Your ideas can change the world. And creative ideas can take an approach that no one else has thought about. The Getty Museum is using some new ideas in their current lobby exhibition. In fact the Getty has gone contemporary.
This is a new idea for the Getty to exhibit Tim Hawkinson’s humongous sculpture, which looms large and plays hourly in the lobby. Of course this is not the kind of art usually seen in the Getty.
It starts in the rotunda as a witty musical sculpture of a giant oompah-machine fabricated from six enormous polyethylene bags wrapped in red plastic netting and tied with bright yellow cord. It is called a uberorgan and it is hoisted high overhead in the lobby. Air ducts snake through the space linking the sacks together and long sounding-tubes made from cardboard wrapped in silver-foil protrude from them. Organ pipes are crossed with Gabriel’s angelic trumpet.
Is this an idea that will change the world? Not likely, but it will change your feelings about how unusual sculpture can be made and may be seen at the Getty Art Museum plus provide you with the idea that creativity has no limits. Be sure to go and see this intergalactic creation and decide if it suggests Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
What fun to have new ideas and introduce children to seeing contemporary art. Children and adults will be curious and ask, “How did the artist execute this fantasy? Where did he get his ideas?”
Of course viewing this sculpture exhibit at the Getty brings up the question, “What is art?” or, “When is something art?”
These questions have been open for debate and are the stimulus for many classroom discussions and the focus of research in art education literature. Do we have visual art exisiting in Santa Clarita. If so, where are there examples to be seen? Where do we have pubic art in Santa Clarita?
When we see images as a work of art, the way people look at it is affected by a whole series of learned assumptions about art (these assumptions are learned in school, home and in art education classes): assumptions people have when looking at art images are beauty, truth, genius (creativity) , civilization-culture , form, status, taste, mystery and style. Find time to visit the new installation of Contemporary Art at the Getty.
For more information contact Jaylene Armstrong, Retired Art Educator, Santa Clarita Artists’ Association Member at 661-255-3050.