Thinking Machines at MoMA

Nothing is better than watching great art pieces made 30 years ago by old machines. "Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959-1989" in Museum of Modern Art shows lots of artworks, design pieces, and equipment at the time when computers just began to be widely used.  The works in the show are made by everyone from composer John Cage and systems theorist Buckminster Fuller to IBM and Apple. The exhibited works and tools include generated geometries, video installations and digital printings that demonstrate the early versions of technology today, such as CNC machine and projector.

This exhibition explores the evolving relationships between digital tools and digital art. At that age when computers come, digital art was more focused on exploring new forms of art, like generative art, interactive art. When an old low-pixel screen is flickering and the graphic is moving. It's still hard to imagine how intelligent people are at that time. Even today, these works are inspired and provide so many possibilities for today's digital art. Overall, This exhibition is more like an overview of how 20th-century visionaries saw early computers as both powerful tools and objects of curiosity and creativity. And that's why these old computers called thinking machines.

review：“Progressive Rocks" by Nathaniel Mellors

“Progressive Rocks" by artist Nathaniel Mellors exhibited at the basement floor of New Museum was truly a fascinated experience of mine.
Mailer created a series of works related to imagery and mechanical sculptures of human heads. He tried to discuss how the mass media manipulates and changes our consciousness in contemporary society from the perspectives of "language" and "body."
The work "Ourhouse Episode " is different from the story structure of the mainstream TV drama. It can be a family soap opera without a sense of conscience, and it is also a conceptual art.  "Ourhouse Episode " is an experimental work of the TV drama concept. This form makes the storyline open and changes the original specifications of the video art and TV script. Meller is good at diverting pop culture elements, and then dismantles the narration of his imagery into the works. He is trying to Combining historical, literary, television or film elements in content, and he used traditional format to raised doubts about mass media, and extended discussion on the current world, between humans and the environment, materials, technology, and media.
From the works of Mailer, we can see the intention of his clamoring for discussion, but he does not directly criticize. Instead, he uses the mass media as he likes, and joins in the magic, witty, and satirical elements to question.

Revised
              “Progressive Rocks" by Nathaniel Mellors exhibited at the basement floor of New Museum was truly a fascinating experience.
              Mellors created a series of works of mechanical sculptures of human heads. I guess he is trying to discuss how the mass media manipulates and changes our consciousness in the present.
The work "Ourhouse " is different from the story structure of the mainstream TV drama.  "Ourhouse" is an experimental work using a TV drama concept. This hybrid form of TV show and experimental video art was achieved by the open-ended narratives and balance between genre, language, costume, and technology. From his works, what I can get is that maybe he is trying to combine historical, literary, television and film elements. He uses a narrative form of the TV show to raise doubts about mass media and extended discussion between human and the environment, materials, technology, and media on the current world.
              From the works of Mellors, we can see the intention of his clamoring for discussion, but he does not directly criticize. Instead, he is questioning uses the mass media as he likes, and joins in the magic, witty, and satirical elements.

Skarstedt Gallery - Sue Williams: Paintings 1997-98

*Revised*

How can one make creepy and weird shapes look cute? Sue Williams shows how. She exhibited fourteen marvelous paintings at the gallery, her huge oil and acrylic paintings portray human body parts like tongues, fingers, even male and female's sex organs, abstractly and humorously. The objects she paints distort and twists together, and also sometimes two or three pieces are mixed almost into one. When people think of drawings of organs or other body parts, it is hard to imagine comfortable images, but Sue Williams paintings are.  She creates cute and cartoony works, full of color and self-expression.

One thing that impressed me was how I could feel an environment that was vibrant, powerful, and smooth at the same time. Sue Williams uses many vivid colors that are essential to her dynamic and vibrant environments. This feature is most notable in 'Ring' (1997).  Although more than five different colors are used for 'Ring'. They accentuate objects' features, and do not interrupt the other colors' direction and spot. She also makes lines from thick to thin that makes paintings look dynamic and have movements. Her touch is very delicate and detailed. Her incredible approach about the expression of human’s body parts and sex organs and abstraction make these paintings amazing. This exhibition shows her works' character very well.

Danh Vo at the Guggenheim

Vietnamese-born Danish conceptual artist Danh Vo’s expansive and personal retrospective Take My Breath Away quietly commands all seven floors of the Guggenheim’s rotunda. His work incorporates a variety of mediums, from found object sculptures, to handwritten letters and decorative wallpaper. Vo's sculptures in particular have are inherently cold and unembellished; the works are barely altered from the time of their acquisition, and are physically placed far apart in the gallery space. To me, Vo faced the challenge of making the viewer feel emotionally invested to his seemingly disconnected objects that hold no meaning without explanation.

