From Controversy to Acceptance

We see it again and again in the art world. A new idea or innovation is introduced that is seen as scandalous and an outrage to the general public. People gather together in protest to howl "that is NOT art!" in the hopes of having the "offending" idea or object rejected by the world.

This is also common in architectural design and maybe no more so than in the design of art museums. I had this subject presented to me twice last night. While driving home and listening to NPR I heard a story in regard to the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Centre Pompidou, the Paris museum of modern art, taking place today. When the Pompidou was first designed it was widely criticized for its unconventional "inside-out" construction where all of the brightly colored pipes and ducts were placed on the exterior of the building to allow a wider and cleaner interior space for the exhibition of the art. Now thirty years later the Pompidou is an iconic image and well-loved landmark of Parisian culture.

When I arrived home I found the February issue of Art in America in my mailbox. One of the articles in the magazine is about the unmistakably unique Libeskind-designed Denver Art Museum building that opened in October 2006. The building is referred to as "quirky" and it is noted that it has been "critically panned". I couldn't help but think of the similar start the Centre Pompidou received thirty years ago. I wonder how long it will be before the citizens of Denver couldn't imagine their city without the unconventional design of the Denver Art Museum?

Local 909er

New Documentary Film and Critic Norman Klein Examine the Inland Empire

The Wignall Museum at Chaffey College presents Local 909er, a 30 minute film directed by Enid Baxter Blader that follows the “redevelopment” of six individuals in the Inland Empire as their local communities also undergo redevelopment. Immediately following the film, there will be a talk by cultural critic Norman Klein.

Local 909er will screen and Norman Klein will speak on Saturday, February 3, 2007, starting at 1:00 pm in the Chaffey College Theatre. The Theatre is adjacent to the Wignall Museum. The screening and the talk are free and the public is welcome.

More people have moved to the Inland Empire, east of Los Angeles, than Los Angeles proper. Housing developments are its new crops; rapidly replacing vacant orange groves, fallow vineyards, cow fields, train yards, and rock mines. The small 19th century towns of the Inland Empire have become a single Burbopolis. Mega malls, giant box stores, acres of asphalt, and yardless "McMansions" suddenly characterize a region once popularly referred to as "just so much dirt." Local 909er offers a look at this transition and its impact on the people of the Inland Empire.

Enid Baxter Blader's films have been written about in the New York Times, ArtForum, ArtReview and other publications. Her work has been shown internationally at venues such as the Smithsonian, Location One, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Arclight Theater and the Kunsthalle Vienna. Blader has won several grants, including the Durfee Foundation, Kodak Film, and the California Council for the Humanities. She is now Assistant Professor of Digital Video at CSUMB.

Norman Klein is a cultural critic, urban and media historian, and novelist whose essays have appeared in anthologies, museum catalogs, newspapers and scholarly journals. His books include "The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory," "Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon," "The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects," and “Freud in Coney Island and Other Tales. A professor at the California Institute of the Arts, he is currently completing a database science fiction novel “The Imaginary Twentieth Century,” to open in 2007.

The screening of Local 909er and talk with Norman Klein are presented in conjunction with Invisible Trajectories: Passing Through the Inland Empire, an exhibition currently on display at the Wignall Museum. Made possible, in part, by a grant from the California Council for the Humanities "California Stories Initiative," Invisible Trajectories runs through March 3, 2007. For more information and a calendar of special events related to this exhibition, go to: http://www.chaffey.edu/wignall/invisibletrajectories

Pollution Damaging El Tajin Carvings

Ancient Mexican Carvings Being Erased by Acid Rain, Experts Say National Geographic

Pollution is threatening to erase thousand-year-old stone carvings at one of Mexico's most important archaeological sites, a new study shows.

The pre-Aztec city of El Tajin, located on Mexico's Gulf coast, is famous for its temple pyramids and intricately carved reliefs.

But acidic air pollutants pumped out by oil-drilling platforms and power stations along the coast are slowly eroding these carvings, according to Humberto Bravo, an air pollution specialist.

"The deterioration is alarming … and could cause irreparable damage to monuments that are an important part of our cultural heritage," said Bravo, of the University of Mexico's Center for Atmospheric Sciences.
...

Other scholars expressed similar alarm at the detrimental effects of pollution on El Tajin.

"The art of El Tajin is crucial to our understanding of the ancient history of the Gulf coast," said John Machado, a pre-Columbian art historian at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, California.

