Monday, December 4, 2017

GOD: THE OFFICIAL PORTRAITS

Portraying a likeness of "God" in any form, much more so anthropomorphic renderings, has long been prohibited -- and that vastly debated --  in Jewish tradition, based upon an interpretation of the "graven image" commandment. Islam picked it up; other traditions, who fear idolatry or that such a likeness might steal the soul from the person have related mandates. Not so when it comes to Korean Shamanism.

Unlike most books about Korean shamanism in English language primarily focused on the lives of shamans (mudangs) and their ritual performances, God in Pictures in Korean Contexts: The Ownership and Meaning of Shaman Paintings by Laurel Kendall, Jongsung Yang and Yul Soon Yoon, discusses the creation and utility of the physical materiality of ritual artworks (taenghwa), and the rising number of institutions (a few museums and their curators and conservators) and individuals (dealers and collector of ethnographic materials) who have opened up the market for these objects.

This relatively small, illustrated and well-considered text is described as “both a study of material religion that takes seriously the use of paintings inside Korean shaman practice and a study of the circulation of shaman paintings from sacred to secular space, exploring the motivations and activities of dealers and collectors, a subject of interest in museum and material culture studies.”

Koreans for the most part have yet to romanticize their past, given the century of cultural and political devastation during the majority of the 20th century. Kendall[1], an American anthropologist who has many books about Korean shamanic culture to her credit, is chair of the Division of Anthropology and curator in charge of Asian Ethnographic Collections at the American Museum of Natural History and president (2016-17) of the Association for Asian Studies. Yoon established the Gahoe Museum[2]  for his folk art collection in the Gahoe neighborhood north of Insadong in Seoul, and previously self-published the predominantly bilingual (Korean – English)  Searching for Origin of Folk Religion – Painting of Shamanism[3], full of colored imagery of a multitude of spirits and brief explanations of their identities. The former curator of the National Folk Museum of Korea, Yang now operates a Museum of Shamanism, also in Seoul, as a place where shamanism may be observed in practice. The most frequent visitors to these establishments, Yang notes, are shamans themselves who express pride and wonder at what they see there.

As we learn from these scholars’ thoughtful reflections, taenghwa, painted portraits of iconic images of  the pantheon of spirits that populate the back walls of gutdang / shindang (ritual or spirit rooms), are not simply reflections of ubiquitous characters from cultural history (judges, saints, military and civil officials, venerable ancestors, spirits of the mountains and sea, etc. embellished with other auspicious symbols including the elixir of life, mushrooms, turtles, dragons, the seven-star constellation, pine trees, bamboo, a body of water in forest, tigers, etc.), but are potent catalytic partners with the officiants in the ritual outcome. The authors postulate there is a “triangulation among shaman, god and painting.” These painted, seemingly folk art-like 2-dimensional works on paper were created by artists (not usually the shamans themselves) for the express purpose of the shaman’s engagement with the painting’s “gaze,” thereby to enable the spirit to be present in the ritual space/time. In short, they reference taenghwa as “divine prosthesis”.


Strung together from their tops into a multi-paneled montage behind an altar, often overlapping each other until only the faces are visible, in the ritual they form the wall behind the altar table festooned with offerings. The shamans’ costumes (changed often during the long rituals) and props are echoed in the uniforms and other paraphernalia used by officiants who seek communion and their mystical intercession in the course of multiscene productions. At the end of the ritual, unless affixed to the back wall, the taenghwa will be removed and stored until the next opportunity.

