Today we went to the Getty Museum to see the Uberorgan by Tim Hawkinson. We arrived just in time for the hourly musical performance. It is very cool — pipes, bladders, tubes and horns made out of industrial materials, a 250-foot-long scroll with black dots and dashes that create the score, and a device that electronically reads the marks and turns them into sounds.
Then we went to see his other pieces – Zoopsia. There was a huge octopus made with photographs of the artist’s mouth as suckers; a flying bat made from used black plastic bags; a huge calligraphic dragon painted in the Chinese style on a large brown kraft paper, but my favorite was a display of what seemed to be the skeletal remains of the vertebrae of a dinosaur, but each vertebral “bone” was formed out of a tiny man with ribs as oars. The whole thing was made out of Sculpey! Brilliant.
Then we checked out the exhibition of Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère — I’ve always loved this piece but hadn’t given thought to the strangeness of the reflection in the mirror behind the bar before. Read up about it at this link to the Getty’s exhibit of this.
We also looked at the European Drawings on view.
There was a nice large show of Weston photos and some very large current photos by Luc Delahaye.
And there were some very nice sculptures outside, such as the one pictured here by Magritte. See more photos from the Getty Museum below.
