greg – Page 220

Shallow Waters Looking To Run Deep

Malcolm Mclaren gives Artforum 500 words on the occasion of his portrait series, Shallow:

I think our culture today can be summed up by two words: authenticity and karaoke. They can both fit together, but you’ve got to be a bloody magician to make that happen, you’ve got to be some extraordinary alchemist. And some of these contemporary artists are. Many contemporary artists spend their days trying very hard to authenticate a karaoke culture.

Not quite sure I agree with Malcolm Mclaren, but he’s quotable, so I’m quoting.

Jeff Koons On Adwords

interesting, i’d never have thought.

The Post-Apocalyptic Open-Pit Mines Are Alive With The Sound Of Music

Alright, so last night I made some wisecrack about a scene from Kevin Costner’s 1997 film The Postman, where a mutant general pacifies his slave army by showing The Sound of Music on a floating theater on a lake at the bottom of an open-pit mine, might be a mashup of a couple of Robert Smithson’s unrealized installations. Little did I know.
I rewatched the scene just now, and it’s positively Smithsonian. I remembered some things incorrectly. [I hadn’t seen the movie since Christmas Night, 1997, when I had a private screening–on what turned out to be opening night, whoops–at a desolate multiplex in Salt Lake City.] Like I’d forgotten how spectacular it is, really well-crafted and poetic, even, for what amounts to a single note in the film [hats off to cinematographer Stephen Windon and the wonderfully named production designer Ida Random].
And the slave soldier army isn’t floating around, watching; they’re perched on the tiers of the open pit mine; I got that mixed up with the harborside cinema scene in Cinema Paradiso: in The Postman, only the projectionist is floating, in his little booth that looks like the offspring of Smithson’s Floating Island and his Partially Collapsed Shed.
I’d also forgotten completely about Dolph Lundgren. As the scene opens, and the ersatz movie theater is revealed, the screen first fills with explosions, the opening credits of Dolph Lundgren’s Universal Soldier. But–unexpectedly!–the crowd of soldiers revolts and starts raining rocks down on the poor projectionist in his floating booth. He quickly changes the movie [beat] to The Sound of Music, and the mob is subdued.
In his Cinema Cavern, Smithson wanted to show only one film, Film On The Making [of] Cinema Cavern. But after a long day of killing in the mines, the “ultimate film-goers” in The Postman reject their own “making of” film, preferring instead the escapist fantasy of Julie Andrews, the singing, Nazi-thwarting nun.
Anyway, there are a bunch of tasty screencaps on flickr and after the jump. Enjoy.
previously: “truly ‘underground’ cinema”

Continue reading “The Post-Apocalyptic Open-Pit Mines Are Alive With The Sound Of Music”

Peter Coffin’s UFO Project In Gdansk

Spectacular. New York artist Peter Coffin flew a 7-meter, LED-studded, SMS-controlled flying saucer on unannounced trips around the harbor in Gdansk, Poland last month. The lighting and structure were created with London’s Cinimod Studio and with the help of the Art Production Fund and others. It just flew underneath a rescue unit helicopter, but it looks incredible.
Peter Coffin’s UFO Project, July 4th 2008 [cinimodstudio.com via andrewkreps]

“Truly ‘Underground’ Cinema”

I loved Cabinet before I wrote for them, and I love them after. In the latest issue, #30 The Underground, Colby Chamberlain looks at an awesome 1971 drawing by Robert Smithson titled, Toward the development of a Cinema Cavern or the movie goer as spelunker. [Colby’s piece is not online, but Smithson’s complete drawing is at the Estate site.]
According to a contemporaneous Artforum essay titled “A Cinematic Atopia,” Smithson described the project:

What I would like to do is build a cinema in a cave or an abandoned mine, and film the process of its construction. That film would be the only film shown in the cave. The projection booth would be made out of crude timbers, the screen carved out of a rock wall and painted white, the seats could be boulders. It would be a truly “underground” cinema….

Smithson’s interest in cinema was phenomenological: the idea that you sit there, motionless in the dark, experiencing a continuous stream of light and sound patterns. The Cinema Cavern’s closed, self-referential loop devolves into an abstract, multi-colored blur, with the “sluggish,” sloth-like movie goer none the wiser.
Colby puts Smithson’s cinema into context with the Underground-brand cinema of the day, as embodied by Stan VanDerBeek, Jonas Mekas, and friends. Which is fine and all; meanwhile, I’ve added the Cinema Cavern to the list of sketchy Smithson ideas I’d love to see realized here and now.
Part of me–the part who, admittedly, has not delved into the Smithson archives, and thus doesn’t know more than the single sketches–sees the Cavern Cinema as just as fully developed and thus, valid for realization, as, say, Floating Island. And part of me is still smarting for not getting to Les Arennes de Chaillot, the subterranean theater and couscous boite built in Paris by la Mexicaine de Perforation, a group of explorateurs urbains. [read my 2004 LMDP interview here.] And