"It gives evidence of a powerful and complex civilization that had broad interaction with Mesoamerican cultures in both central Mexico and Maya-controlled regions but still cultivated its own unique Veracruz style and iconography."

"The loss of these images would be devastating to the cultural heritage of the area," said Machado, who has done extensive research at El Tajin.
...

National Geographic

In addition to the article posted above on El Tajin, I was also quoted in a National Geographic article on possible Olmec influence at the site of Zazacatla. To give some context for the short phrase credited to me in this article, here is the full statement I gave to the author:

Although the concentration of the Olmec heartland is located along the Gulf coast in modern Veracruz and Tabasco, the influence of the Formative period culture can be seen in the planning and organization of ceremonial centers and visual art forms of both contemporary and later civilizations throughout Mesoamerica. The Olmec need for materials, especially the precious and ritually important jade, developed a broad trade network. Evidence of this interaction has been discovered as much as 400 miles from the Olmec heartland in Guerrero. At sites such as Teopantecaunitlan sculptures depicting clear representations of Olmec supernatural figures have been found that date back to between 1200 and 800 BC. If further evidence of the recently discovered objects at Zazacatla indeed supports an interpretation of Olmec influence at the site, it would not be unheard of.

Gustav Klimt, high ranking artist.

Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) was reported in 2006 to have sold for $135 million. People wonder why it surpassed Picasso's Blue Period Boy with a Pipe (1905) that sold for $104.2 million in 2004. "Renee Price, director of the Neue Galerie, in a statement said that the Klimt portrait is as important to that museum as Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is to the Louvre in Paris."

By the late 1970s Klimt's landscapes were selling in a range of $400,000 to $600,000. In 1978 MoMA arranged to sell The Park to New York dealer Serge Sabarsky for $500,000. Prices for Klimt and German Expressionist rose in the art market throughout the 1980s. The U.S. did not show that much interest in his work until Otto Kallir donated The Pear Tree (1903) to Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum, which opened a door to institutions to appreciate his work. Although his erotic gold leaf works are priceless, his popularity has increased recently over the years. I'm sure he would be proud that his art is exposed is such a way, unlike in his years when it was confiscated by the nazis. His talent was not doomed to stay in the dark.

Mona Lisa Found!

Italian historian, Giuseppe Pallanti believes he has located the grave of the woman who sat for Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting, the Mona Lisa.

Pallanti identifies the woman behind the famous smile as Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo. Lisa was the wife of a wealthy Florentine merchant and it is believed that her husband commissioned the portrait to commemorate her second pregnancy at the age of 24. Pallanti's contemporary research supports claims made by the first art historian, Giorgio Vassari in his important text of 1550, Lives of the Artists.

Newly discovered documents verify that Leonardo's father was Lisa's neighbor. This link may seem trivial at first, but it provides solid evidence to connect la Gioconda's husband and Leonardo da Vinci. This new information (in the form of Lisa's husband's will) brings the pieces of the puzzle together. It also squelches theories that the Mona Lisa was a prostitute, the artist's mother, and even a feminized portrait of the artist himself. Yep, she was a real woman - and a woman with a grave!

Scientists plan to look for the real woman's remains, and possibly reconstruct facial features to see if the remains match the portrait.

Possible Chachapoya Find

'Cloud warrior' ruin may hold clues to lost civilization

LIMA, Peru (Reuters) -- An unusual archeological site discovered in Peru's mountains may hold clues to the history of the Chachapoya people, known as "cloud warriors," who fought the Inca Empire before the Spanish conquest.

Keith Muscutt, a British-born Chachapoya researcher with the University of California Santa Cruz, said Wednesday the site was "strikingly anomalous" because of its size, shape and remote location in the dense forest full of spider monkeys and toucans.

The unfortified, possibly ceremonial structure is located in an area previously considered on the periphery of the Chachapoya domain in the upper Amazon region.

"What it is showing is that we don't really know what their territory was," he told Reuters. The place where the ruins were discovered had been considered a buffer zone between the highland Chachapoya and the tribal cultures of the Amazon basin.

"It is certainly not a fortress, so either the Chachapoya's territory extended further East, or they relied more on cooperation than conflict with their neighbors," he said.

The Chachapoya civilization, which flourished between 800 and 1475, is known for its mountaintop citadels like Kuelpa and Vira Vira and well-preserved mummies found in tombs at the Lake of the Condors.