While some taenghwa looked brand new (and may have been newly commissioned by the shaman through a patron’s generous donation for the ritual service) they can also be “antiques” weathered through use (unfolding, hanging, refolding for storage etc.). In some rare cases, I have seen full murals affixed to walls where various highly stylized portraits, including women in traditional “male” roles, share a common landscape in the background. Interestingly, I have seen several images created by Jean Michel Basquiat, an extraordinarily talented American artist who died young, that are remarkably similar in character to the taenghwa of the Hwanghae-do tradition! Please refer to another article in this blog:  Basquiat's Spiritual Portraits

GOD’S PICTURE : PICTURE OF GOD

To twist a Zen metaphor, these are not necessarily the moon’s reflection in a pond on a dark night, but the very presence of the moon itself. Here is an example:

In 2000 I had the opportunity to be the guest of Kim Keumhwa, Korea’s naramansin, in her home and to travel with her group, Seohean Pungeoje, the Society for the Preservation of West Sea Rituals, from Hwanghae-do. Toward the end of the second of four weeks, Songsaengnim took me to Gangwha-do, the island near the DMZ off the West Sea where she now has a culture center. We stayed for two days at a small retreat center at the base of Manisan mountain that was operated by some kind of institute dedicated to Dangun, the mythical founder of Korea and a Sanshin / mountain spirit of the highest order. I was baffled by her effort to pay homage to a large, framed (glass, metal) painted image of the mountain spirit (a wizened old man with a tiger and young attendant) that was up a pathway on the north side of Manisan Mountain peak, when we could actually at minimum address the spirits of the peak in front of us. It was not an original painting, nor did it seem to be an old artifact, yet she carried offerings (fruit, candles, incense and water) and adorned the ledge in front of the image. She began to chant and invited me to share her homage through bowing and offering incense. Later we hiked up to where the Chamseongdan (altar) is sited, where Dangun is said to have offered sacrifices to the heavens.

ARTISTS AS LIVING TREASURES

Shamans come by their taenghwa in several possible ways. Of course, Hwahghae-do shamans have to have been endowed through initiation, vision, dream, etc. to make the connection with particular spirits. Then it is the matter of securing the artwork. Since the earliest days (before printing presses!) paintings have been produced by dedicated artists (usually not the shamans themselves) from a shaman’s description of a vision. Unlike many painters who also may paint images for Buddhist temples, traditional Hwanghae taenghwa painters maintain a singular clientele among initiates of that charismatic lineage; they do not sign their work. 

I was very happy to learn more from the authors about the lineage of artist An Sung-sam (pictured, I'd be happy to ask for permission from the source of this image, but it won't reply.), whose late son An Chong-mo, and now granson (don't know the name) have carried on his vocation. Their great/grandmother was a Hwanghaedo shaman, like the elder An’s colleague Kim Keumhwa. An Sung-sam was one of three (with Mansinnim and Choi Eum Jon, the late ritual jango drummer) deemed to be important intangible cultural assets of Korea. However, the authors state that, unlike venerable brush paintings and calligraphy of the Japanese Zen tradition, “No shaman painting has yet to be designated as a national treasure.” Facing the decline of the marketplace, the artists who are personally regarded and have the reputation of being endowed with a spiritual connection, may likely disappear.


Judging from the styles of Songsaengnim’s taenghwa, several artists were responsible for creating them.The oldest ones seemed to be painted with tempera on cardboard or brown kraft paper (a material that was produced industrially in Korea after the war and was as much rendered into paper bags as it was as a surface for Dansaekhwa artists of the Minimalist movement); the ones permanently mounted on the walls in her shrine rooms in Seoul and Gangwha-do were more likely acrylic and enlivened with the addition of gold leaf in some areas. The now deceased elder An was also responsible for many of the hand-painted tissue paper elements that adorned Kim Keumhwa’s altars for rituals and in her permanent altars in her private shrines. Some seem quite old, but it is hard to know their age, etc.

Other shamans, especially younger ones with less notoriety, may resort to patronizing shops specializing in ritual paraphernalia where they may acquire mass produced taenghwa with images “typical” of the geographically-specific ritual styles. I once visited such a shop in the neighborhood of KimKeumhwa’s home. I was very careful not to be too interested in the goods in as much as my obvious presence in the  otherwise no-tourist environs might be cause for embarrassing gossip that I might be shopping for shaman “power” tools; this would cast negatively on my host.

