the making of, by greg allen
If you’re debating whether to join me at PS1 for my gallery tour among the selected exhibits, remember that many other things are going on at the same time:
Well, almost. I consolidated all my posts on The Atomic Revolution, the shockin’ awesome Military Industrial Complex comic that artist Ethan Persoff re-discovered. Now it’s a greg.org feature.
If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out online, Saturday at 3:30.
For a few days, anyway. I got my Memorial competition submission done, expensively printed at Kinko’s, and delivered. (The official Competition Site forbade hand delivery and said couriers must be “listed in the phone book,” a verification system clearly designed to thwart my plan if I missed the Fedex deadline: dress up as a bike messenger using gear from my Kozmo.com collection.)
Until I saw Ed Wyatt’s Times article about plans pouring in yesterday, I was pretty satisfied with my efforts. My idea’s still great, but now, I think I didn’t pack it carefully enough.
Faced with actually producing a thing that could explain my idea in a (hopefully, at least remotely) compelling way, I holed up with the computer, but without the weblog. Trust me, at 2AM, scanning schematics drawn with fabric paint at the Alexandria, VA Kinko’s, I longed for what The Gothamsts call the “all talk, no action” approach. (Scanning barely-dry paint is like washing your dog’s blanket; it’s better to use someone else’s machine.)
But webloggers can’t stay quiet for long, even if the competition rules preclude publicly identifying oneself with one’s design. Jeff Jarvis worked the competition into a sermon and kept posting (making me jealous of either his weekly magazine-crankin’ production discipline or the team of elves he had working on his poster). So now that it’s over, I’ll tell you, not what I did, but how I did it. Inevitably, I took the ex-consultant and GMAT-taker’s Princeton Review-like approach to the competition, imagining what the real goal should be and how the judging process would play out.
Substance moves ahead of Style
This stated objective for Stage I is not to choose The Memorial, but to choose “approximately five finalists” , who will develop their concepts in Stage II. If a design has enough substance, i.e., if it’s promising, clearly thought through, and successfully fulfills the Mission & Principles, jurors will want to see it developed further. But the Final Five is just one possible goal. You could also set out to be one of the 100 concepts that’ll probably be exhibited, or the 2-300 that’ll get published in some book. Or you could hit a sacrifice fly, submitting a concept that tries to impact the juror’s thinking/discussion. Imagine how 1,000 proposals to recognize firefighters separately might ripple through the selection process.
About “clearly thought through”
Maya Lin’s nearly abstract rendering of her Vietnam Memorial proposal is repeatedly cited as a competition precedent, but that belies the understanding it actually represented. Lin said she spent far more time on her written concept than on her drawings. One juror noted that the submission showed that “(s)he obviously knew what (s)he was talking about.” “Clearly thought through,” then, applies to the concept and the experience. It specifically doesn’t require deciding every detail, material, and elevation: that’s Stage II. Get the right balance of concept images, descriptive text, and relevant, evocative references.
Memorial is not Monument
So many times, people have conflated the two things. It’s understandable, given the monumental scale of the Towers. Last year, I quoted two German artists who said, “The traditional concept of a monument only encourages people to contemplate a hulking stone building and an abstracted past.”. I took Maya Lin at her word when she asked for “a new way of defining what a memorial can be.”
Design for yourself
Maya Lin called for people to submit “what [they] truly believe needs to be done there.” Handicapping the jurors to reverse-engineer the concept or designing to meet currently irreconcilable agendas, or playing it as a political game won’t work.
Produce for the process
We talked about it at the Charette; I imagine the judging process will comprise a series of filters, each with different criteria:
Sanity Check — move crackpot schemes into the Outsider Art bracket. Pick a few fascinating ones for the exhibit.
Elevator Pitch — Can it pass the 30-second test and get the meeting? (i.e., Does it appear compelling and smart/effective/interesting enough to warrant fuller evaluation?)
