Attention art students, SFMoMA is complimentary to all those of you affiliated with SF art schools…so take your lazy bum-bums there and get inspired. Whenever I go to any art museum, I feel as if I am on some sort of yoga retreat in the Himalayas. Today I pondered yet again why the museum space makes me feel that way. I am not going to say anything profound as “ohhh myyyy, it surely does connect me to the eternal notions and quests for beauty and experiments with aesthetical proportions”…no, I will simply note that it the last standing place of peace and quiet except maybe for a cemetery or a church. And the last two are open to negotiation since I have often found myself in cathedrals mobbed with tourists snapping pictures and loudly commenting on their private notions on the everlasting. And don’t even let me get into the opera, ballet, serious film screenings and other spacial vessels holding culture … you seat-pushers and popcorn-chewers know who you are!!!!
So back to the quiet meditative shrine that is SFMoMA, my refuge from the hum and buzz of the city outside. On the relatively sunny day, compared to the tropical rain downpour of the previous week, I found myself intrigued by the two exhibitions on display – “LESS AND MORE: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams” and “FRANCESCA WOODMAN” (both closing February 20).
Dieter Rams, the famous industrial designer for Braun, opened my eyes to what I learned in art textbooks but never cared to explore further – Functionalist school of design that continued what Bauhaus introduced, i.e. simplicity, functionality, resourcefulness.
Rams’ famous principles of good design are the following:
- Good design is innovative
- Good design makes a product useful
- Good design is aesthetic
- Good design makes a product understandable
- Good design is honest
- Good design is unobstructive
- Good design is long-lasting
- Good design is thorough down to the last detail
- Good design is environmentally friendly
- Good design is as little design as possible
Francesca Woodman, an American photographer most noted for her nude auto-portraits in blurred black and white. Her photographs have painful, searching, ephemeral quality that is hard to separate from her suicide at the tender age of 22. It is devastating that her fame and recognition came post-mortem yet her artistry keeps inspiring and questioning what photography was and is today: intimate experience of the photographer overlapping with her search for identity, quest for divine, pondering on...that which we will never know...
A few random works that also caught my attention:
"Lick and Lather" (Janine Antoni) are two busts, one made of chocolate and the other made of soap. The work is a metaphor for female identity traditionally comprised of the feminine notions of delicious seduction and pristine purity.
"The Air We Breathe" (Elliott Hundley) is a fascinating collage made out of pins, photographs, strings and other various objects kaleidoscopically combining and resulting into a work of playful multidimensional quality and symbolic substance.
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