DECOMMISSIONING PAINTING

Perhaps some of the most interesting narrative in the book relates to what happens when a shaman ceases to use/need/want a taenghwa or when the taenghwa no longer wants to be part of that shaman’s pantheistic community:

“The god takes up a seat in the painting, but not always; the god inhabits the painting in the shrine but sometimes departs; the god agrees to cohabit with other gods in a shrine but sometimes refuses.”

The shaman is left with no other choice than to remove the taenghwa. Given their materiality, what is the appropriate way for a shaman to decommission / dispose of them. If the images have / are spirit, what becomes of it? “For most of the 20th Century, shamans generally followed the traditional practice of burning old and tattered paintings after ritually reanimating them,” the authors note. When the paintings of the first Korean shaman I met – Los Angeles 1990 about who I wrote an article for Kyoto Journal – had been destroyed in a flood (they were packed up, not used), the remnants were burned. The ashes were carried by us into the local mountains where we discarded them in a wooded auspicious spot, “Think of your mother,” she admonished me, with no explanation given. Unlike calligraphy scrolls used in Japanese tea ceremony which may be centuries old and are valued accordingly to their longevity, Korean shaman artworks are extremely fragile and were not meant to necessarily be employed forever, much less collected.

Again, the authors recount fascinating stories about certain mischief (or worse) caused by improperly discarded or abandoned taenghwa. “The god operates miraculously or problematically, through a de-animated and hidden painting.” Do they have a “half-life” of empowerment?

NEW LAMPS FOR OLD?

The authors address the more recent attempt to commodify taenghwa works and explain the complexities of another triangulation of dealers, collectors, shamans, less often the artists who created the works.   

There is well-considered discussion about the ways that a “collector’s lens” might distinguish what is desirable as an image, what Korean cultural qualities can be conveyed through this art form, etc. 
Of course, there is great interest on the part of scholars to study ethnography and to have material works with documented provenance can be of great value, as the authors’ own professional affiliations attest. One doesn’t see many shaman paintings displayed in Korean museums, and certainly not in the National Museum of Korea!


Very few museums outside Korea collect or display works of “art” created for and used by shamans. In addition to AMNH, USC’s Pacific Asia museum is a notable exception as a result of the efforts of Yeonsoo Choi, then assistant curator, and has welcomed Kim Keumhwa to demonstrate a sample of her rituals in conjunction with the donation of some objects to the museum’s permanent collection. No doubt the provenance of Kim Songsaengnim’s objects will vault them into a higher “value,” nonetheless, will they command the same level as Basquiat’s works? 

 This brings us to the notion of the independent, private collector of material cultural artifacts who may have to resort to working with dealers with connections to shamans and never actually meeting the artist, who may be alive. The primary collectors of Korean shaman painting are themselves Korean with a “bent toward nostalgia for a not-to-distant rural past.” Much like the romancing of provenance that a collector of Japanese ceremony utensils might show in the course of the ritual or in a display case, the shaman paintings have an “object biography”. Yet again, the history of Korea would not be very kind to the paintings, much less the shamans themselves who were persecuted. Ritual spaces were usually erected in situ and quickly dismantled, with the various paraphernalia, including elaborate wall-sized arrangements of icons, packed up and sometimes even abandoned.

Imagine my surprise a decade ago when I entered a Korean “antique” shop in Los Angeles’ Koreatown[4] when I spotted a colorful tempera painting on cardboard of an old man with a tiger and young boy; it was hanging by fabric strings from the back of an abandoned dining room chair amidst other disparate furniture. “Buddha!” said the proprietor, an oldish man in a worn golf jacket and a baseball cap, noticing my interest and figuring that I was an uninformed Caucasian woman. “Ah, Buddha! Nice Buddha. Umm,” I replied, knowing full well, however, that it was not Buddha, but a taenghwa  of Sanshin, a Korean mountain spirit, rendered for a shaman’s shrine. I retreated back into the shop as nonchalantly as I could, knowing that any interest that would inflate prices. I eventually found 10 other abandoned portraits of other traditional Korean shaman spirits rolled into a bundle with their strings hanging out jammed on a shelf next to empty picture frames. I made a mental commitment to this Sanshin that I would liberate him (and a trio of fortune-telling mudangs) from this soul-less place, if only to make it possible for their true identities to be reinstated.

