Play in the City 2013

I remember the very first time when I was in Philly, it was snowing very heavily, and I wrote that in my first paper for ESEM. I am very happy that the last trip ends in snow too. Starting with snow and ends with snow, that is lovely. I live in the south of China, I have seen snow in my hometown twice for eighteen years, and every time makes me scream. I didn't really have any plans for the last trip, so I ended up lingering around on the streets. I don't know why but snow gives me a feeling of warm. All is covered in white, and there are Christmas lights in many stores. It is like new year. I grabbed some snow and tried to make snow ball, but I didn't wear gloves, so I gave it up. I took a lot of photos till my hands were frozen. I would say it was really a tough walking, but I like it. When it snows, I always want to tell some one else it snows. It is snowing now:) 

In order to read my experience of The Barnes Foundation as a piece of artwork through the lens of Barnes’s ideology, I can consider the time, access system, colors, architecture, people and artwork found in the building. I am thinking of what the space invites me to think as a piece of artwork in itself.           

Phoenix

Mlord

Play in the City 027

Monday, December 9th, 2013

The Artist Barnes

Everybody in Philadelphia seems to have heard of the Barnes Foundation. It created quite a stir when it was moved, expressly against the wishes of its founder, from Lower Merion to Philadelphia, turning in the process from an educational institution to an art museum.

Albert Barnes had a specific vision for his art. He arranged it in his home, paintings, pieces of metalwork, furniture and more, according to design themes such as shape and color. He made his home into a school, a place to study art without what he considered the useless factoids of artist, date, and stylistic period, taking from art only what it presented to the viewer. He did not want it open to the public for more than a couple of days a week, nor used for parties, galas, and the like.

Due to corruption, personal grievances, and mismanagement of money, the Barnes is now open to the public every day, with spaces for events, and even pamphlets and audio tours that tell the visitor about the paintings. The only remaining vestige of Barnes’ original vision is the arrangement of the paintings. Curators of the Barnes insisted that they would stay true to Barnes’ displays, possibly in an attempt to please outraged protestors.

Why Barnes’ displays, and not his limitations on who viewed them, how, and where? Was the art arrangement so much more important than anything else?

Jessica Bernal

ESEM- Play in the City

Art Museums: Do they enlighten or isolate individuals?

When I was younger, I never went to museums. My mother would say, “We don’t have time for that.” The first time I ever walked into a museum, The Museum of Natural Sciences, I was about nine years old and I thought this might be what Disney World is like too, huge and overwhelming. Growing up, we didn’t have the money or the time to wander through museum’s unique collections. As I got older, I kept going to more and more different types of museums through school, but to this day, never have I been with my mother. As she’d say, Yo no le entiendo a esas cosas, I don’t understand those types of places.  

It’s not that my mother doesn’t like art or find paintings interesting, it’s that she doesn’t feel comfortable in that type of environment museums provide. And unfortunately, it’s not just my mother who feels this way. Underprivileged individuals don’t find themselves pursuing Art Museums, or museums in general as a means of enjoyment and entertainment for a family weekend. Art Museums don’t cater to the underprivileged. Art museums isolate individuals in society rather than welcome them, which is the sole purpose of museums in general, to make accessible artifacts and collections to the people to explore and enjoy.

In class discussion, we all seemed to consider the move of Barnes Foundation a failure, because it defied Barnes’ intention. But after reading The Believing Game which asks us to “scrutinize unfashionable or even repellent ideas for hidden virtues”, I tried to believe that the move had some positive aspects as I re-read my trip.

The minimalistic architecture itself was beautiful. The cement exterior seemed hard and indifferent, but the glass and the shallow water made everything delicate and ephemeral. Before entering the gallery, we had to walk across a large empty space and go through ticket and bag and coat checking, which made me feel unwelcomed. Feeling the expensiveness in the air, I expected the inside display to be one painting per wall, so that the artworks could be given sacred majesty and be enshrined and worshiped.

On the contrary, paintings are placed close together, so close that, in order to keep them from fighting for space, they are separated by huge keys, carved fences, and spearheads. Now that the artworks exist in peace and harmony, they talk and dance with each other. Two pieces of the same painter share similarity or symmetry; a huge portrait of an elderly man surrounded by smaller portraits of children like an old man surrounded by his grandchildren; an ancient African painting looks like a 19th century work; a painting and a sculpture have astonishingly similar patterns.

The weekend of November 25th, I visited the Barnes foundation for the first time. While there, I enjoyed the art; travelling from room to room, watching the interplay and conversations between the pieces and the objects, studying how things reflected, contrasted, or contradicted each other. I’m sure Barnes would have approved of my attempt, no matter what he thought of the situations under which I was making it. Next, I sat in front of “Scout Attacked by a Tiger”, by Henri Rousseau, for thirty minutes. This, I think, Barnes would have objected to.

When I think of graffiti, I don’t equate it with the same art I saw in the Barnes Foundation. In the eyes of the law, graffiti is a punishable offense. It is “writing or drawings that have been scribbled, scratched, or sprayed illicitly on a wall or other surface in a public place.” I believe if the word ‘illicitly’ is omitted from this definition, it would take on a whole new face. Whenever I go to a new city, I always make sure to look at the graffiti because it provides a very public window into the social, political, and economical climate of said city. It can almost be considered a form of propaganda. It is a way of communicating to the Man. There’s an excellent example of graffiti in my new favorite movie. In Catching Fire when Katniss and Peeta are on the train to the Capitol, Katniss’s mockingjay symbol flashes by as they enter a rebelling district. When the train slows, they see more graffiti vehemently declaring “The odds are never in our favor.” 

Does the lens we look at a painting through change when it is in new surroundings?

I think that the surroundings of a painting can certainly change the lens it is looked through. Think, for example, of what you would value a painting at if you saw it in a dumpster outside versus if you saw it hanging in the Louvre. But, looking specifically at the Barnes Foundation after visiting, I found myself doubting whether the surroundings had really changed as much as people were complaining about in The Art of the Steal.

Barnes would have you believe that being in the city changed the paintings a lot, and that this is why he wanted the Foundation to stay where it was originally founded. But if the immediate surroundings of the painting are the same, such as they are now in the Barnes (the walls are kept the same, with everything exactly where it was--even the rooms are the exact dimensions as they were when the Foundation was in Merion), is being in a different city really a new lens? Or is it the same lens, but with maybe slightly different background thoughts going in?