Clustering — There are only so many possibilities under the sun. Group all the Put Bush and Giuliani on Mount Rushmore proposals over here, all the How About A Gift From the French? proposals over there. Best of Breed will move on. Anything remotely French will be saved for public burning at the Republican convention.
Libeskind/Silverstein/Westfield Factor — Does a concept play well with other uses and forces on the site? Does it break the rules in a net-positive way? I figured a concept that stayed entirely within the competition’s parameters, that didn’t attempt to inform other aspects of the site, was shirking its mission.
Take the Heat — A Final Five concept will be subject to incredible pubic/family/political scrutiny, but only after they’re selected. I can’t imagine the jurors selecting a straw man concept they know will get pilloried. Unlike the Port Authority’s first attempt to redesign the site (which I, with forced idealism, choose to read as a negotiating ploy to gain public outrage-driven leverage over Silverstein and Westfield), playing hardball with the memorial won’t be tolerated.
Numbers
The unweighted probability of a concept making it to the Final Five is extremely low, but back-of-the-envelope calculations reveal submitting to be a worthwhile exercise. That–and hubris–lead me to believe my concept will get relatively serious consideration by jurors. And if it influences their minds as they choose a memorial, it’ll be well worth it.
# of registrants: 13,683
# who submitted: 10,000
minus # who meet submission criteria: 8,500
minus # of Outsider Art entries: 7,500
minus # of “traditional monuments”: 2,500
% that are evocative–beautiful, even–but ultimately unrealizable: 10
% that are conceptually interesting, but ultimately unrealizable: 10
% that break the rules, but whose concept obviously can’t survive to completion: 10
% that are compelling, but that have some dealbreaking shortcoming in terms of Mission/Principle: 20
% that are admirable descendants of the Vietnam Memorial, but which lack its refinement and staying power: 30
# of Stage II slots going to such entries: 2/5 or 3/6
Minimum percentile where I can, without agonizing arrogance, imagine my submission rankng among the 500 that are left: 80th
Where I actually rank it now, without having seen any other entries: 99.9th
Of course, I’m also sure (or at least I hope) there are proposals much better than mine.
I’d say “Come to my museum tour this Saturday,” but I just realized they booked my talk against Detroit Techno-god Richie Hawtin (aka Plakstikman), who’s performing in the Warm Up Series. I have no illusions.
On the occasion of the exhibition Site and Insight: an Assemblage of Artists, P.S.1 offers a series of museum tours, each led by an emerging collector or a curator for a private collection. Site and Insight is curated by Agnes Gund, one of New York’s most prominent collectors and patrons. Ms. Gund’s curatorial selections are informed by her experience as a collector and thus reflect her unique relationship to art and to artists.
These museum tours invite young collectors or curators of collections to present their views on works in P.S.1’s summer exhibitions and to provide insight into the processes behind collecting contemporary art. Led through the galleries by a collector, participants are introduced to the issues, questions, concerns, and inspiration which face a collector when viewing new work. The “collector’s eye” will be a new lens through which to experience contemporary art at P.S.1.
All events take place at 3:30pm and are free with museum admission ($6)
Sat., July 5th: Greg Allen (collector)
Sat., July 19th: Emily Braun (curator of the Leonard Lauder Collection)
Fri., August 1st: Agnes Gund (collector and Site and Insight curator)
Sat., August 16th: Anne Ellegood (curator of the Peter Norton
Collection)
Sat., August 30th: Bill Previdi (collector)
Film Forum is presenting a 3-week series, The Freed Unit and the Golden Age of MGM Musicals. Stuart Klawans gives a preview in yesterday’s Times and recommends the dark, slightly weird, The Band Wagon.. [By the way, it was written by Comden and Greene, directed by Vincente Minelli, and starred, um, Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse.]
The Band Wagon opens July 4, which means my PS1 museum tour is booked against the 3:15 Saturday screening. At least I don’t have to compete directly with Betty Comden, who’s making a personal appearance after the 5:45 Monday show…
Must. Learn. To. Photoshop. Properly.
