Though there was some buzz about the “Chinese Embassy” on 42nd Street, which is actually the UN Mission, I wasn’t seeing anything in the twitterstream about the protesting the arrest and detention of Ai Weiwei by restaging a global version of his installation, 1,001 Chairs at the actual Chinese Embassy in Washington DC.
So we set out, with a toy high chair, just in case. Good thing.
We rounded the corner, and the street in front of I.M. Pei’s imposing limestone structure was as empty as the rest of the closed-off, empty embassy loop. We took a picture.
Then we decided to head closer, and a good thing, too. Because there was another chair after all.
And a couple being sat in, by five protestors, including two in Free Ai Weiwei t-shirts and two in funny hats. We stopped, added our chair, checked in on the protest [“there’ve been a few”], took some pictures, and took off. A few minutes later on the walk home, the t-shirted pair passed us on their bikes and waved.
Author: greg
Linked Hybrid: Steven Holl Rebuilds The World Trade Center In Beijing
So Dan Hill’s posted another of his typically incisive analysis of an urban situation. This time it’s his extended and engrossing account of visiting Linked Hybrid, the massive urban development in Beijing, designed by Steven Holl Architects, which was just opening at the time [late 2009].
above and top via cityofsound
After being repeatedly shooed away by gun-toting guards from what Holl had pitched as “an open and porous public space,” Hill found his way in, and eventually ended up in the marketing office where there’s this poster of–what to call it without sounding utterly inappropriate? A bombshell? A landmine? A plane flying into a tower?:
More incredibly again, the adjacent wall features another poster of exaggerated Hybrid-like building on an urban skyline, under the phrase:
“Let citizens all over the world gather under the banner of the United States with the spirit of freedom.”
What can this possibly mean in this context? The absorption of the brand of ‘starchitecture’ is easy to see in a culture shifting through the gears of consumer culture, but of the brand of the United States?
That’s no moon. It’s the proposal for Memorial Square, the World Trade Center site put forward in 2002 by Holl, Charles Gwathmey, Richard Meier, and Peter Eisenman, or as they called themselves at the time, the Dream Team.
Memorial Square, 2002, “Dream Team,” image via renewnyc.org
At the time–the day after the unveiling, actually, at a screening of my short film, Souvenir (November 2001), which was followed by Etienne Sauret’s incredible documentary short, The First 24 Hours–I recognized the form the Dream Team was proposing as a gargantuan evocation of the fragments of the World Trade Center’s facade.
They denied the reference, even as they awkwardly argued and edited around it on the Charlie Rose Show. But I think it’s self-evident. Anyone wanting to argue otherwise to me should read those two posts and the links within first. Then I’ll tell you my story about asking Eisenman about it face-to-face.
What’s fascinating now, though, in rewatching that Charlie Rose episode, is not the Dream Team proposal’s basis in the wreckage of the World Trade Center, but its multiple similarities to Holl’s Linked Hybrid.
Holl and Meier especially discussed the Memorial Square proposal as primarily a public space, one which is entered from the city by “multiple portals.” Holl even calls the structure a “hybrid.”
While the Team took great pains to deny the proposal had any “signature” style, I would speculate otherwise. The overall concept of structure capturing “a moment” in history and memory comes from Eisenman’s proposal [above] for Herbert Muschamp’s WTC charette.
Meanwhile, the form is Holl’s, as is the idea that its entire surface would glow at night on one face. The rendering resembles nothing so much as the skyscraper cousin to Holl’s residence for the Swiss ambassador to Washington.
Dan Hill makes a persuasive critique of the simultaneous successes of Linked Hybrid as a structure and its failure as the open urban experience Holl envisioned. And it’s tempting to take comfort from afar and tut-tut the clunky shortcomings of Chinese modernization. But
are the urban and sociological failures of Linked Hybrid really any better or worse than the manipulated politicized mess that Daniel Libeskind’s World Trade Center plan has wrought?
I think the more sobering path is to recognize the remarkable extent to which Holl succeeded in realizing his Dream Team’s proposal for downtown Manhattan in Beijing–and to acknowledge that, there but for the grace of George Pataki go we.
