Each Team Will Be Responsible for Completing the Following Tasks

Each team will be responsible for completing the following tasks. THIS IS NOT A RACE. Rather, you will be judged on the quality of your teamwork.

Photo Competition

Task: You are living statues. Take a creative team photo at the lamppost sculpture.

Modern Art Wing

1. Find a painting by Magritte.

Read:

“La Trahison des images (Ceci n'est pas une pipe) (The Treachery of images [This is not a pipe]) is one of Rene Magritte's Surrealist masterpieces and an icon of modern art. Heavily influenced by Freudian psychology, Surrealism represented a reaction against the "Rationalism" that some believed led Europe into the horrors of World War I. It attempted to join the realm of dreams and fantasy to the everyday world.

Magritte's word-image paintings are treatises on the impossibility of reconciling words, images, and objects. La Trahison des images challenges the linguistic convention of identifying an image of something as the thing itself. At first, Magritte's point appears simplistic, almost to the point of provocation: A painting of a pipe is not the pipe itself. In fact, this work is highly paradoxical. Its realistic style and caption format recall advertising, a field in which Magritte had worked. Advertisements, however, elicit recognition without hesitation or equivocation; this painting causes the viewer to ponder its conflicting messages.

Magritte's use of text in his word-image paintings influenced a younger generation of conceptually oriented artists, including Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Edward Ruscha, and Andy Warhol. (2003 LACMA handbook)”

http://collectionsonline.lacma.org/MWEB/about/modern_about.asp

Task: Sketch the painting in your sketchbook. One per person. As a group, come up with a different word(s) for the object. Be prepared to explain your choice.

2. Find Picasso’s “Weeping Woman with Handkerchief”

Read:

“Pablo Picasso's long career comprised several successive and radical shifts in formal concerns and, to a lesser degree, in subject matter. During and after his stylistic periods — Blue, Rose, Cubism, Neoclassicism, and Surrealism — Picasso explored themes in his own life and the world around him.

In 1937 Picasso executed his mammoth antiwar canvas Guernica , a protest to the carnage of the Spanish Civil War. After Picasso completed Guernica he abandoned all but one of its motifs: the weeping woman. He drew her frequently, almost obsessively, for the next several months.

Tears all over her face, the figure in Weeping Woman with Handkerchief is an emblem of despair. Yet crowned with the traditional matronly mantilla, she is also the embodiment of Spanish womanhood. She represented Picasso's public and private agony: She was the victim of war, the grieving mother, the terrified peasant, the stunned survivor; but more specifically, she was a portrait of his lover, the artist-photographer Dora Maar, one in a long line of Picasso's muses. Picasso's dramatic relationships with women informed the metaphors he used to express the intensity of his feelings over events in Spain. (2003 LACMA handbook)”

http://collectionsonline.lacma.org/MWEB/about/modern_about.asp

Task: When you leave the building, recreate the painting and take a picture of it. One picture per group.

3. Find the Robert Motherwell painting titled Elegy to the Spanish Republic. This is one of my favorite paintings in the entire museum.

Task: Sketch the painting. (One per person) Then, as a group, write a short description and explanation for the painting. Try to refrain from reading the explanation provided by the museum. Rather, I’m looking for your creative interpretation of the painting.

4. What’s my favorite?

Task: In the same room you find the Motherwell, you will find a painting done by one of my favorite artists of all time. Guess which one. Sketch (one per group). Be prepared to explain why you think it’s the right choice.

5. What’s your favorite?

Task: Each person sketch and write (short paragraph) about your favorite painting seen thus far today in the modern art wing.

6. Find the HUGE black sculpture. Stand under it. Walk through it. Go to the balcony and check it out some more.

Task: As a group, discuss what you think the artist was trying to accomplish. Be prepared to share.

FRANZ WEST EXHIBIT:

Franz West, To Build a House You Start with the Roof: Work 1972-2008

7. Find the Adaptives.

Read:

“The idea was more to create an environment, and that the Adaptive could be handled and used rather than be looked at. For the romantics like Schlegel and the German philosophers, what makes art and painting special is that neither should be touched. With the Adaptives, the opposite is true. They were also a way to make a Happening. I was very aware of the artist Allan Kaprow, for example, at that time. It was not about seeing but about entering; art that you could really get in touch with. The first time I showed them was in a small gallery no bigger than the room we are in. Maybe twenty people at most came.” --Franz West

Task: Experience the adaptives. Discuss as a group. Be prepared to share.

Broad Contemporary Art Museum:

First floor:

Task: Experience the sculpture! Discuss as a group. What do you think the inspiration for the artist was? Be prepared to share.

Second floor:

Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures

Read:

“For East and West Germany during the Cold War, the creation of art and its reception and theorization were closely linked to their respective political systems: the Western liberal democracy of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the Eastern communist dictatorship of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Reacting against the legacy of Nazism, both Germanys revived pre-World War II national artistic traditions. Yet they developed distinctive versions of modern and postmodern art—at times in accord with their political cultures, at other times in opposition to them. By tracing the political, cultural, and theoretical discourses during the Cold War in the East and West German art worlds, Art of Two Germanys reveals the complex and richly varied roles that conventional art, new media, new art forms, popular culture, and contemporary art exhibitions played in the establishment of their art in the postwar era.

Art of Two Germanys is the first special exhibition to go on view in

LACMA’s new Renzo Piano designed-building, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM). Divided into four chronological sections, the exhibition includes approximately 300 paintings, sculptures, photographs, multiples, videos, installations, and books, by 120 artists. The show features large-scale installations and recreations of major works by Hans Haacke, Heinz Mack, Sigmar Polke, Raffael Rheinsberg, Gerhard Richter, and Dieter Roth,

as well as a number of videos and performance-based works. After LACMA, the exhibition will travel to Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg (May 23–September 6, 2009), and Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin (October 3, 2009–January 10, 2010).”

http://www.lacma.org/art/ExhibColdWar.aspx

Task: Will be given when the whole group meets again. Just do your best as a group to soak it all in. J Be prepared to discuss what you see and experience!

Third floor:

Task: First, have fun. Then, as a group, choose one artwork that you find thought-provoking. Answer SOAPSTone for the artwork to the best of your ability.

Hang out:

The Grove

Go north on Fairfax. It’ll be on the right hand side.

Meet at fountain by…

Dinner:

Korean Barbeque!

5:30 p.m.

1230 S Western Avenue

Los Angeles, CA 90006

(323) 731-9292

Driving directions to 1230 S Western Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90006

3.9 mi – about 10 mins

1. Head west on Wilshire Blvd toward S Orange Grove Ave (0.2 mi)

2. Turn left at S Fairfax Ave (0.3 mi)

3. Turn left at San Vicente Blvd (1.6 mi)

4. Slight left at W Pico Blvd (1.8 mi)

5. Turn left at S Western Ave

6. Destination will be on the right 420 ft