Must. Learn. Illustrator.
Must. Admit. Powerpoint. Is. Not. A. Real. Graphics. Program.
Must. Say, puffy fabric paint and a scanner is easier than learning Form-Z.
Must. Say, I have newfound appreciation for the way artists’ studios accrete materials and tools. You can’t just go out and buy some of that stuff.
Must. Add, that the world of craft supply stores is actually a solar system of tinier worlds: the claymolding world, the tole painting world, the modelmaking world, the balsa world, the cast-and-paint-your-own-doll-head world, the make-your-own-gel-filled-candles-or-soap world. Oh, and the puffy fabric paint world.
Finally, for the the half dozen people who are as intrigued by The Atomic Revolution, the Cold War propaganda comic Ethan Persoff put online, here is at least part of the story of its origins.
In the MIT speech I posted last week, Rafael Vinoly made a comment that there was “no archaeology left” at the WTC site. It had been stripped to bedrock. The Bathtub/slurry wall had to be rebuilt/refaced/replaced already. The Twin Towers’ footprints themselves now only exist as coordinates in an XYZ grid. I went to the site yesterday morning to map out my idea for the Memorial Competion, and to take reference pictures, and I found there IS “archaeology” on the site.
For all the destruction, demoltion, clearing, and (now-begun) reconstruction, a part of the original WTC has been left standing. I’ve never heard anyone mention it, and I can’t find any reference to it online, but there it is, plain as day. It ain’t much, but it’s all there is.
About 50m west of Church St, the pedestrian entry point to the original plaza, a crumbling staircase runs from street level on Vesey St, to what used to be the plaza level (which is marked in green above). It connected to 5WTC, one of the low-rise buildings that framed the plaza. On this map, it’s the green stairway next to the Children’s Discovery Center.
Read entries on the WTC Memorial Competition or more far-ranging memorial topics
[6/23 updates: in the Times, Glenn Collins writes about rebuilding/stabilization efforts for the wall. And a WSJ story about the successful evacuation odyssey of the Children’s Discovery Center.]
It’s been a while since I’ve posted about working on Souvenir November 2001, my first short. I decided a while ago that it really needed a proper sound edit, but my new Final Cut Pro install has had problems opening the project, and writing has distracted me from debugging.
Still, this week, I met with a cool young composer, Avery J. Brooks, about redoing the soundtrack for the film. We had a productive, fascinating discussion. Avery’s a friend of a friend (Fred Benenson, who, it turns out, is interning for Peter at Gizmodo. Is there anyone not working for Nick Denton these days?), and is alarmingly talented. Watching the current cut of SN01, he spotted emotional and narrative cues in the music that I never noticed.
Intuited, maybe, but never articulated. Jonah and I put tracks down by feel, more or less. Avery labelled one track “success,” another “disappointment,” another “random,” and so on, which mapped pretty closely to the main character’s emotional state as he half-blindly searches for a memorial he doesn’t know much about.
It’ll make a good summer project, we decided, and I’ll post updates of our discussion and clips as we go along. Meanwhile, check out Avery’s own site, where he posts performance info and some examples of his work.
judging from this train car, cel phones strapped to heads, sucking conversations out of us = the start of the matrix.
Turner Classic Movies is showing a dozen Bollywood classics on Thursdays in June, introduced by Ismail Merchant. As might be expected whenever Merchant’s involved, the movie menu reads somewhere between vegetarian and vegan: noble, needs some spice, and definitely not enough cheese.
But that’s just how it looks to a guy who discovered Bollywood through Diesel Jeans commercials and Namaste America, an Indian music video show on NYC’s public access channel Saturday mornings. Merchant/Ivory’s own meta-Bollywood film, Bombay Talkie is good, too, but unfortunately, it’s not in the series.
[via Scrubbles] The Golden Age of corporate comic books coincides nicely with the Golden Age of industrial musicals. Jonathan Ward tells their history.
