April 2007 Archives

Tobias Rehberger was interested in how viewers construct a film as they watch it, particularly as they pass through alone what's nominally intended to be a communal experience.

So he decided to make a film in reverse, starting with the poster, and ending with the screenplay. By handing backwards the "end product", each specialist collaborator interpolated his or her own element of the production. As April Elizabeth Lamm reported on Artforum's blog:

Ennio Morricone’s score was based on the film’s credits alone, a sweet series of comiclike bones arranged in a tic-tac-toe grid by French design duo Kuntzel & Deygas [who did Colette's mascots, Cap & Pep, btw -ed.] This apparently suited him: Morricone had told Rehberger that he never needed to see a film before deploying his trademark, universally lauded sound.

On Otto by Tobias Rehberger is on view at the Fondazione Prada through June 6 [fondazioneprada.com]
Read about the On Otto premiere party on Artforum [artforum]
See On Otto stills and installation shots like the one above on Designboom [designboom]

Uh, they both announced giant Frank Gehry showpieces that never made it past the drawing board because there was never any actual money behind them?

Here's a FOXnews Utah [redundant, I know] report on the 85-acre multi-use development announced by Provo entrepreneur Brandt Anderson last month. Frank Gehry is supposedly onboard to design the complex, though he did not attend the unveiling of the project's master plan/massing study.

When I was in Utah a couple of weeks ago, I heard from several people in the Utah development and construction communities that the project is all smoke, and that Anderson has essentially none of the multiple billions of dollars of financing in place to actually realize his grand vision.

More and more, this Gehry Lehi project reminds me of the Triad Center. When I was in 8th Grade, we lived in Salt Lake City, and the arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi blew into town with huge, shiny plans to build a new downtown right next to the old one. Khashoggi's son Mohammed lived around the corner from us, and so we had a front row seat to the starry-eyed reception those jokers got.[1] If there's any progress to be marked here, it's that Utah's monorail salesmen are now homegrown.

I'll be the first to sign up for wakeboarding classes if Gehry's project ever gets built, but I'll probably be bungee jumping from his Guggenheim Downtown before that happens.

2002: Guggenheim Drops Plans For East River Museum [nyt via wirednewyork]
MOSLEMS JOIN MORMONS IN UTAH BUILDING BOOM [nyt, 1982]

[1] This all happened before Khashoggi was involved in Iran-Contra and BCCI. I had no idea he was Dodi Fayed's uncle, though. Nor that Mohammed is now directing films?

First off, what is up with the Seventies? Those folks was funny. This 1972 documentary about what a lovable failure of a city Los Angeles is stars pioneering urban planning theorist Reyner Banham, who fairly bumbles through hippie dippy, go-go dancing California as if he were Lytton Strachey. It's like Mondo LA, but produced by the BBC.

As a time capsule, the film's almost quaint. Banham plays everything with bemused befuddlement, eating a pineapple sundae while he interviews "painter and photographer of the local scene" Ed Ruscha in a giant convertible at the drive-in, or innocently engaging the security guard about why he can't cut through the ur-gated community of Rolling Hills.

It can boggle, too, though. When ruminating on the city's preference for stand-alone homes to larger multi-story housing estates, Banham actually says about Watts, "even the ghetto people have nice, little houses."

Some things hold up, some don't, and in a laugh-so-you-don't-cry way. There's a hint of irony that LA's great sunsets are caused by all that car pollution, but otherwise, the freeways and the car-centric culture are still only amusing.

Banham offhandedly compares the partitioned-off Rolling Hills to "the Balkans before 1914," not knowing, of course, what would happen to the Balkans of the late 1990's [or what would happen in the LA riots after the Rodney King verdict, for that matter].

And Banham Loves Los Angeles dovetails very unexpectedly with another outsider's look at an inscrutable place, Antonioni's Chung Kuo. The punchline to this narration by Banham's imaginary 8-track freeway tour guide writes itself:

Coming up now on your right is the world's biggest toy and game factory.

From here, Matt Mason space toys, Hot Wheels cars, and Barbie dolls go to all parts of the free world.

Blogging software :: printing press

Pillow case :: digitally printed vinyl Sforzian Backdrops elaborately arranged by White House advance team. Wow. [via nyt]

RECENT SALES OF IMPORTANT EXAMPLES OF ARTISTS LIKE KLIMPT & POLLACK SOLD IN THE 140M RANGE! WHAT SHOULD THE UNIQUE AND ONLY SURVIVING INTACT EXAMPLE OF NEUTRA COMMERCIAL ARCHITECTURE BE WORTH?

