April 2008 Archives

Edward Emerson Barnard was a self-taught astronomer who built a house for himself and his new bride with money earned spotting comets. [A patent medicine magnate was offering $200/comet in the 1880's; in one year, Barnard spotted eight.] He was the first person to discover a new moon of Jupiter since Gallileo.

In 1895, he became a professor of astronomy at the University of Chicago, which gave him the observatory access he needed to complete one of the first photographic sky surveys. He spent decades, up until his death in 1923, photographing the Milky Way and nebulae, and overseeing the printing of photographs for his survey.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of his cataloguer and assistant Mary Calvert, A Photographic Atlas of Selected Regions of the Milky Way, which was finally published in 1929, in an edition of around 700. It's a stunning achievement, a handmade artist's book in the form of pioneering science.

Georgia Tech's library has digitized their copy of Selected Regions of the Milky Way, which allows broader access, and reduces wear and traffic on the $8-10,000 books. [The example above sold at Skinner's scientific instruments auction in 2006 for around $7,000. Can't find the exact number right now.]

I finally pulled some pictures off my camera from last summer. That's when I noticed this little bungalow--with a sweet, vertical addition--just off the mainstreet in Morehead City, NC.

There are a couple more shots on flickr.

Well, he and his studio do. Spatial Vibration documents a series of collaboration/experiments concerning the relationship of sound and space. Several of the experiments are on view in a show of the same name, "Spatial Vibration, String-Based Instrument, Study II," at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery through mid-June.

The Endless Study translates the sonic vibrations of a single-string instrument into a drawing by means of two pen-equipped pendulum arms, which record [sic] the sounds onto a rotating sheet of paper. It's an update of a 19th century invention known as a harmonograph.

It remains to be seen what range of aural and visual effects emerge from the public's access to the experiment. But the Studio crew, who have clearly been practicing, seem quite proficient at producing elegant, spiral drawings. But can you dance to them? Are beautiful drawings the happy accident of a particular type of performance, or is the musical composition--and the experience of listening to it--now incidental to the production of a desired drawing?

Meanwhile, another, even more ambitiously scaled experiment involves a 3-dimensional harmonograph, with a pendulum on each axis, which translates sound+time [i.e., a performance] into movement in 3D space. This path is then translated into a model. Olafur says it better:

By linking each pendulum to a digital interface I can ascribe to them the coordinates of x, y and z, and then digitally draw the spatial result of the three frequencies. They are easily tuned to a C major chord, for instance, one pendulum sounding the note C, one E, and one G. If they are given the correct frequency, the chord is harmonious and the vibrations form an orderly whole. This solidifies over time, thus drawing the contours of a three-dimensional object in space. In other words: sound vibrations can be turned into a tangible object. It is almost like building a model. One could develop this experiment into vast spatial arrangements by turning harmonious chords into spatial shapes. If we were to use a whole concert, like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, we might build an entire city.

An entire city. But that returns me to my previous question: would you want to live in Beethoven's Fifth? What if the highest quality of city life is produced by something musically awful, like Mariah Carey's third comeback album? Or an annoying corporate jingle? Do you lay down a heavy bassline to produce your city's street grid? What would be on Jane Jacobs' iPod?

Spatial Vibration, includes video, photos, and exhibition info [spatialvibration.blogspot.com]
Spatial Vibration is on view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery through Jun. 7 [tanyabonakdargallery]

Very interesting. Stream Magazine, part of Wonderland, is a new venue for online filmmaking, or an online venue for new filmmakers. Not quite sure yet. Alls I know is, Austin Bunn has a nice interview with Brett Hoff editor of Wholphin. It all looks fresh as a daisy, even though the pieces they're discussing are all a few issues old now. [Note to self: finally start watching Wholphin #6.]

The World According to Wholphin [wonderlandstream.com via bigscreenlittlescreen]

From around 1989-92, the German photographer Thomas Ruff created a body of work using astronomical survey photos from the European Southern Observatory in Chile. There is very little discussion online of this series[1], even though I believe it's the first time Ruff uses a found image in his work. [Before the Sterne series, Ruff was known for his very large portraits of his friends, which he described as "a construct based on identification photographs." Since then, he has appropriated and manipulated many types of photos, including industrial catalogue illustrations and internet porn.]

