For all my talk lately about satelloons, Olafur’s stayed very politely quiet about his own giant, swinging aluminum balls. Maybe because he only has one? Seriously, though, I hope it’s an edition.
Your Imploded View is a 51-inch diameter, 660-lb polished aluminum sphere that swings like a pendulum. It dates from way back to 2001 [!], though it’s not clear when it was first realized. At that weight and dimension, it has to be solid, which is rather spectacular. Such precision-manufactured geometry reminds me of the fantastically produced objets de science like Le Grand K, the International Kilogram Prototype stored outside Paris.
Anyway, the Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St Louis purchased Your Imploded View in 2005, and it’s on permanent view in the atrium there. Kemper curator Meredith Malone’s YouTube video is nice and informative, but HD would be better for capturing the sculpture’s experience. Don’t miss they guy using the special, custom-made Your Carpet-Wrapped Pushing Trident to get the ball swinging.
Your Imploded View (2001) by Olafur Eliasson on permanent view at the Kemper Museum, St Louis [kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu]
Category: architecture
On Printing German Wallpaper & Richter’s Film
For their “Art of Two Germanys” show in 2008, LACMA recreated part of a 1966 gallery installation by Gerhard Richter called Volker Bradke, which was designed to mimic or reference the postwar German bourgeoisie’s penchant for ticky tacky floral wallpaper.
But instead of real wallpaper, the museum used an artifact from the original installation, loaned by the piece’s owner via the gallery: a rubber stamp roll with a design carved into it. LACMA’s curator and gallery manager talk here about printing up the walls, but for some reason, I just can’t get enough of this video of them actually doing it.
This reminds me a bit of Christopher Wool, and it’s a fantastic-looking method of generating an image. Or a design, or a surface, whatever you end up calling it. The fact that it’s a painted simulacrum and not actual wallpaper, though, seems pretty relevant, as does the curator’s instruction that “the printing is not supposed to look perfect.” It sounds like an early example of Richter reminding the viewer that he’s looking at an image, not the thing itself.
Anyway, this is all coming down today because Bradke is the subject of Richter’s only film, a 14-min black & white short which was part of the installation. It’s just been released on DVD, along with a book, »Volker Bradke« und das Prinzip der Unschärfe [“Volker Bradke and the Uncertainty Principle] by art historian Hubertus Butin. From what I can tell, the whole project was designed to turn Richter’s friend and studio assistant into a celebrity, using paintings, posters, banners, and a fawning profile film. We’ll see how the film turns out when it arrives; but so far, Richter doesn’t seem too compelled to revisit the medium. [via @gerhardrichter]
Wallpaper in Art of Two Germanys, part II [lacma blog]
That Minnesota Skyway For Sale Again/Still
In this difficult real estate environment, close followers of the used modernist Skyway market will note have reason to be optimistic. Even as asking prices have dropped nearly 40% in the last year,–from $79,500,to around $49,500–they are still way above 2002 and 2006 results of $1 and “a very small amount” that’s probably closer to $1 than $49,500, respectively.
SKYWAY FOR SALE – AGAIN!!! [minneapolis.craigslist.org, thanks sheree from aol]
City Desk Studio architects for all your used Skyway needs [citydeskstudio.com]
In Your Face, Detroit!
The nightly LED show on the facade of the new Motor City Casino in Detroit [via sweet juniper]
Multiverse a now-permanent installation by Leo Villareal at the National Gallery of Art:
I think it’s clear that when it comes to this sort of thing, DC clearly has Detroit beat!
Danish Moisture Farmers
Ten years, people. That’s how long it took me to spot this. Ten. Years. What can I say, I got no excuse. I let you down.
Olafur Eliasson, Double Sunset, 1999 [olafureliasson.net]
While I’m on the topic, my friend John Powers has been killing it with his new blog Star Wars Modern.
You may know him from such web awesomeness as Star Wars: A New Heap, which he published on Triple Canopy last year. Clearly, there’s more where that came from.
