SPN506 BLOG

I feel a little ashamed saying this, but I'm not an artsy person AT ALL. However, today my artsy friend and I decided to go to the Blanton Museum on a whim. The special exhibition features an artist named Jorge Macchi from Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is called "The anatomy of melancholy". I really like what he did with ordinary things like matches, glass, maps, paper... There was one piece that was about lifeless bodies, or "El Cuerpo Sin Vida". I don't remember exactly how he did it, but I think he took newspaper clippings about crime and put the parts where it said "el cuerpo sin vida" really close together while the rest of the clipping was a little more spread out. The clippings were all in Spanish, and I could only pick up a few words here and there. But I knew those four words. From far away you could see that those four words are the focus. I don't know if there's anything significant that I missed... it just looked cool to me.

There was also another piece by Cildo Meireles, an artist from Brazil, that stuck with me. It's the one titled "How to Build a Cathedral" and consists of a ceiling of cow bones and a floor made of pennies. In between this floor and ceiling is a column made of communion wafers. The point of this piece is to show how missionaries in colonial times in the Americas exploited agriculture for the purpose of creating wealth. The communion wafer is the link between the two, showing that the missionaries' purpose of spreading religion wasn't completely pure.

This was the first time I've been to an art museum, and although I fully expected to be blown away and terribly confused, these two pieces were a couple of the ones that I really remember. I like the historical aspect of the cathedral one. It speaks for itself quite simply.