Media Day Out - Playing Hookie

Visiting galleries is fun, especially when I feel like I am playing hookie from my responsibilities.(and let me tell you I am a responsible person!) Like a good middle aged artist, hoping to make it in the all tooo young art world, I sat through a talk on some totally out my my reach grant opportunity, thinking that by some fluke I might have a chance.

The big plus was the venue - the Santa Monica Museum of Art, in a back room, with no obvious windows and a dreary power point display I did my due diligence and luckily, I was forced to walk through several media exhibits to and from the talk. Yup, I actually stopped and looked f

or more that the a minute at all the pieces. Video art is a difficult medium for me to digest. I, for the most part, would like to be hold up in a dark movie theater, eating popcorn and blobbing out, instead of standing in a concrete room or slouched on a hard wooden bench.

I stood and watched a man in a tuxedo pull a rabbit out of his hat....oooh....why? I moved on quickly but the one that held my attention was the short

video, shorty film by Israel artist Nira Pereg. I plopped my butt on the end of a long thin bench, hoping my weight would not cause the very waif thin girl on the other end to flip into the air, or simply throw her onto the floor I began to become engage in the playful, ironic and informed glimpse of yet another border that we create to keep our selves separate and unique. half way through the piece an elder artist woman who I had seen in the talk came in standing next to me, so I scuttled myself myself into the middle, she placed herself on the end and we started to giggle at what we were watching. none of us had read the blurb on the wall and the only information we had was from the museum attendant who occasionally popped his head through the black curtains telling us how much longer the video would run.

Was this the west bank? I quietly thought to myself what a ridiculous statement - the West Bank was in the country this is a city position. Are these new jewish settlements the ones we hear about in the news? Is this Jerusalem? - we started chatting and all agreed yes because the architecture was so contemporary it would have to be in Europe- you would see nothing like that in the Bronx. Sitting on the bench, chatting and watching I got the feeling that this film was just as entertaining as a good film. By the way the little girl at the end of the bench had no idea it was even about Jews.

Taking the time to really play hookie I visited the rest of the open galleries.... knowing there wa

s a painting exhibit at Mark Moore's gallery that I had seen and enjoyed risked feeling the guilt of not being there to pick up my kids from school. As far as I am concerned the best part about painting is the paint - Marshall McLuhan - the medium in the message. ( does that make me sound intellectual) Goobs of thick paint that is wet and will probably crack as it dries were applied to faces, figures, landscapes and a vagina. Why must we have the red vulva be sticking out of a 1/2 naked woman's butt, or am I just a prude? Allison Schulnik what is the point? Back to New media. Recently I have seen tooo many artists doing imitation animations ala William Kentridge or just plain bad ones that are technically atrocious, so I crept around the corner to the side room, thinking not again. Surprisingly I found her very playful figurative blobs alluring, ugly, funning and painterly - is this a new form of painting? This was plasticine magic!!!