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Comments:
(cont'd) - 2004-02-23 18:37:57
"One nice thing abou the Modern is that the interior spaces, all poured concrete, are really huge. Ever see a picture of Martin Puryear's "Ladder for Booker T. Washington"? It's a wooden ladder, two stories high, that recedes into infinity at its top, suggesting both "climbing the ladder" and "never being able to get to the top." It's there, and there may not be another museum where it could be displayed.
What blew me away, though, was their special exhibition. Often the Texas artists at these museums don't really cut it, but Julie Ann Bozzi of Fort Worth was something else again. This was a show of landscapes, although she also paints other things. They were oil paintings on paper, and most of them were semi-miniatures, maybe a foot long and a couple of inches high. They were matted in a more conventionally shaped frame, giving you the feeling you were looking through an aperture. She painted details of landscaping--hedges, highway berms, and so on, especially looking for some aspect of neglect. (For example, there were two different views of four surviving parts of a hedge.) A few drawings were just of rock piles. I was prepared not to like the show, and it really drew me in; there was a very Japanese quality to the plant shapes and colors. She called herself a voyeur of the mundane.
Anyway, nobody thinks of Fort Worth as a cool art city, but it unquestionably is. There are three museums side by each, all by hotshot architects, and the second and third comment on their predecessors. First came the Amon Carter Museum, a Philip Johnson creation that sits proudly, Texas-style, atop a hill. Then Louis Kahn stuck the Kimbell at the bottom of that same hill, in the most unprepossessing spot, as if to poke fun at the Amon Carter building. The building consists of five side-by-side cycloid vaults--long half-tubes, basically. They let in light from above. Walking in is an adventure in itself--there's a square grove of trees, and the sidewalks give way to crushed stone underfoot. Very remarkable. There are also two water pools in front, and it's this aspect that Tadao Ando, designer of the Modern, picked up on...."
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big - 2005-08-25 07:17:11
Very well thank you very much. http://www.bignews.com* * * * * * * * * * * *
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