Linked Hybrid’s marketers invite “citizens all over the world [to] gather under the banner of the United States with the spirit of freedom.” But on this day, when citizens all over the world gather to protest the continued imprisonment of Ai Weiwei, the co-creator [with Swiss architects Herzog & deMeuron] of the China’s most famous public building, the Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium, can we really say “our” public sphere is superior, or even free?
Architecturally speaking, at least, we are all New Yorkers now, and Beijingers, too.
[2018 UPDATE: In 2018 The New York Times reports that five women who worked with Meier, either at his firm or as a contractor, have come forward to say the architect made aggressive and unwanted sexual advances and propositions to them. The report also makes painfully clear that Meier’s behavior was widely known for a long time, and that his colleagues and partners did basically nothing to stop it beyond occasionally warning young employees to not find themselves alone with him. This update has been added to every post on greg.org pertaining to Meier or his work.]
Source Material
What is the point of books if you’re just going to store them out of sight?
I mean, just look at the back cover of A.R.T. Press’s 1992 interview of Vija Celmins by Chuck Close. If only I’d had this book somewhere besides my storage unit all these years, I might’ve realized sooner that what I’ve been doing, basically, is reconstructing the pile of photos on Vija Celmin’s desk.
An Artistic Discovery: The Congressional Art Competition
I know what it is, and what it’s for, and where it is, and what what. But still.
In a year when politicians’ considerations of art have had considerable impact on art, artists, and the art world, it is fascinating to consider the official guidelines [pdf] for the Congressional Art Competition.
Founded in 1982, the Congressional Art Competition offers high school-age artists in each congressional district the chance to have their work exhibited on Capitol Hill, or in their representative’s offices, for an entire year.
Each entry must be original in concept, design, and execution and may not violate any U.S. copyright laws. Any entry that has been copied from an existing photo (other than the student’s own), painting, graphic, advertisement, or any other work produced by another person is a violation of the competition rules and will not be accepted. Work entered must be in the original medium (that is, not a scanned reproduction of a painting or drawing).
…
Artwork must adhere to the policy of the House Office Building Commission. In accordance with this policy, exhibits depicting subjects of contemporary political controversy or a sensationalistic or gruesome nature are not allowed. It is necessary that all artwork be reviewed by the panel chaired by the Architect of the Capitol and any portion not in consonance with the Commission’s policy will be omitted from the exhibit. The panel will make the final decision regarding the suitability of all artwork for the Congressional Art Competition exhibition in the Capitol.
a href=”http://www.house.gov/house/ArtGuidelines.shtml”>An Artistic Discovery: The Congressional Art Competition [house.gov via patch.com, thx @artisphere]
Powhida Street View
As they say in Blurmany, this is ucking awesome.
You, a new print by WIlliam Powhida at 20×200.com [20×200.com]
Previously: Google Art Project, or Les Blurmoiselles d’Avignon
Blurmany and the pixelated sublime
That’s Where All The Deals Are Being Made These Days
You know how at the end of The Player, Griffin is talking on the car phone to his erstwhile rival-colleague Larry Levy, who’s driving through Century City, on his way to an AA meeting? And Griffin says, “Gee, Larry, I didn’t realize you had a drinking problem?” And Larry admits, “Well I don’t really, but that’s where all the deals are being made these days.”? You know that scene?
Maybe that’s how it was with orgies in the New York art world of the 1960s. They’re just where all the deals were being made.
Here’s an entry from Gary Comenas’ exhaustive and ever-growing timeline on warholstars.org:
c. 1961/62: ONDINE MEETS ANDY WARHOL AT AN ORGY. (PS423)
Ondine:
“I was at an orgy, and he [Warhol] was, ah, this great presence in the back of the room. And this orgy was run by a friend of mine, and, so, I said to this person, ‘Would you please mind throwing that thing [Warhol] out of here?’ And that thing was thrown out of there, and when he came up to me the next time, he said to me, ‘Nobody has ever thrown me out of a party.’ He said, ‘You know? don’t you know who I am?’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t give a good flying f**k who you are. You just weren’t there. You weren’t involved…'” (PS423)
JANUARY 31 – FEBRUARY 18, 1961: “JASPER JOHNS: DRAWINGS, SCULPTURES & LITHOGRAPHS” AT THE LEO CASTELLI GALLERY.
