Saturday, April 28, 2012

Friday evening at LACMA

It is wonderful to see thousands of people gathered at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on a Friday evening.  It is free to county residents and the free jazz concert is a huge draw.  People picnic on the edges and others crowd in the center to meet, greet and listen to music.  The museum exhibits are busy with the visitors and several events are held.  It is fun to hang out at the museum and roam about.

I roamed into the Oskar Fischinger and California Abstract Animation video show in the Bing auditorium.

The LACMA blog describes Oskar as one of the most influential abstract animators (1900-1967) who was brought to Hollywood by Paramount from his native Germany in 1936...bringing the European avant-garde fiml movement to the West Coast experimental filmmaking.  The program was called "Optical Poetry:  An Oskar Fischinger Retrospective that showed about 15 short films from 1926 back and white silents to 1947 color films with sound...Bach's Brandenburg Concerto no. 3.  The 1941 Anamerican March to Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever" was fun as wll as the 1934 "Muratti Greift Ein" with his waltzing cigarettes.


My visit to the museum drew me back to Chris Burden's Metropolis...a "complex kinetic sculpture,, modeled after a fast paced, frenetic modern city".   It has 18 roadways, including one 6 lane freeway, and HO scale trians and miniture cars speeding throught the city.  It is a childs car and train set fantasy times 100.  It is fun to watch and feel the engery of cars and trains going every direction.  Great fun on Fridays Sat. and Sundays.  It is also fun to watch the reaction of children and the child in all of us.

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