5000 Moving Parts: MIT Museum

by Drew Martin

My 13-year-old son, Calder, and I are on a road trip to Cambridge/Boston, Massachusetts. One of our destinations was the MIT Museum, which we spent almost two hours in this afternoon. The museum is small but definitely worthwhile, and it has a lot of what you would expect at a technological museum: computers and other interactive displays. What really impressed me is the kinetic art show on display until November 2014, called 5000 Moving Parts, which has work by mechanically inclined creators whose machines range from bizarre to profound. One piece, Please Empty Your Pockets, by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is like a kid's interpretation of how a TSA airport scanner should work, only that it is elegantly executed. The device has a lit moving bed onto which you may empty your pockets. The items you place glide under a hood and when you pick them up on the other side of the mysterious light box, their exact scan remains, and continues down/on the bed. The effect is accumulative so that a sole item might end up in a collage of other previously scanned objects. Calder scanned his winter hat, then his shoe. Arthur Ganson's works, a special feature at the museum, are the most mind-boggling. Machine with Oil, cycles a little bucket into a pool of dark oil, and dumps the contents onto itself when it is cranked up to the apex. It seems decadent, like pouring chocolate or syrup over food but then you realize this only makes the metal, geared contraption run better/smoothly. Behold the Big Bang sits long and wide like a lathe, but on closer inspection you see it is an arrangement of gears. On one end the movement is noticeable but seems to not be transferred down the system. The sign on the wall next to it reads, Note: It will take the motor, coupled with the sets of reduction gears, 13.7 billion years (the estimated age of the universe) to complete one rotation of the last gear. We exited through gift shop and got a T-shirt for my son that reads, i have an imaginary friend (square root symbol) -1. After the leaving the museum we walked around the MIT campus, and I brought him to see La Grande Voile (The Great Sail) by his namesake, Alexander Calder. A police SUV was parked right in front of the sculpture. I was trying to take pictures all around it so I asked them to move. The cop in the passenger seat said they were planning on moving in about an hour. I rolled my eyes and walked away. He shouted back at me, "No, I am just messing with you. I had to do it." Then they drove away.

Language is the Barrier of the Imagination: the Work of Bob Wilson

by Drew Martin
I just finished watching a great documentary about Bob Wilson called Absolute Wilson. The first name that comes to mind with Einstein on the Beach is Philip Glass, who composed the music for this epic work, but Wilson was the mastermind behind the production, and it is said that it was the first opera created around stage sets (by Wilson). He also collaborated with David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, Tom Waits, and William S. Burroughs, and threw himself into grand pieces, such as KA MOUNTain and GUARDenia Terrace, the seven-day play he put on atop a mountain in Iran in 1972. 

She's Tanner in California

by Drew Martin

A few days ago I met up with an old friend, Bob DeBris, a photographer from Canada who has been living in the Santa Barbara area for the past few decades. He is now working for the artist Joan Tanner in Montecito, California. I went to visit him at Joan's place where I met and spent the afternoon with this wonderful and inspiring artist. Here are a few detail shots of her home, studios, and property, followed by a short video of her talking about some of her work.

You See Santa Cruz

by Drew Martin

A couple days ago my daughter and I visited the University of California at Santa Cruz. It is the largest UC campus with the fewest students, and was developed in a decentralized way after the 1970 Kent State massacre in Ohio. Getting around the loop of the scattered areas at UCSC is a little disorienting so we stopped to ask directions from a student who was waiting at a bus stop. Before answering, she asked us to give her a ride while she jumped in the backseat and pushed aside our backpacks to make space for herself. She got us up to speed on campus life as she directed us to the music department where she had to practice her violin before a recital, which put us outside the Digital Arts building and just below the arts studios. We spoke to some of the staff and students, and were really impressed by the art programs as well as the overall energy there. A teacher's assistant gave us a tour of the sculpture studio as students diligently prepared for a critique. The following are detail shots of that walk-through as well as of the other studios.

