I had a week full of headaches and sad news. I have still a pile of works for
Norooz ahead of me. The Persian New Year always brings lots of excitement into any Iranian household. The spring-cleaning is perhaps the hardest task, but I regularly and frantically clean my house so I don’t have much of a problem there. The most nerve-breaking task of Norooz for me is growing sprouts or Sabzeh for the Haft Sin Table. Although for my table they have always turned out OK, I never really know when exactly to start to soak and grow my lentils for them to have the best shape at the New Year’s; this year, the new year will start at the early hours of Thursday, March 20th.
On Arts:
Unmonumental will be on view up to March 23rd in the New Museum; so hurry up. As I mentioned on
New Art, New Ideas, Unmonumental is an exhibition in four parts, all of them displaying works by contemporary artists. What I did not like about this exhibiting, in general, was the repetitiveness of the works in each category. This repetitiveness disturbed the shocking quality that many of these artists were aiming for, and it gave their works an unnecessary dullness which was especially apparent on the category of The Objects in the 21st Century.
The only work I enjoyed in that part was Claire Fontaine’s Passe-Partout, 2006; It consists of three sets of key-chains, each heavy with loads of keys and other small objects, hanging on the wall; each set of keys belongs to a specific place: Paris, New York and Chinatown. As heavy and full as my own key chain, the piece hit me the moment I touched my own key-chain in my pocket. Key chains really are the objects of the 21st century. Keys are clues, are answers; keys open the doors to our own homes; they let us access the most intimate properties we have; we feel lost without our keys; we are homeless without them.
The collage section of the exhibition was the most interesting part. While most works presented antiwar views of their creators, I was intrigued with a series of Film Portraits by John Stezaker, 2005. The Film Portraits were combinations of two different photos of two well-known film stars, usually a male and a female; this combination created a new third picture in which the person is neither of those stars, and it is not clear what is the gender of this newly born movie star; this ambiguity is very much the core of the film industry itself.
I am heading to New York tomorrow to visit some exhibitions and galleries. Also I meet with
Jeerjeerak, my lovely friend, who is here in the Big Apple.
Film Portrait, John Stezaker, 2005
Color of the Earth, March 2008
