I couldn't have gone to the mini-apple (they don't call it that anymore) without spending some time at a museum. Usually it is the Walker, since I usually lean so very contemporary, but I decided after 10 years that I should stop being so m.i.a. toward the M.I.A. Plus they had a fantastic exhibit of Edo prints and I wanted to stare into their oceans because I was feeling so homesick.
Stop 1: Bon Jour Japon
The influences the Edo prints had on 19th century France. Which I had never really thought of before and was brilliant curatorialship if I do say so myself.
This piece Je t'aime
Stop 2: Edo-pop
I actually think that I went through this exhibit wrong. I should have gone clockwise instead of counter, but I was loured in by squeaking, music and a flashing screen, an example of how the Edo period is influencing Japanese artists today. A dreamlike cerebral anime short film of technology versus nature, beautiful womens faces superimposed on vegas like skyscrapers, flowers, trees and bug erasing them away, the buildings winning, then nature winning, but not until you learned that first nature won over the humans, beautiful severed woman heads hanging from trees like apples.
Kabuki gangsters cornrowing their hair wearing Los Angeles Ronin jerseys.
As I went more counter a whole wall dedicated to Hokusai and his Great Wave.
I am always amazed by this, the great wave and all the others, the tiny details, the skill of these artists who did these things all without technology. No laser cutters, mixing colors out of pigments and plants, the hours it must have taken. I was puzzled by the ability to make the materials so dense, one print had a kimono with a black, almost transparent overlay and I wondered how someone could make that possible.
How these little details, a look that lingers from eyes of beautiful women, who fully clothed, except that one naked shoulder was so very erotic.
Unfortunately for you this show is now over and I don't think it travels. (someone correct me if I am wrong)
One thing that I forgot about the Minneapolis Institute Arts as that it's Asian art galleries are so very immense and impressive. I haven't seen anything like it in L.A.
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