Also on the list: the 1973 Bingham Copper Mining Pit – Utah Reclamation Project. Smithson called for a giant, revolving viewing platform at the bottom of Kennecott Copper’s mountain-sized hole on the western side of Salt Lake Valley, all the better “to survey nature’s gradual and inevitable reclamation of man’s invasive enterprise” with, my dear.
[Every time I fly into Salt Lake, I’m reminded of this drawing/collage, which I rather impulsively bid on–and lost–when it came up for auction in 1993. I later met and became friends with the winning bidder, but I suspect I lost my chance at the drawing; its next stop will most likely be a museum.]
But what if Smithson’s visions already have been realized, and I just didn’t realize it? What if the Cinema Cavern and the Bingham Copper Mining Pit were combined and installed in the post-civilizational, entropic future, offering a front-row seat to nature’s reclamation?
I don’t know if it’s in David Brin’s original mid-80’s sci-fi novel, but in the 1997 film version of The Postman, the dopey title character, played by Kevin Costner, has a showdown with a “hypersurvivalist militia leader named General Bethlehem [played by Will Patton.] In one of the funniest scenes in the unintentionally hilarious fiasco, Bethlehem pacifies his troops–scraggly, murderous slaves who float around on rafts and inner tubes in a giant, water-filled, open-pit mine–with movies. As the battered projector whirs to life, the a battleworn print of The Sound of Music
PDF of “A Cinematic Atopia” in portuguese and english [sescsp.org.br]
Cinema Cavern, 1971 – Robert Smithson Estate – Drawings [robertsmithson.com]

Salt Lake City Modern

SLC Mies, originally uploaded by gregorg.

I almost never associate Utah with great–or even good–architecture, and certainly not with modernism. Even though I’ve been head over heels for this eye-popping, uncompromisingly International Style house on Salt Lake City’s east bench for something like 25 years.

Before I knew who Mies was, I just liked it for its alien qualities. With the exception of a couple of steel beamed ski cabins, it literally looks like no other house in Utah. And then there’s that giant boulder. It always comes back to the boulder.

Whoever built this house in 1959 [IIRC] did it just right; the juxtaposition of the two forms, the balance of their sizes, the tension of their placement, is all nearly perfect.

As McMansionization has swept the state–and the neighborhood, where the low-key, low-ceilinged original homes are regularly scraped and replaced with jacked up stone dream chalets–I take a lot of smug satisfaction from knowing that the coolest house in town is totally off the local radar.

I figure the boulder and the busyness of the street will help preserve it, even if its architectural merits are lost on the SLC real estate community. Or maybe a bunch of those Eichler groupies from California will discover Salt Lake’s under-appreciated modernist heritage. There’s nothing this stunning, but there are quite a few decent 60’s modern houses in the Foothill Village area. [I’ve posted some more pictures on flickr.]

In The Driver’s Seat

Five years ago, someone in North Philadelphia committed suicide by getting hit by the Amtrak train I was riding. I was in the first car behind the engine, where we heard the impact and the aftermath.
I was kind of preoccupied by the incident for some months afterward, and I went so far as to try to identify the person who died, and to inquire with Amtrak about interviewing the engineers and train personnel about what had happened. Though I didn’t necessarily want [sic] to make a documentary about the experience, I found myself using the filmmaking process or conceit as a way to frame and make sense of what had happened. As if making a movie is reason in itself to get into peoples’ lives, losses, and traumas. Anyway, nothing came of it.
And I’m glad, especially after reading the account of Vaughn Thomas in the Guardian. He was driving a train in London when a man stepped off the platform to die.

Last year I killed a man [guardian.co.uk via i forget]

Is The Spiral Jetty Visible? Check USGS Elevation Data

So the geocachers I’ve relied on to provide the link to the USGS real time data about the elevation of the Great Salt Lake have rejiggered their site.
So here’s the link I’m using to see if the Spiral Jetty is visible, submerged, or high and dry.
The Jetty’s elevation is 4,197 feet above sea level, so with the lake level at 4,194, I suspect it’ll be high and dry tomorrow.
update: it was, and it’s spectacular, black-on-white, with the shimmering water just off the outer edge of the spiral. Also, we got a flat, which I had to change at the Jetty, which sucked. The flat, of course, not the Jetty.
USGS Water Surface Elevation, Great Salt Lake near Saline, UT [waterdata.usgs.gov]
Previously: lots of Jetty goodness on the greg.org