An architectural landmark on the market [neutra.org via andy at reference library]

I'll come clean. We've started contemplating a dip of the toe into the real real estate market in Washington, DC. There's precious little to choose from, though. DC's longstanding status as an officetown means there are almost no industrial or commercial loft buildings [though there's now no shortage of "lofts," which is shabby developerspeak for "exposed ductwork." Besides, thanks to unchecked flippery and speculation, the condo/co-op market is a zombie, unaware of its own death.]

What passes for modernist architecture in town, too, is either a McMansion tarted up in Richard Meier drag, or is located in an ever-to-revive? neighborhood of lackluster Sixties urban revitalization gone to seed, or is an aging suburban utopia [sic] of some kind.

Almost any foray into DC mid-century-onward modernism includes stops in architect Charles Goodman's various developments: the sylvan Hollin Hills along the Potomac and the much more ambitious, [sub]urban experiment of Reston, a city begun in the rural farmland of Virginia in the early 1960's. Goodman's densely packed, slightly rural-toned Interational Style homes, townhouses, and apartments are known as Hickory Cluster. They front on the manmade Lake Anne, and are connected by trails and bike paths to the rest of Reston [which has exploded into a car-centered, Galleria-style ring city of its own, ten minutes on a good day from Dulles.]

What might it be like to live in the perfect modernist suburbs, I wondered? The vintage interior photos of Hickory Cluster on the Reston Historical Trust and the Storefront Museum of Suburban History website offer a tantalizing--and tempting--glimpse.

On a clear day in Reston, for example, I might lounge in my Saarinen Womb Chair and look out past my palm trees across the valley to the mountains. Maybe I'll even eat one of those grapefruits, picked this morning from my own tree out back.

Or maybe I could do a little work in my home office/studio, maybe polish off a film project for my client, a large, international business machines manufacturer, then head, where? Over to Outback for a Bloomin' Onion?

Can I just say that, my entire design-sentient life, I've dreamed of living in just such a space? Only somehow, I always thought it would be at the end of a narrow street, up against the hill, overlooking the ocean in, say, Pacific Palisades, California. That's the freakin' Eames House, people.

Reston looks like this, freakin' shoeboxes with room for a dinette set and ceilings no taller than the 8' patio door that is the only source of light.

Does anyone know a good way to steam motor oil out of a concrete floor, because at this point, the only option for us is to live in a deconsecrated gas station.

[update: I've since visited Lake Anne, as the original core of Reston is known, and have learned that Hickory Cluster is actually a series of Goodman-designed townhouse neighborhoods on the other side of the ring road from the town square, which architect James Rossant designed to emulate--what else?--Portofino.

In at least one respect, he succeeded: apparently, the pedestrian-oriented center is dead in the non-summer, and businesses on the plaza can't survive. Which is one factor driving a current government/development push for "revitalization." The other most immediately obvious characteristic of Lake Anne is its Latino-ness. It's like Reston Town Center for Mexicans, and visiting it makes me realize how overwhelmingly non-Latino the RTC crowds and target demographics are.

The only larger concentration of Latino Reston/Herndon residents I'd seen was in the parking lot at KMart, which serves as a kind of impromptu zocalo con coches. Rather than providing an idealized escape from the "problems" of the "inner cities," such as density and a heterogeneous racial, cultural, and socio-economic population, Reston turns out to have [at least] two cultures and economic strata superimposed on each other, equal on the parkways, but separate on the town plazas. I wonder if anyone's asked a Mexican about the Lake Anne "revitalization," or is he the problem to be solved?]

Holy smokes, I'm in like. Geoff sat down with editor/polymath Walter Murch for BLDGBLOG to discuss, of all things, the music of spheres. At least obliquely. I'd say they were Renaissance men, but as their discussion shows, the Renaissance was only just a rediscovery. They're more like Ptolemaic Men. Here's a very interesting aside on the possibilities of innate cinematic structure that isn't even in the top quartile on the interview's interestingness scale:

BLDGBLOG: When you’re actually editing a film, do you ever become aware of this kind of underlying structure, or architecture, amongst the scenes?

Murch: There are little hints of underlying cinematic structures now and then. For instance: to make a convincing action sequence requires, on average, fourteen different camera angles a minute. I don’t mean fourteen cuts – you can have many more than fourteen cuts per minute – but fourteen new views. Let’s say there is a one-minute action scene with thirty cuts, so that the average length of each is two seconds – but, of those thirty cuts, sixteen of them will be repeats of a previous camera angle.

