Sojourner-Douglass Au Pair Weekend Course @ Washington D.C.

- October 13, 2012

Name of Institution: Sojourner-Douglass Au Pair Weekend Course

Course: Art History Course

Date: October 6 and 13, 2012

Time: 10am - 4pm

Instructor: Ms. Kaputsos

课程感想：第一堂导师竟然迟到，课堂解释得很impromptu，像似没有做好准备。为了我的4个学分付了$300，收获却不多。好处是不需要做繁重的功课，少了烦恼。这并不是很棒的weekend course。

刚巧在十月第一个周末，John和Anja在华盛顿有大学同学聚会，所以我可以和他们一起共车并住在舒适的Capitol Hill Hotel套房………………的沙发床上。哈哈。他们当然不会为了我而特地预订另一间房间让我住，所以他们睡睡房，我睡外面的沙发床。我也不是很在意，因为基本上星期五晚上到达目的地时已经是深夜了，在车上睡死了的我只想快点倒在床上睡觉。隔天上完课后逛了一整天的美术博物院，又走了很长的一段路后，我只想快点梳洗睡觉。唉，所以睡哪里又有什么关系，有地方落脚已经很棒了，还有什么好怨言的呢？（下人的劣根性）

准备出发咯！途中我们把Lily和Sam交托给Judy（John的妈妈）照顾。

长途驾驶。

@ Domaine Hudson

The "award-winning" wine list.

特别的是，450多种的酒精饮料全部列在iPad。太多选择，加上我对酒不熟悉，所幸有sommelie，得以尝试一杯白酒搭配我所点的前菜。

这是我第一次的fine dine，气氛佳，食物精致，是个很棒的经验。

Sweet Potato Soup Caramelized Onions, Autumn Spiced Croutons

Delmonico Steak Potato Gratin, Sautéed Spinach, Truffle Butte

最后以Flourless Chocolate Cake为这完美和超饱的晚餐画下完美的句点。

xxx

Woodland Sage

United States Botanical Garden.

Dept of Health & Human Service.

@ American Indian Museum

George Rivera, Buffalo Dancer II.

For the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest, the Buffalo Dance is an enduring celebration, a prayer for the well-being of all.

说好早上十点开始，我们一群Au Pair在外面足足等了一个小时十分钟，导师最后姗姗来迟。第一次上课就给人这么糟的影响，还浪费了一个小时的授课时间。可恶，还我钱！

Northern Ute moccasins, 1880-1910.

Oaxacan (pronouced Wa-Haw-Ken) wood carvings are whimsical and enchanting art figures that have captivated collectors and enthusiasts worldwide. These imaginative and brilliantly colored figures are handcarved and painted in tiny villages in the state of Oaxaca, home of the Zapotec Indians in Southern Mexico.

Each figure is handmade from Copal wood from the hills surrounding the Oaxacan Valley using machetes and pocket knives. Artists carve the basic shape of a figure in a few days, then hand sand and meticulously paint each piece in great detail. It can take up to a full week to complete one figure. The artists use fantasy and imagination in their painting to make the animals appear more alive. Full of movement and humor, Oaxacan wood carving is an authentic folk art that knows only the boundaries of the imaginations of the carvers, for whom myth and magic are a major part of their daily life.

Each carving is an original work of art and no two pieces are identical. There are a limited supply of carvings available and it is possible that each piece may appreciate in value, as many of these figures have become collector's items.

看起来真可怕~！

White is the color of the north.

Teeth, bones, the whites of the eyes and eyesight,

growth, children, and education are linked to the north.

Community Curators

Charlie Willeto, Male and Female Navajo Figures (1962-64).

“打劫！举高双手！”

Jack Savitsky, Train in Coal Town (1968).

@ Smithsonian American Art Museum

Nam June Paik, Megatron Matrix (1995).

Megatron Matrix is roughly the size of a billboard and holds 215 monitors. The video-augmented by a loop of unrelated sound bites-mixes images from the Seoul Olympics with Korean folk rituals and modern dance. Smaller clips play stimultaneously on multiple monitors, while larger, animated images flow across the boundaries between screens, suggesting a world without borders in the electronic age.

Paik sorted the monitors into two distinct sections. The Megatron conveys the vast reach of the media, while the smaller section, the Matrix, emphasizes its impact on each of us. In Matrix, Paik arranged the monitors so that the images seem to spiral inward around a lone screen showing two partially nude women. He may be suggesting that our bodies are our primal connection to the world, but the effect on the viewer is of being assaulted by too much information.

In the early 1960s, Paik began incorpotating televisions into his collaborative performance pieces with American dancers, musicians, and artists. Today, the fusion of pop music, commercial culture, and nationalist symbols captures Paik's story and that of millions around the world. Paik's prophetic awareness of the power of television has been borne out in our "plugged-in" age, when any kind of art or entertainment is available on our screens all the time.

Michael Goldburg, Sardine (1955).

Modern and Contemporary Art.