Temporary Waterfalls Return To Brooklyn
The BBC has nice footage of the mockup for Michael Arad’s World Trade Center Memorial waterfalls, which was constructed in Brooklyn last week. My impression: unexpectedly Olafur-esque.
Also, the [engineer?] guy saying it is to be an “Eternal Waterfall” that never gets turned off. Unless it gets cold or something. File that away for after the Memorial’s dedicated, when we will be able to see/hear if they actually turn the Eternal Waterfall on and off during operating hours, which will seem like the logical/inevitable thing to do.
9/11 waterfall design unveiled [bbc]
The East River School
Zaha Hadid’s Torqued Sheds
This is really a beauty of a Zaha Hadid takedown of her firm’s riverfront museum in Glasgow–and so much more.
I came for the roof-as-nth-facade condemnation:
And this futility just deepens… the building is an example of ‘Google Earth Urbanism’. That is to say; all this complexity can only really be seen from directly above. Without a spare helicopter, all you are really left with is the façade, which is marginally more interesting than your typical shed, and the blank slug-like form of the ‘swooshing’ S-shape, which meets the ground with all the elegance of a squished gastropod.
and stayed for the thorough routing of turn-of-the-century Stylist Modernism:
He says the competition-winning concept they had to work with was a system of ridges and valleys, which had to be translated into a structure.
Read that again.
So this is what has happened to the Modernists’ quest for a synthesis of the Engineer and the Architect in the last 80 years. Absolute disassociation. The architect wins the competition with a shape, which the brains then have to spend time figuring out how to solve. This isn’t exactly a full circle (the negation of the negation blah blah), but this is a very strange cultural position to be in, a truly postmodernist one. Now of course the Modernists’ quest for synthesis was vulgar and naïve, and of course this quasi-dialectical teleological view of the world and its cultural expressions had to be surpassed (ha!), but is this really where we’ve ended up, nearly forty years after Pruitt-Igoe and Complexity and Contradiction? The best architects in the world as decorators, as stylists? And what’s more – all that structure, all that difficulty, all of the real work of the building will be completely clad, both inside and out, expressed only as shape.
Zaha Hadid Architects – Purveyors of Architectural Melancholy [youyouidiot via things magazine]
A Still More Glorious Daybreak Awaits
I’ve been telling people in person all about Lucy Raven’s multimedia tour of Daybreak, Utah since it came out last fall; it’s way past time that I mention it here. Daybreak is a massive real estate development strategy disguised as an advanced, master-planned, Community of The Future. It’s Kennecott Copper’s parent company’s venture to maximize the value of tens of thousands of acres of land they’ve accumulated–and as often as not, filled or flooded or contaminated with the remnants of their century-old, open-pit mining operation–on the southwest side of the Salt Lake Valley. It’s a 70-year plan to build a 100,000 acre suburb.
Or it was. Or is. Or was. Raven’s text, photos, and interviews at Triple Canopy caught this industrial-scale city planning operation last year, just after the real estate market went off a cliff. To overextend the metaphor, Daybreak is lying on the ground, twitching, and not quite realizing what happened to it.
Anyway, the part I love to quote is Kennecott Land’s Myranda Baxter explaining Daybreak’s “village centers”, warmed over New Urbanist retail offerings for “all your basic daily needs”:
In other words, there’ll be a medium-sized grocery store, all your mom-and-pop restaurants and little cafes, bakeries, dry cleaner, hair dresser–but on a small. scale. There are offices above the shopping areas, and the parking, as you’ll notice, very little parking on the streets, because it’s all tucked. behind the buildings. So it becomes a very pedestrian-friendly area and not a strip mall.
One funny incident was, the last time the commercial director came here he said, “I love all the people you send my way, who are interested in opening businesses, however. If there are any more tanning salons–[laughs]–I have about 30 tanning salons that want to open a business here, and I don’t need any more applications.”
