Cool Cars
02/07/2010 · Grant Davis
Sudha Cars Museum is one of Hyderabad’s hidden gems. Tucked away in an unassuming roadside lot near the Nehru Zoological Park, the museum lives up to its claim as the world’s first and only handmade wacky car museum. It’s home to handmade wonders such as the Shoe Car, Parrot Cage Car, Lotus Chariot Car, and Condom Bike and boasts the world’s tallest tricycle which has a wheel diameter of 17 ft and is 37 ft long. The trike was made by the museum’s owner and primary craftsman, Mr. Kanyaboyina Sudhakar and was ridden in Hyderabad, India on July 1st, 2005.
Computer Car / Toilet Car
Anish Kapoor
01/08/2010 · Alexander Keefe
Confession: I’ve walked by Anish Kapoor’s Chicago “bean” (ok, ok: Cloud Gate) one too many times, and if familiarity has not, in this case, bred any real contempt, it has bred something akin to disinterest. It is an expensive-looking, starchitectural funhouse mirror cloaked with the same solemn air of profundity that the art directors of BMW web-ads achieve with a far greater economy of means, and far less self-importance. In a sense, it is perfectly emblematic of the corporatized busy funness and funny business of the Millenium Park vibe in general, and of the AT&T Plaza in particular, where the orecchiette-shaped behemoth sits demanding attention, looking a bit like a random freeze frame snatched from a sci-fi film: the part where a giant malevolent metallic demonoid robot shape-shifts into a fast-moving blob of all-devouring, extraterrestrial mercury.
Stilled in the midst of this collosal machinic alchemy, however, it evokes neither awe nor terror. A far better aesthetic journey can be had perusing the many amateur youtube videos featuring the object in question. And maybe, in the end, this simple technique could stand as a useful measure of the efficacy of any art object these days—and provide a telling spectrogram of its aura: ask yourself which is more interesting, the work itself or the youtube videos made of it by tourists goofing around? The Cloud Gate as it were, or the beloved “Bean”? Either way, it is most accurately categorized as an art-ertainment mega-bauble, one short step away from the Wynn Las Vegas. Watch out, Chicago: the Great Whore of our contemporary and cosmopolitan (remember, this is Anish Kapoor we are talking about!) Babylon has lost an earring on the way back to her suite, stoned and speeding, after a long and weird night at the Cirque de Soleil afterparty.
Anish Kapoor, Cloud Gate (2004)
Anish Kapoor has made a career out of this sort of midbrow accessibility, engaging and cleverly surprising, producing gentle aha-moments and a sense of having thought something big and ennobling. This American Life, Wes Anderson, The English Patient and Malcolm Gladwell are all staring at me right now saying: “what the hell’s your problem?”
My strong feelings on the matter notwithstanding, when I was in New York last month I stopped by the Guggenheim to see his Memory. It is a corseted and ruddy corten-steel zeppelin, somewhat deflated looking although still plenty bulging and tumescent, belted and bolted and stuffed into a room seemingly too small to contain its swelling immensity. And that right there tells you that Anish Kapoor’s preferred brand of heavy-handed populism is about to nail you with a David Copperfield-style ship-in-a-bottle effect. Don’t fall for it. It’s the sort of thing that appears to have worked some magic over cosmopolitan sensibilities in this decaying late-capitalist moment of ours but the imagineer’s spell, after all, isn’t that powerful. There is a whiff of Andrew Carnegie’s megalomania about Kapoor’s work, an atavistic steel-baron gesturalism that imparts an old-fashioned appeal (this one is patinated with powdery-looking rust, an au courant steampunkish touch), and there is the inescapable stench of rampant Jindalism as well, the icy and soulless stainless-steel rot of maximalized modernist minitude.
