A Fond Art Memory: IMMA

In 2005 I was an artist-in-residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. For four months, Anna and I lived on the grounds of the museum with eight other international artists. The museum was formerly a veteran’s hospital, built in the 1600′s; the carriage houses in the back were converted into artists studios and apartments.

I have never felt so fortunate as an artist as I did at IMMA.

I had just graduated from grad school, where all of my professors warned (just as my undergrad professors had) that once we all graduated no one would care about our work. (They didn’t word it so dreadfully, but basically that’s what they were saying.) No one would be knocking on our studio doors demanding to ponder with us the details of our projects for two hours straight, engaging in heated debate with colleagues over the intent of our work.  Also, I suspected that this probably was not a degree that would earn much money.

But then there we were at IMMA. In short, we resident artists felt like rock stars. We were living in a museum. They were giving us money, studios, and apartments. Museum curators were visiting our studios, genuinely interested in what we were doing. Perhaps most thrillingly, there were giant iron gates that opened for us when we came home at night, and then closed behind us. Once, a few guys trailed us home from a pub. We cackled with delight when the giant gates closed in their faces. I thought, Our teachers were wrong! THIS is what it’s like to be an artist!

(HA!)

And then we came home (well, after another residency that is another Fond Art Memory), or rather to my parents’ house, where we would then live for four months, before we moved to a friend’s lightless basement in the dead of winter to sleep on an air mattress on the floor for three months, jobless, in much debt, and warding off depression with many episodes of Alias.

I guess one of the advantages and disadvantages of being an artist is that there isn’t just one reality. IMMA was real (I have pictures to prove it, in times of doubt), and so was the subsequent reality of being homeless (though thankfully not shelter-less), moneyless, prospect-less.

Anyway, there’s no moral to this story. Except that if you’re an artist, you should apply.

L’Orangerie, Paris (Favorites, No. 3)

Monet’s cycle of eight Nymphéas are not so much paintings as they are an installation. Many people “know” them (or have a vague sense of the water lily paintings in general) via their reproduction on umbrellas and calendars, but you really must be at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris in order to see them in their entirety. I guess this could be said about any painting and its reproduced incarnations, but here I’m being literal. Over 19 feet long, the paintings are too big to take a picture of. They will not fit in a singular field of view; rather, they are a field, and the viewer is surrounded and suspended in it.

Wrapping the walls of two oval-shaped rooms, the canvases are not flush against a flat wall; they are convex on a curved wall, so that to stand in front of them is to move into them in space, literally. They are an environment, complete with an elliptical sky of diffused light above. It is precisely the installation that Monet intended.

I felt alone in these rooms, even though there were other people stumbling around. I felt submerged in color, thrilled to the core, yet peaceful at the same time. As paintings, the Nymphéas are flawless, whether viewed up close or fifteen feet away. I might say that this is my favorite work of art, ever. And damn, I love the French. They let you take pictures inside their museums, saying “Here, this is for you, too.”

Favorites, No. 1: Mariele Neudecker’s Winterreise

On days that I would like to get out and be inspired by art in person, but the baby is not wearing his sociable face, I will revisit my favorite works of art seen in days past.

I saw Mariele Neudecker‘s Winterreise (A Winter’s Journey) at Temple Bar Gallery in Dublin in 2005.  Projected large on the wall in a dark room, Winterreise is a series of 24 short films with music.  The films correspond to Schubert‘s 24 songs in the song cycle also titled Winterreise. Schubert’s 1827 Winterreise sets to music 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller.

In Neudecker’s Winterreise, Schubert’s song cycle, with voice and piano, plays on a loop along with the film. Müller’s poems float as English text over slowly changing imagery.  The film uses scenes of landscape and life on the 60th degree of latitude on the globe. Winter. Iceland, Russia, the Shetland Islands. Sometimes the images mirror the poems in content, sometimes they don’t.  Sometimes the images breathe contemporary content into the poems, striking and perfect. There is the feeling of being held in suspension between the old and the new, with the combination of the old music and the new medium of video/installation. They go beautifully together.

I sat through the whole cycle with eyes like saucers, in disbelief at how perfect it all was. Then I came back the next week and sat through it again, taking pictures of each scene. I wanted to have something to remember it by.