MOMA THURSDAY

Always adventures. Today we’re at MoMa for two exciting exhibitions, Jeff Wall and Armando Reverón. The two couldn’t be further apart in execution and philosophy but they both share something important. They’re nuts. Reverón, self-exhiled to the Carribean Coast who died in 1954, painted in bleached-out tones and faded pigments; a schizophrenic who created life-sized dolls and treated them like people, painting their portraits and giving them life. Wall on the other hand is a contemporary photographer who lives in Vancouver B.C., a former art historian who manufactures a highly-controlled version of reality in order to capture its pure intention.

No photography allowed in either of these galleries which means I didn’t happen to take any photos of Natalie Portman standing behind us in the Reverón galleries, and from then on everywhere else in the museum we happened to be. It’s odd when you make eye contact with a celebrity who obviously just wants to be treated like a normal person and you want to honor that but you know they know you know who they are anyway. Oddly enough I don’t think anyone else really recognized her, dressed down as she was with a fashionable pair of Wellingtons on.

Comic Abstraction was pretty damn cool too, though it always amuses me how few people read any of the artist’s statements and completely miss the point of the artist’s intent. German artist Franz West encourages people to take oddly shaped plaster objects (Adaptives) and enter a small structure to interact with them, only no one dared pick them up even though a video demonstrating their potential comedic value was continuously playing. Instead, crowds filled the space sans Adaptives and proceeded to read newspapers of no particular content value that lined the walls, rendering the whole exhibit useless. Cara and I hate Adaptives regardless. We saw the show in Vancouver a couple of years ago and thought it was retarded. I just want to take Adaptives and smash them on the floor.