According to Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol, published in 2009, it was at this exhibition that Warhol first met Johns.
Oh, whoops, it looks like I accidentally cut and pasted part of the next entry in the timeline.
PS423 is Comenas’ own annotation system, a reference to Patrick S. Smith’s 1986 dissertation, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films (Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1986)
From Jasper Johns’ A History Of Orgies
Barbara Rose called this partially obscured page of text “The most tantalizing fragment” visible in Jasper Johns’ 1962 painting, Map, and speculated that it was “probably ripped from a paperback book Johns had in his studio.” The visible word “rebel” resonated with Rose’s idea that Map is akin to a battlefield map, and relates to the Civil War, the centennial of which was being commemorated when Johns, who had recently decamped for his native South Carolina, made the painting.
It turns out the page is from the short, 2-page preface to a hardcover, the 1960 US edition of Burgo Partridge’s 1958 book, A History of Orgies. I bought this book, which is basically one Oxford student’s quick tour through the dirty parts of the classics, followed by a brief history of sexual excesses and hypocritical moralizing in Europe, ending with a call to keep pushing modern society toward a Greek ideal of a sensible, guilt-free sexual culture.
A History of Orgies was apparently a good-, if not best-, seller, both in the UK and the US. After buying a copy online–strictly for research purposes, you understand–I skimmed through it. What I don’t know about orgies could fill several books, but its argument, even its thesis, frankly, seems a bit scattershot. Perhaps more lucid syntheses of orgies have followed Partridge’s? I’ll wait for the orgiast literati to chime in. But it was impossible for me to read the preface without thinking of it in terms of Johns’ work, and also his life in 1960-62, and the culture around him.
Rose calls the visible phrases “chosen and deliberately revealed,” and says they “participate in Johns’s game of peekaboo, which he plays with his audience, much as a stripper suggests that more will be revealed with each succeeding fan flutter,” which is a kind of hilarious image, given the actual source of the text.
And just as the brushstrokes teasingly obscure some of the text, I also can’t help wondering what’s behind, what we can never see: the other side of the page. There are at least three Johns works from this period–Canvas (1956), Fool’s House (1962), and Souvenir 2 (1964, below)–where the artist affixes smaller canvases face down on his larger work, depriving the viewer of knowing what lies underneath. I have no idea if there’s anything in the first page of Partridge’s preface that Johns wanted to not-show, but the full text of what he ended up not-showing is below.
Souvenir 2, 1964, which was in the Ganz collection until 1997 excellent discussion at Christie’s
In the previous post, I referenced the skepticism, voiced by Yve-Alain Bois, of the usefulness of identifying [and thus being tempted to interpret] all the raw materials in Rauschenberg’s combines. It’s not like there’s a unifying, hidden message, a Rauschenberg Code, waiting to be deciphered by some future Tom Hanks. But technology is rapidly making the once-impossible trivial, and art from the past is going to have to deal with it. It took me only a couple of Googling minutes to identify a text that Rose could only speculate on–and which Johns, if he ever meant for it to be identified, has certainly not discussed.
But this impact of instant, ubiquitous information reminds me of how Land Art, once intended to be remote and highly inaccessible, if not impossible to find, ends up on GPS systems and Google Maps. The times, they’re a-changing.
Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, the preface to Burgo Partridge’s A History of Orgies with pagination intact, and the texts visible in Johns’ Map in italics:
The Orgies Of Art History
Map, 1962, Jasper Johns, via moca.org
For her contribution to the Jasper Johns Gray (2007) catalogue, Barbara Rose writes about the history and significance of Map, 1962, the artist’s first big, gray masterpiece. Johns made it to raise money for his new Foundation for Contemporary Arts, which was founded to stage some performances of Merce Cunningham. Marcia Weisman bought it out of Johns’ studio and ended up leaving it to MoCA.
