After riding the It’s a Small World ride half a dozen times on my first trip to Disneyland, I sent off for information on how to become an Imagineer. I was seven.
Yet somehow it’s taken me until this week to realize that the treacly animatronic Mary Blair masterpiece was originally created by Walt Disney at the behest of the Pepsi-Cola Corporation, which wanted a popular pavilion for the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Disney was apparently commissioned to design four corporate pavilions that fair.
According to Billy Kluver’s long, rambling account/apologia published in the 1972 book, Pavilion, Pepsi was in talks with Disney to produce the 1970 pavilion in Osaka, too, but Disney’s budgets were orders of magnitude too high. Disney’s withdrawal in late 1968 left Pepsi with an empty pavilion to fill, and it created the opportunity for E.A.T. to get involved.
It’s a small world after all.
Category: architecture
Joep van Lieshout: Those Who Can’t Do, Make Art
Now I’ve been a fan of Joep van Lieshout’s work for a long time, even if a lot of it’s too irreverent or too bombastically oversexualized to evangelize about regularly. [“You see, mom, he builds these room-sized uteruses with built-in bars…”]
But listening to his talk at Tate Modern last fall, it wasn’t his successes so much as his failures that stuck in my mind. The arc of the interview with curator Marcus Verhagen was the failure of AVL-Ville, Atelier Van Lieshout’s attempt to turn its Rotterdam waterfront studio complex into an independent, anarchic state, and how that flirtation with utopianism eventually led to the artist’s current dystopian fascination. The artist then explained his concept for a hyper-capitalist, sustainable, totalitarian slave city with a population of 200,000 that produces EUR7 billion in profits each year. So far so good [sic].
When it got to the Q&A, though, someone asked van Lieshout if his zero-impact utopia, with its organic urban farming, &c., was so great, why not keep developing it? He dismissed the idea, since it would involve actually running the thing, then it’d take expertise, and attention, and involvement with the bureaucracy, and anyway, who knows if it really works? [Obviously, I’m paraphrasing here.]
The gist of his reply, though, was reality’s too hard, so he’s leaving it as art.
Then when someone lobbed a generous softball of a question by describing his structures and installations as “cinematic,” van Lieshout punted again. Though he, too, conceives of his work as the sets upon which some unspecified drama unfolds, he never makes films, because he “doesn’t know how.”
I’d always thought of AVL-Ville as something of a conceit, but I had no idea how utterly dependent it was on the benign neglect of Dutch bureaucrats, and I certainly didn’t know how quickly and utterly it folded when faced with the most rudimentary challenge. And similarly, when even a clueless yahoo like me can figure out how to make a movie, expertise and technology just are not credible obstacles anymore.
Sure, art is not, by definition, the real world, but I’d always somehow considered it to be superior in its distinctiveness. And yet here was van Lieshout’s art being defined by its impractical, unproved inferiority in one case, and as the refuge for ignorance in another. We unconsciously give Art a presumption of cultural significance that, what do you know, it may not automatically deserve.
Too often, it gets considered only on its own terms, in a bubble, a world [sic] apart from the real world. It’s why the mediocrity of an artist like Mariko Mori gets taken seriously when it’s dwarfed technically and philosophically by CG and narratives of the best films and video games. Or why a piddly little spiral jetty is raised to masterpiece status while the US Army’s vast earthworks at the nearby Dugway Proving Grounds are ignored and detested. There’ll be a reckoning some day, a reality check, and a lot of art that was considered intrinsically valuable or important will end up as worthless oddities, like 19th century jewelry made from that most rare of metals at the time, aluminum.
Talking Art | Joep van Lieshout [tate.org.uk via imomus]
Meanwhile, In The American Pavilion…
Here’s a description of the American Pavilion at the Osaka ’70 Expo from an online exhibit at Columbia called, “Housing The Spectacle: The Emergence of America’s Domed Stadiums”:
Trying to best R. Buckminister Fuller’s Geodesic Dome built for the U.S. Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, the architects of the Expo 70 Pavilion first envisioned it as a huge floating sphere, inspired by NASA’s Apollo 11 mission that put the first man on the moon. This spherical scheme was the winning entry (submitted by Davis – Brody Architects and deHarak, Chermayeff & Geismar, Designers) in a competition sponsored by its future owner, the United States Information Agency (USIA). The competition scheme would have included exhibition space inside the sphere, and used its inner surface as a giant projection screen for continuously played film clips. The Pavilion ultimately erected at Osaka marked the birth of a new structural building type — the longspan, cable stiffened pneumatic dome — which would for a time become the predominant roof system over America’s emerging sports palaces. Remarkably, the U.S. Pavilion’s pneumatically supported 465 foot by 265 foot clear span dome was developed largely in response to Congress’ 50% reduction in the project’s budget. The completed Pavilion cost $450,000, which was about half the cost of the Montreal dome.
