My relationship with the Getty began when I was still an undergrad studying architecture and the history of art. As a junior I applied for the Multicultural Undergraduate Internship offered by the Getty Foundation, and was thrilled to receive an internship with the Manuscripts Department at the Museum.
There was only one problem: I didn’t know much about manuscripts.
My education in this art tradition started on day one, as I began an intensive exploration of the Getty’s outstanding collection. The collection focuses primarily on western medieval manuscripts but embraces a variety of rarities ranging in period and geography from a 10th-century Coptic devotional leaf to an illuminated British storybook from the early 20th-century.
The internship provided me with an intimate look at this fascinating medium, and gave me a behind-the-scenes glimpse at how a museum operates. I worked with the large group of people who work collaboratively to put on an exhibit. I learned more about our artworks through conversations with the manuscripts conservator and the Getty Conservation Institute scientists who also work on them. And I helped piece together bits of content for a variety of exhibitions.
A little more than a year after my internship, the Manuscripts Department had an opening for which I applied, resulting in the opportunity for me to return as a curatorial assistant. I’ve been involved in a variety of projects in our busy group, including co-curating the show Gothic Grandeur: Manuscript Illumination, 1250–1300.
In my current post, I refer to the introductory knowledge of manuscripts my internship offered two summers ago. More importantly, however, I draw on the opportunity it gave me to put the pieces of my experiences together, combining the academic subjects I studied at college with the real-world roles I’ve played at the museum.
As another group of students submits applications for the Multicultural Undergraduate Internship (the deadline for the 2012 program is February 1), I realize that I didn’t necessarily need an extensive background in manuscripts to benefit from my internship here. I just needed the willingness to jump into something new, the chance to consider all the pieces of my studies and career, and the freedom to put them together.
Tags: Gothic Grandeur, interns, Multicultural Undergraduate Intern Program
Dancers, a World War II searchlight, and 400 spools of thread combined to turn the Getty Center’s Arrival Plaza into a performative installation last Friday night. Hirokazu Kosaka’s Kalpa was part of the Pacific Standard Time Public Art Festival, an 11-day celebration of performance art in public spaces.
Because of the setting, it took hours of rehearsal to plan the piece. Check out the video to get a glimpse of some of the preparation that took place before the performance.
Tags: Hirokazu Kosaka, Kalpa, Pacific Standard Time, performance art, performances, PST, PSTinLA, video
The current exhibition Gothic Grandeur abounds with images in the margin. These charming and often humorous additions, called marginalia (Latin for “things in the margins”), were introduced to manuscript illumination during the Gothic era.
Initial C: The Massacre of the Innocents in a breviary, French, about 1320–25. Tempera colors, gold leaf, and ink on parchment, each page 6 9/16 x 4 3/8 in. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. Ludwig IX 2, fol. 142
In the lower border of this French Gothic devotional book, three boys play a board game; in the illuminated initial in the page’s left column, a soldier prepares to slay a male baby at a king’s command—an illustration of the biblical Massacre of the Innocents.
It is difficult to tell what board game the boys in the border play. In the Middle Ages, both strategy games like chess and alquerque (akin to checkers) and games of chance like knucklebones and hazard (both played with a form of dice) were popular.
Elsewhere in the borders of other pages in this manuscript, games such as bowling and hide-and-seek can be found, and most seem to have little resonance with other images on the page. Here, however, the pairing of young boys playing a game in the margin with a male child being slaughtered in the initial may have been intended as a purposeful contrast between the innocence that should characterize childhood and the grim reality that sometimes intrudes.
Tags: games, Gothic art, Gothic Grandeur, illuminated manuscripts, medieval art, Middle Ages, The Manuscript Files
Self-Portrait, Andy Warhol, 1979. Polaroid Polacolor print, 32 1/4 x 22 in. The J. Paul Getty Museum, 98.XM.5.1. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
Andy Warhol was asked by the Polaroid Corporation in 1979 to create a series of works promoting its new product—a giant 800-pound camera that produced instant large-scale color photographs almost three feet tall and two feet wide. Warhol produced ten final images, four of them self-portraits, including the one shown here, which is featured in the exhibition Images of the Artist and is the focus of this week’s Masterpiece of the Week tours.
