Peggy Guggenheim

Peggy Guggenheim

Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim was a famous socialite and art collector. Over the weekend, on March 6th, I got the opportunity to watch a documentary on her life from the point of view of her closest friends and family. 
Peggy was born August 26, 1898 and died December 23, 1979, so she isn't technology a contemporary person but without the modernist and bold moves Peggy made during this modern period who knows what contemporary art would look like now. 
Her father was Benjamen Guggenheim and her mother was Florette Seligman both of whom were wealthy families in 1920's America. 
However, Peggy speaks of how she always felt different and out of place in high society and was considered to be the black sheep of her family when she chose to move to Paris to join the arts. She was drawn to the idea of the modern artists and how different their ideas and art was. It allowed her a place to be herself.
After moving to Paris and joining the bohemian lifestyle Peggy begins to express a desire to lose her virginity so she marries Laurence Vail, a Dada sculptor, with whom she had two kids and was soon divorced in 1928. So began her vicious affair with the writer John Ferrar Holms, that ended with his death. All of the time she remained close friends with Marcel Duchamp.

John Ferrar Holms

All the while she is living in Paris, she is seeing all of the amazing art being made and decides to open a gallery with her inheritance. Her gallery becomes very famous with popular Modern shows. Some of the artists she featured were Wassily Kandinsky, Yves Tanguy, and Wolfgang Paalen. 
By the late 30's she had realized, with a little encouragement from her uncle Solomon Guggenheim, that what she really wanted was to open a museum. 
The most amazing part of her life for me, was the part when they were discussing how Peggy began to viciously collect artwork from the modern artists during the time of Hitler's invasions. She bought as many paintings as possible and because the artists were trying to sell them so that they weren't destroyed during World War II. In the film they also discussed how she with the help of her Duchamp several artists escape from Europe. 

interview with Jean Cocteau

Peggy really was an amazingly misunderstood woman, but she did extraordinary things. After leaving Europe she opened another museum in New York which is the Guggenheim that we know today.

 

Three Portaits

    The contemporary artist and Chinese director Wang Bing (b. 1967) using films to tell the story of mundane detail. Bing was born in the Shaanxi Province in China, the third largest exporters of crude oil. When Bing was twenty-two he spent time in Tiananmen Square in Bejing, where he was among many protests, one of which was brutally shut down in 1989. Student were protesting for reformation of their government when they were forcefully suppressed by assault rifles and tanks. This to Wang Bing became a staple for his view on political context of his art.
     Bing focused over the years on the events in China. Filming the lives of the individuals so they may be heard over the noise of the mass growth in economics. He focuses on the details and how those details come together to form the larger picture in our day to day lives. Making the mundane into the extraordinary.

Crude oil room

     The Wattis Institute in San Francisco is holding an exhibit on three of Bing's works entitled Three Portraits, which visited on March 2. After learning about and watching these three movies I can see why they were chosen. My first impressions of the gallery were very minimal. When you first enter the space is covered in black walls and the lights are off the only thing you can read are the titles and short explanations of each films on the walls. Each movie is separated into different rooms that are all black and the entrances to each covered with black curtains, and in each room are 3 to 5 chairs in one corner.

Me watching Fengming

    The first movie I watched was called Crude Oil, made in 2008 it documents the lives and unfair treatment of the Gobi Desert oil field workers. Originally meant to be a 70 hour film it was cut to 14 hours however, not once during those 14 hours does Bing or anyone else give any sort of narration. The opening scene that I watched was several men in small, windowless room discussing the rough, long hours and conditions that their work involves and the small amount of wages they seems to accrue from it. The interesting part that I saw was how these men seemed to take every hardship they had thrown their way in stride never seeing how it accumulated over time. Never acknowledging Bing or the camera he had. This movie to me spoke of the theme of greed and money grubbing at the expensive of the people who help to create the profit in the first place.

Fengming

      The second film I watched was by far my favorite, it was Fengming, A Chinese Memoir. This one was made a year before Crude Oil and it was actually suppose to be part of Bing's biggest hit The Ditch but she was so captivating to him, Bing made her into a whole film of her own. Fengming is a woman sitting in her living in front of camera that never moves, and talks about her entire life. The simplicity of the background of the film drives all your focus onto this little old woman and you become entranced into her story. I wasn't the only who felt this way either, my mom who had come with me, was so interested in Fengming she would every once in a while utter an under her breath wow or amazing, even at certain points she actually became in raged for Fengming.
       The third and final film for me was the least successful out of all of them. It was called Man With No Name, made in 2009 it is a documentary with no words ever the man in the film never speaks and there, as tradition with Bing's films, is no narration. The man in the film is what appears to be homeless and walking around the rural area of Bejing, just doing whatever he wants or needs at the time. Bing films him over all of the seasons and the most I could take away from this film was the three common themes that seem to be present in all of the films the ideas of greed, power, and control over ones life. 

