MoMA Visit! Oh Boy! also colorful squigglies.

This weekend I visited the MoMA to see what I could see. And I saw some interesting things. I was able to hand around the Sculpture Garden for a change, which I am not usually interested in but decided to give it a chance due to the new Sculpture in Color exhibition going on. I'm not usually a huge fan of sculpture but I AM a huge fan of color. My favorite thing about the sculpture garden is the fact that some of the work in interactive. I love being able to interact with a sculpture or have it part of an environment. Due to space, there weren't a ton of sculptures on display for the exhibit and some permanent ones were still in place. The exhibit was made up of five sculptures by three artists, so it was limited but involved use of one color per sculpture. Each sculpture was a bright color and a non-objective shape. The pieces were very representational and most were very squiggley.
The first sculpture I saw was Midday (1960) by Anthony Caro. This one looked like a lopsided bench with metal planks jutting out of the top. I didn't care much for the shape and I honestly didn't get much out of it. On the positive side, it was a nice school-bus yellow, I must say. It was very poppy and industrial looking, which is not a very pleasing combination in my opinion.

Next I came across Elsworth Kelly's GreenBlue (1968). Again, I love color, but I am not a huge fan of Kelly's aesthetic. This sculpture was basically a huge lopsided square piece of metal diagonally split into green and blue halves. There is a little nook formed behind it in which you can kind of hide behind formed by the base and side of the piece. This was the only part of it I really liked. It is very obviously a Kelly piece, I feel, as his work is full of brightly colored, solid triangles.

The only pieces I really enjoyed in this exhibition were the Franz West sculptures...and luckily for me he had the most work in the show. West's pieces were a combination of my three favorite things: Bright colors, interactive sculptures, and squiggles. I just love squiggley things. The three sculptures were entitled Lotus, Maya's Dream, and Untitled (Orange). Each doubled as a bench, and quite a few visitors were getting a kick out of it and posing for pictures, including myslef.

I took a picture of Chris...a Squiggle in his natural habitat.

I feel like these sculptures are meant to be fun and encourage others to play along. They are playful colors (a sunshine yellow, bubblegum pink, and a citrussy orange) and the shape are humorously wiggley, like a shaky doodle in a student's notebook. The others artist's works just didn't have the same playfulness to them. They felt too serious to be masked in what would normally be fun, bright colors.

So! Overall, Franz West saved the show for me and more than made up for the lack of excitement I felt from the other work. Then again, like I said, I am not a huge fan of sculpture so I tend to be hard to please in this realm of art. Still, I found the show pretty interesting.