Here are my site visits: Museum of Jurassic Technology, Watts Towers, and Allan Kaprow Art as Life.

Here are my class notes.

Here are my reading notes.

Here are my final project notes.

Here are photos from the ArtistsCookbook Tasting.

I visited Allan Kaprow, “Art as Life” with the class during the field trip. Allan Kaprow was a pioneer of performance in the 1950s, and is perhaps best known for coining the term, Happening, meant to describe a game, adventure or any kind of activity people might engage in for the sake of playing. Along with the Museum exhibition, MOCA was also hosting several Happenings, reinventions of key Happenings.

I think as with all artists that are primarily known for performance, it is a difficult task to create a Museum retrospective that rightfully examines the person’s work. The action and happening is essentially dead, and the original political and cultural climate is also dead. So I think pieces enter the arena of the spectacle, because audiences might come to see the piece solely because of what they read or learned about this character from a class, or a book, and that they pioneered something. The actual work has changed.

Walking through the exhibition, which had fliers, videos, films, photographs, overhead projectors, paintings, and an installation of blue furniture, I was interested in the archiving, and the attempt to re-present these materials.

The only installation I engaged in for any length of time was the blue furniture installation, which is a new version of “Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann.” Visitors can rearrange the furniture and play the piano. It reminded me of a preschool role playing room, with the move-able furniture and ladies’ shoes scattered around.

I really enjoyed watching a video interview of Kaprow’s where he talked about some of his projects, including the Dirt Exchange piece, where he would go around to people and simply exchange dirt with them. I think one of the very successful aspects to his Happenings is how they incorporate all kinds of people as its audience, not just fellow artists, but engaging out in the public sphere and asking something of people, in this case, dirt.

The Watts Towers, considered “the finest example of a folk environment in the world as well as the largest single artwork ever created by one person,” (Moran, Sceurman 2004) is for me, a place of both fantastical beauty and intrigue and a demonstration of how creative endeavors can supersede personal traumas.

Perhaps because I have the back story of knowing that Italian immigrant Simon (Sabato) Rodia was once an alcoholic, that his wife left him, his daughter died, he had two estranged sons, and he scarcely spoke English, I see this place that he worked on after he quit drinking was his way of navigating through this difficult world. It was his way of finding a light at the end of the tunnel, or perhaps even creating his own palatial environment in a strange and foreign land.

Rodia named his creation, which he started building when he was 42, “Nuestro Pueblo,” which translates to “Our Town.” On a triangle lot, at the end of a dead end street, Rodia set out to build something big, without the help of anyone else, and not even using the aid of scaffolding. He continued to work on this one work in his free time for the next 33 years. Undoubtedly inspired by his native Italy, the construction worker/tile maker created an entire, interconnecting world of steel towering structures and arched flying buttresses serving as supports. He infused his steel armatures and mortared chicken wire with a plethora of found objects, including broken tile chards from his day-job, porcelain objects, figurines, plates, bottles, sea shells, and other scrap materials. He built without any direction, adding one layer after another, like a giant mosaic with arms and legs.

Walking through the space, you suddenly feel like you are at an antique store, seeing pieces of old salt and pepper shakers, old soda bottles, milk glass, broken tiles, as well as recognizable chards of plates and cups. It serves as a type of graveyard for these everyday objects, and the time period from which they were created, just as much as these objects collaboratively make a new object–a structure whose creation myth is deeply embedded within its crevices.

The Watts Towers were a labor of love for Rodia. And to me they seem very romantic. There are numerable heart shapes throughout the space — in fact it seems like a theme. I read that weddings often took place there. I think it is significant that he did not make many things. In fact, there are only a few things that have been attributed to him, but none are on par with the Towers in Watts. This one location confirms his monogamous relationship with and his insatiable love for this project.

Today, the Watts Towers are used as a regenerative anchor for the city (which at one point called the towers a pile of junk, but then a group of concerned citizens joined forces to preserve the site as a cultural landmark), which has given special promotion to area galleries and museums that surround the towers in an effort to gentrify the city. But the City still has a long way to go.

One thing I was struck by (and I can’t deny) on my most recent visit to The Watts Towers, was not the Towers themselves, as I have been there before (and somehow have forgotten the drive to and from the Towers). But this time, I was struck by the quality of life in the city of Watts, verses, well, everywhere else, but also the contrast between the City and the Towers. I guess the Towers function like a diamond in the rough for the city which was not in its current condition when Rodia was mortaring these towers, from 1921 to 1954. In fact, it was a quaint suburban village, where people had chickens and cows, and folks once left their front doors unlocked.