In Warhol’s work self-portraits are a predominant theme, a strange fact for someone who was reputed to have hated his looks, finding himself to be grotesque and constantly griping about his weight and skin.
The contradiction between the picture and its purported content puzzles me: it’s a self-portrait—an image meant to convey personality and identity—and yet, no Warhol self-portrait actually conveys who he really was.
Taking Warhol’s self-portraits together, however, we can begin to piece together some idea of what he was trying to say about himself, or at least parts of himself. There is the fascinating series of self-portraits in drag costume, glamorized with full hair and makeup. Many of his self-portraits have him grimacing or making uncomfortable faces—he even captured himself blowing his nose with a tissue in a couple of bumbling shots.
In a few images, he represents himself with a camera. There are a few with a menacing-looking skull hovering near him. In others, he dons one of his many wigs. Looking at the range of these photographs, we have a better idea of who he was: a sometimes awkward, flamboyant artist with a propensity for both the macabre and mundane, the droll and dramatic.
Perhaps the saying “a picture’s worth a thousand words” no longer holds true?
Polaroid portrait of me by Katherine Ahn
Consider this Polaroid that my friend took of me. I’m holding a little bunny toy, puckering my lips and looking away from the camera, affecting a cutesy look—is this who I am? Not really; maybe in that moment; maybe a little part of me. But certainly this portrait doesn’t speak to all of me.
Perhaps, beginning with Warhol and now even more so today in the age of Facebook, personal blogs, Flickr, Twitter, Instagram and more, the inverse of the old adage is really true: a thousand pictures are required to convey our true, multi-faceted identities.
Tags: Andy Warhol, Facebook, Images of the Artist, Masterpiece of the Week, photographs, Polaroids, Pop Art, self-portraits
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The J. Paul Getty Museum and the Bibliothèque nationale de France are collaborating on the research and conservation treatment of the Berthouville Treasure, the extraordinary Roman silver hoard from the Bibliotheque’s Cabinet des Médailles.
Antiquities curator Kenneth Lapatin with in the antiquities conservation studio at the Getty Villa with the statuette of Mercury from the Berthouville Treasure (Roman, 100 B.C.-A.D. 200. Silver, 14 5/8 in. high. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des monnaies, médailles et antiques, Paris).
Almost one hundred objects arrived at the Getty Villa in December 2010, and technical examination, analysis, and photography of the individual artifacts continued throughout 2011.
One of the most intriguing objects is a small silver statuette, about 14 inches high, of Mercury, the Roman god of travel and commerce. The statuette was found in fragments, which were entrusted in the 19th century for restoration to Alexi Joseph Depaulis, a well known artist who worked in metal.
Knowing what has been done to the sculpture over the years, and what is inside it, is the first step in understanding how to properly conserve it. Close visual analysis along with X-radiographs have revealed much about this history.
X-rays revealed that Depaulis employed an armature of small metal rods with twisted wire. Wax was used to construct a stable support structure to hold the individual silver fragments. Analysis by our colleagues at the Getty Conservation Institute has established that the wax is natural beeswax.
We have also discovered that when Depaulis first restored the figure in the 1830s, the wax was lighter in color and more in harmony with the adjoining silver fragments. The results of recent wax analysis indicates that lead white was added to the wax mixture, which lightened the overall appearance of the wax restoration. Over the past 180 years the wax has darkened and become discolored.
Our study also suggests that the silver used to create the Mercury statuette was manufactured by hammering silver to a thin gauge sheet, but the left hand is solid and seems to have been made separately and to have been attached to the wrist of the right arm by sliding its wrist portion into the hollow arm. Traces of gilding on the wings of the god’s helmet are also preserved. The support rods appear to be solid and stable, so we have no plans to remove them.
Our work on this statue was one of what we hope to be many more interesting findings with this project.
Tags: antiquities conservation, Berthouville Treasure, Mercury, silver
Suzanne Lacy with the Rape Map at LAPD headquarters, January 2012. Photo: Neda Moridpour
January 19 is the official launch of the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival. But it’s already unofficially begun, not only with pre-festival events last night at LAXART and tonight at the Getty Center, but also with what promises to be one of the landmark performances of the festival.