Daybreak, by Lucy Raven, Issue 7 [canopycanopycanopy.com]
‘Little Uglies’
I’ve had a research question simmering on the back burner for a while, trying to figure out what the history of modernism and contemporary art have been in Washington DC. Partly, it was the dearth of good modernist architecture that got me wondering, then a crash course in the history of contemporary art and official Washington generally, and the odd genesis of the Hirshhorn Museum specifically. Then there was some sporadic attempts at securing Washington’s place at the art world table [more on those later].
Then last spring, I attended a dinner in the State Department’s Diplomatic Reception Rooms. Though they were originally built in an off-the-shelf, 1950s corporate modernist style that matched the building, in 1969, Walter Annenberg, Richard Nixon’s newly appointed ambassador to Great Britain, gutted the space and installed the current veneer of neo-colonial splendor. That gut job stood in nicely for the essentially anti-modernist hostility of the Washington Establishment. Little did I know.
In the the latest batch of White House documents released by the National Archives and the Nixon Library this week is an incredible 1970 memo from Nixon to his chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, outlining a direct, political assault on the NEA’s support of “the modern art and music kick,” which he he associated with “the Kennedy-Shriver crowd,” art whose supporters “are 95 percent against us anyway.”
The LA Times’ Christopher Knight has some great context and quotes, but the full document is well worth a read [pdf]. My favorite part is the postscript, which has Annenberg’s fingerprints all over it:
P.S. I also also want a check made with regard to the incredibly atrocious modern art that has been scattered around the embassies around the world…I know that [Kenneth] Keating has done some cleaning out of the Embassy in New Delhi, but I want to know what they are doing in some of the other places One of the worst, incidentally, was [career Foreign Service Officer Richard H.] Davis in Rumania.
We, of course, cannot tell the Ambassadors what kind of art they personally can have, but I found in travelling around the world that many of our Ambassadors were displaying the moder art due to the fact that they were compelled to because of some committee which once was headed up by Mrs. Kefauver and where they were loaned some of these little uglies from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At least, I want a quiet check made–not one that is going to hit the newspapers and stir up all the troops–but I simply want it understood that this Administration is going to turn away from the policy of forcing our embassies abroad or those who receive assistance from the United States at home to move in the direction of off-beat art, music, and literature.
The “little uglies” probably came from MoMA’s International Council, which, along with the DC-based Woodward Foundation, often arranged embassy art loans.
Until the creation of the committee Nixon referred to, that is. The Art in Embassies Program was started in 1964 by Nancy Kefauver, who was selected by John and Jackie Kennedy for the post. In a 1990 NY Times history of the AIEP, David Scott, who helped Kefauver get going, recalled that Washington was scorning modernism just fine before Nixon took over:
“It was at a time when we were still fighting the battle of whether modern art was seditious or evil or un-American…As a result of the McCarthy period, people were very suspicious about having any government agency deal with abstract art. If you didn’t like the art, maybe the person was a Communist.”
Digging around, I’m kind of intrigued by Michael Krenn’s 2005 book Fall-out shelters for the human spirit: American art and the Cold War, which looks at the US Government’s interactions with the private art world, primarily through the State Dept, the USIA, and the Smithsonian. From the preview:
What the government hoped to accomplish and what the art community had I mind, however, were often at odds. Intense domestic controversies resulted, particularly surrounding the promotion of modern or abstract expressionist art. Ultimately, the exhibition of American art overseas was one of the most controversial Cold War initiatives undertaken by the United States.
At $50, though, I might need a little more than a Google Book preview.
Meanwhile, poking around MoMA’s archive site to try and see what some of these ‘little uglies’ might have been, I found the 1966 exhibition, “Two Decades of American Painting 1945-1965,” organized by Waldo Rasmussen, which included 111 works by 35 postwar artists, including Gene Davis, Hans Hoffman and Jasper Johns.
