via Eyeteeth | “File under: This could be art”
Can’t tell you how awesome this is. I would pay cash money to see the biennial that shows it.
Author: greg
The US Expo 67 Pavilion Has Seven Fathers
I’m getting pretty comfortable with my love affair/obsession with the US Pavilion at the Expo 67 in Montreal. I mean, it’s got Buckminster Fuller; Alan Solomon curating gigantic paintings; photomurals; and satelloons, what’s not to love, right?
So seeing Design for a Fair, the 1968 promo short film by Peter Chermayeff is awesome just as it is. The vintage footage and photos are some of the crispest I’ve seen, and it really is pretty crazy on a whole bunch of levels that this thing existed at all.
But maybe the greatest thing–even better than the giant graphic designed flags that look like a lost Ellsworth Kelly, as if there wasn’t enough giant, escalator-optimized, actual art already–and even better than the sheer soft power/propaganda play that was so drop-dead awesome it won the future for the day–is the voiceover.
Because the whole thing really sounds like Chermayeff’s idea. Every last bit of it, dome to nuts. It’s fantastic. Chermayeff, of course, is an architect and exhibition designer, and his former firm, Cambridge Seven Associates, or C7A, was contracted by the US Information Agency to produce the US Expo entry.
And so, as Chermayeff tells it, they knew they wanted a 3/4 geodesic dome, so they ordered one. And they wanted some giant art, so they ordered that. And the moon stuff, and the Hollywood and all the happy parts of American culture.
Now I don’t doubt a thing; I’m sure that’s exactly how it all went down. It’s just that that’s not how it’s typically remembered. Architects only remember Fuller; the art world only recognizes Solomon and the artists, not the venue or the show or the implications of it; and everything else is artifact and prop. [And the poor lunar photomural, I’ve hardly found anyone remembering that at all.]
The historical focus is either on the general awesomeness of the spectacle and mood, the political context and propaganda, or on the parts in isolation. What Design for a Fair reminds me of, though, is the visitor’s experience, the carefully orchestrated messaging, and the reality that it was orchestrated by a contractor working to a brief provided by the USIA. It was a government-funded gesamtkunstwerk, a massive piece of installation art before the fact, and probably one of the most cost-effective public diplomacy efforts of the Cold War era. It literally seems unimaginable today.
Pakistani Camo Landscape
These people are not wearing their videoconference faces.
According to the EXIF data, White House photographer Pete Souza took this photo at 4:05 PM, or 1:05 AM Abbottabad Time, five minutes in. They’re watching it as it happened. Which people already know, since it has garnered 455,000 views been blogged and retweeted and facebooked 455,000 times in a matter of hours.
Souza also asks us to “Please note: a classified document seen in this photo has been obscured.” Indeed, there it is. Funny how unobscured it looks at this size.
Let’s take a closer look:
Didn’t I just post something about collecting all the seals and emblems of government agencies?
Because that’s the seal for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency sticking out from underneath there. As you’d expect.
And that corner of landscape does look like the image of left sideyard of OBL’s compound. [image via ogleearth]
And now that you mention it, the pixelated image does look like the front gate area of the compound, just at an as-yet-unacknowledged high resolution. Of course, from here, it also kind of looks like a painting. I’ll get right on that.
Previously: Google Maps & the everchanging Dutch Camo Landscape
Partly In Jest
NPR interviewed former National Intelligence Director John Negroponte this morning. Steve Inskeep asked a too-long question about the multi-year intelligence work that resulted in yesterday’s attack on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan:
Did some of this happen while you were National Intelligence Director? Would this be the kind of level of detail that would get to the desk of some of the highest people in the intelligence hierarchy, of someone in the White House, if you just had a bit of information like, we think we might have a courier, would that be the kind of thing that–
Well, let’s put it this way: the President, President Obama said, and certainly President Bush before him, said that this was the, uh, highest, uh, priority. Very often when representatives or leaders of the intelligence or law enforcement community would come in to brief President Bush, one of the first questions he’d always ask, partly in jest, but also deadly serious, “Have you found him yet?”
