“Volume for Lying Flat”
“Mother Mound Salt”
“Stick Structure”
“Solar Grow Room”
Ready to keep on my way, I was drawn in by these plant-sculptures by Meg Webster at Paula Cooper the other week. Not quite sure how to get my mind around the art, I’m basically cribbing here from Ken Johnson’s review from the NYT which you can read here. On view are “Elemental states of being — the wet, the dry, the organic, the crystalline, the quick and the dead — converge under the implied aegis of a harmonic metaphysical order.” There’s a short description of her work, which you can read here. While the roots of this kind of work are in Land Art, the scale here is more intimate, brought into the smaller confines of the gallery space. The combination of organic and non-organic material lends a wild and integrated sense of sense, including a strong smell and the idea of touch and taste alongside the visual experience. On the one hand, the objects on their own are object oriented. On the other hand, as a whole, the exhibition has a strong immersive character. If I were to go back, I suspect that this exhibition bears no little relation to German Romanticism and, as per Johnson, the hermetic tradition.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03y4jbb#play
We are at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York at The Met Breuer, where the exhibition Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, is a springboard to explore the notion of things unfinished or incomplete. The concept of a work of art that is unfinished, the so called ‘non finito’ style, has been with us since the Renaissance. But it has taken on new meaning in modern art of the 20th and 21st Century. So how should we respond to a work which is unfinished whether it is a painting, a book, a piece of music, a film or a building? And, how does the idea of ‘unfinished’ translate into an ever-changing historical and political context?