Alfred Jensen, Honor Pythagoras, Per I-Per VI (1964).

In Honor Pythagoras, Per I-Per VI, the thousands of shapes and color strokes symbolize the unity that Jensen saw behind art and science, feeling and thinking. The colored triangles represent prisms that break white light into brilliant hues, suggesting the mystical insight that Jensen felt mathematics offered.

Jensen was born to a Danish couple living in Guatemala, and this enormous painting evokes the astronomical calendars found in Mesoamerican temple ruins. He arranged thick strokes of red, yellow, blue, and green in triangles and squares to express the inter-relatedness of all things. Colos affect us by their relation to one another, numbers take theory meaning from combinations, and geometry underlines the basic shapes of the universe.

David Hockney, Savings and Loan Building (1967).

Allan D'Arcangelo, US Highway 1 (1962).

Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (1995-96).

Electronic Superhighway is Nam June Paik's tribute to the United States, his adopted homeland. Paik, born in Korea in 1932, moved to New York in 1964 and lived in America until his death in 2006.

Though the outlines of the fifty states are familiar, Electronic Superhighway challenged the viewer to look with new eyes at the cultural map of the United States. Each state is represented by video footage reflecting the artist's personal, and often unexpected, associations with the place. He celebrated some states for their connections to his artistic friends and collaborator - composer John Cage in Massachusetts, performance artist Charlotte Moorman in Arkansas, and choreographer Merce Cunningham in Washington. Some states he knew best through classic movies-The Wizard of Oz appears for Kansas, Showboat for Mississippi, and South Pacific for Hawaii. Sometimes he chose video clips or assembled flickering slideshows that evoke familiar associations, such as the Kentucky Derby, Arizona highways, and presidential candidates campaigning in Iowa. Topical events such as th fires of the 1993 Waco siege or Atlanta's 1996 summer Olympics create portraits of moments in time. Old black-and-white television footage and audio of Martin Luther King's speeches recall Civil Rights struggles in Alabama. California has the fastest-paced-imagery: racing through the Golden Gate Bridge, the zeros and ones of the digital revolution, and a fitness class led by O. J. Simpson. A mini-cam captures imges of Superhighway's viewers and tranmits those images to a tiny screen representing Washington, D.C., making visitors a part of the story.

Nam June Paik is hailed as the "father of video art" and credited with the first use of the term "information superhighway" in the 1970s. He recognized the potential for media collaboration among people in all parts of the world, and he knew that media would completely transform our lives. Electronic Superhighway-constructed of 336 televisions, 50 DVD playes, 3,750 feet of cable, and 575 feet of multicolored neon tubing-is a testament to the ways media defined one mans's understanding of a diverse nation.

Roger Brown, Natural Bridge (1971).

Edward Kienholz, Sollie 17 (1979-80).

Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz collected furniture, fixtures, wallpaper, and personal effects from the Pedicord Hotel in Spokane, Washington. They created this installation to convey the isolation and defeat of aging alone in America. An old man in boxer shorts appears in three moments that describe an ordinary day in his life. He peers through the window at a bleak cityscape, plays solitaire on the edge of his bed, and, in a darkly comic touch, reads A Handful of Men with one hand down his shorts. Snapshots in the mirror frame suggest the life he once enjoyed with others. Naked bulb and straggling wires threaten. as if suggesting how this abandoned human being might die, while ugly stains on the walls, floor, and under the reclining figure suggest that the people who live here are already decomposing. The Kienholzes' installations explore the seamy underside of this country's habitual optimism, reflecting the hardscrabble lives Edward encounterred in a series of marginal jobs before he joined San Franciso's "funk art" scene. Sollie 17 offers a voyeuristic glimpse into a life of solitary despair. It elicits sympathy, fear, and questions for a society that leaves its elderly to sit and wait for death.

Robert Wesley Wilson, Jefferson Airplane with Grace Slick (1966).

Even the name seemed psychedelic. Jefferson Airplane was one of the first rock bands to fully capture the counterculture of the mid-1960s, quickly gaining national and then international fame. This 1966 poster featured a photograph of the band with its new lead vocalist, Grace Slick (born 1939). Jefferson Airplane's irrelevant lyrics-with references to sex, drugs, and radical politics-pulsating sound, and Slick's soaring contralto and dramatic stage presence launched the band into the national consciousness. The psychedelic posters commissioned by rock impresario Bill Graham for San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium suggest the dizzying, multisensory experience of many Fillmore events, which were often charged with high-decibel music, light shows, and mind-altering drugs. Although the wild lettering and colors that designer Wes Wilson used rendered the advertisement almost illegible, this innovative style successfully evoked the burgeoning hippie counterculture.