This is the recreation of Suzanne Lacy’s Three Weeks in May, a provocative confrontation of violence against women first staged in May 1977. The reincarnation, entitled Three Weeks in January, centers on a Rape Map at the Los Angeles Police Department headquarters downtown, where rapes reported the previous day are stamped.
Hotline activist in front of the Rape Map, May 1977
Three Weeks in January not only visually confronts the daily incidence of rape in Los Angeles, but also includes a sound-art piece featuring stories of survivors created by Bruno Louchouarn. The intent is to link the disturbing symbolism of the red, raw “RAPE” stamps on the map with the words of victims.
The three-week chronicle of sexual violence began on January 12 when Lacy joined mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and LAPD chief Charlie Beck for a press conference, along with partners in CODEPINK, Peace Over Violence, and the Rape Treatment Center. In 1977 there was some cooperation by City hall and the LAPD, but this time around there is much more, as both now fully stand behind Lacy.
Suzanne Lacy's Rape Map at LAPD headquarters, May 1977. Each red stamp represents a rape reported to the LAPD.
Detail of RAPE stamp on Suzanne Lacy's Rape Map at LAPD headquarters, January 2012. Photo: Neda Moridpour
Spreading out in waves from the Rape Map, the project is also taking place across the city and the Web. Lacy and her team have partnered with L.A. nonprofits and schools to stage discussions with students, and the project will include several public discussions on how sexual violence is portrayed. A major component of the performance is taking place on Twitter, where you can participate by tweeting or retweeting “I know someone, do you? #RapeEndsHere” to raise awareness about the prevalence of sexual violence across the globe.
To get more involved, follow @3WeeksinJan and check out the project website, www.threeweeksinjanuary.org, where you can hear Louchouarn’s sound art, get instructions on holding your own performance, and find out about events near you.
Suzanne Lacy’s goal is no less than to help end rape in Los Angeles. Join your voice with hers by demanding that #RapeEndsHere.
Tags: Bruno Louchouarn, contemporary art, festival, Pacific Standard Time, performance art, PST, PSTinLA, rape, Suzanne Lacy, women
Artist Ed Moses opened his studio and shared insights into his creative process last December 18 as part of In Studio, a program we in the Museum’s Education Department organized featuring six artists whose work is included in the exhibition Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents. The following questions grew out of that visit.
Where do you get the titles of your works, like Dalton’s Waffle #1?
They appear as a word. The word pops out. It’s sort of an intuition that may be a correspondent to the painting, or not.
Does Buddhism inform your outlook?
I’ve been student of Buddhism since 1960. And of course it interfaces how I behave, how I think, how I perceive.
You described painting as a daily ritual and likened getting ready to work as preparing for a surgical procedure, laying tools out in a methodical way. But you also emphasized the importance of serendipity, stumbling across things that you like or move you in the work. Can you describe your method and how you make space in the studio for control and surprise?
Balance or harmony are things that are not of any interest to me. It’s really the adventure of going out every day, setting up the workers and myself, and what follows that preparation is chance and circumstance. I never know where I am going—or do I?
Sometimes the previous day leaves evidence for the next day. Evidence in the form of, What will I do, what will the process be, what paint will I use, how will it be applied?
I’m often described as unafraid. Actually that’s not true. Or actually it is true. I am unafraid but I’m really terrified. Terror is my constant companion. Maybe brought on by ghosts at the hour of the wolf, 4:00 a.m.
Course participants explore Ed Moses' studio, December 18, 2011
What is it about painting that continues to inspire you?
I’m never inspired. I’m obsessed. And I look forward every day to paint.
Paints and materials in Ed Moses' studio
Ed Moses's dog gives course participants a warm welcome
Learn more about Ed Moses and see a video interview with the artist here.
Tags: Ed Moses, In Studio, Pacific Standard Time, PST, PSTinLA
Left to right: Matthew Henerson, Jonathan Le Billon, and Daniele Watts rehearsing for Eleanor Antin’s Before the Revolution.