Ruff talked briefly about the Star photos in a rather painful 1993 interview with Philip Pocock:

Pocock: Why stars? Do they mean something extra special to you?

Ruff: When I was eighteen I had to decide whether to become an astronomer or a photographer. I also wanted to move the so-called künstlerische Fotografie boundary. Do you know Flusser?

Pocock: No.

Ruff: He defines isolated categories for photography that sometimes cross over. For example, if medical photography is used in a journalistic way, or with the Stars, a scientific archive isn't used for scientific research but for my idea of what stars look like. It's also a homage to Karl Bloßfeldt. In the twenties he took photographs of plants to explain to his students architectural archetypes. So he was a researcher but the way he represented his intention with the help of photography made him an artist. I like these crossovers.

All interesting enough, but given the photos he uses, I think the most relevant perspective comes earlier in another part of the interview, where he distinguishes between photographing to "capture reality" and "to make a picture."

Ruff definitely makes an awesome picture. The Sterne photos are stunning, at least the largest prints--185cm wide by 250cm tall--are. They generally do well at auction, though it sometimes feels like the ones that do better are the "starrier" ones, a notion that seems to play right into Ruff's interest, inherited from his teachers, Berndt and Hilla Becher, that photographs are cliches, constructs of expectations ["my idea of what stars look like," even.]

The photos Ruff used came from a project so conceptually ambitious and subjectively constrained, it'd do the Bechers proud. The ESO Southern Sky Atlas was a massive undertaking, an attempt begun in 1972 [images were taken from 1974-1987] to document the entire visible universe. Or at least the half of it visible from the Southern Hemisphere. And just the objects of enough magnitude to show up with the then-new 100-inch UK Schmidt Telescope and the 1m ESO telescope at La Cilla, Chile. And which could be seen on Kodak's then-new, experimental, hypersensitized emulsion.

The resulting 1,000+ photos are at once evidence of photography's futile limitations, and one of its greatest artistic achievements; they out-Becher the Bechers. The Sky Atlas is just one of several sky surveys over the 20th century. Each starts out with the same ambitious goal; each takes years of painstaking work; each results in images and objects that exhibit conceptual rigor and contemporary visual appeal in equal amounts; and as technology progresses, each is rendered utterly obsolete by the next survey. Particularly as astronomical data is digitized, the era of producing objects--glass negative plates and photographic prints--has died. Now it sits, at best, forgotten and neglected in university libraries and on storeroom shelves. At worst, it will be cleared out and dumped, replaced--people think--by a small stack of CD-ROMs or a web server.

For such projects, once-scientific milestones that represent an era's pinnacle of our achievement, the literal attainment of the capacity of human vision, maybe the best thing for them is to stop being science and start being art.

Note to astronomical librarians: if you're clearing out old sky surveys and atlases, please dump them my way.

[1] At least in English. Henning Engelke wrote about the Sterne series and the science-to-art spectrum, but it's in German and locked in a in pdf. maybe this google translation of the reformatted html version will be comprehensible.

Holy smokes, this is really wonderful. [via fimoculous]

In 2005, Robert Gober curated a show at the Menil Collection in Houston. In his catalogue, Robert Gober Sculptures and Installations, 1979-2007," for the Schaulager show, Gober says, "Initially, I was only interested in curating from the collection and not including my own work, but when I began investigating the contents and the storage of the Menil Collection, I saw what [then chief curator] Matthew Drutt was already seeing. My work and the work in the collection shared affinities and themes. Catholicism, Surrealism, race, and a belief in the everyday object."

The exhibition's title, "The Meat Wagon," comes from a codicil to John de Menil's will. It's awesome.

To my Executor
c/o Pierre M. Schumberger

I am a religions man deep at heart, in spite of appearances. I want to be buried as a catholic, with gaiety and seriousness.

I want the mass and last rites to be by Father Moubarac, because he is a highly spiritual man. Within what is permissible by catholic rules, and within the discretion of Moubarac, I want whoever feels so inclined to receive communion.

