Somebody Told Me…

Somebody told me that I’m an example of a Renaissance (wo)man just like Leonardo (da Vinci, not the ninja turtle, and also herself), interested in many different subjects, excited by the prospect of new things or projects and make sure that there’s always something new to learn, but gets bored when it becomes monotonous and unstimulating and abandon projects halfway in the end.

Art for Today – Jacques Lipchitz

This write-up was done for my first presentation for the Singapore Art Museum training. I’ve never heard of his name before I had to do this write-up on him. We all learn something new everyday

Jacques Lipchitz (1891 – 1973)

The influential 20^th century sculptor Jacques Lipchitz was born in Lithuania in 1891 into a Jewish family. At first he studied engineering, but at age 18, with the support of his mother and the dismay of his father, he moved to Paris to study art. In 1914 he joined a group of artists which included Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso. This environment played a great role in influencing Lipchitz into adopting cubism in his work and rejecting his earlier, more classical style.

The authority in Cubism is generally considered to be in painting, but unlike other artists such as Picasso and Braque, Lipchitz did not dabble in painting but worked exclusively in sculptures (of course discounting his preparatory sketches and gouaches). Lipchitz was the first sculptor to embrace cubism completely and pioneered nonrepresentational sculptures. Other cubist artists also experimented with three-dimensional cubist constructions, but Lipchitz consistently worked with traditional methods and materials in delivering Cubist ideas.

Man with Guitar, 1920, Bronze

One of the preoccupations of sculptors after the First World War was monumental pieces. Having created works for indoor environments, Lipchitz was working out how the same principles could be applied to outdoor, monumental sculptures. Man with Guitar (1920) is one result of his preoccupation with the monumental.

The sculpture combines two different views of a guitarist out of which a third, otherworldly bird-like profile emerge. Unlike any of his previous works, it is angular, blocky, masculine, and generates a sense of bulk. Its abbreviated forms are reduced into tightly integrated blocks. The sculptor said of his work:

“… is now completely frontalized, composed of massive, integrated blocks. I even eliminated the shaft of the guitar, squaring off the body and integrating it completely with the torso of the figure. The asymmetrical staring eyes give to the figure a peculiar sense of almost hypnotic power which emphasizes its specific human personality.”

Standing at only 53cm tall, it was initially visioned to be elevated on a pedestal. Lipchitz dubbed this and other small-scale works “easel sculptures”.

In the late 1920’s, Lipchitz’ style started to shift away from cubism as he got more interested in the curves of the human form. Under the German occupation of France in World War II and their persecution toward Jews, Lipchitz moved to U.S. This was where he renewed his style and introduced underlying lyrical and spiritual ideas in his work.

Sources and Readings:

Putz, Catherine. 2002. Jacques Lipchitz: the First Cubist Sculptor. London: Paul Holbertson Publishing.

Wilkinson, Alan G. 1996. The Sculpture of Jacques Lipchitz: a Catalogue Raissone Vol.1, the Paris Years 1910-1914. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd.

Jacques Lipchitz: Biography. http://www.answers.com/topic/jacques-lipchitz?cat=entertainment

Marlborough Gallery, NY. http:// www.marlboroughgallery.com/artists/lipchitz/Lipchitz%20pr-2007.pdf

Jacques Lipchitz: His Life in Sculpture. 1972. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series, Vol.30, No.6. pp.284-288.

Singapore Night Festival 2008 – Week 1

It’s Monday and my fingers are having the blues so I won’t be typing out much but I’ll just paste some photos we took at the first weekend of Night Fest. Enjoy!

ps: for those of you wondering, my camera is a compact Fujifilm F100fd. And I love it!

The National Museum of Singapore, note the dancing couple in the middle

Sailing ship and dancer suspended in the air from wires

Extreme piano playing

Part of the crowd and a line of local girls in gigantic skirts on wheels

Giant luminescent ball – can’t really see it here but there’s a dancer suspended in the centre of the sphere

The moon (I assume) and two ladies

Dancers suspended from some really pretty balloons

Another view of the balloons – personally the red one is my favorite

Classical-style faces projected onto a screen of fine mist from a sprinkler

Water dance, a bit like gymnastics with goldfish in a bowl

Fire dance, ladies in nighties with pyromaniac tendencies

Fire umbrella, patent pending – waiting for scientific proof that spinning fiery spokes will keep you dry

Monday Blues

Don’t tell. But I so felt like not doing anything this morning that after I got ready at 7.50, I watched Cartoon Network instead of rushing to the office. Yawn. Mondays.

Happy Virus

I found this plastic kiddy bag in a neighborhood shop in the vicinity. Cracked me up. Also, note the bunch of Barneys behind.

Celebrating My Entry to the Late 20’s

My birthday’s over but the gathering’s happening this Saturday, 19 July 2008. We’re gonna have dinner at Ricciotti (Italian, which is a safe choice for all the picky eaters out there. I’ve never heard of anyone not liking Italian food. Well OK except my Dad, who, like many other Indonesians, his age especially, can only eat Indonesian and Indonesian-Chinese food. But not my friends. Nobody’s ever complained of Italian.) It’s gonna be followed by some board-games (I know I know. Geeky. Yeah.) and whatever thing you wanna do after since we’ll be around Boat Quay and Clarke Quay and there are watering holes abound.