These lavishly produced sales-and-morale-boosting programs were usually performed only once or twice, at a company’s sales or management conference. Souvenir records were pressed in extremely small numbers and distributed only to the conference participants, making them very rare.
The non-comic comic book is often cited as a phenomenon of these troubled times…These garish publications are marked by horror, violence and practically everything but humor. They have evoked nation-wide condemnation.
In recent years a far different kind of “unfunny comic” has made an appearance. It is a publication, drawn in newspaper strip form, prepared for and distributed by American business concerns…These little books are becoming an important tool in industrial public relations. They go to stockholders, employes, schools, civic organizations, and the general public. As a medium of goodwill, they have proved extremely effective.
– New York Times, Sept. 1956
The driving force behind these “industrial comics”? Mr M. Philip Copp, a commercial artist-turned-agent-turned-publisher, a Connecticut sailing man from the Ivy League (well, he attended both Princeton and Yale), who set out, quixotically, to win over the leaders of the American Establishment for the “juvenile delinquency”-inducing medium they were, at that very moment, condemning— comic books.
During the Forties, Copp repped Noel Sickles, whose cinematic chiaroscuro style influenced generations of comic artists. Copp apparently sought to leverage this powerful style for Larger Purposes than just entertainment. He comped up a “Life of Jesus” comic book, but neither the Lord nor his churches provided, and the project was shelved.
Stiffed by God, Copp turned to Caesar, then Mammon: in early 1950, the State Department bought over one million copies of “Eight Great Americans,” in eleven languages, for its worldwide propaganda war against the Soviet Union. Then in September, Copp flipped another million copies of “The Korea Story,” a comic booklet denouncing the communist North Korean June 25th invasion of South Korea. It was distributed in the Mid-East and Asia as part of the State Dept’s “Campaign of Truth.”
1952 was at least as busy for the M. Philip Copp Publishing Company. He made commemorative comics for utility companies, followed by a 50th anniversary book, “Flight,” which was purchased in large runs by the Aircraft Industries Association, Douglas Aircraft, Lockheed, IBM, and GM. Oddly, his probable classic, “Crime, Corruption & Communism,” went unmentioned in the Times puff piece which is the source for many of these details.
Copp took a Company Man view of his comic books, calling himself “a ‘catalyst: [I] furnish the basic idea, bring together artists, writers and researchers, and out comes the finished product.” It may have been an attempt to reconcile the comic art he had an eye for with the highly circumscribed, WASP-y world he lived in. Copp didn’t quite finish school; he ran a job shop, selling the Latest Thing to his classmates, neighbors, and yacht club slipmates; his boat was only a 14’ knockabout, but he was funny and, later on, wrote glowing profiles of his sailing friends for the Times.
Maybe I’m imagining (or projecting), but Copp’s eager desire to please his native tribe has kind of a sadness to it. The Atomic Revolution is remarkable in part because of the incongruity of powerful artwork and the patently hollow Military Industrial message it delivers. But it hints at what might have been, if Copp’d had been less concerned with his standing at the yacht club and more concerned about his place among artists.
Related posts:
Part 1: On M. Philip Copp, The Military Industrial Complex’s Goto Guy For “Unfunny Comics”
Finding The Atomic Revolution: Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a winner
Q. You’re posting about magazine cruises?? If TMN told you to jump off the Empire State Building, would you?
A. Could I basejump?
A cruise consultant who had helped set up the trip was taken aback by the ambience. ‘I’ve never seen a cruise audience be so ornery to its guest speakers,’ he confided to me by the Stairmasters, adding, ‘and it’s not only the New Yorkers, either.’ He was grateful, though, that no one tried to unionize the crew’s largely Indonesian wait staff.
It’s part of Mr George Loper’s [pictured above] The Nation Cruise Anthology. Nick’s experience with one Nation editor begs the [gender biased. So sue me.] question, “Would YOU go on a cruise with this woman?”
Able efforts all, but for my money, David Foster Wallace is still king of the Reportage From Cruises You Don’t Want To Go On hill.
