Maori art at SAM
Apr. 6th, 2012 08:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersIt's been a busy week. On Tuesday I got together after work with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
daveon at the Elysian and solved the problems of the world. (Somehow they keep recurring. That's the one problem we haven't solved yet.) On Wednesday I saw The Raid: Redemption at the Metro with holyoutlaw, followed by pizza at the Big Time. (Highly recommended to fans of hardcore martial arts films. The movie *and* the pizza, yes.) Then yesterday I went to the Gauguin and Polynesia show at the Seattle Art Museum with carl and Scott, after a tasting at the Oola Distillery and another visit to the Elysian.
The Gauguin show was utterly packed, probably because it was First Thursday and prices were reduced. The crowd made it very difficult to enjoy the artwork, and I actually ended up being more fascinated by the teeming schools of well-dressed, intellectually-curious faces with guide-phones stuck to their ears. Running through my head was Gang of Four: "He fills his head with culture/He gives himself an ulcer." As many have said, the interesting thing about this exhibit is that it has a lot of Polynesian art in it as well, and it attempts to show how naive Gauguin's understanding of Polynesian culture and history was -- how much he imposed his idealism and ideology on the Polynesian subjects of his art.
If the joint had been less crowded and hectic, that might have been an interesting thing to engage with. As it was, I felt pretty disconnected from the show, and generally found the Polynesian art more interesting to look at, if only because there tended to be fewer people standing around it with guide-phones glued to their ears. There was one painting by Gauguin that I had never seen in reproduction that I really liked a lot (although the JPEG at the link does not reproduce the colors accurately), but other than that my favorite pieces were the Maori carvings in the final room of the exhibit. They were incredibly elaborate, and I particularly loved the use of spirals to depict the muscles of buttocks and shoulders. Or perhaps they represented tattoos. Beautifully detailed stuff.
After that we wandered around some of the permanent collection on the third floor, which was full of fascinating stuff, from the paintings of Morris Graves and Mark Tobey to the early paintings of Mount Rainier and Astoria Harbor to the carvings of Susan Point and other contemporary Coast Salish artists (which reminded me of the work by John and Luke Marston that I saw at a gallery in Vancouver in 2009) and much more. That was a very pleasant chaser to the over-burdened main attraction.
So a busy week, and the weekend comes just in the nick of time. Perhaps I'll relax by mowing the lawn or otherwise digging around in the garden.
daveon at the Elysian and solved the problems of the world. (Somehow they keep recurring. That's the one problem we haven't solved yet.) On Wednesday I saw The Raid: Redemption at the Metro with holyoutlaw, followed by pizza at the Big Time. (Highly recommended to fans of hardcore martial arts films. The movie *and* the pizza, yes.) Then yesterday I went to the Gauguin and Polynesia show at the Seattle Art Museum with carl and Scott, after a tasting at the Oola Distillery and another visit to the Elysian.The Gauguin show was utterly packed, probably because it was First Thursday and prices were reduced. The crowd made it very difficult to enjoy the artwork, and I actually ended up being more fascinated by the teeming schools of well-dressed, intellectually-curious faces with guide-phones stuck to their ears. Running through my head was Gang of Four: "He fills his head with culture/He gives himself an ulcer." As many have said, the interesting thing about this exhibit is that it has a lot of Polynesian art in it as well, and it attempts to show how naive Gauguin's understanding of Polynesian culture and history was -- how much he imposed his idealism and ideology on the Polynesian subjects of his art.
If the joint had been less crowded and hectic, that might have been an interesting thing to engage with. As it was, I felt pretty disconnected from the show, and generally found the Polynesian art more interesting to look at, if only because there tended to be fewer people standing around it with guide-phones glued to their ears. There was one painting by Gauguin that I had never seen in reproduction that I really liked a lot (although the JPEG at the link does not reproduce the colors accurately), but other than that my favorite pieces were the Maori carvings in the final room of the exhibit. They were incredibly elaborate, and I particularly loved the use of spirals to depict the muscles of buttocks and shoulders. Or perhaps they represented tattoos. Beautifully detailed stuff.
After that we wandered around some of the permanent collection on the third floor, which was full of fascinating stuff, from the paintings of Morris Graves and Mark Tobey to the early paintings of Mount Rainier and Astoria Harbor to the carvings of Susan Point and other contemporary Coast Salish artists (which reminded me of the work by John and Luke Marston that I saw at a gallery in Vancouver in 2009) and much more. That was a very pleasant chaser to the over-burdened main attraction.
So a busy week, and the weekend comes just in the nick of time. Perhaps I'll relax by mowing the lawn or otherwise digging around in the garden.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-04-06 06:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-06 06:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-06 10:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-06 10:44 pm (UTC)