I want to be buried in wood, like the jews. The cheapest wood will be good enough. Any wood will do. I want a green pall, as we had for Jerry MacAgy. I would prefer a pickup or a flat bed truck to the conventional hearse.

I want the service to be held at my parish, St. Annes, not at The Rothko Chapel, because it would set a bad precedent.

I want music. I would like Bob Dylan to perform, and if it isn't possible, any two or three electric guitars playing softly. I want them to play tunes of Bob Dylan, and to avoid misunderstanding, I have recorded suggestions on the enclosed tape. The first one, Ballad of Hollis Brown is evocative of the knell (nostalgic bell tolling). Then at some point Blowin' In The Wind, The Times They Are A-Changin' and WIth God On Our Side, because all my life I've been, mind and marrow, on the side of the underdog. Then Girl From The North Country to the rhythm of which the pall bearers would strut out of the church. Father Duploye could also be asked to sing Veni Creator in latin, to the soft accompaniment of a guitar.

I would like the funeral director to be Black.

I would like the pall bearers to be Ladislas Bugner, Francesco, Francois, Miles Glaser, Mickey Leland and Pete Schlumberger.

I would like George to stand with Dominique, Christophe, Adelaide, and Phil. Simone Swan, Helen Winkler, Jean Riboud, Ame Vennema, Rossellini and Howard Barnstone will be part of the family. Also Gladys Simmons and Emma Henderson.

I want no eulogy.

These details are not inspired by a pride, which would be rather vain, because I'll be a corpse for the meat wagon. I just want to show that faith can be alive.

Date: November December 13, 1972

/s/ John de Menil

The Rothko Chapel had only been dedicated in 1971. John de Menil died on June 1, 1973. His wife Dominique, who exerted a formative influence on my views of art in the times we met between 1990 and 1995, died in 1998.

Just a Vegas-y two second video, but I wonder if this rain machine gives a hint of what's coming this week at Olafur Eliasson's MoMA/PS1 show.

Another of the things that Richard Serra said at LACMA last week has stuck with me was the artist's call to arms for abstraction: basically, for artists in the 20th century, you're either with us [i.e., Serra and Malevich] or you're with the terrorists [i.e., Duchamp].

I was reminded by it, ironically, by the Times' review of the new Tomma Abts show at the New Museum. By now, the spatial effect of seeing Abts' arduously determined, small-scale, abstract paintings installed in large, white cubes is part of her experience. Abts' room at the Carnegie International--which was also curated by Laura Hoptman--was an engrossing highlight; the paintings commanded the industrial space at greengrassi in London, too.] Ken Johnson writes, "Ms. Abts’s 14 small works look as though they died and went to heaven."

But he also said, "Stylistically the paintings seem oddly out of sync with the present; they could be recently rediscovered works from the 1950s or ’60s." That sense of anachronism seems inextricably tied to both the style--abstraction--and to the size. Though I can think of powerful exceptions, it seems like abstraction and smallness have been out of sync since WWII.

Abstractionist Thomas Nozkowski, who gets namechecked by Johnson--and whose resurgence is happening right now withfirst show after switching from Max Protetch to PaceWildenstein--talked in 2004 of deliberately choosing in the 70's to paint on small board instead of giant canvas...

You can’t really understand artists of my generation until you factor the political atmosphere into any analysis of their work. I felt that I could no longer do big paintings that were for an audience of the very institutions that I then despised. The last thing I wanted to do was to paint for a museum, to paint for a bank lobby. I wanted to paint paintings that could fit in my friends’ rooms. So I started making 16 by 20 inch paintings that you would recognize today as my work, in 1975. These pictures, initially for political reasons, had roots in subject, in things that connected to the real world.

...and of the extremely skeptical response he received at the time, from curators, dealers, and his fellow artists:

I remember Steingrim Larssen who was then the director of the Louisiana Museum near Copenhagen coming by, and, to my surprise, he got excited about the paintings. This was 1975 or ’76, and he pulled a whole group out, said that he thought they were really interesting and then said, "Your psychiatrist told you to do these right?" He just thought it was some kind of therapy, he couldn’t imagine that this was serious work. I got a lot of that. Even Betty Parsons who was very supportive and loved young artists, she would flinch whenever I showed her a painting. So, I joined a co-op gallery to have a way to get them out of the studio and into the world.

