Monday, March 05, 2007

Light exhibit at the Hirshorn Museum

There was a really lousy writeup about this exhibit in the Smithsonian Magazine. But the picture was of this one piece that I saw in the basement of the Wichita art museum a long time ago.
Some of the pieces are old stuff repositioned, but there's some new stuff, too.
Early on there's a wheelbarrow made of flourescent lights.
There's a spotlight pointed at a slowly rotating prism ring that is worth a couple of minutes.
Then there's a dark room that's pretty lame.
There's an old piece that is a circle painted in a circular gradient so that the edges are the same color of the shadows it casts on the wall behind it. It's hard to tell when it ends and the wall begins. One of the first bits that I saw the first time I went there and one of my favorites.
Right after the one I first saw in Wichita was a film which can only be described as every 70's abstract special effects show set to something that is almost but not quite the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. It's the sort of thing they would show when the Enterprise went through a nebula, a baby was being born, someone got drawn into a black hole or alien monolith orbiting Saturn.
There's a room of videos of elephants walking around.
There's a sculpture of boards that are white from three visible angles, but brightly colored on the side facing the window so it casts colored light on the white surfaces.
Up on the thrid floor there's a half hour video of a really long... wossit. You know, when puching the bell wakes the dog that scares the cat that makes the mouse run on it's wheel to turn the gnereator to make the light come on to toast the bread that... you know what I'm talking about. Well it's half an hour long... with a few edits.
In the basement there's a couple of short films both based on nightmares the artist had.
There's some other stuff, but I really should have written this the day I went because I can't remember them now.

2 comments:

Carrie M said...

so...worth it or not?

Ibid said...

Yeah, totally.
Just remember that it is the Hirshhorn and their floors are specially designed to cause suffering if you spend too much time standing.