Anish Kapoor, Memory (2008)
Memory wants so badly to be interpreted that it practically coerces it out of you. Jammed in to its undersized quarters, and forcing curious visitors to navigate uncertainly through the early-period Kandinskys and lavatory waiting-areas of the Guggenheim to take it all in, it is all about Memory, which also grows really big as time goes on, and also takes on a kind of slippery steel skin. The seams are visible, but they are tight. Nothing could escape from there… or could it? If you could open a window into it—but you can!—you would see a black square of absolute darkness—but I think I see a little light in there!—an unenterable black hole of memory and time past. I’m feeling like memory is empty and yet it is full. It is the past, but it is also endlessly protean and capable of creative change and refashioning! That black square sometimes looks flat and two-dimensional, like a painting, and sometimes looks three-dimensional, like a cosmic door. (I am at heart your guide on otherworldly journeys in time and space, says Kapoor with this, really working as a painter, but doing so surreptitiously by actually working as a sculptor). Much as in the David Bromberg joke about the original leather-bound edition of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet with all the significant passages underlined, here too every stinking word is underlined.
But you know I actually enjoyed myself standing there digging the op-art special effects emanating from this dead-black yolk of a hundred-year egg, this unplayable ocarina of the titans. It was much better than Cats, which is also about memories. I felt a yawning sort of gravity in front of that window-door, a dicey pull into the enclosed and yet bottomless black. It even felt safely dangerous for a moment. That and the fact that it doesn’t feature dildos (Chelsea’s galleries right now, wow, dildo-central)… it may be just enough. But if challenging and dark post-Minimalist beauty is what you’re after, go upstairs and see what Kitty Kraus did with a light bulb full of black paint and two panes of glass. Mr. Kapoor, if you insist on plying me with quasi-mystical promises, then offer me hard, maddening wine, not some sweet watery spritzer!
Amar Chitra Katha
01/04/2010 · Mansi Shah
Special Exhibition Lecture:
Heroes and Villains in India’s Amar Chitra Katha Comics
Sunday, January 10 | 2:00 pm @ LACMA
Karline McLain, assistant professor of South Asian religions at Bucknell University, will discuss the mythological and historical heroes and villains of India’s most beloved comic book series, Amar Chitra Katha. She will provide insight into the stylistic, editorial, and ideological choices that went into the making of these comic books. Her recent book, India’s Immortal Comic Books: Gods, Kings, and Other Heroes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009) was awarded the Edward Cameron Dimock Jr. Book Prize in Indian Humanities by the American Institute of Indian Studies. This lecture is held in conjunction with the exhibition Heroes and Villains: The Battle for Good in India’s Comics.
Brown Auditorium | Free, no reservations
This lecture is made possible by the Southern Asian Art Council at LACMA.
Freddy Birdy
04/11/2009 · Mansi Shah
SMS Shakespeare, 2009
Oil on Canvas
47″ x 47″
Chain painting , 2008
Oil on Canvas
84″ x 60″
“Highly idiosyncratic within the context of contemporary Indian art, [Freddy] Birdy’s works participate in a long history of language-based paintings and art works that characterize Western Modernism: from the word/image puzzles of the Surrealist Rene Magritte, the studies of meaning by American Conceptualist Joseph Kosuth, the Pop Icons of Los Angeles painter Ed Ruscha, to the linguistic experiments of Feminist artists such as Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer. Yet Mr. Birdy does not recreate an academic’s dry rhetoric. Rather, his works are humorous and highly entertaining, self-deprecating and tongue-in-cheek, placing him in the context of his own generation of artists such as Richard Prince, Maurizio Cattelan and Martin Kippenberger, who poke fun at the conventions of art so as to take it forward. Mr. Birdy posits painting as a type of stand-up comedy.” – Nature Morte
Sandeep Mukherjee
02/17/2009 · Mansi Shah
Pune born, Sandeep Mukherjee creates beautiful Duralene paintings often referred to as “kaleidoscopic, cosmic abstractions.”
“…Mukherjee speaks as avidly about the principles of physics and cosmology as he does about Hindu mythological paintings and the Buddhist cave temples of India…
.[His] commitment to these sorts of existential questions — the relationship of presence to absence, the archetypal to the ineffable, energy to matter — and perhaps his Indian ethnicity have led many to attribute a spiritual dimension to the work.”
.– From LA Weekly
Read the entire article here.
http://www.sisterla.com