乘搭Metro返回酒店。

说实在今天的课程感觉都是匆匆忙忙地讲解，我根本没有心情听课。完毕后当所有人迫不及待离开回家，我决定留下来好好地再看一看所有的美术。好不容易千里迢迢来到美术博物院，还不趁机欣赏启发自我的艺术？

逛到晚上7点半已是关门时间，决定听取Wipa（一位泰国Au Pair）的介绍到Pentagon City逛街。不知道是我不晓得她所谓“Pentagon City比Crystal City购物广场好逛许多”的好逛点在哪里还是什么的，我看那只是一个普通到不行的普通商场，连我这里的Wyoming Valley Mall都比它好逛许多倍。有点被咋到地想起从午餐到现在我只喝了一杯smoothie，所以此刻的我可说是饥饿十分，只想赶快回到酒店附近找东西吃。

浪费时间和钱回到了L'Enfant Plaza站，走出地铁，发现人影也不见几个。早上这里不是充满人潮的吗？怎么才晚上八点多的现在，经过著名的United States Capitol、National Air and Space Museum、Cannon House Office Building和Library Congress都没人影了，使我觉得特别诡异。走了半个小时，终于成功认路回到了酒店，却发现隔壁的咖啡馆已经关闭了。什么？！才八点半而已，你不会做生意啊？（丢笔）原本想认命不要吃晚餐了，可是肚子和脑子却不争气地叫我一定要吃（意志力不足）。询问了酒店服务人员后，得知不远处还有餐馆在营业。而后吃了一份三文治，体力和精神才逐渐恢复。

冲凉。睡死。结束一天的学业。

xxx

第二个星期，我就没那么好运，因为我需要搭巴士下华盛顿。笨蛋Greyhound公司的来回两趟巴士票花了我$120左右。天啊，好贵啊！！！！（跪地）

由于是第一次搭公共交通，决定带非常简单的行李。基本上算不上行李，只是一个塑料袋装着一天的换洗衣物和梳洗用具。在美国，无论是公共巴士还是戏院，只要你买了票，要坐哪里随你喜欢，有些人甚至放自个儿的行李在椅子上“霸位”。他们的巴士可算是很整洁，座位都蛮舒适，有的还提供插头。你买了票并不代表说你保证有位子，例如前往华盛顿的总站Union Station，巴士各自在Harrisburg，York，Downtown Baltimore停并换巴士。我和其他乘客在Harrisburg下车，由于巴士座位有限，只有少数的幸运乘客才能上车，而我是幸运的其中一个，因为其他人则要在寒风中等待另一辆巴士。从无法上车的乘客脸上看得出他们非常的生气和不满，可是又有什么办法？

从Wilkes-Barre到Washington D.C.，我坐了将近7个小时，比起普通驾车只需3个小时。为了减轻想要上厕所的念头，我可是不大敢喝水，因为我彻底了解“人有三急”忍耐不住的那种超痛苦感受。基于巴士行程耽误的关系，原本该傍晚7点半抵达变成晚上8点半。这次的我被John安排住在他们的朋友-Jeff & Jenae Brown的家。下了车后，到Metro乘坐地铁到FairFax，再由Jeff从总站接我。我们事前都没有见过面，当我走出总站时，我看到一个男人站在门口外的正中间相似等待人。我想说我的名字对老外来说应该蛮亚洲的，为什么我经过他时他却没有注意我？我决定站在他后面拨电话给Jeff并注意那男人的行动，最后那个男人接了电话，“Bingo!”。和他们从谈话中，才了解为什么Anja会说John是个很“loud”的人了，因为比起我的host dad，Brown Family讲话都很斯文不大声，真的是天壤之别啊！哈哈。

随后到了他们家，迎接我的除了女主人之外，还有两只超大型的狗！！！这两只大狗不是盖的，光是它们的狂吠已经让我像木头般站在门前，闭着眼睛背对着它们不敢动，唯有Jeff和Jenae的指示才能让它们冷静下来。真的很可怕~~！！

其实当它们冷静后知道你是无害后，狗儿还算平易近人的，唯一的缺点是它们太热情和善忘了。热情：只要你坐下来，它们会把头钻进你的身体间然后舔你；善忘：隔天早上它们已经忘记曾经舔过你而开始对你狂吠。哦，还有，有时候它们无意踩到你的脚，你会注意到它们是多么的重！

隔天早上八点半由Jeff载我到FairFax总站，从那里我乘坐Orange Line到Farragut West。下车时偶遇到Wipa和其他的Au Pair，然后我们一行人一起走到这天的上课地点：Renwick Gallery。今天除了上课之外，我们也必须呈现各自的作品。作品必须是融合了自己国家的传统和上个星期在American Indian Museum启发灵感的作品。老实说我并没有好好利用那一个星期来做任何作品，在临时出发来华盛顿时，我用了那张我引以为傲凋零叶子照片作为我的成果，再加上“硬掰”的解释作为结合。我的解释大概：美国印第安人热爱大自然并融合在日常生活里，而我对美国的天气和state park感到十分有兴趣。比如马来西亚没有秋天，所以我拍了这张图片来表达秋天对我的启发………………（鸦雀无声）…………………………（掩面而逃）。唉，有东西交差就算了。

学习素描。