Vo explores the individual’s relationship with historical events, and the means by which identity is formed through objects belonging to others. In displaying chairs of past American presidents and chandeliers found in the Paris ballroom where the treaty was signed to end the Vietnam War, Vo holds the United States partly responsible in shaping the fate of his family. However, his most successful pieces draw from his family’s personal history, rather than the broad histories of nations. A particularly moving sculpture is simply the engine of a Mercedes-Benz belonging to his father, a car he had always wanted. The convoluted, blackened piece of machinery materializes his father's struggle of attaining an idealized Western consumer dream.

While Vo ambitiously attempts to capture the intersection of public and personal histories, his work is grounded in a constant search for identity, both in himself and his family.

Tania Bruguera's Untitled (Havana, 2000) at MoMA

No more than four people are allowed in at a time, but the long wait is worth the experience of Tania Bruguera’s Untitled (Havana, 2000). Entering the exhibit, one’s eyes will take some time to adjust to the near pitch-black room, providing an opening for other senses to kick in and take notice of the heavy aroma of sugar cane crackling beneath one’s feet. The room is warm and the air feels heavy as the spectators trek forward blindly until the single light source above dimly reveals the silhouettes of four nude men slowly  - and repetitively – motioning as if they are washing their hands. Eventually viewers will discover the single light source in a small television screen playing footage of Fidel Castro.

The entire experience is haunting – from the nude apparitions restricted to the footage of Fidel Castro shedding the only visible light. The single light serves as a representation of Castro’s absolute control of the media and of the state. It feels oppressive, as if the viewer being watched. The work is unnerving and somber, and through its complete sensory command can touch one’s core. While the wait to get in is long and time spent with the work may be brief, the effects of this installation will stay with the viewer long after leaving the museum.

Stephen Shore in Chelsea

As a body of work, I don’t think the Stephen Shore exhibition at 303 Gallery is cohesive enough; several of the photographs deviate in both composition and subject matter. What these nine 64”x 48” prints by Stephen Shore do have in common is the uniform size and banal content, depicted in a very close proximity and at high resolution. Most of these photos include some manmade element like paper bags or cigarette butts, but several pieces depict purely natural elements like river water or tree branches. While most of the photos are looking towards the ground, one image of tree branches is shot at a frontal angle, raising the question of how this work is related.

If you are making photographs nowadays, when everyone is at license to take a picture of street trash and post it on Instagram in the name of some vague poetic impulse, then your work is challenged to do something more than just add to the existing noise. In a few singular pieces, the use of the closeup removes context and abstracts the image like a painting. After giving time to the initially unfamiliar textures and colors, it reveals to the viewer yellow traffic paint and dirt on asphalt. Shore, through several individual photographs rather than the entire body of work, prove photography’s enduring power as a tool to help contemporary viewers forget what we are looking at so that it becomes visible to us again.

Stephen Shore at MoMA

Stephen Shore at MoMA is the artist’s first museum survey exhibition in New York and covers his career of more than five decades. His prolificacy is made clear by the density with which his photographs are packed into the galleries. Despite the exhaustive inclusion of his many different bodies of work, Shore’s aesthetic is clear and consistent. Modest homes, street corners of sleepy towns on overcast days, unglamorous food and friends and strangers caught off guard, captured unapologetically. Shore’s photographs feel urgent, as if he paused for just a moment by accident, that their objective might simply be documenting moments of remarkable stillness. 

His landscapes from 1979-1993 felt like the strongest and most moving work in the show. They are pastoral and romantic. There’s an ease and a suddenness with which Shore decides to capture a figure or a building, such as a 1974 photo of Robert and Lucille Wehrly - his sensibility appears to more rapidly determine what and how the photo is. In relation to these selections of urbanity and humanity, the landscapes seem more careful. In his 1979 photo of Merced River at Yosemite there is the sense that Shore had to wait for this image to come together before he could take the photo. The figures had to align, the ripples in the water had to be just so. There is something illuminating in perhaps having to wait till the last possible second, right before all the details fall apart and the image is lost. Shore's ability to recognize this last interval before the image is broken is what ultimately unifies his long career.

Tania Bruguera at MoMA Untitled –Havana, 2000

Tania Bruguera at MoMA

Untitled –Havana, 2000

This piece is steeped Inside the cultural history of Cuba under the rule of Fidel Castro. Tania Bruguera addresses a time ripe with atrocities and political unrest. For me this piece had a very powerful impact due to the way the experience completely enveloped all of your senses. From what I can tell the space constructed inside the MoMA building is almost identical to the space where it was first shown. After waiting In a line for three hours I was finally permitted to enter the exhibition. From the bleach white light of the exterior space, you enter a concrete slab doorway almost three feet deep on all sides. You are unable to see where your going as your eyes adjust. The dry sugarcane at your feet is soft, and makes your throat scratch. A projection of Castro plays in a screen overhead in the center of the space. The only light other then the doorway. Upon walking back, with the light of the door as an exit beacon, the nude figures are exposed in clear sight. Each moves in a restricted manor, each look very uncomfortable. Upon exiting I had to take a moment to decompress and walked around looking at other works, though this piece I couldn’t get out of my mind.