My Friend, Marita, Balloons, and Modern Art

Or... You Call That Art? Part Two - Electric Boogaloo

While kicking around grad school at Oklahoma State, I went to Chicago several times with the Hispanic Student Association to go to the United Hispanic Leadership Conference. During one of those trips, we went to the Chicago Museum of Modern Art, where I came away with the idea that most modern artists are lazy hacks.

On display was a special piece done by Jeff Koons, who holds a special place of disdain in my heart. Koons' past work has included putting basketballs in fish aquarium tanks with posters of basketball stars hanging down from the ceiling as well as several vintage vacuum cleaners in a long display case. The latter was on display at the museum. He insists on being called an artist.

Interestingly (or not), Koons has actually been putting effort into his art by making large representation of balloon art out of fiberglass - mainly simple dogs and flowers. Still I detest him.

Other interesting things I remember at the museum:

- a room with around 64 oil drums filled with water, which held a disjointed reflection of the large image above it (a girl and her grandmother holding a flower if I remember correctly). I'm sure the message was something about how fractured our society (even benign parts of it) is.

- a room showing a film of an artist (who looked a lot like mutual friend of Marita and mine), Sarah Gonzales, destroying a hotel room, except it was running in reverse. So the pieces of a smashed drawer would fly together, bounce off the wall into the hands of the artist who would then place it in the chest of drawers it belonged to.

- a painting of people with fish heads sitting on a rock on a seashore (my favorite piece because it actually involved effort and artistic talent)

- and finally a stack of 1 foot by 2 foot pieces of paper with a 1 inch black border on them. The card next to it invited the viewer to take a few sheets as it turned the "sculpture" from something static to something dynamic. You can experience this art thrill on a smaller scale for yourself through the normal use of a pad of sticky notes.

So I just got back from Chicago, having gone there to attend a balloon twisting convention and visit my friend, Marita, who also does abstract and other kinds of art, but hers is actually cool, takes talent and work to put together, and several of her pieces can be used to defend yourself against assailants. I bought Marita a bag of balloons, a pump, and a beginner's book on balloons as a thank you for letting me stay with her to save some moolah. She quickly learned the basic dog and made several of them and started connecting them into a large mass of balloon canines. Here you can already see the brilliance of the artist in a new medium.

She sent me a note today saying that she did some modern balloon sculpture at a women's club meeting, and it went over really well.

Marita now needs to contact the Chicago Museum of Modern Art and get her artwork displayed. It will not need effort on the viewer for it to be dynamic as the air leaks out of the balloons, slowly collapsing the sculpture, reminding us of (and this should go on the card next to the art), "the inherent beauty and fragility of life on display all around us... unlike that stupid pile of papers over in the corner."