POST SCRIPT

As noted above, in some cases the taenghwa are formally affixed to the walls. David Mason’s extensive research into the mountain spirit images enshrined in Korea’s temples, shrines, rock faces and even real and artificial caves, grottoes is unsurpassed. Both his book Spirit of the Mountains: Korea’s SAN-SHIN and Traditions of Mountain-Worship (1999, Elizabeth New Jersey and Seoul Korea, Hollym. Editions in English and Korean languages) and ever-evolving website www.san-shin.org provide great insight into the artistic techniques and imagery as well as significance of this particular spirit’s presence throughout Korea. The artists, for the most part, remain anonymous, but the images are beloved by Buddhists, Taoists, NeoConfucianists and Shamanists alike. He notes, in addition to the mountain spirit, major Buddhist temples’ have a shrine buildings that often includes Samshin, three spirit shrine, that includes images of Chilseong and  Doksong, the Seven Stars / Big Dipper and Lonely Saint, respectively. His book explains the symbolism and relationships within spiritual hierarchy.

Other sources of information on the topic:

Yoon Yeosul's book Searching for Origin of Folk Religion -- Painting of Shamanism. [원형을 찾아서 토속신앙의 巫俗畵|, 2004, Seoul: ICOM] has excellent images and is mostly in Korean language. His Gahoe Museum is well worth a visit, as is Jong-sung Yang’s Museum of Shamanism which functions more as a living laboratory of Korean native spirituality. An extensive article may be found at the first issue of the Korean Art Society Newsletter, as well as an earlier article that I wrote on this subject.

My article about the late Dr. Zo Zayong for Kyoto Journal #36, 1997, (reprinted ) explores the work of this artist / collector / scholar / author and architect whose life was filled with the profound beauty of Korean spirit imagery. His Emile Museum in Seoul and later moved to become the basis of Samshin Hoegwan Songnisan near Po’un was a huge collection of works on paper, in stone, wood and other materials. Most of the collection was sold to the Samsung Leeum, I’ve been told. Dr. Zo was also a patron of the local villages who still worshiped their resident spirits and often helped them create new iconic works to this end.





[1] This link goes to Professor Kendall’s lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXbvj4tg7TM
[2] www.gahoemuseum.org
[3] https://books.google.com/books/about/Searching_for_origin_of_folk_religion.html?id=xolLQwAACAAJ
[4] -- Korean Art Society Journal.Don’t Buy the Buddha!”. Vol. 1 (2009)

Monday, November 27, 2017

What's Scarier Than A Nuclear Bomb: A Woman's Period!

The fear men have of menstruating women has not yet abated in the souls and imaginations of those who do truly fear it. We are well past the border of tolerance.

When the Taliban fled to their remote caves in Afghanistan, I was trying to think of what I might do to keep them there. We don't need to travel long distance any more. We have those who fear menstruating women in our midst, from the tippy top of the federal government to our next-door neighbors.

I propose to bomb and surround them with used "feminine" menstrual padding ... pretty simple.

They will not cross the line. Free. Harms no one. Caters to their deepest fears (yay!) and is a renewable commodity.

Lord knows! Any "Lord". Every "Lord". Even the little "lords".

I know you have questions about reloading. Here are some actual answers.

Are (ahem) feminine products available [at Disneyland] restrooms?
It says in the restrooms that things are available at City Hall but I have no idea what they have.
You could also go to the little Casino supermarket which is to the left of the train station, just before the entrance to the park, they would probably have things there and maybe a wider choice.

Here's another tip if you're bound for the Magic Mousedom.

Good way to get rid of those toxin-carrying "hygiene" necessities!

I've read that "tampons" are out among young women these days. What's a defense contractor to do with stores of them for the newly-entered fighting force of women combatants?  There's a consumer war going on ... welcome to the new battlefield!

