Little Dog(s)-Big Park: Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Friday, January 13th, 2012
10:30am-4pm

Hello friends! There was no blog this morning because....well.....I slept in this morning. Yesterday was my Immunology Final and up until yesterday I've been holed up in my apartment with Sofie studying. Well today I slept in (until like 9:30), then I drank a half a pot of coffee and...I'll let the pictures tell you the story of my day :)

The day started in the place where all excellent days start - Central Park. I think today was the epitome of an ice cold-ice blue winter day. East coast winters are: stark trees, chapped faces, hands, and lips, bitter-nasty wind (that these pictures aren't quite conveying) with a gorgeous icy blue sky backdrop. It flurried most of the day.

I have a beloved Ice Cream, too. She found this wonderful stick in the Park and proceeded to carry it all the way back to the apartment. Once she finds a good stick, she is no longer sniffing around here and there. Instead, she is on a mission. The mission is to get the stick back to the apartment so she can chew it to bits. So she pulls and pulls all the way back and then when we get to the door, I have to take it from her. I always feel terrible, but she gives me no choice - she rips it to shreds and makes a terrible mess if I give her the chance.

Once I got home, I got all dressed and put together and hoofed it up to the Guggenheim Museum on 89th and 5th Aves. I wish I could have captured all of the museum - it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It's set up as a tower of concentric circles leading upwards with annex gallery offshoots to display the collections. By designing the museum as concentric circles, Wright meant to contrast to the sharp and exact squares of the NY city blocks, and the rectangular shape of both Central Park and Manhattan as a whole. (I learned that from the audio tour).

There was a huge mobile hung in the center of the museum displaying ALL of the life's work of Maurizio Cattelan. He was a satirist of sorts and was known for making extremely life-like sculptures - many of his pieces are political in nature. He used his art to express his feelings about the abuse of power. Also, many of his sculptures are somewhat disturbing and overtly morbid. For instance, he had a sculpture of a young boy hanging by a rope from his neck, and a woman nailed by the hands face down on a white sheet. There were also a lot of stuffed yellow labrador retreivers - maybe about 4 or so, and 5-6 horses/donkeys. I really liked the oversized cat skeleton for some reason. There was also a sculpture of Pope Benedict lying on a red carpet with a rock that had fallen on him. He used this installation piece to both celebrate his life's work and announce his retirement from the art world.

The real belle of the ball that I was there to see, however, was the Vasily Kandinsky exhibit. I loved the exhibit because I enjoy color and the way he thinks about art is very interesting. I couldn't take any photographs in that exhibit, but I found the two I like the most on the Guggenheim's website. Disclaimer - his pieces are large and these just don't do them justice AT ALL - I just mean for you to get an idea of what I'm talking about.

Kandinsky was, I believe, the first artist truly to achieve abstraction. What I mean by that is, many of his paintings are not meant to evoke any real life object or landscape at all, rather, he believes art is an avenue for the artist to create something that brings the viewer to a completely different spiritual or imaginative world.

This painting is considered to be his most impressive piece and the "white border" for which it is named, eluded him for a long time. (It's A LOT brighter and more vibrant in real-life). The piece is entitled "Painting with a White Border." The white border is supposed to be a sort of portal for the viewer to walk into the world of the painting. It also has been described by Kandinsky as an expression of "the peace of emptiness and quiet," which is a sentiment borne out of his experience in Moscow during the chaotic and frightening Communist revolution (the painting was completed in 1913). To me, it felt a bit "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe-ish." Especially if you stand on the right side of the painting you can imagine as though you are walking through a white fog into a magical, idealized Moscow. It is not truly abstract as the painting is inspired by his strong emotions for his homeland and city of birth, Moscow. The 3 curly lines at the top left represent a troika (Russian sled), and the 3-humped white and brown line in the dead center above the white "scepter," is Saint George on his horse (Moscow's patron saint). It was very cool to see his sketches and practices leading up to the final beautiful end product. The way the exhibit was set up, you could almost experience his frustrations, and feel the cogs in his brain turning to conjure what the final piece would look like.

This painting is called "Black Lines" and is considered by some to be the first truly abstract painting ever. It's beautiful - so strikingly beautiful that after I'd left the gallery and wandered the rest of the museum for awhile, I walked halfway back up the tower just to see it one last time before I left. Then I got a magnet of it (I know that's lame).

After leaving the Guggenheim, I walked about 30 blocks down Lexington to 54th St to what I was hoping to find: Buttercup Bakery. Weirdly I couldn't find it, but I DID find Magnolia Bakery, which is considered to be one of the most famous cupcakeries in all of The City. So I had to check it out for myself and see what all the hype was about...........