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8/15/00 Oh, what an interesting day. Too bad I can't talk about a lot of it. I'm such a tease, I know. You would think with me splaying tales of my pussy out on the web as much as I do, I'd be willing to spill all, but I'm not. I have a handful of secrets left. Just a handful, but they're mine to keep. OK, onward and upward (hopefully) - on to my trip to Chicago. Kath, my mother, and myself all went downtown on Friday to the Museum of Contemporary Art. (Their website is surprisingly crappy, but whatever.) We saw the Sol LeWitt show, and now I'm obsessed with him. This is totally the kind of art that gets my rocks off. That's an inelegant way to describe it, I know, but when I was looking at it, I felt this pull in me. It was just so...anal. It was also smart - I loved the fact that it was totally planned out beforehand (and then executed by assistants). I can totally identify with that. Most of the time, I just walk around thinking about what I want to write about before I write it, and then when I actually sit down at the computer, I can usually crank anything out in less than two hours. He wrote in 1967: "In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair." Once you know how it's going to end, the fun part is over. So fucking true. So there were two rooms. One of them contained more line-oriented stuff, including full walls of small, perfect criss-cross lines. Up close, it was impressive; the consistent hatching, all done in pencils, regular and colored. Take a step back, and you've got a breathtaking vision: lines become shades, and the minutiae comprises a giant form. There were also some smaller pieces that totally set neurons firing off in my head. For example, there was one piece that had numerous arrows coming out from a focal point, and then each line was defined, like, "Arrow from upper left hand corner to lower right hand corner," and so forth. (I unfortunately took few notes, so I don't know if this is the exact language, but you get the idea.) I turned to my mom after I saw this piece and said, "I love this. Love it." The second room had large painted installations on the wall of 3-D images, like stars and stairs. We were told by one of the docents that the artists had drawn the figures beforehand, and then filled them in like a paint-by-numbers picture; color by color; all the orange first, and then the blue, and so on, until all were complete. After they finished each color, they put tape inbetween each section, so that the colors wouldn't bleed into each other. When they were done, they scored the tape, but small strips were left behind. When you looked closely at the installations, it appeared as if each section was placed on to the wall, rather than painted, adding to the 3-D illusion. Before we spoke to the docent, we couldn't figure out if it was painted on or not, so both Kath and my mom stole swipes at the walls. I walked away, giggling. I couldn't believe my mom was being such a bad girl. Kath, yes. My mom? No. (Later, we stood before a pencil sculpture hanging from a thread that was part of the Tom Friedman show and my mom started blowing on it to see if she could make it move. And she wonders why I'm such a freak.) Anyway, Sol LeWitt made me very happy that day. I was also excited about the simple fact that I had discoverd a new artist, not that he wasn't famous before, but just that he was new to me. I get to grow and learn all of the time. That fucking rules. You can check out some of his stuff here, here and read about him here. Also, if you would like to curry my favor, and you have $250 to spare, you can buy my a signed lithograph on ebay. The rest of the trip was lovely. I sat in the backyard with my folks and drank wine and talked for a while about life and how you live it. More on that later.
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