I'm just reporting.

Nothing Lost ... Somethings Gained: Found in Translation - Design in California and Mexico 1915 - 1985






Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico 1915 - 1965 is one of LACMA's offerings in the Getty-sponsored festival of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA.
PST LA/LA... (hey, pssssssssssssssssst! over here! 
 Never say la-la, as in tra- ...!

This exhibition does much more than clear up the ruse of Olivera Street (set up as a tourist attraction like Chinatown LA). It honors, not just disparages, the mutual admiration society between CA and ME!

Being a child of the post-WWII era, an early consumer of television and having emigrate from the Mid-Atlantic region in the late 1970s to CA, the show strikes a familiar chord of cultural sensibility, but now I can see the back-story of what was projected as the "goldene medina" of my mediated youth. I will now admit to having drawn a serape-d/sombrero-d "Mexican" propped up against a saguaro sleeping in the noonday sun in a mural in middle school. 

What did I know? I was brought up in Philadelphia area in the age of TV!
California was once part of Mexico and which was a Spanish colony. The very soil, the ocean, the forests and mountains, the weather and the sun ... above all, the sun! The indigenous people were not waiting to be discovered! They were also not consulted when design images were attribute to them. It is still hard for me to eat lettuce and grapes, given what I learned about the Chicano Movements ... Woody Guthrie was right. California was and remains the "Garden of Eden", and we sill need, more than even, the Do-Rey-Mi!

It's a full range of design and architecture dialogues between California and Mexico from 1915 - 1965. The more I visit this exhibition (and tour school kids to show the Portrait of John Dunbar, by Diego Rivera), the more I learn, such as the fact that Ruth Asawa, a participant in the Black Mountain College art/community experiment, learned how to weave wire into sculptures in Mexico! I was already familiar with Peter Shire's work, and love the inclusion of his "Mexican Bauhaus Tea Pot".


The Mexico / USA California split in 1804 never left either wish a sore spot in term of design sensibilities. There has been a natural trickle up and down effect for a long time despite efforts to appropriate imagery and disseminate stereotypical impressions via the then "new" media as photography, wire audio recorders and movies and later TV. There was and continues to be a "mutual admiration society" among the colonialists. There are a few indigenous pieces, but mostly this is a celebration of conquest.

The triptych (right) includes (l-r) LACMA's Standing Male Figure with Club" a (200 BCE - 400 CE) slip painted earthenware acquired in 1986 and Dora De Larios (b1933, active Los Angeles) "Warrior (mid-1960s) and "Blue Dog" (1979). I couldn't help but chuckle, as they reminded me of 2 pieces in the permanent collection on the top floor of the Pavilion for Japanese Art. (l-r) "Seated Figure" and "Horse", both Haniwa (tomb figures) from the Late Tumulus Period (4th and 5th Centuries, CE). 







#FoundinTranslation @ #LACMA has opened as one of the PST/LALA offerings around town thanks to the #Getty. It's a full range of design and architecture dialogues between California and Mexico from 1915 - 1965.

Klingon: The Art of Inventing a Language

The Final Frontier Forever"
(originally published 2013)
 
Since the beginning of time: 2161, or at minimum, over 40 Earth years ago when Gene Roddenberry launched the Star Trek enterprise, the crafty creators of races and galaxies, technologies and tools have been hard at work to transform everyday Earthlings into a Trekkies worthy of citizenship in the United Federation of Planets.
 
The Star Trek franchise builders have not been content to merely dabble in pop culture and fantasy storytelling. Now over 40 million human fans world-wide have access to powerful tools to cross the media threshold and interact with other weekend wanna-be warriors by learning to speak and read the Klingon language.

The master-mind (and mouth) of the Klingon language is linguist Dr. Marc Okrand, author of Conversational Klingon, the definitive audio book, the Klingon Dictionary, among others. A specialist in an extinct language of a people of Northern California, Okrand was making a living over-dubbing and subtitling for the film industry when he was brought into the Star Trek picture, literally. His first task was to create just four lines of otherwise non-extant Vulcan in post-production of Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan to match the actor’s English language lip movements as an over-dub.

