De Young

De Young

Last Tuesday was our field trip day to the De Young museum. I had been to Golden Gate park many times and I've visited the California Academy of Sciences which is just across the road but I had never been to the De Young so I was looking forward to the trip. It was good to get out of the classroom for a day even though we had to take what seemed like the bumpiest bus ride in the world to get there. 

The first thing that I noticed when we pulled up to the museum was the design of the building. It had a quality of being from out of this world, hiding in a thick fog surrounded by the greenery of the park. It's almost camouflaged into the background, it's sharp curves dissolving into the trees. At the rear of the building, a mysterious tower shoots up through the low clouds of the morning. It is definitely a cool structure. 

Though that should be no surprise as it was designed by Herzog & de Meuron, a very accomplished Swiss architecture firm with a history of museum design. They had designed the Tate Modern Museum in London as well as the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. More recently, they designed the Beijing National Stadium which was the centerpiece of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. The de Young was made with its surroundings in mind. The exterior of the building is covered with a copper skin which will eventually oxidize and change the color of the building to a more greenish tone. 

The inside of the museum is just as impressive as the outside. The layout is very well designed and there's a great flow to the building. You can start at any point and be sure that you will eventually cover most of the exhibits without having to constantly consult a map. I had always thought that the de Young houses mostly classical fine art pieces but was pleased to see that there was a good mix of contemporary art and sculpture as well as classical pieces. 

There was a very interesting section of the museum devoted to African and Pacific art. I'll just let the photos I took do the talking here.

Of course, we were still on class time so our assignment for the day was to pick a piece that caught your eye and blog about it. I picked a piece by English sculpture Cornelia Parker named "Anti-Mass". If you were at the museum, it's almost impossible to miss this piece. It looked like a giant cube that was made out of pieces of wood that seemed to float in the air in the middle of the room. If you looked closely, you would realize that the wood was being held up with almost invisible wires and that the wood was burned. 

The wood that was used in this piece was taken from the charred remains of an African American Baptist Church in Alabama that was burned down by Arsonists. The title is a play on words as Parker used the word "mass" to signify the elemental substance as well as the sacramental ritual in the Christian religion. This piece unites science and religion as a monument of the power of belief and creativity over the negative force of intolerance. 

I picked this piece because it is something that I immediately noticed when I walked into that room. There is a very strong contrast within the piece even at first glance. The lightness of the floating structure seems to contradict what the piece is actually made of. When you find out the history of the structure, then the contrasts are even greater. Another aspect of it that works is the sense of order within chaos. A cube is shaped out of several pieces of charred wood, all in different shapes and sizes. It is the perfect vessel for the message which the artist is trying to convey, that true spiritual belief cannot be destroyed and that creativity will transcend intolerance.