I mean, this has been a major preoccupation of our leadership ever since 9/11 occurred.
Reminds me of GWB pretending to look for WMDs under the table at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
Also reminds me just how little we actually know of the hunt for OBL between Tora Bora and Abbottabad. The media likes to call itself the first version of history, so we should expect that large chunks of it will be fact-checked, corrected, or thrown out entirely.
Tuymanmatic
Apparently the first footage released from inside Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound was shot on an iPhone with Hipstamatic’s new Luc Tuymans filter.
Mission Accomplished
Previously, besides basically everything: Errol Morris talking about the Bush era with Stockholm Syndrome-afflicted WH photo editors.
The Great Letterhead Of The United States
I’ve written before about the “clean and presumptively powerful” design of various government letterheads I’ve come across in my recent archive diving.
And I must not be doing it right, because my searches for the expansive survey of the history of such official design, and for the comprehensive sourcebook containing the thousands of seals and emblems of various government agencies and offices keep coming up empty.
I mean, Total Information Awareness, right? Somebody must be keeping a list. Anybody? Bueller?
So I’m reduced at the moment to random click trains through Wikipedia, or to search diving in the digitized collections at the National Archives. Not very productive.
Though it has yielded some nice finds. Nothing spectacular, but then, that’s kind of the point of these designs. Up top, the United States Information Agency, once part of the State Department. That’s the director’s office letterhead there, with the smaller seal.
What I really like, in addition to the undesigned design, is how all the rest of the information is handled. Though a zip code does pop up occasionally, there’s almost never a street/mailing address. Or maybe there is; “Department of State comma Washington” would probably get you or your letter there in 2011 as easily as 1898.
But it’s the way information accretes, the way the document functions, that’s kind of cool, too. The tiny instruction for answering and the reference number on the upper left of this 1922 Dept. of Labor letter, for example. And all the stamps! Check out that received stamp: not just the date, but the time, too.
Anyway, I made a little flickr photoset of a few examples I’ve found. I’m looking forward to having my scattered, amateur enthusiasm swamped by the exhaustive review of government logo and letterhead design that some expert has already compiled. And then we can start talking about what I’m looking at this stuff for.
Previously: The Great Letterpress of The United States
And Furnish It With Love
I want to buy this world of chairs, but this signed, dated, handmade Judd ur-chair, from Flavin’s stash in Marfa, even, sold in 2003 for $60,000–and in 2007 for $29,000. At that rate, I figure by 2012, I’ll be able to just pick it up from the curb.
And then this unsigned, undated, handcarved teak chair from who knows where, the knuckleheads at Rago didn’t call me back about it–twice–and it ended at just $465.
Holy smokes, a Juddy stack of Coke and Pepsi cases? Is this for real, anonymous objects? Anonymous in that we don’t know the name of The Master of the Atlantic City Bottling Co. $300 at Kamelot. That hurts.
Which, I guess I could make my own for less–five Coke crates at $10-30 each–autoprogettazione x Coke. Sorry, no Pepsi.
I’ve been so focused on generating enough empty plastic Diet Coke bottles to be recycled into a dining roomful of Emeco With Coke 111 Navy Chairs, I haven’t even thought about the crates.
But seriously, I’m kind of kidding. Because as much as I’d like to close the loop and save the planet and all by turning my empties into chairs, the fact that normal Emeco chairs–recycled from cans–last 150 years, and this rPET one has a 5-year structural guarantee makes me a little uneasy. How long would one cast out of recycled glass bottles last?