Now, Watts is one giant wrought iron, pitch-forked gated fence. Not a single window is left un-barred, not a single shopping center is left un-gated. The community has the lowest median household income in all of greater Los Angeles. One wonders whether these Robocop-esqe bars and gates are over-reactive or dramatic, but either way, they carry a psychological weight to them that no doubt influences each and every one of the City’s citizens whether they are the enemy or not.

After the dizzying appreciation of the colorful towers fades with each camera stop-light and fiercely gated shopping center, one can not help inhale the contagious fear that Watt’s residents might feel just to go outside to water their lawn, or have their kids walk to school. I know the fear comes from somewhere, is rooted in physical things like crime and violence. But is the reaction of the city to become more like a jail going to stop or even deter the violence? Do these bars and gates carry a symbolic double entendre as both artificial safety for the resident and as fuel for the very divisiveness these various gangsters and crimesters thrive on?

I mull over Rodia, and how he took his pain or dissatisfaction with this bi-polar society, and channeled it into making something, even one thing, and how hopefully that action can speak to the city’s people as an alternative way to deal with the shitty hand that one’s been dealt.

I ventured out to LA a few weeks back to go to the Museum of Jurassic Technology. I had gone before, several years ago, and have thought about it ever since. The MJT is a one-of-a-kind space that is both an examination of the museum itself, and the objects we place in a museum. By the sound of it, one might think that it’s about dinosaurs and bones. Not so. Rather, it is a natural history museum about oddities themselves. The Museum explores the specimen-crazed world we live in, we excavate, we examine, and we arrange and showcase in a sterilized museum setting with dim lighting and wall signage, accompanied by the gentle hum of the narrator’s voice bringing us into the mystery of the very thing we think is odd or curious.

What is genius is that the Museum is itself an installation, a collection of various collections under one non-descript roof. The stories around objects destabilize the viewer in that I constantly question what is real and what is not. The Museum “preserves something of the flavor of its roots in the early days of the natural history museum - a flavor which has been described as “incongruity born of the overzealous spirit in the face of unfathomable phenomena.”

The curating of what is and what is not phenomena is what is intriguing. The trailer park exhibit, aptly titled “The Garden of Eden on Wheels”, complete with dioramas, a pin cushion display, photos and other artifacts take you into the history and mystery of, you guessed it, the trailer. What I am impressed with is the precision of the displays in this area. For example, the display cases in the center look like they came from the Star Wars set, and the diorama settings are an exact, scaled down version of the things they represent, which is so interesting in terms of materials available. The white lattice and the paving stones are straight out of a miniature Home Depot, and the mini year-round Christmas lights set the mood for what one can only imagine as a Coors Light night of heaven on Earth.

The Museum also takes old-wives tales to a more illustrative level, where the absurdity becomes hard to navigate in what is historically correct and what is imagined to be so, because, as they say, life can be stranger than fiction. But alas, I’m pretty sure I was being fed a bunch of high-falootin’ bull excrement. Take for example, eating mice on toast, fur and all, was meant to cure anything from whooping cough to stammering. Or, take a duck beak installation, where inhaling a duck’s cold breath cures children “afflicted with thrush and other fungeous mouth or throat disorders.” Or if a groom leaves his shoe untied during the wedding ceremony, he is ensuring no difficult love consummating later that evening. None of the tales are true, but all are compelling and worthy of our attention and concern. Many old wive’s tales are absurd, so it is nice to frolic in that gray area.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology is one of those places that make you question everything you see. But alas, some things are just what they are. Like the amazing microminiature sculptures of Hagop Sandaldjian in the eye of the needle and the stereoradiographs of Albert G. Richards, that follow you as you move ala ghost-style at Disney’s Haunted Mansion.

I am probably going to have a blog on my blog, but meantime I thought it would be fun to share my favorite blogs.  Well, some of them anyways…

Here is Ashley G.  I have a big art crush on her. Here is another blog I frequent, The Black Apple, run by Emily.

I like how industrious these women are and how crafty they are.  It’s inspiring to see and peek into all the things that drive and inspire them and see how far they stretch their workweek.  Albeit, they have people helping them.  But essentially, their blog, and the art businesses built around them, are their entire lives.  I love that type of consumption.  And also, how spread out their creativity is, so as to touch every aspect of their life.