Art, art … and more art (continued)
I’ll tell you about our day visiting Benesse House Museum – a site designed by Tadao Ando.
On a side note, we also visited the Ando Museum – a small but insightful window into his work.
At the museum, we saw Ando’s drawings for the Benesse House Museum. It seems as though he grabs anything to draw on.
I love that kind of immediacy, the need to get an idea onto paper.
At the Benesse House Museum Bruce Nauman’s 100 Live and Die stands by itself in this huge room.
This is the ceiling over the installation – not really black but the time of day darkened the area significantly.
Nauman’s piece is a four-column sculpture of neon-lit opposing concepts. It reads like poetry because the words are illuminated randomly. In every instance, there is truth to the words.
Speak and Live
Black and Die
Spit and Live
It rarely happens when a line’s counterpart is illuminated right after it.
Black and Live / Black and Die.
After about 2:30 minutes, each column is lit up. then two columns are lit up.
Finally, all four – and it’s amazing!. The room, with its polished concrete, glows. I think the “poem” cycles through roughly every three minutes.
Some of David Hockney’s pieces are also housed here.
I saw a documentary on David Hockney some years ago and learnt that he used a Polaroid camera to sometimes piece together his ideas to then work on his paintings.
In the painting with the yellow columns the perspective shifts, indicating that the “Polaroid camera conceptualization” may be at play.
At first, I thought this other piece Yellow and Black Boats was also by Hockney because it seemed to be his style. However, the artist is Jennifer Bartlett.
I love this piece. It’s large; the three panels cover a large wall. Bartlett’s rendering of the water is masterful. Close up it’s entirely impressionistic.
What was truly fascinating is that in front of this painting is a picture window. In the distance, I could see a beach and a yellow and black boat.
Did she painting that scene?
Were the boats made after?
Were they made at the same time as the ones in the gallery?
There are so many other amazing installations and paintings in this museum.
I want to show them all to you but I’ll share just one more by Richard Long.
It’s called River Avon Mud Circles by the Inland Sea. It’s done on the wall of the museum (so yes – a very permanent piece to the collection).
It’s not hard to imagine how it was done, the movement the use of fingers and hands to draw with the mud. Amazing how the mud in the center of the circles look like bamboo leaves.
This museum is a must see.
There’s a beautiful Gerhart Richter – and so many others that give you pause.
Some that pull you back making you stay a while.
Copyright © 2023
Lisi-Tana.com
All Rights Reserved