Inflight Movie: Gravity

by Drew Martin
I did not watch Gravity on a big screen with surround sound. I watched it yesterday inflight between Newark and Chicago on the small headrest screen with a lot of plane noise. I probably missed many details of the effects and music score but in another regard I think I had a closer experience: between 5.5 -7.5 miles up in the air for a movie that was supposed to take place 372 miles above Earth.

Gravity was a perfect inflight movie, especially for the EWR to ORD flight that was slightly longer than the length of the film: Sandra Bullock was safe on Earth before we touched down on the wintry runway. The suspense of the film was definitely heightened being up in the air and the pilot's interjections, which overrode the film seemed fitting.

Although I love sci-fi movies, I have recently been disappointed with ones that were not made so well. This was well-crafted, and Bullock, who I usually stay away from with a ten-foot pole was excellent and made the film.

Under the Hood: Los Angeles Revisited

Art and Life in Modernist Prague

by Drew Martin
This evening a coworker/fella Czech enthusiast dragged me to an event organized by the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences at the Bohemian National Hall on the upper east side of Manhattan. Actually, I really wanted to go but it was in the opposite direction of my commute home. In the end, it was totally worth it.

The event was an author presentation: Thomas Ort spoke about his new book Art and Life in Modernist Prague: Karel Čapek and His Generation, 1911 - 1938. Ort intensely engaged the audience with his depth of knowledge of the topic, clear view of his subject, and incredibly well-structured talk. It was such a thorough and intelligent lecture that I bought his book so I could continue to follow his train of thought.

From his introduction:
In most contemporary historical writing, the picture one gets of modern life and culture in...Central Europe is rather a gloomy one...so the story goes, there was a retreat from public and social life and a narcissistic withdrawal into the self...paradigmatically, for the Prague of Franz Kafka. This book tells a different story. It is the story of a generation of Czech writers and artists distinguished by a more positive and affirmative encounter with the modern world in the years before the First World War. It is the story of those who greeted the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy not with despair and trepidation but with a sense of hope and liberation. It is the story of those whose early vitalism and anti-rationalism later led them closer to liberalism, not further away from it. The subject of this study is the "Čapek generation," the idea of a loose group of modernist writers and artists coalescing around Karel Čapek (1890-1938), the leading novelist and playwright of interwar Czechoslovakia.

Coming of age in an atmosphere of acute rebellion against the positivism of the nineteenth century, Čapek and his closest peers were strident critics of reason, emphasizing the subjective and provisional character of all knowledge and the impossibility of its disentanglement from individual beliefs, desires, and values. Yet, unlike so many of their contemporaries elsewhere in Europe, their critique of reason issued neither in irrationalism nor in the dogmatic assertion of a particular truth, but in a pragmatic and relativistic vision that combined elements of reason and intuition alike. At a time when many of their modernist counterparts were turning to fascism or communism, the writers and artists around Čapek resolutely opposed the radical political alternatives of the left and the right and steadfastly defended the Czechoslovak state's fledgling democracy.

The Use and Abuse of Museums

by Drew Martin
I just read an essay from 1882 by W. Stanley Jevons titled The Use and Abuse of Museums from the book, The Emergence of the Modern Museum: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Sources. Jevons ponders the etymology of museums: temples or haunts of the muses, and questions why we use a term such as concert hall instead of museum even though music shares the same root word. He writes that while books are inherently educational and beneficial because of "the labour of reading," the benefits of museum range "from nil up to something extremely great."

Jevons complains that many people go to the museum only to take a walk or to unleash a household of children on a rainy day. He also comments that large collections are pointless and states that a good lecture on one subject can last an hour. The "glancing over some thousands of unfamiliar specimens" destroys "the habit of concentration of attention, which is the first condition of mental acquisition." Better, he continues, to stand a group of school boys in front of a grocer's shop window where there is a steam mill grinding coffee or to watch "the very active boot maker who professes to sole your shoes while you wait" than to file them cluelessly through the long galleries of a museum.

Jevons favors how the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen contains, in a single building, primarily work by the artist, which he says expresses a unity in style. He also liked The Pompeian House within the Crystal Palace (pictured here).

"For a few minutes at least the visitor steps from the present; he shuts out the age of iron, and steam, and refreshment contractors, and learns to realise the past."