Event 2: Fowler Museum

For my second event, I decided to visit Vivan Sundaram’s Making Strange: Gagawaka + Postmortem exhibition at the Fowler Museum. It was the first time I ever stepped inside the museum despite having a handful of classes no more than 50 steps away from its entrance. Needless to say, I was amazed at how big the museum actually was and wish I took advantage of its convenient location on campus over the past few years.

Dress made of recycled red bras

This sculpture made of braided hair was a bit unsettling, but interesting

When I first entered the exhibit, I was in awe of the bizarreness of Sundaram’s sculptures. I began with Gagawaka and made my way through half of the pieces there before finally realizing what Sundaram meant when he titled his entire exhibit Making Strange. Each piece was made of familiar items such as red bras, surgical masks, and braided hair; however, he made them unfamiliar by creating unusual items of clothes with them. In a behind the scenes video, Sundaram explains how he created each piece using recycled items to create an anti-aesthetic effect.  The Gagawaka portion of the exhibit seemed to be a satirical view of today’s fashion.

Moving over to Postmortem, Sundaram incorporates medicine and science with art in his pieces. While he emphasizes the surface of the human body in Gagawaka with clothes, in Postmortem he focuses on the inside. He placed medical educational tools (models of the human spine, organs etc.) into the bodies of the mannequins. Without this course, I do not believe I would understand the importance of Sundaram’s decision to incorporate science in his art.

Here is a video preview of the Making Strange exhibition for those of you who are on the fence about going to the Fowler Museum! I definitely recommend this exhibit because it is relevant to the DESMA 9 course and is extremely fascinating.

Works Cited:

"Making Strange: Gagawaka + Postmortem by Vivan Sundaram." Fowler. Fowler Museum at UCLA, n.d. Web. 29 May 2015. <http://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/making-strange-gagawaka-postmortem-vivan-sundaram>.

Sundaram, Vivan. "Vivan Sundaram Talks about GAGAWAKA." Artforum.com. Art Forum, 20 Dec. 2011. Web. 29 May 2015. <http://artforum.com/words/id=29889>.

Sundaram, Vivan. "Vivan Sundaram's "Making Strange"" YouTube. YouTube, 20 Apr. 2015. Web. 29 May 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DRX4dlBA-w>.