You can even see the tags on some of the clothes that make up rivers and lakes, and buttons in odd places. Most of the little buildings are built along the open flap, inside the body of the suitcase is a map of each city, viewable through a small lit hole.
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| Hangzou, China |
The blue-painted walls suit the yellow strings hung above. The strings map out the distance from one city to the next, forming a makeshift globe out of the three blue walls that surround the five suitcases. The string-suitcase combination makes for a beautiful scene, like a miniature world that can be thrown in the washer whenever it gets dirty.
Check out the rest of my Portable City pictures and others from the MCA here in my Flickr set:)
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Aug 21, 2012 | news
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| Photograph by Violette Bule, also courtesy of the Guardian. |
Remember Matisse’s “Odalisque in Red Pants” painting that was recently found in Miami? Well recently more than a dozen women went topless, wearing only red pants at the Caracas’s Museum of Contemporary Art, to ask for a quicker return of the painting to its rightful place in Venezuela.
Even though the painting was said to have been recovered by FBI agents more than a month ago (my last post on this painting being found is from exactly a month ago, to the day), the whereabouts of the Odalisque are still unknown. The Venezuelan attorney general has asked US officials about the painting twice with no response. Some think that this could mean the oil painting recovered is just another copy.
The women protesting were photographed here by Venezuelan artist Violette Bule, playing with prop frames and in poses related to the 1925 post-impressionist work. “My main goal is to have the original returned, but I also want to call attention to the irony behind the way the art market works,” she said, “After this scandal, the Odalisque will surely be worth much more.”
Read the whole story on the Guardian here.
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Aug 20, 2012 | news
Semir Zeki is a professor of neuroesthetics at the University College London who’s been studying the affects of art on the brain since 1970. As it turns out, different types of art affect your brain in different ways depending on what’s being represented, turning museums into mental jungle-gyms.
Check out the nifty table I made to get the breakdown on which mental aerobics you’re doing when:
| Type of art |
That might look like this |
Activates this part of your brain |
That’s usually associated with |
Exercising your brain here |
| Representational |
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| Cezanne’s Still Life with Skull, 1900 |
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Primary visual cortex & inferior temporal cortex |
Object recognition, long-term memory, & emotions |
Primary visual cortex in blue. Inferior temporal cortex follows the ventral stream down in purple
|
| Portraits |
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| Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait, 1889 |
|
Fusiform gyrus in the temporal lobe |
Facial recognition, word & number recognition, and color processing |
Fusiform gyrus in pink
|
| People in action |
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| Cupid & Psyche by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. 1889 |
|
Mirror neurons in the prefrontal cortex |
Muscle memory that fires when you can relate to another’s physical action |
Prefrontal cortex
|
| Abstract |
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| Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1943 |
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Parts of the visual cortex and parietal lobe |
Visuospatial processing, and geometry/numbers |
Parietal lobe
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| Surrealist |
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| Vladimir Kush’s Metamorphosis |
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The anterior cingulate cortex & dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the frontal lobe
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Resolving conflicts or catching errors |
(A) Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (blue). (B) Anterior cingulate cortex (yellow).
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You can read a section of Zeki’s research for yourself here. My table was inspired by this post on Gurney Journey – and you can read a brief interview Gurney did with Zeki here as well.
In the paper linked to above, Zeki wrote, “…the overall function of art is an extension of the function of the brain,” meaning that the creation of art and even just looking at it both work as mental exercises that are only possible because of how complicated our brains are in the first place.
There was a gallery in Baltimore in 2010 that tried to play with the different ways art could exercise your brain. They showed visitors 3-D printouts of slightly altered abstract sculptures by Jean Arp – some skinnier, some wider, to see which they were most attracted to, as a way of studying “aesthetic emotion.” In 2007 the same museum experimented with a show of Courbet’s landscapes by playing classical music in the background and subtly changing the shade of the lighting every 60 seconds. Visitors ended up staying four times longer in the exhibit because of these additions.
Pieces of art deemed “beautiful” by the viewer can also increase blood flow in the brain’s emotional center in the limbic system by as much as 10% – the same increase we experience when looking at someone we love. The increase in blood flow is directly proportional to how much the viewer likes the work, so my heart starts pumping at Van Gogh and almost stops beating at Cindy Sherman. Which works make your heart race?
Read about the full results of this study done by Zeki last year in this Telegraph article.
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