{"id":1363,"date":"2007-01-08T13:20:00","date_gmt":"2007-01-08T17:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/archives\/1363"},"modified":"2007-01-08T13:20:00","modified_gmt":"2007-01-08T17:20:00","slug":"friday-night-at-the-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/archives\/1363","title":{"rendered":"Friday Night at the Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"

The past weekend was hella busy, so I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been trying to write it out in little chunks; on the back of napkins at bars, in matchbooks, on my wrist, etc. I wrote this and a lot more last night which I will post in bits throughout the day. For those of you concerned about the draining impact this writing-mania may have on my day job, let me reassure you that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve composed one article, two memos and several pages of a speech already today. I am prolific.<\/i> <\/p>\n

Friday night was great. The good doctor and I enjoyed steak and red wine, moseyed over to the AGO for the photography exhibit. The Ansel Adams section was completely different from what I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d expected, partly because I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d expected to see those popular iconic landscapes that make it into calendars, which are mostly from his later period of visual mastery in the 1950s and 60s. This exhibition had 120 images, including rare prints from when he was just starting out and screwing around with technique in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Photos of old dudes on porches, grocery stores, portraits and interior shots. Where are the big rocks?<\/p>\n

The other thing that threw me was the scale of the prints being all out of proportion to their subject matter. Somehow images of Giant Sequoias and massive moraines, Yosemite and Joshua Tree in the California desert feel like they ought to be 50 feet tall, printed in high-contrast on glossy white photo paper. Not so much. The initial print of the 1927 shot titled \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Monolith – Face of Half Dome\u00e2\u20ac\u009d which features a spectacular uplift of granite carved by glacial ice, was on a tiny 3\u00e2\u20ac\u009dx4\u00e2\u20ac\u009d piece of heavily yellowed, textured paper. Chemicals and paper cost a lot more back then, I suppose.<\/p>\n

I had a few moments of self-discovery at the museum. Turns out the Doctor likes her photos to be of living trees with leaves, while I prefer deadwood, driftwood, petrified forests, etc. Also, I have spent 29 years of my life spelling Georgia O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Keeffe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s name incorrectly. Two f\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s? Really? Shit.<\/p>\n

The 50 or so Eisenstaedt photos weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t at all what I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d expected either. Like most people who lived in a university dorm and went to the poster sales, my prior experience of his work was the classic sailor-kissing-nurse photo that captured the celebration of V-J Day. But this is a man who was born in Poland and didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t immigrate to the United States until 1935. The body of his recognizable work is photojournalism, mostly for Life magazine where he worked for nearly 40 years. But again you got to see the progression from \u00e2\u20ac\u0153bum with a camera taking photos of random crap\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153serious international photojournalist\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. I liked seeing his candid style develop. <\/p>\n

First there were lots of snapshots of some very bizarre forms of entertainment that seem to have died out in recent years, such as weird archaic non-hockey sports on ice skates and card games that involved all of the participants to be sucking on baby teething soothers (not making this up), or playing their poker hands on different floors in stairwells while calling out bids using megaphones (not making that up either). Then his international travel years, with photos documenting old Ethiopia, the Galapagos, etc. Lastly, from the era just before WWII, lots of industrialized workers in factories making sewing machines, or large groups of people in uniform running about, delivering telegrams with this frenzied “the Nazi\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s are coming!” feel. <\/p>\n

All this, however, was trumped by the strippers. Yes, , it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s true. Strippers. On poles. At the art gallery. Hand to God. As part of the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcSwing Space: contemporary art in unexpected places\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 exhibit, the Henry Moore sculptural gallery (which I always take time to pause in on my way to feature exhibits) had a spicy little addition on the walls. Thong th-thong-thong-thongs just don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seem right when placed next to Moore\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 1962 plaster masterpiece, ‘Three Piece Reclining Figure No. 1’. Much as I would like to say I was horrified and appalled by Julian Opie\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s meditation on the female form in string undergarments, the entirety of my reaction was: 1]”Was… was that… always… there?”, 2] uncontrollable giggling, 3] HOW did he get FUNDING for this?<\/p>\n

I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t permitted to take any photos in the Adams\/Eigenstadt show due to copyright protection of the images, but the guards did allow me to snap some photos off, without flash, of the Swing Space strippers. Ladies and (more particularly) gentlemen, enjoy… <\/p>\n

***WARNING: Strippers may not be workplace appropriate, depending where you work***<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The past weekend was hella busy, so I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been trying to write it out in little chunks; on the back of napkins at bars, in matchbooks, on my wrist, etc. I wrote this and a lot more last night which I will post in bits throughout the day. For those of you concerned about the […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-consciousness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}