Now what you have to keep in mind is that the perceiving brain reacts differently to completely new visual information than it does to something it has seen before. In the second case, there is already a familiar template into which the information can be placed, so it can be taken in faster and more readily.

So with fourteen “untemplated” angles a minute, a well-shot action sequence will feel thrilling and yet still comprehensible: just on the edge of chaos, which is how action feels if you are in the middle of it. If it’s less than fourteen, the audience will feel like something is lacking, and they’ll disengage; if it’s more than fourteen, so much new information is being thrown at the audience that they’ll also disengage, though for different reasons.

At the other end of the spectrum, dialogue scenes seem to need an average of four new camera angles a minute. Less than that, and the scene will seem flat and perfunctory; more than that, and it will be hard for the audience to concentrate on the performances and the meaning of the dialogue: the visual style will get in the way of the verbal content and the subtleties of the actors’ performances.

This rule of “four to fourteen” seems to hold across all kinds of films and different styles and periods of filmmaking.

A short film Noah Baumbach made in 2000, Conrad And Butler Take A Vacation, was included on the Criterion edition of Kicking and Screaming. Variety was not pleased with this story of two buddies, one damaged from his divorce, getting annoyed and drunk on some sofas: "with grade-Z production values, this esome lark serves only one purpose: It proves just how far Baumbach has come."

I don't think it's that bad, though, kind of carefully written, in fact. The short's on YouTube, broken up into three 10-minute parts. At the moment, Part 1 has about 700 views. Part 2: 300, and Part 3: 250.

This vote-with-your-eyes data feels like a more useful assessment than Variety's snark, especially if everyone who started watching was looking for Baumbach or Wes Anderson in the first place. [via coudal]

Jason caught a Guardian article saying that the Weinsteins are going to split Grindhouse in two: "There have been reports that many film-goers have been confused by the movie's structure - mistakenly assuming that there was only one film on offer and leaving the cinema en-masse after the Rodriguez section."

Having seen Grindhouse on opening night, I can only suggest the obvious: maybe people are leaving early because Rodriguez's film sucks and blows simultaneously, and they're trying to cut their losses?

Tarantino's film is infinitely better, even in the trashfilm terms the two movies purportedly want to be judged on. I wish I'd gone to the previous showing of Deathproof, hung out in the lobby, then sneaked back into catch Planet Terror. Which I'd have then left early. Oy.

Grindhouse to be sawn in two? [guardian via kottke]

And by 'out there,' I mean in North Korea. And by 'a Cremaster,' I mean Cremaster 1, Barney's foray into Busby Berkley stadium spectacle.

NK's Arirang Festival has choreographed logistics to make even Barbara Gladstone blush [well, maybe]: 100,000 performers training for a year...actually, I bet they're pretty cheap.

With stuff like this going on in the world, once-quixotically grand projects like Cremaster seem almost quaint. It's like how almost any earth art you name pales to the inadvertent aesthetic alterations of the US Army's Dugway Proving Ground.

The interesting/odd thing is how undercovered the Arirang Festival appears to be, especially given the Great Leader's supposed fascination with film. The event remains a totalitarian spectacle intended to be experienced live.

There are only a few clips on YouTube [some are at everyoneforever, where this great photo came from as well]. Add live event producer/director and publicist Kim Jong Il's "to kidnap" list, I guess.

Even though I know that the official White House photographers work inside the bubble, and hence, can often shoot around and through the Sforzian setups that so masterfully entrap their nominally independent wire service colleagues, it always floors me to find a photo like this on the White House's own website.

This was GWB speaking to the US Conference of Mayors in 2004.

My favorite line in the Daily Utah Chronicle interview with Paul Morrissey, where he admits Andy Warhol sent a double, actor Allen Midgette, to a lecture at the University of Utah, is from Kay Israel, assistant editor campus paper:

Mr. Morrissey:...On the back of Nico's Chelsea Girls Album there is a picture of Warhol...That's where the talk of Andy having Nico impersonate him. And Andy once impersonated Nico. We do it a lot in New York..."

Israel: Well being from the West I don't think we're quite used to it."

There's also a regular skepticism that crops up about "Pop Art," as if it, too, is a scam. It's a sentiment I was surprised to find still, when I spoke about the vagaries and influences of money on the reception/perception of a work of art. Minimalism, conceptualism, pop, whole generations of contemporary artistic production and exploration were all still suspect.