From January 19 to 29, the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival will present more than 30 new public art commissions and re-invented works of performance art inspired by the amazing history of art in Southern California.
As we move into the final days before the festival, artists are moving into their final rounds of building, planning, and rehearsing. Here’s a look at a few of the projects now getting their finishing touches.
For the Festival’s opening on January 19th, Judy Chicago and Materials & Applications will present a reinvention of Disappearing Environments, a 1968 work by Chicago, Lloyd Hamrol, and Eric Orr that utilized 25 tons of dry ice to blanket a Century City shopping plaza in dense fog.
For the Festival, Chicago and M&A have been working with a team of volunteers to develop a new design based on the Environments’ original ziggurat form. The new work will surround the opening of the Art Los Angeles Contemporary art fair in Santa Monica, including a dramatic illumination of the structures and fog at dusk.
In a series of workshops, volunteers for this performance learned about working with dry ice, did model-building exercises, and developed a series of proposals for potential ice structure designs and site layouts. This Saturday, participants will have their third and final workshop, test-building two of the nine dry ice structures using five tons of dry ice.
A visitor admires one of the original Disappearing Environments structures in 1968. Photo: Lloyd Hamrol
Judy Chicago presenting the history of Disappearing Environments at a recent dry ice workshop. Photo: Donald Woodman
Experimenting with dry ice and flares at the dry ice workshop. Photo: Donald Woodman
Chicago has also been working for the past several months with pyrotechnicians to develop a new Atmosphere performance called A Butterfly for Pomona that will take place on the Pomona College football field on January 21st.
That same evening at Pomona, you can see a re-invention of John White’s Preparation F featuring the Pomona College football team, and James Turrell’s Burning Bridges, which will transform the exterior of Bridges Auditorium at Pomona with crimson light.
Judy Chicago (right) with pyrotechnician Chris Souza (left) and curator Rebecca McGrew testing fireworks. Photo: Donald Woodman
On Sunday, January 22nd, Lita Albuquerque will be presenting a new version of her 1980 earthwork Spine of the Earth. The original work created a large spiral figure in the Mojave Desert using raw pigment.
Spine of the Earth, Lita Albuquerque, 1980. Ephemeral installation at El Mirage Dry Lake Bed, CA. Photo: Lita Albuquerque © Lita Albuquerque Studio, 1980
For the Festival, Albuquerque has re-imagined the work for a new site: the striking stone staircase that cuts through the landscape at the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook in Los Angeles. Taking advantage of this incredible hill and landscape, Albuquerque is imagining the original spiral as coming unspooled as it spills down the staircase. Visitors will gather at the bottom of the hill to witness hundreds of red-clad volunteers on the hillside. A dramatic intervention will then occur in the sky, visually connecting the earth to the heavens! Albuquerque is still recruiting volunteers for the piece. Signup is available here.
Hundreds of volunteers will dramatically transform the landscape for Lita Albuquerque’s Spine of the Earth 2012.
Lita Albuquerque’s aerial plan of Spine of the Earth 2012
Following Albuquerque’s performance on January 22nd, visitors can head to Pasadena for a new work by Richard Jackson that also connects pigment to the sky. For Accidents in Abstract Painting, Jackson is constructing a model Cessna plane that will be loaded up with paint and crashed into a temporary wall in the Arroyo Seco, creating a colorful new mural. Jackson is currently in the process of building the plane for the performance.
The model plane under construction for Richard Jackson’s Accidents in Abstract Painting. The soda can sitting on the plane is for scale reference.
The wings of Jackson’s plane for Accidents in Abstract Painting. These will be filled with spherical capsules of paint.
Meanwhile, other artists are deep into rehearsals. William Leavitt is in the midst of run-throughs for The Particles (Of White Naugahyde), his previously unproduced play about a family’s auditions for a NASA program that will send them to a planned space colony.
In San Diego, Eleanor Antin and director Robert Castro are rehearsing actors for a new production of Antin’s play Before the Revolution, which will be performed at the Hammer Museum as one of the closing events of the festival on January 29th. (See a rehearsal photo at the top of this post.)