Conquered by the Incas just before the Spanish conquest, they allied with the Spaniards after 1532, but fell victim to diseases brought from Europe and vanished.

This ruin, dubbed Huaca la Penitenciaria (Penitentiary Ruin), consists of a large ceremonial platform, a plaza and a number of rectangular and circular buildings.

The heavily overgrown site was discovered by the Anazco family of Peruvian explorers at a plateau in the mountains between the Rio Verde and Rio Huabayacu in the Department of San Martin, about 560 miles north of Lima.

In August, Muscutt, 60, took part in an Anazco-led expedition that made a preliminary survey of the site.

"My goal at this point is to notify the appropriate Peruvian authorities," Muscutt said. He is also talking to archeologists to evaluate the find.

Although additional research is needed to confirm that it is a Chachapoya structure, Muscutt said it had an ornamental frieze and dry masonry very typical of the Chachapoyas.

"Also, all the walls have a slight bulge to them like the side of a barrel, which I think is a fault in their engineering that they adopted and made a feature -- an aesthetic choice resulted from engineering accident," Muscutt said.

The site had been abandoned for at least 400 years. "It is a very interesting archeological time capsule," he said.

Artists Set Out to Map the Uncharted

The Wignall Museum at Chaffey College is pleased to announce Invisible Trajectories: Passing Through the Inland Empire, a project utilizing maps, stories, weblogs, and photographs collected and created by Deena Capparelli and Claude Willey about the experience of traveling and observing the landscape of the Inland Empire at the end of the age of oil.

Invisible Trajectories opens on Monday, January 22 and runs through March 3, 2007. The opening reception is Wednesday, January 24 from 7:30 to 9:00 PM. A presentation by artists Claude Willey and Deena Capparelli will precede the reception on Wednesday, January 24 at 6:30 PM. Admission and events are free and open to the public. For more information and a calendar of special events related to this exhibition, go to: http://www.chaffey.edu/wignall/invisibletrajectories

Made possible, in part, by a grant from the California Council for the Humanities “California Stories Initiative,” Invisible Trajectories is a multi-pronged public discussion and story documenting the experiences of a core group of travelers who have surveyed the vast Inland Empire on foot and bicycle with occasional excursions undertaken via bus and automobile. Told using a low-tech layering technique, the stories utilize maps, written excerpts of personal accounts, and photographs to emphasize the ‘problems’ of mobility that continue to define the Inland Empire as perpetually transforming, continually blurred, overwhelmingly dynamic, and arguably placeless.

Against the backdrop of world oil decline, the stories in Invisible Trajectories investigate personal movement and public access while pointing to some of the region’s unresolved transportation issues. Invisible Trajectories observes the movement patterns of individuals and considers how these patterns might change with the termination of what some have called the petroleum interval. We are living at a crucial moment in history with a growing list of unresolved transportation, development, and access issues facing us. The future of movement in the Inland Empire must be discussed. Invisible Trajectories will provide one possible framework for starting the conversation.

In addition to the Wignall Exhibition, the public is also welcome to visit the Invisible Trajectories Planning Space & War Room in Alta Loma, the main hub of the archive and all Invisible Trajectories planning and production, Saturdays, February 17 – March 31, 2007.

Invisible Trajectories Special Events

Wednesday, January 24, 2007, 6:30 – 7:30pm:
Public lecture by artists Claude Willey and Deena Capparelli; reception immediately to follow, 7:30 – 9:00pm.

Saturday, February 3, 2007, 1:00 – 3:00 pm:
Screening of Enid Baxter Blader’s “Local 909er” and a talk by Norman Klein in the Chaffey College Theater.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007, 6:30 – 8:30pm:
Jon Gillespie, Traffic Engineer, from the City of Rancho Cucamonga talks about the closing of CA-Route 30. Screening of Enid Baxter Blader’s “Local 909er” in the gallery.

Saturday, February 24, 2007:
Invisible Trajectories Bicycle Ride from Altadena (LA County) to the Wignall Museum with stops in Claremont, Upland, and Alta Loma. Call 909-989-4263 for times and routes. Planned arrival time at the Wignall Museum is 2:00pm.

The Wignall Museum is located on the Rancho Cucamonga campus of Chaffey College at 5885 Haven Avenue, Rancho Cucamonga, CA 91737-3002. Admission is free. Park in the north parking lot, permits can be purchased for $2. Parking is free during museum receptions and special events.