Brought back to work on Star Trek III The Search for Spock, this time in the scriptwriting phase, he decided to formally create an entire new language from scratch, complete with grammar and vocabulary as well as an inventory of sounds, Klingon at once needed to reference the history and current world view of the inhabitants of that distant galaxy. No detail was overlooked.

Since then, new stories and new characters have been blending into those earlier “realities”, necessitating the development of Klingon’s greater linguistic complexity. Klingon further morphed as fans began try to speak and write it in their ordinary, 21st Century Earth-bound lives. There are also lexicons and grammars created by fans, such as the online program “battle tested” at the Klingon Language Institute that has attracted many adherents and many efforts to compile English – Klingon dictionaries.

While Microsoft’s Bing search engine identifies 1,060,000 entries for “translate Klingon”, now, in cooperation with Paramount and the Klingon Language Institute, Bing offers written translation from many languages into both the “original” Klingon script as well as Roman and Hindu-Arabic characters. It seems that Bill Gates’ team has been considering how to do this for a long time, and released it in time for the premiere of Star Trek Into Darkness. There are no coincidences!

While we at Acclaro have yet to receive a request for translation into Klingon, we salute the Trekkies who have delved into learning the language for themselves. To you, we say majQa’…well done!





Saturday, May 20, 2017

Sneak Peek @ Marciano Art Foundation's New Museum

With all the scaffolding finally down ($5k/week for over 1 year in rent I've been told) and the blessing of Los Angeles' Hancock Park neighbors, the Marciano Art Foundation (MAF) showcase has opened at the time of this writing.

The Millard Sheets - designed Scottish Rite Temple (1961), built to zoning limitations as a “clubhouse” like it’s neighbor the Wilshire Ebell, remains a singular mid-century “modern” masterpiece; inside there are still a number of Sheets' signature elements that have remained intact, including a really beautiful mosaic of a woodland scene.

There is an elegant, refined contemporary feel to the space -- not the warehouse feeling of the Geffen/Temporary Contemporary that opened MOCA -- that should serve the Marcianos' cultural, civic and philanthropic mission and vault L.A. (to whom they want to “give back”) deeper into the heart of the artworld's spotlight for years to come.

MAF is a fine example of gesamkunstwerk, a collective effort by artists, architects, collectors, curators and the general public conspiring to explore the past, present and future zeitgeists (is this even a word?) where in the past symbolism separated those who "know" and are "in" from those who don't and aren't. Cindy Sherman’s gigantic, almost ghostly image (of herself, of course!) commands the entrance, casting a most watchful eye instead of a typical museum ticket booth. Bewigged, as usual, she is regaled with the Odd Fellows' symbol of three golden links emblazoned on a uniform-esque Beverly Hill Baroque outfit. (Odd Fellowship is similar to the Masons as a civic group built upon ethical culture.) Is this all the MAF needs in terms of a security detail?

With four floors, including the Mez, there’s a total of 55,000 sq ft of exhibition space within seven galleries. A book store, operated by Artbook, is now open with the new catalog in stock; a cafe with limited menu is planned. 

I say Bravo to the Marciano brothers, founders of GUESS? brand of designer jeans and other "lifestyle" products. Maurice Marciano spoke on behalf of his brother/partner Paul, at the press briefing and introduced Kulipat Yantrassat, creative director and lead designer of wHY for the project. He stated that there were three goals to the effort to repurpose and renovate the very special building: 1/ to allow the artists to experiment, to create a vehicle that challenges them to make new work, 2/ to maintain the integrity of Sheets’ design, and 3/ with a bow to Robert Rauschenberg, to encourage collaboration among the artists and connect objects within the relatively recently acquired collection of 1500 works.  