And I feel my questions about the sources of authenticity and artistic value only fueled that doubt, as if astronomical prices paid for art could somehow be warranted, after all, by a single artist's craftsmanship and technique, but not by their ideas, or even by the other aesthtetic qualities of the objects they created [or "jobbed out," to use one audience member's derogatory term.]

The entire practice of art is wrought with subjectivity, which translates into money very roughly. So it's fascinating to read an almost obsessive investigation into the art-money flimflam from nearly 40 years ago--and find it still resonates. Things are still different "out West," I guess.

By which she means, I assume, that only in DC could virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell perform at a subway station during rush hour and be recognized by only one of the six people who stopped for more than a moment to listen.

It was a stunt concocted by the Washington Post which, at first, I thought was brilliant. But the more I think about it--especially considering the title of the article--the more I think it was a condescending slap by a paper that has very little claim to cultural awareness itself, never mind superiority.

Pearls Before Breakfast [washpost via tpm]

[update from the Saw Lady's blog: "The thing is Joshua Bell is a great violinist but he doesn't know how to busk...A busker is someone who can turn any place into a stage. Obviously, Joshua Bell needs an actual stage." ]

So I'm researching camera angles for an article I'm writing, and so I break out the trusty Susan Sontag, On Photography, and I finally get to the last essay/chapter, which I guess I've never read.

It's the one where she talks about Michelangelo Antonioni's Chung Kuo - Cina, his 1972 documentary gift from Italy to the PRC--which promptly got caught up in China's internal party battle between Mao's wife and Zhou Enlai, and was massively denounced as a vicious pack of anti-China propaganda. [The Party had approved and supervised/surveilled the 8-week shooting, and Antonioni deployed secret cameras at various points to shoot un-preapproved crowd shots.]

As evidence, the Communist-controlled news media published an analysis/critique of Antonioni's editing techniques, his subjects--and his camera placement:

And he was accused of denigrating the right subjects by his way of photographing them: by using "dim and dreary colors" and hiding people in "dark shadows"; by treating the same subject with a variety of shots -- "there are sometimes long-shots, sometimes close-ups, sometimes from the front, and sometimes from behind" -- that is, for not showing things from the point of view of a single, ideally placed observer; by using high and low angles -- "The camera was intentionally turned on this magnificent modern bridge from very bad angles in order to make it appear crooked and tottering"; and by not taking enough full shots -- "He racked his brain to get such close-ups in an attempt to distort the people's image and uglify their spiritual outlook."

I'm trying to download a torrent of it right now, but otherwise, it's so hard to find, you might as well be in China. The only thing on the YouTube, appropriately enough, is a five-min segment of comrades lining up to have their photos taken in Tianenmen Square.

ESWN has excerpts of Umberto Eco and Sontag discussing the film's Chinese reaction [via archive.org, found via supernaut]
Google trans. of clip's narration/subtitles [fuluzhenxiang]

In 1994, Philippe Starck designed mailorder plans for a Timber House for the French department store 3 Suisses. It was sold as a numbered edition for 4900FF, or around $1,000.

Last year, a copy of the kit--a wooden box with plans, a handbook, a video of Starck speaking about the project, a hammer, and a little French flag--was for sale on Apartment Therapy for $2000. In a couple of weeks, another edition will be auctioned at Rago in Lambertville, NJ. The estimate is $1,500-3,500.

A couple of the houses have been built so far, including the one featured on Starck's site under 1994 Architecture [and linked more easily at Starck Ting, a jawdropping blog about Starckology.]

There's a flickr set of opening the box, too [both of those links are from mocoloco]

I don't like Starck, and I don't believe him when he says this is/was "the most advanced prototype of the modern house." I also don't believe him when he claimed it was a "political action," though it is interesting that a lot of the discussion on this French architecture forum is about the inappropriateness of woodframe houses in France.

Staffers in the University of Utah Art Department raised suspicions that night that the man who'd just presented on campus was not, in fact, Andy Warhol, but an impersonator. As a result, event organizers withheld the $1,000 speaking fee while they conducted their quiet investigation.

The questions were not reported until several months later, when the student-run paper picked it up. For more than a week, the investigation was front-page news and provided the first inkling of the switch to other colleges where "Warhol" had appeared. Michelle Condrat, a UofU art history student researched the investigation and found the articles.

So this week I gave a lecture about how collectors and the market get weird with art at the University of Utah. It was a lot of fun for me, and it seemed to go over alright. I took as a point of reference an earlier, well-known lecture at the UofU by Robert Smithson, the audio of which has posthumously been repackaged--without much justification, based on my research--into Hotel Palenque, a "multimedia installation" work that was purchased by the Guggenheim Museum.

