don't ruin it

"Don't ruin it, please?"
She said to me.
At a party, pointing her fingers at me, though kindly.
"I won't, I promise."
I said, a bit concerned that I might, and my mind going at 100 mph thinking, how? how not to ruin it?

At Farnsworth house, again.
It is a rainy Sunday. We are a small group touring the 50+ acres property and the beautiful white elevated glasshouse that Mies Van der Rohe built for Dr. Edith Farnsworth in 1951.

I see it differently this time. It is a female building. All of Mies' buildings are black steel, while this one is white. It is elevated for obvious reasons, yet this creates a feeling of having a skirt on.  A skirt that is pulled up with a tease, or a determination that she wants to be running around the meadows and nothing would stop her. The stairs and the porch lay off of the building as if the tail of a Victorian dress.

It is light and fragile, yet strong and built on steel and has endured "biblical floods." It is single, but not alone. It has constant visitors who come to appreciate its elegance, endurance, beauty, poetry, grace, and solitude.

Palumbo, the second owner of the house, before it became a National Trust for Historic Preservation site, breathed and felt the house with every inch of his being. He wrote descriptions of living in it as if a sensual night with a lover. He understood it. The caress of the wind on the steel, the light laying down on the glass. He spent money on house repairs and restoration, like one would on an ailing child.

We take another short tour, the "LumenHaus." The Virginia Tech students' award winning solar house inspired by the Farnsworth house, in 2010. It doesn't move us. The water around it, while recycled and reused, doesn't transcend oceans and rivers. The solar shades a great technology but already done, in shapes of flying birds in another magnificent space, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, by Santiago Calatrava. Nothing is ahead of its time, and nothing marries steel, wood, water, light, and recycled material poetically.
"60 years later, and this is the best we could come up with?"
He says.

When she told me not to "ruin it", she was talking about him. That he has a pure soul and that it is rare. I believed her. She brought a good example of her husband of fifteen years, and I wanted to be her, believing in purity, in the soul, and not ruining it.

At Farnsworth house, seeing what Palumbo did to the house, and how the preservationists and art collectors came up with the money to outbid bidders at the auction house, made me cry. They believed in its purity and didn't want to ruin it. They tried and succeeded to keep the Farnsworth house in her birthplace, where she could continue to hold her skirt up for it not to be ruined by flooding rivers. At the LumenHaus while solar power and recycled water was rightly used, poetry had been lost.

I sit across from him as he also blogs about our shared experience of visiting the Farnsworth house on a rainy Fall Sunday. I raise my head from my laptop and look at the side of his neck over his laptop and I tell myself: remember not to ruin it. Build on it, but "don't ruin it."
I think: that must be the trick and that must be the challenge. Good luck!

his: http://waveland.tumblr.com/post/10390972424/people-who-live-in-glass-houses

my earlier entry on the Farnsworth house:
http://fekrozekr.blogspot.com/2010/11/place-calling.html

more: http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3785&page=1

best piece of art I have seen in a long time

"the search"
jazon lazarus (american, b. 1975)
andew rafacz gallery, chicago, il
september 2011
http://jasonlazarus.com
www.andrewrafacz.com

image: (c) Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago

First it is nothing.
Just a set of white stairs in the middle of a gallery and nothing else.
Then it is a ziggurat, a pyramid, out of place and leading to a dead-end roof.

Everyone is obsessively, competitively and curiously climbing its narrow, high steps to go to the top. To a place that seems as if there is no point to go to but hitting your head to the short ceiling and having to come back down.

Then, some people disappear.
Where is he? looking around, inside the gallery, outside the gallery, around the pyramid.
Searching...
: He is 'inside'.

The white urban machu picchu, the inside-out triangle, is like a kiva. It has a belly and is alive inside. Viewers can take a straight down vertical ladder, that is hard to spot first, from the top and climb down to its sanctuary. A place where other participants are sitting across and scribbling in big black books, titled 'the search'.

Jason Lazarus' piece - masterpiece invigorates such a fantastic change of planes, from searching to finding, from exterior to interior, and from black hole to home, that you feel full, achieved, grounded.
You have arrived.

I change planes. From the sophisticated, intellectual and gallery hopping adult, I become the stair climbing giggling child in a playground, poetically disoriented. I sit in the hole of the kiva next to him. He writes about losing his grandmother earlier that week. I draw lines from the deep cove, away from the surface, from the crowd. We are peaceful and grounded.