Philipp Kaiser, curator of the inaugural exhibition Unpacking: The Marciano Collection, title of the inaugural exhibition, explained that from the get-go they invited participating artists to respond to the building, both to its former and future lives. The theoretical heart of Unpacking is sourced from an essay by German intellectual Walter Benjamin who, in 1931, wrote about the "chaotic potentiality inherent in unpacking and recontextualizing one’s collection of objects before they become tinged with ‘the mild boredom of order’." (In addition to Benjamin's treatise, I recommend reading Allen Weiss' newest title The Grain of the Clay: Reflecting on Ceramics and the Art of Collecting.)

As was well-publicized, many abandoned but still official Masonic costumes, wigs, photographs and other material found squirreled away in the building's many secret spaces now hold court in the Relic Room installed behind one of the stained glass dopeladler (two headed eagles) facing Wilshire Blvd. This display is curated by Susan L. Aberth, associate professor of Latin American Art at Bard College.

The idea of "artist as archaeologist" was at the foundation of the Foundation's inaugural installation; special emphasis is placed on "process and how it relates to the creation and execution of the work and the art object itself informed the opening exhibition".
 Artists vied for spaces in the new facility and some final touches were still underway when I was there.  While some of the works in the inaugural exhibition connect directly to the narrative of ancient symbolism, as does the Cindy Sherman piece, other works' theatricality reference the Mason's penchant for elaborate ritual, if not also incorporating some of these "found" objects, as does Jim Shaw's "The Wig Museum" installation.  

The former auditorium has been transformed into a huge gallery space and accommodates Shaw’s glorious pop-artish immersive environment, much like a stage set, which includes historic Masonic theatrical drapes and wigs, as well as his new work on scrims hanging from the extremely tall ceiling of what was the huge proscenium theatre audience chamber. One may wander at will through this fantastic forest of 2-D and 3-D images set up like so many paper doll cut-out scenarios. The effect allows, nay, insists on engagement. Bring a friend. Make up a story! (see below)

The Mez provides not only a view of the grand foyer, but leads to the former balcony from which one may view the Shaw installation as well as Adrian Villar Rojas Two Suns (II), a 17’ replica of Michelangelo’s David laid out in repose at what was the landing of the underbelly of the stage, now known as the “Black Box”. This provides yet an alternative view and create a new impression on the expansive work. (see images, below)

Other galleries feature artworks in a wide variety of media that do in fact seem to interact with each other (and demand more than the cursory look I could give them at the time). The artists are listed alphabetically in the sparse “guide” and include rooms featuring McCarthy/Murakami/Lawler, Kelley/Ruby, and Oehlen/Wool. The installations attempt to show “personal artistic relationships and reveal commonalities, admiration, and mutual respect within the art community”.










Two long-form video works captivated my attention. Ledge by Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin, is billed as a "unique sculptural theater" in a tent that fills the entire Lounge Gallery on the Second Floor. The multi-screen HD 49:24 minute experience is as much a "documentary" as it is a fictional account of what happened when they allow artists to go for it for 3 (in 2014) months in your some day to be refurbished space. Yes, there are wigs, loud music, drones and attitude. I've been told that recreational drugs are stronger these days.

Inferno by Yael Bartana, is provocative, cinematic epic set in Brazil with the “protagonist” being an exact replica of Solomon’s Temple (a bow to the Masons, again!) under construction in Sao Paolo by the evangelical Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in the summer of 2014. ($300 million cost!) Filled with referential rituals and chanting from the Yom Kippur liturgy, the multi-racial, multi-generational faithful make their pilgrimage to reinstall the “ark of the covenant” and the 7-branch menorah (flying in via helicopter) to the holy of the holies III. No spoiler here, but be careful what you wish for.

While the Marcianos have been involved in LA's contemporary art scene, particularly through MOCA, there is no doubt that through MAF, these "new" kids on the block have very interesting ideas to share about culture, philanthropy and creativity infused with ethical instruction aimed at spiritual and moral self-improvement.

Admission to MAF is free by reservation only!!!! Only 80 people/hour may enter; times are every 15 minutes. There will be no lines around the corner. Free parking underneath. 

Images from Jim Shaw's installation "The Wig Museum"