The greg.org Evening Sale
Flipping through the lots for Christie’s upcoming contemporary sale feels like diving into the greg.org archives. Besides the Rauschenberg combine coming out of the Ganz’s closet, there’s also:
a great Johns White Numbers painting (1991) by Sturtevant. This text is nice, too:
To create her paintings, Sturtevant does not copy. She does not employ grids, squares, tracing paper or cameras. She summons her memory of images to recreate and reinvent them. By obsessively utilizing the identical materials and techniques as those who came before her, Sturtevant asserts her work is not about copying or appropriation, rather, the power and autonomy of originality.
Love that, so Pierre Menard.
Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nude #21 (1961) is up for sale again, too. In her biography of DC artist and JFK mistress Mary Pinchot Meyer, author Nina Burleigh mixed up #21 with #44. It was the former, not the latter, which was the subject of some controversy in Washington when it got yanked before the opening of the 1963 Gallery of Modern Art exhibit, “The Popular Image.” Burleigh said Meyer whispered about it to JFK, who laughed and kept it in. The painting in the show. But I looked it up, and no. The painting stayed out, probably because it included a nude next to an image of the sitting president. Or something. Anyway, censorship! Scandal! Sale!
And speaking of scandal and mystery, Los Angeles collector Richard Weisman is apparently selling one of his remaining sets of Warhol Athlete Series paintings, which he commissioned en masse back in the day.
They’re like the set that was reported stolen from his dining room a couple of years ago. The disappearance of which prompted LAPD’s art theft unit to release the awesomest wanted poster ever. Which I tried to Kickstart into production as the Find The Warhols Project, only Kickstarter and I had apparently not developed our audiences sufficiently to accept the idea of a project-as-critique. And the reward for which was discontinued anyway when Weisman decided to drop his insurance claim, because of the investigative hassle. Which art theft experts read as a sign that the theft was an interfamily job, and not the kind of thing that one likes to have reported out in all the papers if one can help it.
But it’s not that set; I checked. Instead, it’s the set Weisman tried to sell in China during the Olympics for $28 million. Now priced to move, with an estimate of just $4-6 million. Also, too bad the Warhols don’t need finding anymore; that poster looks really sweet. Guess I’ll save it for the retrospective.
Mister Rauschenberg’s Neighborhood
Christie’s is selling The Tower, a 1957 combine by Robert Rauschenberg which Victor and Sally Ganz bought from Betty Parsons in 1976. The work is a double portrait assembled from found, painted objects and light bulbs, and was originally part of the set for a Paul Taylor Dance Company production based on the myth of Adonis. The costumes for the production were designed by Rauschenberg’s partner Jasper Johns.
Did I say partner? I guess I meant neighbor. Here’s Christie’s quoting Paul Schimmel from his 2005 Combines exhibition catalogue:
While Rauschenberg’s work does respond to the painterly traditions of the 1950s, it does so in a manner that isolates the act of painting from the complete composition. For him, painting became a thing, an object treated similarly to Assemblage in which elements were organized on a non-hierarchical surface. Rauschenberg took aspects of Picasso and the Cubist collage, Kurt Schwitters, and the Surrealism of Joseph Cornell and created a three-dimensional, collage-based art. Together with Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg defined the American art of the 1950s; Pop art would have been inconceivable without their respective breakthroughs. Incidentally, many of their most important advancements were devised when they were most closely associated, living as neighbors, during the second half of the 1950s-the period during which The Tower (1957) was created.
[emphasis added for salient points regarding Short Circuit and for WTF, respective? Incidentally? Neighbors??, respectively.]
Schimmel goes on to note that the appearance here of a broom “anticipates Jasper Johns’s use of the broom in Fool’s House (1962), at a time when they were no longer neighbors.” Yet while he notes that “Lights and bulbs,” one of the defining elements of The Tower, “recur in numerous works”–of Rauschenberg–the fact that just months later, while they were still, uh, neighborly, Johns chose a light bulb as the subject of his first sculpture goes completely unmentioned.
