LA to Africa: Johannesburg

 Last year at this time Clark and I were talking about the Tibetan Buddhist saying that anyone can make a religious object, we were walking up to Camp 1 in the Khumbu.  And last week, his class was testing this assumption.

 Paintings from the big Kerry James Marshall exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Such black figures. I am in Africa thinking about Kerry James Marshall paintings.  These are the large abstract Rorschach paintings test our understandings of Modernism and the impossibility of a universal, purely expressionistic, color blind abstraction.

 Franz Kline and Richard Chamberlain, and back to Kerry James Marshall

Mark Bradford and Glenn Ligon

 The Broad Museum and LAX

 Suweto, where we spent a few hours, very tame hours but interesting to see the places where so much had happened.

 Driving north of Johanessburg to the Lasedi Villages tourist place, where I could continue my study of what makes a good souvenir?  What do we want to collect from our travel?  What can we possibly understand?  Or as Bowen asked me today: "What is this place".  This was after the visit to the furniture showroom place, where I pondered seating arrangements.

Once there were tables of Buddhas now there are tables of hippos.