Man with no name

     All three of the films that I saw shared these aspects along with power themes of greed, power, and control. In each there was the elements to have any political message sent out and the most obvious being Crude Oil. It seems more like Bing wants us to take away the meaning we feel fits best with each film. His whole approach to these are the daily adventurous we go on every day. The devil in this case does seem to be in the details, as the details are extremely important to each one of these films.
     Overall, I would say that it is well worth the trip. While some parts of the exhibit I enjoyed more then others, I did think the central theme was strong and present each one of the rooms as well as the films.

Eileen Quinlan: Modern Contemporary

Eileen mid lecturing

Eileen Quinlan was born in Boston in 1972, where she grew up to receive her BA in Fine Arts at Tufts University in 1996. This was the birth of one of the greatest contemporary artists today. One week ago, February 18th, at UC Davis I was lucky enough to attend a lecture given by Eileen, it was actually truly enlighten to listen to her speak about her processes and her body of work. It was amazing to hear about how inspired by everyday life she can be. Eileen's style is considered to be an appropriation of late modern style by photographing media in an abstract manner.

Quinlan's Smoke and Mirrors Work

               She began her lecture talking about the early 2000's when she was photographing landscapes. More specifically the areas around her home and work, she discussed how she would use an analog camera to create more captivating photographs. She talked about  how she could take a shabby environment look more exotic. A big part of this topic that interested me was how she mentioned the use of analog over digital and how many people saw it as a political statement when in reality she just preferred the use of film over digital to create the desired effect.
      Next Eileen moves into 2005, when she graduated from Columbia, at which point she was moving into more self-exploratory photography. She moved from landscapes into 19th century style ghost photography, which is a style that implies spiritual exploration. Through this Eileen discovered the use of smoke in photography, she would set up "candid" shots of everyday scenes using smoke to cloud half the picture in an attempt to show how not everything is as it seems. The idea of the smoke and light through the smoke became a huge subject for her, through some encouragement from one of her professor she continued to expand on the smoke using mirrors and colored lights. That same year she opened her first exhibition in collaboration with her husband, Cherny Thompson, together they created 20 painting and 20 photographs framed them all the same and hung them to watch to see if the audience could tell the difference between them. Eileen discusses how this exhibition changed her view on what art could be and what painting was really. That anything in life could be viewed as art and that photography and painting weren't so different from one another.
             Fast forward three years to 2008 where Eileen had her own show in LA , there she was more focused on motif and designs. She discussing using more figurative subjects and reincorporating people again. To her it was about being able to feel the artwork through your eyes more then it just being an abstract piece, she wanted it to feel like something. For example she would use yoga mats and fabrics up close to create textures and designs that someone could visually feel. This is how she began to destroy the film just enough to create a different image on top of the photo. Eileen would do all kinds of stuff such as exposing the film to light or scratching the film. When she was talking about how she would destroy the film just to see what kind of image it would make and how it was never the same it reminded me of how the Dada in the modern period would all chance to help them create their images, it seemed similar that Eileen would just do random stuff to her film and whatever the result was she considered it art.

Quinlan's Later Work by Destroying the Film

     A couple years later, 2013, Eileen communicates a revival of older works and how to reincorporate them in new and different way. Especially the concept of the smoke and mirrors, the symbolism of them for her is the idea of vanity and shallow seduction of contemporary life. She expresses different uses objects of just everyday life that symbolize the everyone being transformed and looking at it in a different way. Not to mention the use of mixing medias such as the analog and digital, she has been experimenting with scanner and mirrors on scanner to create rainbow effects on the pictures. When I asked her what her favorite medium out of all that she used and talked about her answer was the mirrors. They had the most use and presence in her work they seemed to mean more to her then just a mirror it was a reflection of light and space, an appropriation of  reality and twisted to be abstract. 

              Eileen Quinlan was most definitely inspirational to listen to her discuss her passion for her work and how she sees the world. The fact that we get to view this passion in her work is truly something magical for me.