Light Bulb (I), 1958, Jasper Johns, image: mcasd.org
Here is Post-War & Contemporary Deputy Co-Chair Laura Paulson in a gallery talk video,
The Tower is very autobiographical, using found imagery, found objects that would give you clues to aspects of Rauschenberg’s life. Rauschenberg was a gregarious, outgoing, very generous person, but he spoke often in sort of cryptic, very defined ways. And in Tower you have this sort of personage, which to me is just so perfectly Rauschenberg, you really feel this inside/outside aspect of it. And to me, that really defines how his art was: very autobiographical, giving you clues, but not necessarily the full story.
You don’t say.
It’s a little bit funny. One reason I’ve stayed so interested in Short Circuit has been the implications of finding the original Jasper Johns Flag on the creation myth of Flag itself. Because really, what would it mean if Johns’ first flag painting was actually shown inside his boyfriend’s combine? And he didn’t even get credited for it? What if Johns’ idea to paint the flag came from the same place as his idea to paint the map, Rauschenberg?
But what if it goes both ways? The Tower, Schimmel writes, dates from “the middle of Rauschenberg’s Combine period, which extends roughly from 1954 to 1962.” Which is, incidentally, also the period Johns and Rauschenberg were a couple. What if combines came from Johns? Or silk screening?
Or maybe it’s not so simplistic or binary. Maybe “their respective breakthroughs” were collaborative? Maybe they talked through and worked through “their most important advancements” together? How does Target with Plaster Casts relate to the combines of 1955? Or how do the combines relate to Johns’ object-laden paintings of the post-breakup era? What do the famously autobiographical, emotionally-charged-yet-obdurate works of these two artists reveal about each other, their life together, their production, and the culture in which they lived?
For three generations now, the art and art history worlds have been arguing for the separation of these two artists and the distinct, unknowable power of their “respective” achievements. Some day maybe we can tell the full story.
Lot 28, The Tower, 1957, est. $12,000,000-18,000,000 [christies.com]
The Free Speech Movement Monument Was Censored.
In 1989, a group of veteran activists organized the Berkeley Art Project to create a monument marking the 25th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. Mark Brest van Kempen’s conceptual proposal won the elaborate national competition and dialogue. It is a 6-inch diameter circle of earth surrounded by a granite circle that reads, “This soil and the air space extending above it shall not be a part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entity’s jurisdiction.”
Remarkably, the Berkeley University administration only accepted the monument on the condition that any reference at all to the Free Speech Movement be stricken from the work and any surrounding publicity.
A podcast I’d never heard of but really like now, 99% Invisible, has the story of the Free Speech Monument, and an interview with the artist.
For added perspective, check out the 1992 statement by FSM leader Michael Rossman, who opposed the selection of a conceptualist monument–until Berkeley’s president added to its conceptual power by censoring it:
If this story be remembered as part of the work, it will stand for the ages, or until a censorious jackhammer erases it from the Plaza. A century hence, our descendants may read the truth written in stone: What happened here in 1964 was so significant and so deeply contested that nearly thirty years later the university administration still would not permit faculty and students to honor its name, but instead insisted on censoring their political expression. In this perversely perfect monument to the FSM, they may read a larger truth applying far beyond the campus: that the issues opened in that conflict and era, of civil liberties and rights, had still not been resolved, but continued deeply contested.
The Invisible Monument To Free Speech [99percentinvisible.org via someone awesome I can’t remember who, but probably Geoff Manaugh, since he’s the subject of the previous episode]
The Berkeley Art Project, by Michael Rossman [mrossman.org]
Pass It On
In 1969, Rene Block in Berlin published Blaues Dreiecken, Blue Triangle, an instruction-based edition by Blinky Palermo. It includes a large triangular stencil, a tube of blue paint, a brush, and a print made with same.