It was only during a post-game wrapup with Prof. Monty Paret, the contemporary art historian who invited me, that I learned Hotel Palenque was only the university's second most infamous artist lecture. After the famous Fake Andy Warhol lecture tour of 1967, that is.

In 1967, Warhol agreed to take a cross-country college lecture tour organized by the American Program Bureau. His appearance at the University of Utah was scheduled for October 2, and created "a mild furor," according to the campus paper, The Daily Utah Chronicle. [One of Monty's students, Michelle Condrat, researched the lecture history, including the series of articles of the Daily Chronicle's investigation.]

From the lecture to the reception following, several people were suspicious that it was not, in fact, Warhol, but an impostor. The school held off on payment of the $1,000 speaking fee for several months. Then on January 31, 1968, after comparing photos of the U's speaker with film footage of the artist, the Chronicle announced "Phony Warhol Suspected, Film Reveals Hoax On U". It took about a week for Warhol--via then-manager Paul Morrissey--to come clean.

The impostor--who did not actually look anymore like Warhol than anyone with a shaggy silver 'do and a pair of Wayfarers--turned out to be Allen Midgette, a young actor and Warhol posse member who appeared a couple of months later in Warhol's Lonesome Cowboys. [Shooting for Lonesome Cowboys took place in Arizona at the end of January 1968, just as the UofU story picked up.] He appeared in the artist's place at the University of Oregon; Linfield College in McMinnville, Ore.; and at the Univ. of Montana in Missoula.

The one-line mention of sending a double on a lecture tour is in Warhol's art history bio, but I've never seen or heard any details of how the lectures appeared from the duped audience's standpoint, nor how the impostor was unmasked, largely due to the doubts of people at the University of Utah and the investigations of the school paper.

The Chronicle articles are very focused on recognizing Warhol, getting Morrissey to come clean, and what should happen to the $1,000 fee. There's very little about the content of the lecture or even about Warhol's art generally beyond a couple of namechecks of Campbell's Soup.

I'll excerpt the Daily Chronicle articles below.

1. When the backdrop to a GWB speech about Iraq war funding is literally Dick Cheney lurking in the bushes. [via towleroad]

We had a four-hour layover at O'Hare yesterday, which was long enough to become thoroughly disgusted with CNN's non-stop toggling between three major crises: what if that dude with the hair wins American Idol? the daily truck bombings in Iraq, and the Chocolate Jesus scandal. [The fourth piece in CNN's rotation--how the Iraqi version of American Idol is bringing the country together--was obviously a feelgood story of hope.]

As disingenuously imaginary artistic affronts to religion go, Chocolate Jesus is definitely no elephant dung Madonna, not even a Piss Christ. The otherwise ignorable artist, Cosimo Cavallaro, is no Andre Serrano, much less Chris Ofili; his previous work seems muddled, messy, and unserious [or deathly self-serious, which amounts to the same thing.]

That said, even as my own religious self is discomfited, I think there could be some serious readings of the work appearing during this high season of hollow chocolate bunnies, but those critiques of commercialized Easter are irrelevant now, drowned out by the Catholic League's self-(pre)serving venality.

But where was the outrage two months ago, when the same streetfront gallery, The Lab at the Roger Smith Hotel, showed "Detainee," a performance by David Duckworth that criticized the US government's sanctioning of torture and prisoner abuse in Iraq, Guantanamo, its network of secret CIA prisons, etc. etc.

In "Detainee," the bound, gagged, and blindfolded artist was coated in red paint, then dragged across the floor to paint an American flag. The performance was repeated over several nights, Jan. 29-Feb. 2. [edited flash video is running on The Labs' site.]

Duckworth's piece is a clear reference to another transparently scandalous exploration of the exploitative dynamics of power, Yves Klein's "Anthropometries," performances in which the artist used nude female models slathered with his trademark blue paint as "living brushes," sometimes with musical accompaniment.

"Detainee" has, at this moment, six citations on Google, including two from The Lab themselves. Not a peep of outrage from either patriotiness-loving demagogues or those zealots who "draw near to [Jesus] with their mouths."

Either our media society is so sanguine about the idea of American torture that it's not, in fact, outrageous any more, or Duckworth made a fatal mistake in the attention economy when he decided to keep his detainee jumpsuit on.

Detainee, by David Duckworth, Jan. 29 - Feb. 2, The Lab at Roger Smith [rogersmithnews.com]
Yves Klein Anthropométries [youtube]