...

There was an organization called The Organization of Independent Artists and they were attempting to subvert the gallery and museum system and all the established hierarchies. They had decided that each artist shown in their group shows would pick the next artists and so on. I was one of the artists chosen for the second show. I remember going to the organizational meeting and being told that the other artists had decided I couldn’t be in the show because the paintings weren’t serious.

Andy designed this postcard for the Walker Art Center, which is cool.

But the notes on the flickr photo are even cooler.

cf. the most heavily annotated photo on flickr [kottke]

which includes a Diet Coke butler [via andy]

If you had to name one American, for instance, who clubbed together with a couple of friends in 1965 and spent more than three weeks building a futuristic seven-foot vertical city out of Lego, you might not immediately think of Norman Mailer. Thirty-three years later, however, the city still stands in Mailer's living room in Brooklyn Heights, and its creator remains enthusiastic about his project. "It was very much opposed to Le Corbusier. I kept thinking of Mont-Saint-Michel," he explains. "Each Lego brick represents an apartment. There'd be something like twelve thousand apartments. The philosophers would live at the top. The call girls would live in the white bricks, and the corporate executives would live in the black." The cloud-level towers, apparently, would be linked by looping wires. "Once it was cabled up, those who were adventurous could slide down. It would be great fun to start the day off. Put Starbucks out of business."

Last fall after he died, the fate of Norman Mailer's Lego "City of The Future," which stood in his living room for more than 40 years, was not publicly disclosed.

I wondered what it looked like. Turns out, it probably looks a lot like the photograph of it by Simeon C. Marshall, which accompanied The New Yorker article on Lego from which the above quote was taken.

update: Basically, awesome.

This photo was used on the cover of Mailer's 1966 essay collection, "Cannibals and Christians." The city itself was Mailer's own proposal for dealing with the looming crisis of sub/urban sprawl: "If we are to avoid a megalopolis five hundred miles long, a city without shape or exit, a nightmare of ranch houses, highways, suburbs and industrial sludge," he wrote in a 1964 essay in Architectural Forum, "then there is only one solution: the cities must climb, they must not spread, they must build up, not by increments, but by leaps, up and up, up to the heavens." Thus, the Lego city. [quote via arcchicago]

In Mary Dearborn's Mailer: A Biography, the construction of the Lego City is portrayed as nothing less than a bold attempt by the author "to make a revolution in the consciousness of our time"--if only they could've gotten it out of the writer's living room:

In many ways this was a typically Mailerian project. He announced it in advance in the pages of the New York Times Magazine and, to underline his seriousness, in Architectural Forum. The prose city he outlined would change the face not only of public architecture but of society itself. He had long blamed architecture for many of the woes of contemporary society, and now he applied himself to setting forth his plans in pronouncements and, beginning in the fall of 1965, the creation of an actual model city, immense in scale and meticulously planned.

...

He decided to build a model of a city that could be populated by 4 million people, and to build it in his own living room. He conceived it as a monument to his sweeping utopian vision.

At the quotidian level, Norman acted as the brains behind the project, soon discovering that he didn't like the sound of the plastic Lego pieces snapping together; it struck him as vaguely obscene. He delegated the task to [fourth wife] Beverly's stepbrother, Charlie Brown, who worked as a kind of handyman for him, and to Eldred Mowery, a friend from Provincetown now in the city. The two men drove Norman's 1961 blue convertible Falcon out to the Lego plant in New Jersey and returned with cases of the colored blocks. Then Norman directed them, instructing them to create hanging bridges, buildings with trapdoors, and four-foot-high towers, all constructed on an aluminum-covered piece of plywood on a four-by-eight-foot sheet of plywood supported by five-foot legs.