It was a straight-up museum exhibit, not embassy art, but it did travel to India and Australia from Japan, and was accompanied by a film program, The Experimental Film in America, which sounds specifically designed to give Nixon an aneurysm.
And the Johns that was in the show? the a White Flag painting from 1955, which the artist held onto until 1998, when he sold it to the Metropolitan Museum.
Delirious DC
At the 1931 Beaux Arts Ball, more than a dozen New York architects came dressed as their buildings: [l to r] A. Stewart Walker [Fuller Building], Leonard Schultze [Waldorf-Astoria], Ely Jaques Kahn [Squibb Building], William Van Alen [Chrysler Building, who clearly booked his own stylist], Ralph Walker [Irving Trust Company], and Joseph Freedlander [Museum of the City of New York].
Rem Koolhaas included the Ball in his 1978 history/”retroactive manifesto,” Delirious New York.
Which was hook enough for Lali Chetwynd, whose 2006 performance piece, “Delirious!” reimagined the Beaux Arts Ball as a skyscraper cocktail party. It was ably documented by Showstudio:
“Delirious!” was staged in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion designed by Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond, which comprised a giant, inflatable ovoid canopy atop a cylindrical amphitheater/event space.
Which, of course, bears a striking resemblance to the much-discussed, little-funded inflatable balloon space Diller Scofidio + Renfro have designed for the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC.
So now we have some idea what will go down in the Hirshhorn Balloon if and when it is realized: Liz Diller will appear at a $5,000-a-table benefit, dressed as her creation, and probably looking not a little like this:
but in light blue.
Or perhaps.
Soon after “Delirious!,” Chetwynd changed her first name to Spartacus. Tom Morton discussed the implications of this move in Frieze:
Chetwynd’s adopted moniker seems designed to make us stage a mock-heroic mini-drama in our minds, in which she persuades a band of artists to stop pitting themselves against each other and instead revolt against their masters. Push this fantasy a little further (and Chetwynd’s art is nothing if not about pushing idle thoughts as far they’ll go), and we might imagine the defeated rebels refusing, pace Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film Spartacus, to identify their chief, instead claiming one after the other ‘I’m Spartacus’, only to be symbolically crucified by a poor auction result or a less than complimentary review.
If this flight of fancy resembles the absurd, unexpectedly telling narratives and motifs that characterize Chetwynd’s work, then this is no mistake. In her practice the epic and the everyday speak through each other in accents of giggled hope.
Giggled hope seems to be an apt operating principle for the Hirshhorn’s Balloon of Cultural Democracy. Is it not now time for us balloon lovers, each of us, to put on our puffy down coats, cinch our hoods around our noses, and raise the defiant cry to all who dare challenge or pooh-pooh us, “I’m Liz Diller!” “I’m Liz Diller!” To the Mall!
[hoodie image via old chum’s flickr, thanks to the purely coincidentally titled blog, an ambitious project collapsing]
Time To Make The Doughnut
Sweet. The Hirshhorn Museum is floating the idea to turn its central plaza into a 4-story event space by filling it with a giant temporary balloon pavilion by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The $5 million pavilion would be put up to house “performing arts, film series and conferences to foster a wide-ranging public debate on cultural values.”
It’s a grand and awesome-looking architectural gesture that would dance around the bureaucratic hurdles any permanent structures on the Mall would face. The key to its success, obviously, is the programming.
The popularity of the Hirshhorn’s Afterhours DJ parties is proof of concept for courtyard events. But that sounds like barely the tip of the programming iceberg. Think of the Hans Ulrich Obrist-era Serpentine, which fills the temporary pavilion with concerts and and 24-hr lecture marathons–bring your sleeping bag! And of course, you can throw one helluva benefit dinner in that thing.
A lot of work to be done, but it’s nice to see the folks at the Hirshhorn are well-versed in the grand tradition of implausible balloon interventions on the National Mall. And with the even grander tradition of talking to the New York Times, not the local Washington Post, when you want to make cultural attention.
