Category: architecture

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?]

When Kurt Schwitters died in 1948, his lawyer inherited the art the artist had held onto. After his death in 1956, it was dispersed. Sidney Janis bought this 1922 Kurt Schwitters Merz collage, titled er, and then promptly sold it to Schwitter’s friend Mies van der Rohe, whose family held onto it until 2003, when they sold it for £105,650. [christies.com]

So I’m slowly making my way through the 35-page press release [!! those were the days, right?] for MoMA’s 1968-9 exhibition, “The Machine As Seen At The End Of The Mechanical Age,” which included a long-lost, recently stumbled-upon in a Tempe, Arizona shed, Dymaxion Car, and curator Pontus Hulten’s freshly researched and replicated magnum opus, a life-size model of Vladimir Tatlin’s 1920 Monument To The Third International. Some choice excerpts on the remaking of:

Work was based on only four photographs (a crucial one was discovered during the process), a few drawings, some written descriptions and information from the sole living assistant of Tatlin. Troels Andersen, Ulf Linde and Per Olof Ultvedt of the Stockholm Academy of Art prepared a small wooden working model. From this, carpenters Arne Holm and Eskil Nandorf built the reconstruction, which is 15 feet 5 inches high, about the same size as Tatlin’s.
The research and reconstruction took about a year. The tower was first exhibited in the Tatlin show at Moderna Museet in Stockholm last summer. It was shipped to the United States in nine crates and reassembled by Mr. Nandorf in the Museum Garden.

So many interesting things here. Andersen had been working with T.M. Shapiro, part of a group called the “Creative Collective,” which included Tatlin, who made the first Monument in 1919-20, to document and resuscitate [to use Nathalie Leleu’s term] the neglected/suppressed history of the Russian Avant-Garde. In the catalogue, Hulten wrote, “For the first time, it seemed possible that an artist-engineer materializes the synthesis of architecture and sculpture.”
Leleu took a detailed look at contemporary curators’ use of refabrications and replicas; the excerpt dealing with reconstructions of Tatlin’s Monument was published in 2007 by Tate Papers.
She notes how Hulten was “a major protagonist in at least two of these reconstructions,” the first at Moderna Museet in 1968, and then at the Pompidou in 1979 for his historic show, Paris-Moscow. The Paris model was substantially different from the Stockholm model, Leleu writes, in part because Shapiro had recovered additional notes and rebuilt a Monument himself in 1975, but also because by 1979, Hulten was able to access original Tatlin materials in Russian museums and archives which had previously been blocked.

In fact, because of last-minute denials of key loans by Soviet officials, Hulten’s show in 1968 consisted entirely of reconstructions, which led Hulten to dub his show “conceptual.” As it happens, this whole Tatlin saga and the fabrication of the Monument, was unfolding while the Moderna Museet was showing Andy Warhol’s work–including the Brillo Boxes, which would eventually become the subject of their own refabrication controversy.
It’s almost as if, while showing the dominant, if controversial, figure in American art, Hulten was simultaneously constructing an alternative to the arc of modernist and postwar art history. With an emphasis on the constructing, I guess.
Anyway, after an insurance dispute, the Parisian fabricators ended up making a new, Paris-style Monument for the Moderna Museet, and then consulting, along with Hulten, on the fabrication of additional Monuments in Moscow, one in London, and one in Los Angeles.
Maybe it’s clearer in her fuller paper, but in the Tate excerpt, Leleu refers to a “reconstruction project…in Washington,” which I think is actually the model built by USC Architecture School students for Maurice Tuchman’s LACMA 1980 exhibit, “The Avant-Garde in Russia,” which later traveled to the Hirshhorn.
The Model of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International: Reconstruction as an Instrument of Research and States of Knowledge [tate papers 2007]

So I’m searching through the New York Times archive, trying different combinations of keywords to find references to photomurals at the Museum of Modern Art, and I find this intriguing 1934 headline:

TWO FORSAKE ART TO FOUND A PARTY; Museum Modernists Prepare to Go to Louisiana at Once to Study Huey Long’s Ways. GRAY SHIRT THEIR SYMBOL Young Harvard Graduates Think Politics Needs More ‘Emotion’ and Less ‘Intellectualism.’

But the Times’ archives purchasing has been acting up for a few months [it’s not just me, right?], and my 10-pack of articles has been stuck at five since October, so I can’t click through to see who these Museum Modernists are.
And a couple of weeks ago, I could have searched the rest of the internet and not found the answer, but now that Google has added the complete run of Spy Magazine, a search for “Museum Modernists” and “Huey Long” turns up one result: the devastating 1988 Spy article by Michael Sorkin detailing the fascist and Nazi activities of the young Philip Johnson.
I mean, holy crap. Gray Shirt Their Symbol barely scratches the surface. Johnson’s fellow modernist was Alan Blackburn, the Museum’s executive director. As MoMA’s archive puts it, “Both Blackburn and Philip Johnson resigned from the Museum in December of 1934 to pursue outside interests.”
Those interests ranged from donating large sums of money to and founding a youth wing for raging anti-semitic demagogues such as William Lemke and Father Coughlin to spying for the Nazis during the invasion of Poland.
Where was Philip? Spy, Oct. 1988 [google books]
Here’s an image of the Times article and photo. Amazingly vague. [uncommonplace book]

Looking through the installation photos for Road To Victory, Edward Steichen’s 1942 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, I find myself asking two things:
Who took these photos, and how did they make them? [Of course, my real question is usually, Where are they now, which really means, where can I get some? But anyway.]
The first question turns out to be harder to answer than I thought. The MoMA Bulletin for the show states that over 90% of the images are from government agencies, military sources, or wire service/news agencies, but they lack any credit line. It’s slightly amusing that most of the photocredits in the Bulletin turn out to be for the installation photos, not the subject photo murals themselves. If Edward Steichen and Carl Sandburg are the creators of Road To Victory: The Propaganda Artwork, then Samuel H. Gottscho is a rephotographing appropriation artist 40 years ahead of Richard Prince. I’ll have to do some digging for an image checklist in the exhibition’s archives.

As for how these things were made, though, there is actually a footnote for that. And the answer is surprisingly painterly:

To make the large murals, the negatives were enlarged in sections upon strips of photographic paper forty inches wide. The museum wall was first sized, then covered with a layer of wallpaper, next with one of cloth, and then the photographs were pasted on the cloth by paper hangers. The seams were lightly airbrushed, imperfections were retouched by hand, and finally the whole mural was painted with dull varnish to eliminate the glaring reflections rendered by the surface of photographic paper.

Fascinating. Photo wallpaper? Overpainted photomurals?
While large prints in the show were mounted on boards, and some murals were affixed to freestanding walls and panels, others were applied straight to the museum’s walls. Given the anonymity of the images, I’m going to guess that approximately none of these prints or murals survived the exhibition, much less the war.