The instruction sheet reads, “Malen Sie mit Hilfe der Schablone ein blaues Dreieck über eine Tür. Verschenken Sie dann das Original Blatt.” [“With the help of the template, paint a blue triangle over a door. Then give away the original sheet.”]
image: editionblockberlin.de
I wonder how often that has happened. The example shown at the Hirshhorn’s Blinky Palermo retrospective still includes the original print; the tube of paint looks undepleted, and that stencil doesn’t look like it was used to paint anything, including the triangle over the gallery doorway. [UPDATE: alright, I happened by the Hirshhorn again today, and took a closer look; the stencil does seem fresh, but the brush has been used at some point. And maybe the paint, too? Maybe Blinky painted each triangle print with the set itself? I hate ending everything with a question mark. This was 46/50, from Block, btw.]
All of which should surprise no one, I guess, conservators and exhibition practices being what they are.
Does anyone ever actually execute these things? Complete the artist’s instructions and realize, presumably, their intentions? Or have market forces condemned these kinds of works to permanent potentiality?
A Blue Triangle sold in Berlin for EUR34,000, and though it still contained the original, giveaway print, at least it did “contain traces of use.”
In 2009, artist Pierre Leguillon translated Palermo’s instruction to mean “give away the stencil,” and so he started just paintin’ Blue Triangles over doors all over the place. [Though it doesn’t appear that he used a Palermo edition, or even a stencil at all; he just taped them off. C’est complique.]
Do It Yourself (Target), 1960, Sonnabend Collection, image: MADRE
In 1960, Jasper Johns created Do It Yourself (Target), a framed drawing/diagram and collage of paint pots and brush. Given the artist, date, and that it’s a unique work under glass in his dealer’s collection, I would suspect that the denial of the invitation to collaborate is central to the work.
And yet, what happened to Target 1970, a mass-produced multiple similar to Do It Yourself (Target), which was included in MoMA’s catalogue for a 1971 Gemini G.E.L. retrospective? Those books are occasionally misdescribed as signed Johns editions [the signature is part of the offset print], and they’re offered for between $2500 and $75. Yet, even so, I’ve never seen one executed.
Does that mean the contingency of the void has been successfully translated to a different market segment? Or just that no one ever bothers to try to resell the “used” copies? Maybe it’d be interesting to buy a few of these Johns things, and give them to folks to execute.
In Fighting Cubists Of All Sorts
Mr. Kenyon Cox expresses the views of a sound artist and a rational human being in relation to the so-called art of the cubists and the futurists in an interview reported in the Magazine Section of THE SUNDAY TIMES. The cant of these people already fills the air. We all know too well that judgment of their silliness by common-sense methods will not avail to silence them. They may all be arrant humbugs, or some of them may be weak-minded persons who really believe their unintelligible markings and scratches signify something. Mr. Cox. well says:
This is not a sudden disruption or eruption in the history of art. It is the inevitable result of a tendency which has grown stronger and stronger during the last fifty years.
We need not dwell upon this branch of a particularly painful subject. Mr. Cox really says all there is to say about cubist “art.” But it should be borne in mind that this movement is surely a part of the general movement, discernible all over the world, to disrupt and degrade, if not to destroy, not only art, but literature and society, too. There is a kind of insanity extant which had its remote origin, it must be said, in the earlier developments of the democratic spirit. Its kinship to true democracy and to real freedom in thought, action, or expression, however, is slight and indefinite, but the cubists and futurists are own cousins to the anarchists in politics, the poets who defy syntax and decency, and all the would-be destroyers who with the pretense of trying to regenerate the world are really trying to block the wheels of progress in every direction.
There have been cubists and futurists in religion who have made of faith a mockery, that have their counterparts not only in politics but in all forms of art, including music, in the industrial movements and in philanthropy as well. Their only need seems to be that all that is old is bad, all that has been proved is false, all that has been cherished should be destroyed, all that is beautiful should be despised, all that is obvious should be ignored. Their power is wholly negative, they have nothing to replace the things they would exterminate.