UPDATE: aha. Score another one for the bloggers. Here’s then-new Hirshhorn director Richard Koshalek talking to Tyler Green in April [!] about his plans:
We really want to engage the arts in big themes not just in the galleries, but outside the museum, say in a tent-type structure on the National Mall. One of these events would be in the fall and one would be in the spring, in a kind of inflatable building. The structure would house 500-1000 people and we’d have programming that includes everyone, from trustees to directors to curators to artists. [Koshalek showed me drawings of what the tent might look like.] It’s about where the cultural institution needs to go in the future to be relevant.
In Washington, a Different Kind of Bubble [nyt via tropolism chad]
Bubbly Museums 2.0
Robin Pogrebin reports on all the museums waking up with a financial and strategic hangover after a decade of Bilbao Effect-ed building.
It’s good, obvious-and-not-just-in-hindsight stuff. I seem to recall during the midst of the boom, the American Cinematheque in Paris blew its wad on a Frank Gehry building it couldn’t handle. Now the Cinematheque’s run off of some guy’s dining table or whatever, and the Gehry building’s, uh, something else.
When MoMA picked Yoshio Taniguchi for their expansion, I translated a very similar article on Japan’s 1980s museum bubble from Yukio Futagawa’s GA Document 33: Japan’ 92.
I don’t have it in front of me, but the gist is roughly the same: Japanese cities felt a competitive urge to build trophy museums, which almost immediately began faltering on their collecting, programming, or operations because of incredible strategic, political, and financial short-sightedness. City fathers wrote one check, and they were done.
Taniguchi is just one architect whose reputation was formed in large part on his beautiful contributions to this bubbly museum era. I’ll try and track that article down.
Domes In Dutch Landscapes: Awesome Worlds Collide
I love it when several plans come together. Apparently, not all the Dutch Google Maps landscapes camo’d out by the Military Intelligence Department are actually sensitive sites. And some sites will toggle in and out of camouflage without warning or explanation.
One such site is the southern town of Schoonhoven, which has been poly’d off the map for most of the last four years, for no security reason at all.
It’s no secret that NATO operated a SATCOM weather station on the north edge of town. The giant, geodesic dome that hid the doppler equipment is a prominent roadside landmark. But the base was decommissioned in 2005, just before Google’s contractor, AeroData, began its hi-res geoimaging flights over the Benelux region.
It was too late to get off the Defense Department’s polygon list, though, and so the entire town is obscured, even the Pegasus Steakhouse [above].
By 2008, with plans for the residential redevelopment of the abandoned base well under way, it was reported that townsfolk were finally being promised year-round, un-camouflaged Google Earth access to their homes. Maybe today was just a bad day.
06-2008: No More Blind Spot [ad.nl, image via ad.nl]
Urbex – NATO Schoonhoven photoset by Marc Duiker [flickr]
I GET IT. Le Corbusier Was A Totalitarian
Wow, who tore up Theodore Dalrymple’s urban fabric and replaced it with a tower in a garden?
If there were no conservative polemic blogs for cranky, reactionary modernism haters, I’m sure the Manhattan Institute would’ve invented them. Oy.
The Architect as Totalitarian [city-journal.org via @bldgblog]
The Roni Horn Memorial Signage System
Pentagram has nice coverage of Abbott Miller’s work for the crisp signage and graphics systems at Thom Mayne’s spectacular new building for the Cooper Union.
Which looks, in some of its particulars, quite like Roni Horn sculptures.
I look forward to hearing that Cooper Union students and faculty eventually learn to read the backsides/bottoms of the signs, too. And that the barcode-like patterns start to appear on peoples’ business cards. [Do professors have business cards?]
Kind of like how Rem Koolhaas/AMO made that awesome proposal for an EU flag by extruding the colors of all the member states’ flags across the field.
If I were a hostel-type, would definitely sew that on my backpack.
New Work: The Cooper Union [pentagram via greg.org reader br]