Cold brains, unmoved, untouched, unglued

I headed up to the Whitney Museum this afternoon to see their newly added exhibit "Five Angels for the Millenium" by Bill Viola. That amounted to watching about 10 minutes of large-screen videos in a dark room, so I had plenty of time afterwards to see what other exhibits were lurking about. Floors 2 and 3 were so-so, but on 4 was a survey of work by this guy Tim Hawkinson that made the trip worthwhile. Right away I recognized some of his pieces from Beck's Mutations album art. To keep things interesting, there was an eclectic mix of paintings, sculpture, and giant crazy mechanical sculpture. As an example of the latter - I pulled this off the web just now - PBS.org describes "Pentecost" as "a work in which the artist tuned cardboard tubes and assembled them in the shape of a giant tree. On this tree the artist placed twelve life-size robotic replicas of himself, and programmed them to beat out religious hymns at humorously irregular intervals." Trust me, it is cool to see though it is one of his largest pieces by a stretch. Apparently I have to go somewhere else in the city to see "Uberorgan," a stadium-sized monstrosity of a musical instrument that would not nearly fit in the Whitney. The effort and imagination that has gone into many of his elaborate constructions of which he has assembled everything from scratch, including electronic components, is quite amazing. This is the best of contemporary art, IMO, and definitely the best I've seen since Matthew Barney's surreal transformation of the Guggenheim.

And while I'm here, if I may, I want to give love to SIU for beating Wichita State tonight to lock up the Missouri Valley. And to UH for continuing their nice run this season, holding up at 64 on the Sportsline RPI. That is a fragile bubble.