Since I discovered on Wednesday that Theo Jansen’s workwill be at Hibiya Park in Tokyo, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. By Friday, I had decided that I’m taking an art-pilgrimage in the spring, with Tokyo as the highlight.
Ideally, I would be going to MoMA to see Matthew Barney’s work, Utah to see the Spiral Jetty, Tokyo to see Theo Jansen’s work, stopping somewhere in Europe (London? Italy? Paris? Athens?), then back home to recover. But, realistically, funding that is an absolute nightmare.
So, I’ve decided I’m going to Tokyo for a few days in March or April. The cost isn’t as high as I feared, and although I could dip into my “savings” (aka line of credit), I would much prefer not to. I’m looking at a base $2,000$2,500 $1,800 for travel and accommodations for a week (formerly only three days, but that’s clearly insufficient!), plus food and misc expenses.
How you can help
1. Make a straight donation of any amount. :D I prefer cash or cheque, if you can get it to me, and also accept PayPal donations:
Cheques can be sent to my studio:
Julianna Yau
141 Whitney Place, Studio #22
Kitchener, ON
N2G 1X9
2. Buy one or more of my signed notecards. They feature the following image, but with a signature where the watermark is:
I’m still twitching from the painful nauseating lesson I learned today from what shall be my third and last attendance at a Cinematheque Waterloo screening. Although I’m still happy to have supported them with the purchase of an annual membership, they are now well-known enough to be attracting just the type of person I don’t want to have in a cinema with me.
Compared with my near-religious experience while watching Synecdoche, New York, this brought back all my misanthropic feelings and contempt for the inconsiderateness of others. Tonight’s audience had everything but a ringing cell phone—people talking through the live introduction, people arriving late, people [loudly] discussing the film during the film, someone wrestling with a shopping bag for a full minute, someone dropping their keys, and, of course, me hushing whoever was within a 3-seat radius.
The film, Jules et Jim, was passable, but overly long at a mere 105 minutes. After the war sequence, François Truffaut flexed his directoral muscles, then was simply trying too hard to be impressive. I quickly found myself uninterested in the story and unenchanted (sic) by the barrage of perspective shots which had no connection to the narrative. Oh, but wait! French New Wave is not supposed to be about narrative, non? Like with Hitchcock, I’m wholly unimpressed by experimentation for the sake of experimentation (especially when it was laughable or too little, too late).
I saw Syndecoche, New York today, and I don’t even know where to start with the review. To avoid this being a mess of randomness, I’ll attempt to write this chronologically.
Firstly, it’s been a long time since I’ve been to the cinema. Before seeing The Dark Knight and the Cinematheque Waterloo screenings in the past few months, I had been boycotting the movie-going experience for over four years—a boycott I only broke to see the X-Men and Pirates of the Caribbean movies. After sitting through movies at The Princess Cinema in Waterloo and the Kingston Canadian Film Festival where the movie-goers insisted on discussing the movie while watching the movie, and seeing more mainstream movies like Mystic River, Master and Commander and Tears of the Sun (all of which were horrible, by the way) where people insisted on answering cell phones and slurping their drinks, I badly needed a break from seeing movies with the public.
So, the 20 minute “pre-show” of commercials was a tiresome surprise. With the amount of money they must be making from the sale of ads, I’m upset that ticket prices are still as high as they are. I did, however, get to enjoy a hearty laugh at Stella Artois‘ attempt at making their “beer” seem like something worth drinking.
The movie was absolutely amazing. I do wonder whether people who aren’t familiar with Kaufman’s work would get the full effect of it. His world is unique, but entirely consistent, and Synecdoche, New York was an extremely fine presentation of it. I’m both relived that his direction lived up to my expectations (hopes?) and that he has finally been able to direct one of his own screenplays so I can see exactly what he had intended.
Synecdoche, New York had the fuller version of the world we started to see in Being John Malkovich but, more surprisingly, seems to be a refined version of the themes in Michel Gondry’s video of Bjork’s Bachellorette. The absurd humour in the movie was in keeping with what Kaufman did in Adaptation, and the actors did a fantastic job with maintaining the understated delivery required for it to be “Kaufmanesque”.
I will be trying to see the movie again before it disapears from the cinema. Although it was worth the four-year wait, I missed the significance of the clocks/time in the movie (please, don’t tell me what it is—I want to find it for myself) and want to capture the artist’s name. The thought of waiting at least another year for the DVD release is maddening. And although the circumstances are entirely different, a part of me is terrified I’ll relive what happened when I missed the Cremaster Cycle when it was at the Guggenheim.
Despite what Harper says, the 1 million attendees of this year’s Nuit Blanche and the half-hour wait to get into the AGO yesterday, in the cold and rain, I would say that “ordinary Canadians” do care about the arts. Whatever “ordinary Canadian” means.
The AGO was open at 10am yesterday, and by 11:15, the line had already snaked three times directly infront of the building, then around to OCAD. Before joining the line, I had brunch at the Art Square cafe, and saw some stunning work by Jeff Margolin. After brunch, the line was still stretched out to OCAD, and I was in the company of people who Harper may not consider ordinary, but they represented the different walks of life that you hear about all the time.
The AGO was brimming with people—I’ve never seen so many people in the gallery, and was relieved that they were actually there to soak in some culture. There was so much to visit, I was glad for the little alcove they kept from the original gallery. It was the perfect hiding spot for a break, because most people passed through fairly quickly when they realized it didn’t house any art.
To no surprise of anyone who knows me well, my favourite work at the AGO was Mona Hatoum’s Socle du monde. When I first saw it, I thought it was made of hair or fur. But upon closer inspection, I noticed the material immediately: iron filings. How did I know? A few months ago, out of curiosity, I placed some rare earth magnets over an open can of magnetic paint.
The most frustrating part of the AGO visit was the no camera rule (which was as dificult to police as their no touching rule), in conjunction with the absense of an online cataloge of their collection. Although I was able to track down Socle du monde, there was a sculpture titled Stretch, and searching for “stretch sculpture perspective optical illusion” (and variations thereof) proved futile. I suppose it would help if I could remember names, but I hope the AGO follows the lead of the Textile Museum in putting their collection online.
After four or five hours at the AGO, I left to find that the line was still snaking around the corner.
Update 2008-11-17: Sometimes, people really do a better job than Google. My friend Sara Kelly (new Associate Director at Open Studio) was able to identify the artist of Stretch as Evan Penny from my description alone.
Bidder unhappy with decision to scrap National Portrait Gallery – "Cantor said he found out the project was being killed when he received an e-mail from the government, but the $1-million deposit his group submitted with its proposal has yet to be returned."
Harper orders financial review – I guess Harper thinks Ordinary Canadians care about "a pretty comprehensive internal evaluation of Canada's own domestic systems of regulation in response to the international financial crisis". But how will cutting jobs in a $85 billion industry help the economy?
