Berkshire House

It rained all week last week when we were in the Berkshire house, but we were thrilled because two miraculous things happened. One was that on Wednesday, after drizzling all morning, a huge rainbow emerged in front of the house. We have seen amazing rainbow in Hawaii one time, in the remote resort of Hana, Maui, but because we were so high up on the mountain this time, the rainbow appeared to hang on the same horizontal plane as our house. Instead of raising head, we could simply look at it straight on. And what an incredible sight! The rainbow anchored on two hills and straddled the entire valley in between. From the east side of the house, which was basically all glass, it displayed a complete panoramic profile. Then when we stepped out to look at it more, we realized that it was actually a twin-bow. The twin was much fainter and was blocked by our eve. I ended up jumping up and down, more excited that my 17 years-old nephew.
The second was on Sunday night, we came back from NYC and Philly. It was already dark when we pulled into the garage. But we realized that there were a lot of little lights on the lawn. When we got into the house, I looked at from the second floor, oh my god, the meadow slope in front of the house was sparkling like a light show. Obviously, overnight, all the fireflies in the world got hatched and now they were dancing all over the hill! I poured myself a drink and just sat on my porch looking at them. In front of me, it was the darkness of a summer night and the sounds of all the inhabitants of a forest, upon which, a sea of sparkling light made up of little creatures who seemed to be celebrating something more mysterious that I could ever understand.

Francis Bacon at Met NYC

We are having my nephew James visiting from Atlanta these two weeks. At a sensible age of 17, he finally seems to embark on the initial adulthood which is sparkled by occasional conversations on the "real stuffs" and intellectual curiosity about things like art and culture. A huge leap from the hip hop/gangster culture he left behind. Yes, he wears clothes I wear now, clothes that actually fit and made by Ralph Lauren.
So among everything else, we decided to take him to NYC to see the Francis Bacon exhibition at Met. Honestly, it was a kind of selfish motive because I have been wanted to see it for a while.
Francis Bacon is one hell of a painter. Like all great ones, his painting is basically himself, his tormented emotional life, his compulsive-obsessive psychic, his addiction with love and sex, his borderline schizophrenic relationship with this world. And he did it with conviction and success, simply because he didn't take into pleasing the viewers into account. He did what he had to do and for himself, and miraculously he achieved great fame.
Many of his contemporaries found his painting repulsive and yes they probably still remain so to many people nowadays. They are tormented, twittered, fragmented, foreboding and disturbing. Yet they are also honest, naked, vulnerable and therefore endearing. They take the viewers beyond the paintings to a person's life, which reflects the ethos of our society in those particular eras.
One can't avoid the fundamental issues like religion, war, homosexuality and morality when looking at his painting. He chose to confront these issues because regardless being addressed or not, they exist, and by a large degree, they define us as human beings.
James basically "liked" the exhibition. One thing he certainly got was that the guy is weird and not all expensive art has to be eye-candy. I am happy with that. He doesn't need to understand more than that yet at this moment, but at least he witness the existence of such things, just because they exist.

Dia NY: a silent converation between Richard Serra and Louise Bourgeois

The past weekend we went to Curtis' nephew's wedding in upstate NY and took the time to visit Dia at Beacon, the Riggio gallery of the Dia art foundation established to collect modern and contemporary art since 1974. The gallery is in a 1920s Bauhaus-style printing factory. Its minimalism vast space and flooding natural light sets up a surreal stage to present the artwork in its collection.
Needless to say, there are many pieces that are landmarks of modern art, such as Chamberlain's monumental sculpture The Privet, Sol Lewitt's wall drawings, and Donald Judd's untitled wooden boxes, to just name a few. What I found mostly visceral was the presentation of Richard Serra and Louise Bourgeois' work. Serra's work is known for its complexity masked by the simplest forms. His deployment of steel provokes an impersonal, rational feeling when first approached, yet with each minutes spent with them, one was more and more absorbed into its organic forms and gigantic proportions, maneuvered to overpower the sense of being. The feelings when one walks into his sculptures becomes very much personal, so intense in a way as if one embarks on a psychic journey, a little bit unpredictable, intriguing and repelling at the same time.
I think Serra's work (especially the Torque series in Dia) deals with our emotion in reaction to the outside and everything within its scope, an intuitive emotion that we are born with, which through his work, is reduced to the absolute abstract. Louise Bourgeois' work, like the shadow of Serra's, the ying to the yang, complements strangely well with Serra in both scale, material and concept, by dealing with our emotions in reaction to the inside. It digs deep into our primordial memories that we build and then suppress in order to live on. Compared to Serra's work, her form is bodily instead of celestial, her dimension is personal rather than imposing, yet their work both provoke the visceral feelings, one of inside and the other outside, which ultimately is the same fundamental thing because emotion, regardless lies within ourselves and often stay with ourselves.
I have been a fan of Bourgeois for a long time. In 2007, we spent a whole day in Tate Modern London to look at each piece of her work in the retrospection exhibit. In Dia, with Serra's work looming nearby, I was somehow able to discover yet another layer to the psychic and emotional aspect of her work. To me, that's the beauty of art.