Construction proceeded apace, and Norman never really did call a halt to it. But someone from the Museum of Modern Art came out to Brooklyn to take photographs of the model, hoping to display it at the museum. At that point, Mailer and his helpers found that the "city" could not be taken out of the apartment. though they consulted movers with cranes and took measurements of the glass in the front windows, they soon saw that it couldn't be removed without being disassembled first. Here Norman drew the line. He told Mowery to build a fence around it and leave it where it was. There it still sits, occupying a third of the living room's floor space. Beverly, who contributed a scale model of the United Nations to indicate the overall scale of the city, professes that she loved it, but concedes, "It was a bitch to dust."

That must be the UN in the lower left corner there. As so often happens to builders of utopian Cities of The Future, Eldred Mowery was arrested several months later in an art insurance scam. Seems that in December 1966, he and an artist/carpenter friend broke into the Provincetown cottage of painter Hans Hoffman and made off with 41 paintings, which they tried to return to the insurance company for a reward. Only instead of insurance company executives, they handed the works over to undercover FBI agents.

Any photos or documentation in MoMA's archives remains to be explored.

The Joy of Bricks by Anthony Lane, Apr 2, 1998 [newyorker.com]
Apparently some brickers sussed out the photo last December, too[brothers-brick.com]
Mailer: A Biography, by Mary V. Dearborn [google books]
Buy Cannibals and Christians on AbeBooks [abebooks]

Choire's interview with Elizabeth Berkley reminded me of some unfinished Showgirls business here on greg.org.

Back in 2002, right after Beyer Blinder Belle released the first, banal master plans for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site, a parody critique circulated in the style of Herbert Muschamp, then the architecture critic for the NY Times. Finally, here it is:

A Critical Appraisal
Special to The New York Times

Striding down the row of design proposals for the World Trade Center site, balefully eyeing each inert mien and artificially enhanced plan, I was reminded of the scene in Showgirls where the choreographer grimly surveys his topless charges. Flicking a feather across their assembled nipples, he scolds, "Girls, if you are not erect, I'm not erect."

Ladies and gentlemen, I've seen the master plan proposals from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, and, to put it mildly, I'm not erect.

My heart sank as I watched John Beyer of the architectural firm Beyer Blinder Belle attempt to describe these hapless proposals. I was painfully reminded of another much more casual presentation one glorious autumn on Capri. The visionary Rem Koolhaas was holding forth on urban planning, shopping, life, and the smell of fresh basil. Wearing beautifully tailored trousers and a tight, cropped black top (need I add it was by Prada?) he gestured energetically as he spoke. With each gesture, his shirt rode up ever so slightly, revealing a tantalizing sliver of tan, taut tummy.

It is this kind of energetic gesture that those of us who care about contemporary architecture hunger for so desperately. Beyer Blinder Belle's work is occasionally competent: certainly their by-the-numbers renovation of Grand Central Terminal pleases the hordes of moronic commuters who stream through it each day, but it will come as no surprise that this recidivist pile of marble is of little interest to the infinitely more important audience of attractive young European architectural students who make pilgrimages to our city each year and can barely choke back their tears of disappointment. John Beyer, whose exposed torso would be unpleasant for even the more adventuresome New Yorker to contemplate, must shoulder the blame for this catastrophic failure.

It is now time to list these names: Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Elizabeth Diller and Ric Scofidio, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, Steven Holl, and, of course, Rem Koolhaas. There.

Is a little daring, a little excitement, a little sexiness too much to ask for on this sacred site? Lower Manhattan Development Corporation chairman John Whitehead and New York governor George Pataki would do well to rent a videotape of "All About Eve" and examine Bette Davis's behavior before the big party scene. Her character Margo Channing reaches into a candy dish and hesitates again and again before finally popping a candy into her mouth. This tantalizing motif "impulse, surrender, gratification" is the central one of the twenty-first century. It alone must provide the ideological blueprint for all architectural work being done anywhere in the world, including lower Manhattan. If this fails to make sense to the theme-park obsessed corporate apologists for big business, so be it.

In the interest of full disclosure, my proposal for the site will be revealed at a time and place of my choosing. Fasten your seatbelts, New York.