Rose suggests that Johns’ Map paintings are akin to battlefield maps, and that the gray one, in fact, resonates with a particular Civil War battle, the Battle of Antietam. She cites Johns’ own South Carolina upbringing, the centennial commemoration of the Civil War that was in the news in 1960-2, and a series of paintings by Frank Stella which drew some of their titles from Civil War battlefields. [Rose was married to Stella at the time, of course, and also refers to one diptych from the series titled Jasper’s Dilemma.] Also, Rose writes, “The difficult realities of Johns’s personal life coincide with the idea that this map pictures a battlefield.”
After recounting some formalist skirmishes with General Clement Greenberg’s troops, Rose zooms in on the surface of the painting and on some of the collaged elements in Map that Johns intentionally left visible:
Topographically, the hills, ridges, and ravines of Johns’s gray Map suggest geological strata bursting. Paint washes over the surface like sea spume or waves eroding coastlines. Known borders are changed or blurred. This transgression of boundaries is a physical fact of art historical as well as personal significance. The surface is scarred and scraped in areas so that the printed matter sealed into it with adhesive encaustic is visible. The most tantalizing fragment is not newsprint but part of a page, probably ripped from a paperback book Johns had in his studio. One can make out the words “intense feelings of guilt and self-disgust,” as well as “rebel” and “orgiast.” These chosen and deliberately revealed phrases participate in Johns’s game of peekaboo, which he plays with his audience, much as a stripper suggests that more will be revealed with each succeeding fan flutter.
Map detail, via Jasper Johns Gray
Lots of interesting stuff, but I am most fascinated by the overall strategy Rose adopts, of floating the connection to “the difficult realities of Johns’s personal life,” and then going both wide and deep about everything but.
This Week In Awkward Twitter Juxtapositions
I think Jason’s tuning that one a bit, but still.
I’ve had this one sitting on my desktop for a little while, actually.
Process Color Street View
I kid about Jon Rafman, but it’s out of love. Just check out this incredible pano of BF wherever stitched together from different CMYK separations. It could be a Rauschenberg or something. By which I mean it’d make a great painting or print.
And which is kind of what caught me up about it; I’m sure it’s just some automatic step in the Street View imaging process, but I always associate CMYK with print output, not screen. Maybe someone who knows this stuff better can explain the advantages of converting RGB to CMYK for images that are presumably never intended to leave the digital world.
2/12 update: thanks to a Guardian slideshow of 9-eyes, we now know this was shot on CM-4009, north of Polan, Spain. It also appears to be the effect of a wonky rear-facing camera. Similar spectral striations appear all along the road, interspersed with a patch of b/w or desaturated imagery knitted into the pano, which I assume isolates the effect to a single camera. The CCD striations contrast nicely though with the occasional appearance of their optical equivalents: old-school lens flares from the sun. Ironically, the particularly awesome glitch Rafnan highlighted seems to have been removed or reprocessed. Another reminder that Google is watching the watchers.
Previously:
Google Street View’s shiny balls
Google Lens Cap View
Walking Men, or the Google Street View Trike has a posse–who delete images of themselves when they’re published on blogs
The Satelloons Of Buckminster Fuller
You know, every once in a while, I think that it’s crazy to be considering satelloons as art instead of what they really were–aestheticized objects designed to be seen and exhibited.
And then I’ll catch a glimpse of Expo 67 somewhere, and realize I’m still well inside the bubble.
A still from The World of Buckminster Fuller, which is on DVD, available at Amazon, not ubu.com, why would it be?
Previous Expo67 posts:
not that anyone asked, but here’s Fuller’s own idea for the US Pavilion
on the American Painting Now show, organized by Alan Solomon
the Canadian fracas over Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire
Forgot how much I loved writing this post on art protestor/greenhouse owner John Czupryniak’s Newman knockoff, Voice of the Taxpayer
Expo 70 design finding the Expo 67 Pavilion hard to beat
Device For Producing Light Effects
This is basically the funniest Oskar Fischinger post you will ever read.
Oskar Fischinger’s Love Machine [lacmonfire]
Donald Trump Will Not Be President.
I went to the groundbreaking ceremony for MoMA’s new building. It was held in a large tent in the Sculpture Garden. The time came when all the VIPs were supposed to don ceremonial hardhats, and take their ceremonial shovels, and then take their first ceremonial photo-op scoops in the sandbox in front of the dais.