I know it’s unrealistic to post an invitation here because nobody reads my blog anyway, but (hi, nobody!) do dress up in stripes and drop by if you wanna.

Update: we’re gonna head down to the Night Fest at 11.30pm

Library Book Sale

Date: 18 – 20 July 2008

Time: 9.30am – 8.00pm

Venue: Singapore Expo Hall 4A

The National Library’s having a garage sale, a “cuci gudang”. English & Chinese books are going at $2 a pop, magazines at $5 for a pack of 10. Malay and Tamil book are going at at $1 a pop and magazines at $5 for a pack of 20. Your purchase is limited to 50 copies, tho. And they also provide delivery service through SingPost.

Unfortunately I’ll only be able to visit the sale on Sunday (that’s the third and final day) cos today I’m gonna go to the night festival opening, then tomorrow we’re going on a field trip to the Matisse exhibition at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI) and my birthday dinner. So.. yeah I really really really hope they still have buy-worthy stuff left on Sunday. I can visualize the kiasu Singaporeans queueing up and loading their baskets up with any book they can find, and bringing along friends or members of the family so that they can buy more than the 50 book quota. Fingers crossed!

Update:

According to the bf there were 600 people waiting outside the hall before the sale opened this morning. Damn.

Singapore Night Festival

Date: 18 – 26 July 2008

Venue: National Museum, SMU lawn, and its vicinity

Time: at night

There’s gonna be some fun happening the next two weekends. Singapore is holding a Night Festival which includes performances spectacular (imported, of course) some outdoor Zouk-ing and a slew of other performances and installations.

The Italian aerial Performance, The Dancing Sky by Studi Festi, will be on 18 and 19 July at 9.00pm at the National Museum with a second performance at 11.30pm. It’s gonna involve suspended stuff and people flying around. There are also other performances around the venue.

The highlight on 25 and 26 July is the Zouk Beatnik Picnic outdoor party (do I hear PARTY? Yeah!!!!) A number of heritage-related events will be held in museums and and vicinity, and watch out for the light installation that will paint the facades of the National Museum and the Art Museum. They’re also going to screen (the John Travolta) Hairspray and Willy Wonka (the 1971 version) outdoors, under the huge banyan tree outside the National Museum.

And.. and.. they’re all FREE!!!! And the 5 museums in the civic district (Asian Civilisation, National, Peranakan, Art, Philatelic) will be open to the public until 2.00am on both weekends the 25th, and.. and.. it’s FREE admission from 6.00pm onwards! Now how cool is that?

I picked up a pamphlet with all the performance schedule but apparently they don’t have an online version of it. The National Museum website lists the programmes but the website isn’t really that friendly – but anyway it’s better than nothing, so if you wanna know more you can visit their website then click on the Night Festival link at the bottom of the page and then click on the respective dates to view the programme line-up.

On Television

Like any other homes around the world, ours has a TV, too; although an eye-straining 14″ one – since we don’t really see the point in buying a new, bigger set when we’re going to move in a year or two anyway and it’s hardly worth the investment and most TVs they sell now are those expensive flat screen ones and we can still make out what’s on it if we sit close enough. You can find people watching TV practically anywhere, in cities where each member of the family has their own set, or in villages where a hundred villagers huddle every night in front of the Village Head’s set to watch soap operas about evil stepmothers. The invention has long evolved from being an information / entertainment broadcast receiver into the centre of every home. It’s one item that’s on a new home owner’s shopping list, right next to the fridge and the washing machine. We eat while watching TV, sleep with the TV on, play games on TV, listen to music from TV, and it’s so hypnotising that even when we are not really interested in what’s on we simply continue on sticking our eyes on it – and that’s why so many people keep their TV on 24/7 at home. Or maybe it’s just people are too used to noise that we can’t appreciate silence?

There was once I walked through a kampung near my school and what I experienced was surreal. The houses in the kampung are build wall-to-wall with no space between the road and the front door so you can see what’s happening inside. The footpath between the rows of houses are also pretty narrow, 4 people can’t walk side-by-side on it. Anyway, in each and every home there was a TV set. And on each and every TV set were the Teletubbies. And the kids and the parents and the grandparents and the cousins, all their eyes were glued on to Teletubbies.

Like some other people my age (gosh I feel old) I’ve also stopped being a fan of MTV. Simply because they’ve stopped being a Music Television. There used to me a number of Video Jockeys (VJs), and now we have like, two – Utt and Denise who’ve been with MTV since forever. That shows that the number of music Videos they show has decreased drastically. All they’re showing is now shows where people get hurt, people get their t-shirts wet, women get into catfights over unworthy boyfriends, people insult each other’s mother, or 16 year olds throwing a tantrum because she can’t get a diamond-encrusted Lamborghini for her 16th birthday.

I still like TV. We’ve got cable and I can always get my dose of beautifully done documentaries by Discovery or National Geographic. But it always happens with cable, you have so many channels but sometimes there’s just nothing to watch, and I end up surfing the channels or watching reruns of old shows. Sometimes I just give up and do the laundry instead.