Ignore, if you can, the glaring error that Muschamp would never have made: the choreographer used ice cubes, not a feather. The irony is that not only did Muschamp's writing the last few years before his too-early death seem to cut loose, as if to meet his parodists in the sky, the fake WTC critique turned out too true by half: thanks to a sycophantic 1776 minstrel show from Daniel Libeskind and a chorus line of starchitects flashing their tits, the Port Authority's original proposal is right on track.

[via mouthfulsfood]
Previously: Surely, Hordes of Showgirls-Googling Architects Can't Be Wrong?

Shotgun! Does anyone know who wrote about visiting a gun show and the NRA convention for Spy? The caption under the photo of Charlton Heston was "Guns 'n Moses." The title of the magazine got everyone they talked to to open right up. To a guy whose idea of humorous magazine writing had been limited to Mad, it was a life-changing article.

[update: I guess it really is a joke that writes itself. ]

Much less get me one of thesehere sweet Obama banners.

After almost a week of daily trips past this sign/awning company with giant vinyl Obama - HOPE banners by Shepherd Fairey on either side, I resolved to scale the building and steal them. One, at least one.

Alas, my diabolical plan was thwarted by the friendly guy laughing and waving at me as I snapped a photo--and the two hungry kids in the backseat. Oh well. And anyway, it looks like there's a HopeCam perched above it.

What looked like a cement plant or oil refinery--but what obviously was neither--on a jet-lag-early walk through downtown Los Angeles turned out to be Coop Himmelblau's High School for the Performing Arts, an aggressively industrial design that will serve as the eastern gateway to a massive cultural redevelopment plan in the works for Grand Avenue.

The original workaday design for a much-needed high school was given the boot, replaced by the PA school, with a huge event space, at the behest of Eli Broad, noted philanthropist.

Recently, Broad has been noted for not giving away quite enough of his billions of dollars or contemporary artworks as others think he should. The Coop school is significantly over budget and behind schedule, and critics complain that the LA School District is stuck footing the bill. [The project has already blown through the figures in Nicolai Ouroussoff's 2003 article on the project, supposedly reaching over $200 million.]

That prow-like tower will be sweet, though, no doubt an inspiration to thousands of future kings of the world. My favorite part about the building is the perforated, skeletal tower's dramatic contrast/challenge to the cliff-like solidity of Rafael Moneo's LA Cathedral and its bell tower. I'm not sure if freeway appeal is the most important priority for LA's high schools, but this one sure has it.

Richard Serra. In the Broad. With a 600-ton steel plate.

Serra's always good for a zippy quote, and even though I've heard his and Lynne Cooke's routine before, I figured it'd be worth the trip to hear them speak at LACMA tonight. [Worth the trip from our hotel in downtown LA, that is, not necessarily from NYC.]

Serra's in town to install a wall drawing in the Broad Museum, and the "post-pop post-surrealist" collection he finds himself surrounded by has apparently been weighing on his mind. And this, a guy who knows from weight.

In 1991 or so, I got a bit too obsessed about an offhand grand unifying theory Serra tossed off at a Cy Twombly panel discussion at MoMA. [It went something like, "the 20th century is based on a misreading of Cezanne."] When I met Serra a few years later, I mentioned that I'd been wondering what he was talking about; I think I'd hoped to be let in on some kind of secret Art History, but he didn't remember ever saying it, and had to improvise an explanation anew.

After hearing him speak enough times, I see it's just a habit of his to constantly try to suggest contexts for him and his work, both for us as viewers and analysts, but also for him as a viewer and student of the work that's come before--and that's now hanging or standing around his own.

[Tonight at LACMA, for example, he talked about how "Nauman, Hesse, Smithson, Long, and me" did this or that in response to minimalism, a conveniently historic grouping that elides Serra's less famous colleagues in the Sixties. You know, what's his name. Married to, uh. He actually made a reference to "your friend, who married, uh," and Cooke correctly identified the guy.]

Anyway, as he was a guest of the institution, Serra tried, or at least pretended to try not making pitiless fun at the Duchampian "hand-me-downs" that filled the BCAM--and by implication, the current art market/scene. In the 20th century, you were either Team Malevich or Team Duchamp, and most people went with Duchamp. He said. The last words out of his mouth before the Q&A were a stage-muttered charge, calling for "the death of the found object."

Just sayin'.