The Invisible Trajectories Planning Space & War Room is located at 7152 Amethyst Ave., Alta Loma, CA 91707. Please call to confirm: 909-989-4263 or email: claudewilley@sbcglobal.net

Event Info: (909) 941-2702, www.chaffey.edu/wignallgallery

Brenna Youngblood at the Wignall Museum

The Wignall Museum at Chaffey College is pleased to announce Brenna Youngblood, an exhibition of the Los Angeles artist’s photographic collages. The exhibition opens to the public on Monday, January 22, 2007. The public reception is Wednesday, January 24 from 7:30 – 9:00. Admission is free.

Brenna Youngblood fuses painting and photography into densely layered collages. Figures, architecture, and decorative backdrops are fragmented, multiplied and layered to form dynamic chaotic rhythms. Youngblood uses her own archive of photographic images and detail, from which she pieces together mosaic-like versions of her environment and community. Police cars, storefronts, and people in the artist’s life intertwine, conjuring up personal, social, and cultural situations that are sometimes sinister, sometimes humorous.

Born in Riverside, CA, Youngblood is a recent graduate from the MFA program at UCLA and has exhibited widely nationally. Her recent exhibitions include solo shows at the UCLA Hammer Museum and in the project space at Suzanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Youngblood’s style has been described by the LA Times as “audaciously distinctive” and the LA Weekly noted the “powerful outburst of painterly nuance” in her large-scale works.

Event Info: (909) 941-2702, www.chaffey.edu/wignallgallery

Using NASA satellites to locate ancient Maya ruins.

Last year I went to a symposium on ancient Maya murals. One of the speakers, archeologists Bill Saturno who had discovered the San Bartolo mural, discussed the use of satellites to locate ruins. The satellites detected differences in the thick jungle topography that was not visible to the plain eye. In the satellite photos these areas appeared lighter in color. Saturno discovered by using a GPS to find these lighter colored areas that they marked ancient Maya ruins that had yet to be discovered my archaeologists.

Last night NOVA on PBS had a short segment (14 minutes) on this discovery. You can watch the video here. The website also has a copy of the San Bartolo North Wall mural illustrated by Heather Hurst and a section where the archeologists Bill Saturno and Tom Sever will answer viewer questions. They are accepting questions through today and then they will post their responses on January 16th.

This is a composite image of a digital photograph and the correspondong line drawing and reconstruction painting of a portion of the northern mural.

LACMA Ticket Prices

Tyler Green at ArtsJournal: Modern Art Notes is quite disturbed about LACMA's high ticket prices and isn't holding back about letting everyone know. There are several other posts on this issue in addition to the one linked here, so be sure to scroll around. I know the issue of LACMA's pricing is something I also have to take into consideration when organizing museum trips. It's often cost prohibitive when you have to consider an additional $20-something per person to see current special exhibitions.

Ink & Clay 33

An annual competition, established in 1971, of prints and drawings; ceramic ware and clay sculpture sponsored by the W. Keith and Janet Kellogg University Art Gallery of California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. The primary underwriting is through the generosity of Col. Jim Jones. Ink and Clay is an exhibition open to all of the Western States including AK, AZ, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT, ND, SD, NM, NV, OK, OR, SD, TX, UT, WA,WY. A virtual catalog will be published and mounted on the gallery's website.

January 18 thru February 24, 2007
Opening reception Thurs Jan 18th 7 - 9PM

W. Keith and Janet Kellogg University Art Gallery
3801 West Temple Ave., Pomona, CA 91768

Mark Rothkos at the MOCA

MOCA’S Mark Rothkos
CLOSES SUNDAY, JANUARY 21
MOCA PACIFIC DESIGN CENTER

The first exhibition devoted solely to MOCA’s monographic holdings of paintings by the great New York School artist Mark Rothko, whose luminous color-field paintings made a significant mark on 1950s abstract expressionism in the United States.

MOCA Pacific Design Center is located in West Hollywood
8687 Melrose Avenue, West Hollywood, CA 90069
INFO 310/289-5223

Help

I was doing a European History Course and the teacher asked us to compare famous works of art to ones which were in a Sesame Street Coloring Book. I found one out of the three and I was wondering if anyone could help me out with the other two. I am guessing the time period should be near or around the Renaissance.
I found this one "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat:
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The second one:

This one I have seen before but I am not able to recall the title:


Thank you.