Welcome To Costco Country

We’re in Southern Utah at the moment, visiting family outside St. George, which you may know as the city with the Polo Outlet outside Zion National Park.
Last night, we went to my second cousin in-law’s wedding reception at a Mormon stake center in Santa Clara. [a stake is made of several wards, or congregations. a stake center is the same as a ward meetinghouse, only bigger. There’s a wardhouse roughly every ten blocks in this part of Utah.]
It was a very casual affair, with a western theme. The new couples’ lassos hung on a coat rack made with horseshoes at the entrance to the cultural hall. Centerpieces of rusted iron hardware, horseshoes, bandannas, and cowboy hats sat on each table, as did a bowl of butter mints the color of over-farmed soil. I’d say they were khaki, but except for me, this was not a khaki crowd.
Men were wearing plaid shirts, jeans, and boots. Kirkland Jeans were surprisingly popular. While I got the belt buckle right–I’d changed from my turquoise truck buckle to my Montana Silversmiths “G” buckle, it’s a wedding after all–and those madras Jack Purcells that have been on clearance sale at J. Crew since about five minutes after they were released. I could not imagine a more out-of-place pair of footwear if I tried. If it hadn’t been a family affair, I would have–should have–had my ass kicked, just on principle.
After the celebration, we came home and watched our pre-ordered Dark Knight tickets become worthless as the kids refused to sleep on schedule. I snuck an Almond Joy from the 36-count case and a Mexican Coke in a glass bottle, and we sat outside in the pitch black desert, spotting what we believed to be two satellites passing overhead.

On The Last WTC Staircase Standing

The Tribeca Tribune has some rather incredible shots of the last above-ground element of the World Trade Center, now dubbed the “Survivor Staircase,” being moved on the back of a flatbed truck for the second time this year.
Though it was uprooted from its original site, and it has lost its original base, the stair treads, at least, are being preserved for eventual installation in the WTC memorial/museum.
Watching the care and effort being expended on this deracinated staircase’s behalf, it’s worth remembering their totally arbitrary post-9/11 history. Though they’re revered as the only remaining fragments to survive the collapse of the World Trade Center, in fact, they’re the only above-ground fragments to survive the demolition and clearing and headlong rebuilding of the WTC site. They were damaged during the site cleanup and appear to have survived because they were located on the periphery of an access road, outside the active construction zone of The Bathtub.

The stairs were used to evacuate a day care center in 5 WTC, but when I posted about them in late June 2003 and for a long time afterward, they were apparently ignored. Architect Rafael Vinoly, who lost the competition to design the WTC site to Daniel Libeskind, betrayed no awareness of the staircase. In a speech that month criticizing Libeskind’s overwrought reverence for the Bathtub’s slurry wall–which had already been reconstructed and resurfaced several times by then–Vinoly went so far as to say that there was “no archaeology” left at the site, that every piece of architecture above and below ground had already been cleared.
It was only when they were finally slated for dismantling by the Pataki administration’s Port Authority–with some of the treads being used for the memorial plaza–that preservationists and survivors fought for their future. Last summer, the Spitzer administration announced the compromise: to incorporate the stairs into the stairs leading down to the memorial museum.
As Avi Schick, then chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation told the NY Times, the stairs would become an interpretive element so that memorial visitors are “experiencing the path of travel just as someone else experienced it.”
More or less.
Survivor Stairs Moved Again [tribecatrib via curbed]
Previously: Archaeology at WTC Site

Steve Guttenberg Writes Three Hours Each Day

-From the otherwise excellent Observer profile of recent NYC returnee Steve Guttenberg, which inexplicably leaves out one of his best New York projects, the Village People vehicle Can’t Stop The Music:

“I am a seducer, I’m a salesman,” [The Goot] said. “I’m trying to get people to buy my message. I do have a message. I’m as corny as Kansas in August. I’m as high as a kite on the Fourth of July. That’s from South Pacific, but yeah, I do have a message …”

Welcome To The Fly’s-Eye Dome

buckminster fuller sculpture at La Guardia Place, originally uploaded by yuko ‘n sherlock.

The Center for Architecture, Max Protetch and the Buckminster Fuller Institute have teamed up to exhibit two of the original Fly’s Eye domes, the last dome scheme that Fuller developed.

The original 10-ft diameter dome is at the gallery, and this vintage 26-ft version from 1976-7 is currently installed at LaGuardia Park, below Bleecker St, in the Village.