They have no true message to impart, but there is no room, nevertheless, to doubt the potency of their appeal to many of the disheartened, embittered, and discontented, as well as the mentally ill-balanced. Of course, they will not destroy art, supplant literature with ribald nonsense, abolish economic law, or permanently retard the growth of nations. But we have no present hope that their influence will not grow and produce evil results. The mirth they cause encourages them, the ridicule they receive actually strengthens them. The only influence that can overcome them is sound education. What the cubist artists show is false art. The reasoning of their brothers in other fields is false. In fighting cubists of all sorts the trustworthy weapon is the truth. [Emphasis added.]
– A New York Times editorial, published March 16, 1913 condemning, among others, Brancusi, Duchamp, Matisse, and Rodin [nytimes.com]
Related: CUBISTS AND FUTURISTS ARE MAKING INSANITY PAY, by Kenyon Cox, National Academy of Art, March 16, 1913 [nyt]
On John R. Pierce, Or The Satellite Has Two Daddies
Everyone [sic] probably has the story tucked away in their head that science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke was the father of the communications satellite. I only recently realized, though, that satellites have, if not a thousand, then at least two fathers.
Dr. John R. Pierce was Executive Director of Bell Labs’ Research Communications Principles Division. He coined the word “transistor.” And in 1955, independent of Clarke’s 1945 conception of manned, geostationary satellites, Pierce published a proposal for an unmanned communications satellite.
“Orbital Radio Relays” was published in April 1955 in Jet Propulsion, by the American Rocket Society. Pierce calculated that relays in space would be useful for transoceanic communication and proposed three types:
(a) 100-foot reflecting spheres at an altitude of around 2,200 miles; (b) a 100-foot oriented plane mirror in a 24-hour orbit, at an altitude of 22,000 miles; (c) an active repeater in a 24-hour orbit.
He was concerned with maintaining proper orientation in cases (b) and (c), the geostationary orbits, and so concluded that (a), a 100-foot inflatable sphere, was the easiest, most feasible starting point.
So yes, Pierce’s proposal triggered NASA’s early work on Project Echo, and NASA teamed with Pierce’s Bell Labs to operate it. Meanwhile, by 1960, Pierce was already well along on developing the first commercial satellite, Telstar I, which launched in 1962.
I’m kind of blown away by how much major work Pierce was involved in, but also at the breadth of his contributions and interest. And yet I’d basically never heard of him [or, rather, made the connection.] He wrote regularly for a non-expert audience on the role of technology in art, music, and literature. His 1968 collected essays is titled, Science, Art, and Communication.
But he was no technological evangelist, no Marshall McLuhan-style pop guru. And certainly not even remotely avant-garde. As far as I can tell, there were no Billy Kluver-style artist collabos for John Pierce.
Pierce opened a speech about Echo I at the Economic Club of Chicago on Dec. 8, 1960 by quoting Milton:
Sweet Echo, Sweetest nymph–
Sweet Queen of Parley, Daughter of the Sphere!
So may’st thou be translated to the skies
And give resounding grace to all Heaven’s harmonies!
So even as he zeroed in on the cost and technical calcuations needed to realize them, Pierce had to have been conscious of the beauty, the aesthetic perfection, even, of the satelloons he conceived.
A few weeks ago, I stumbled across an insane collection of photo negatives relating to Project Echo, including this image, of Pierce at the Palmer House hotel for the Economic Club dinner, prepping a fully functioning demo how Echo I works. Fully functioning. They are not miming; there are actual vacuum tubes and whatnot underneath that transmitter dish and the horn antenna. And of course, there’s a chandelier-sized satelloon hanging from the ceiling. Dr. John R. Pierce is now my favorite performance artist, and I must collect the ephemera from his most important work.
Thomas Hirschhorn Stamps
I ♥ the fact that Switzerland had Thomas Hirschhorn make a series of stamps to mark his involvemente in the 2011 Venice Biennale almost as much as I ♥ Thomas Hirschhorn’s stamps.
Stamp | Crystal of Resistance [crystalofresistance.com]