I was sitting on the far edge, and Mayor Giuliani’s security detail was standing next to me.
When a MoMA operative began putting the helmets on the VIPs’ heads, they tightened into a panic. “Oh, shit, not the hair,” they stage whispered. “NOT the hair.” Maybe they were praying, because no one could hear them but the Good Lord and myself, and I was actually praying for the helmet.
I was reminded of that extreme combover encounter as I watched this clip of Donald Trump nuzzling his mug into Giuliani’s drag queen cleavage. Trump’s part is somewhere on the back of his neck, just high enough that the rest of his hair looks like those stubby, shaving brush ponytails that were all too common in the early 1990s [insert mea culpa here].
I just point this out because at least Giuliani lost the combover before he went on his own ego- and business-prospect inflation tour by pretending to run for President.
Some Vija Celmins Interviews
This LACMA interview with Vija Celmins about her show there of early work is just great. [The show itself is great, too; it was first at the Menil.]
No sooner did I watch it, than Celmins’ name came up in the Jasper Johns Gray catalogue. And I decided that what’s needed is more Vija Celmins interviews.
And that’s when I realized that my expectation that there weren’t enough Celmins interviews was based on my reading of her work as so quiet and self-contained. In fact, Celmins herself is quite open, and gives lots of great, thoughtful interviews.
Here’s another from 2008, the Carnegie International:
Art21 did one, of course, but this clip’s only a minute long.
Simon Grant did a pretty long career-related interview with Celmins for Tate in 2007, which used the Pompidou’s drawings retrospective as its hook.
I started going through my photographs and newspaper clippings that I had collected -images of Second World War planes, a nuclear explosion at Bikini Atoll, an airship – and I made drawings of those.
Reading that, and thinking of the Menil/LACMA show, my being reminded of Joy Garnett’s paintings doesn’t seem that far afield after all.
Anyway.
Phong Bui’s 2010 interview is classic Brooklyn Rail: deep and specific on history and the work. Ah, see? Here’s the word I was looking for, the one that threw me off of Celmins’ interview path:
Rail: Guston also loved Morandi, whom I know you admire, and Morandi’s most admired painter was Chardin.
Celmins: I like Chardin, too.
Rail: Especially the late Chardins, depicting the modest interiors, which include kitchen maids in moments of reflection. They were generally painted with muted lighting and therefore created a quiet ambiance, which also is reinforced by the subdued color scheme. The series that made the depiction.
Celmins: You know that muteness exists in Vermeer, Chardin, and Morandi. I don’t know who else you would say, in contemporary art. Would you say Ryman? It’s hard to say.
Rail: It’d be hard to talk about silence or quietude.
But you know where THE Celmins interview is? In a book. Chuck Close interviewed Celmins, at Bill Bartman’s behest, and A.R.T. Press published it in 1992. I think I may even have that somewhere. I certainly thought about buying that etching of Saturn often enough. Gotta track that down.
Dwelling For Seclusion, By Observatorium
I’m trying to remember what made me think of this. I’m coming up blank.
In 1995, Geert van de Camp, Andre Dekker and Ruud Reutelingsperger decided to work together to create space which facilitated longer-term contemplation. They called their collaborative Observatorium.
In 1997, they set up their second Observatorium structure– in this case, a small, modernist house-like space made mostly of plywood bookshelves–at Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island. You could arrange to stay in it for 24 hours, a day and a night. It was like Rirkrit’s apartment replica at Passerby, but only for one person at a time. Like De Maria’s Lightning Field, only turned inward, for communing with an interior landscape.
Somewhere over the years, I’d gotten it in my head that the Observatorium was by another Rotterdam-based collective, Atelier van Lieshout, and I’d periodically try unsuccessfully to find it again.
Here is the Observatorium website [observatorium.org]
And their blog. [observatoriumrotterdam.blogspot.com]
Look, they’re at the Marin Headlands now, organizing a residency/workshop to address the use of the old Fort Barry Gymnasium building. [opentotheelements.wordpress.com]
They have a new book: Observatorium: Big Pieces Of Time [6 to 9 weeks?]