Changing planes. What life should be about. A constant change of states. From adult to child, from serious to playful, from silly to professional, from real to fictitious, from dream to consciousness, from abstract to concrete. The lines between the states losing color, becoming lighter and softer, blending the planes as the search for balance ends.

Exquisite Corpse

I am participating in an Exquisite Corpse exhibit, where I got paired with two other artists with an open reign on doing our collaborative works as we wanted.

How do I describe it in one word: limiting.

It is a limiting process as you have to deal with more constraints than usual. The medium, scale, time and the usual paradigms you have to work within are coupled with having to work with others' works, creativity, pallets, mediums, and vision. The challenges however force you to let go of the freedom you would have otherwise had. Art should not and is not only about possibilities and so it should be able to tackle this lack of freedom. As I install and review the installation, I ask myself, did it?

Some of the images of my pieces incorporated in a larger mixed media piece:

"Homage to Bacon", Avisheh Mohsenin, Mixed Media Installation in a Box, 2011

 

"Ladderal Exploration", Avisheh Mohsenin, Mixed Media Installation in a Box, 2011

(rotate clockwise, 90 degrees)

 

 

Exquisite Corpse
Independently Curated Show
Curator: Jenny Lam
Fulton Street Collective
Chicago, IL 2011


More on the show and details on the opening here:

http://artistsonthelam.blogspot.com/p/exquisite-corpse.html

for Paul Klein (Chicago's independent art critic preview on the show): http://www.artletter.com/

Hardy

I was a little older than 5 years old. We were living in Hamedan, a province in the middle of Iran, the house of Avecina, the longest cave in the world, and nice highland weather. I was a confident, energetic, no none sense type of kid. Not much girly, very fair (in terms of justice not skin tone), and curious.

I learned skiing there, skipping school as recommended by my father on a Tuesday because there was fresh snow. I also learned about Darwin's theory of evolution, through the visuals on the back of a book that my father casually showed me and my sister as something obvious and funny that we were monkeys in the past. It did make total sense.

I also saw tanks for the first and last time, it was 1978 and the year of the revolution. There were curfews, sounds of shootings, and demonstrations. I learned about hunger strike and making dolls out of used detergent bottles (mother's favourite craft time) and walked in a lot of snow in Hamedan.

We had a neighbor with a daughter younger than me and my sister. The mother had married young instead of going to college. She was smart and ambitious but without a platform to use her potentials. She spoiled the little girl whose room was filled with new toys. She would put real pieces of chocolate in the girl's hot coco drinks and the little girl didn't even enjoy hot coco that much, or so my sister and I thought, as we were licking the saliva off of our chins, since we were not offered that hot coco with real tablets of chocolate. The mother looked up to and seeked guidance from my mother who was older, had gone to college and graduate school, and was living her dream at home and at work.

We were at their home one day looking at the spoiled girl not really enjoying her hot coco -with real tablets of chocolate!- and whining and not enjoying her room full of toys, when I saw the most adorable little piece of toy that I had ever seen. It was a small 3 inches long figurine of Hardy, from Laurel and Hardy's comedy. It was made out of hard plastic and had vivid colors. It was the cutest thing anyone could have made. I had to have it.

Two days later and my mother, the quintessential democratic and equality rights feminist, approached me in a dark corner of the hall that went between our bedroom and theirs. She said, X (the mother of the spoiled kid) says that you have her daughter's Hardy figurine, is that true?
I was disappointed! I was so disappointed that an adult could not let a little girl have something that her daughter clearly didn't care about. I was disappointed that she told on me and behind my back and found her stingy, not generous, petty, and unfair to have taken away this ultimate joy from me!
We had the usual "now let's be civil and return the toy to whoever it belongs" moment and walked over and handed it in. I did not feel remorse or embarassement, just feeling sorry for her not being able to see me have it!

Years passed. The mother went to college and started working. She raised great independent and well educated daughters and always told us how my sister and I were their role models. It didn't move me much.

32 years later, on a snowy day in Chicago, where there are no tanks and curfews, and no father to take you away from work for the pure joy of being in fresh snow, I receive a little packet. It has a used cover that is stapled back together. It has the wrinkles of the touches of a little girl or a boy on its old plastic wrap and it comes from a seller in Argentina. My secret lover who has heard my story found Hardy from the other side of the world and got it for me on Ebay! Thank you! I love it! and I am happy for that lady and her daughters and their achievements.