It’d take some engineering, maybe thread some systems and climate management through the structure, but I could totally see turning the largest version of the Fly’s Eye into a house somewhere. Just get some of that tasty Bosch aluminum beam and build your free-standing structure within the larger space. Sort of like FAR’s Wall House, only with a dome instead of a tent.

I’d like to think that the practical problems of dome living are due to the cheap-ass, DIY nature of most of the projects, and not to something inherent in the structure. But just by virtue of it’s being cedar shingle-proof, the Fly’s Eye Dome wins the Fuller Dome Off in my book.

the Fly’s Eye Dome exhibits run through Sept 14 or so [aiany.org]
Previously: Bucky chandelier almost makes up for the severe artifact/object shortage

And That’s The Way It Was

After seeing it posted here and there, I finally got around to reading the Times article on Rachel Barrett’s photo series of NYC newsstands.
The documentation & typology field has been well plowed, photography-wise, but I guess Barrett doesn’t have to necessarily break new ground to make good art.
Still, for my money–and I wish I’d been able to spend it, but I was literally like the fifth or sixth hold on it when it took over Andrew Kreps’ booth at the 2003 Armory Show, so I never had a chance–no newsstand-related art beats Cheyney Thompson’s spectacular, life-size painting of a newsstand on East 86th St, An Event Commencing in the Spring of 1997 (part 2).
Even back then, in 2003, when there were still newsstands aplenty, Cheyney’s work was already marking lost time; he’d painted the same newsstand three years before. Never mind that every detail–magazine covers, candies, drinks–were completely different, and yet somehow the same. And never mind the inherent futility of using an excruciatingly slow and laborious medium to capture a single instantiation of an everchanging media landscape. Or actually, mind all these things, which are embodied in the meticulously non-photorealistic brushwork.
According to the Times, Barrett’s photos have been overtaken by nostalgia for a disappearing streetscape. Fine with me; the only things I buy at newsstands are Dots and the occasional Sunday Times anyway. But Cheyney’s painting has me reminiscing about the good old days, too: the days when an art fair was a major event of discovery, where an energetic young painter would declare his presence with a work three or six years in the making, not three months. Ahh, 2003. Those were the days.
Yesterday’s News [nyt]
An Event Commencing in the Spring of 1997 (part 2), Cheyney Thompson, via Andrew Kreps Gallery [andrewkreps.com]
Michael Wilson wrote about Cheyney’s work in 2003 for Frieze [frieze.com]

You’re A MoMA Gallery, You’re Garbo’s Salary, You’re Cellophane

It’s been a low-intensity pleasure watching the pre-fab houses being constructed and installed for MoMA’s upcoming Home Delivery exhibition. For a variety of reasons, none of which involve seeing it completed in person, mind you, I like Kieran Timberlake’s Cellophane House the best so far.
The shortest explanation is it’s the one I could most see myself living in. Its vertical plan is urban and density-friendly. It’s extremely advanced and efficient in terms of its materials–the Bosch Rexroth extruded aluminum beams have the aesthetic sexiness, functional integrity, and off-the-shelf goodness that updates the innovations of the Eames House without merely aping its form. And its sustainability profile sounds excellent. Beyond this modernist idealism, it seems to truly extend and expand on the efficiency/quality promises of prefabrication; KT’s production paradigm of simultaneous component assembly is adapted from the automotive and aviation industries.

And part of the appeal may be the architects’ level of engagement and the amount of detail they’ve contributed to the Home Delivery construction blog, especially compared to some of the other firms. I loved this detail from a couple of weeks ago about bringing the finished building modules into the city from the factory in western New Jersey:

Time constraints, clearance limits for bridges and tunnels, and both local and federal Department of Transportation laws were taken into account to orchestrate the delivery of Cellophane House. New Jersey has a law which prohibits oversized loads from traveling on their roads at night, while New York has a law prohibiting oversized loads from traveling during the day. Therefore, all trucks will park on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge before nightfall, and cross the bridge into New York before daybreak. Rigging is scheduled to commence at 6:00 a.m.

Cellophane House: Delivery [momahomedelivery.org]
KieranTimberlake site [KieranTimberlake.com]
KT just put out a book/DVD about Cellophane House’s most immediate precursor, Loblolly House, which was built on a remote island in the Chesepeake Bay [amazon]

Opening Ceremonies

Wow, just wow. Paramilitaries forming the five rings and [apparently] performing the haka? Competitive hurdle-sawing? SWAT teams on Segways?? From the photos of Arirang-style military and police parades staged in cities around the country in advance of the Olympics, China is deadly serious about wresting the propaganda gold from Hitler’s Olympic legacy.
Anti-Terrorism Exercises in China [the big picture]