Even as far away as Amsterdam, artists are preparing for the Festival. Last month Sandro Dukic presented a preview for his new work Still Movement: Homage to Nan Hoover, which will be presented at Sci-Arc on January 27th and 28th. Dukic’s work is part of a series of performances, “RE:COMPOSITION,” organized by curator Julie Lazar for the Festival.
Sandro Dukic presenting Still Movement: Homage to Nan Hoover at the Netherlands Media Art Institute on December 2-3, 2011
Reservations are open now for Festival events and they’re going very fast! For more information, please visit www.pacificstandardtimefestival.org.
Tags: Eleanor Antin, festival, Judy Chicago, Lita Albuquerque, Pacific Standard Time, performance art, performances, PST, PSTinLA, Richard Jackson
“One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends.”―Jean Cocteau
We’re offering an array of films this weekend in the free screening series Dream a Little Dream: Artists in Film. I’m particularly looking forward to our Jean Cocteau double feature on Saturday, when Blood of a Poet and Testament of Orpheus screen back to back.
Maybe because it’s easy to lump French films according to their circle of friends, one typically encounters Cocteau’s first film, Blood of a Poet (1930), on the heels of having watched Luis Buñuel’s early masterpieces Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age d’Or (1930) and other works by the Surrealists. But you soon realize that Cocteau is in a separate dream world all to himself. Blood of a Poet feels the most profoundly dreamlike, yet Cocteau always made clear that it drew nothing from dreams, symbols, or Surrealism.
Without trying to interpret Blood of a Poet’s evocative images—I’ll leave that fun part up to you—the film’s “downtempo” movements, and the non-linear structure Cocteau used to tackle his vision of the poet’s artistic process and struggle, may tempt you to just give in and experience the film as a 50-minute dream.
Blood of a Poet may draw nothing from Cocteau’s own dreams, but the way it choreographs everything from bringing a statue to life to falling through a mirror portal, peeking at opium smoke through keyholes, and a couple of suicide-triggered gunshots to the head, Cocteau uses film as one more visual license to dream poetic. As in a dream, the back and forth of images Cocteau presents don’t come as startling surprises, but as pleasant, strange encounters.
Screening after Blood of a Poet is Testament of Orpheus, Cocteau’s final film. Testament of Orpheus (1960), the conclusion to the Orphic Trilogy, continues the conversation on the artistic process, features Cocteau himself traveling through the space-time continuum—along with cameos from Yul Brynner and Pablo Picasso—and is more fun than a Twilight Zone episode.
It would make for an interesting change of pace if more of today’s films were willing to let go and dream on screen.
Stills from Blood of a Poet (first three images) and Testament of Orpheus (last two images) courtesy of Tamasa Distribution. © Tamasa Distribution.
Tags: Blood of a Poet, film series, free events, Jean Cocteau, movies, Saturday evening events, Surrealism, Testament of Orpheus
Initial D: The Fool with Two Demons (detail) in a psalter, illuminations by the Master of the Ingeborg Psalter, after 1205. Tempera colors, gold leaf, and ink on parchment bound between pasteboard covered with brown calf, each leaf 12 3/16 x 8 5/8 in. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. 66, fol. 56
One of my favorite details from the current exhibition Gothic Grandeur comes from a French psalter of the early 1200s. A hallmark of Gothic art was an increasing sensitivity to the natural world, which led not only to a new physical naturalism in images, but also to a new psychological realism.
Here, a malicious demon whispers into a man’s ear, trying to convince him of the blasphemous notion that there is no God.
There’s something particularly devious about the way the demon leans in on the man’s shoulder from behind. The man, meanwhile, seems oblivious to the demon’s physical presence, so the worried expression on his face makes you wonder whether he fears that the thoughts are coming from within his own mind.
This image shows how Gothic artists were exploring new visual ideas, such as conveying a disturbed mental state or portraying the effect of invisible evil forces lurking in the world.
The Manuscript Files is an occasional column featuring details from manuscripts in the exhibition Gothic Grandeur: Manuscript Illumination, 1200–1350, on view in two rotations at the Getty Center through May 13, 2012.
Tags: devils, Gothic art, Gothic Grandeur, illuminated manuscripts, medieval art, Middle Ages, The Manuscript Files
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