Those budget cuts meant The Great Balloon was replaced by a flat, quilted dome derided as “the world’s largest bunion pad.”
“Space balloons” were a prominent element in another of designs invited by the US Information Agency. According to an exasperated-sounding 1968 Architectural Forum review of ten of the eleven invitees, Isamu Noguchi proposed an underground exhibition space topped by a “vividly colored” and contoured playground landscape, comfortably shaded by a giant balloon. A space balloon.
Davis Brody’s winning plan for the Great Balloon originally included a spiral exhibition-filled ramp leading up to a panoramic platform where films would be projected on the entire upper half of the dome.
When that didn’t work out, the quest for giant, space exploration-evoking spheres, though, seems to have been moved inside. I can’t make much sense of the exhibition design or its purpose from photographs [the clearest picture I’ve seen so far is a tourist’s snapshot], but there were certainly some Project Echo-esque Mylar spheres floating in there.
Also, the entire surface of the earth berm walls were covered in silver Mylar.
Especially with the dot-covered spheres, you see how short a trip it is from the Triumph of the Cold War and the Space Race to the Age of Disco.
There are more and larger images at the Columbia site. [columbia.edu]
The US at Osaka, Arch Forum, Oct. 1968 [hosted at columbia.edu]
Previously considered unrelated. Now? Helmut Lang’s self-portrait, a scavenged, battered disco ball
Q: Was The Pepsi Pavilion Art?
Of course, I’d only need to recreate The Pepsi Pavilion from Osaka 70 if it didn’t exist anymore. Does it? No. As relations between Pepsi and Billy Kluver, the engineer founder of E.A.T., deteriorated over issues of budget and esoteric programming [Pepsi had originally envisioned their dome-shaped pavilion as a site of a string of rock concerts to entertain The Pepsi Generation coming to the Expo], Kluver argued that the entire Pavilion was a work of art and thus, a success, and thus, worthy of continued expenditure and preservation. Pepsi, literally, wasn’t buying:
As an artistic experiment, though, it can be considered a success, and according to Klüver deserved to be treated as an art work.
In the case of the Pavilion, he therefore suggested to Pepsi-Cola to officially recognize the total work as an art work, in order to give it a legal structure. In a letter to Donald Kendall, President of Pepsi-Cola, Inc., he wrote “Our legal relationship to Pepsi Cola has developed so that the artists are put in the category of commercial artists designing a commercial product. One consequence of this is that we must obtain rights from all artists and engineers and others involved, particularly with regard to use of the Pavilion after Expo ’70. Of course, there is no question of Pepsi’s ownership and right to use and exhibit the Pavilion. Our dilemma is whether the artists have created a work of art or a work of commercial art to which there are rights which must be guaranteed… A decision to recognize the Pepsi Pavilion as a work of art and to treat it as such will set a much needed precedent in this area.” Pepsi-Cola never took this step and eventually the Pavilion was left in a state of gradual desolation and decay. This was certainly due to the fact that the relationship between E.A.T. and Pepsi-Cola had considerably cooled down, to the point that the company, the sole sponsor of the project, withdrew its support when E.A.T. presented a maintenance contract for $405,000, instead of the proposed sum of $185,000.
Too bad the strategy didn’t work; art seemed to be the only ticket to surviving the end of Expo 70. Today, almost all that’s left of Expo ’70 are Taro Okamoto’s massive sculpture, Tower of The Sun, and Kiyoshi Kawasaki’s International Art Pavilion, which until four years ago, housed the National Museum of Art, Osaka. Whoops, never mind: “The old museum was demolished and turned into a car park.”
From Ch. 2, “The Nine Evenings,” of M.J.M Bijvoets’ Art As Inquiry [stichting-mai.de]
No museums, but m-louis’s Expo70 photos do have sweet pavilions and the Tower of The Sun [flickr]
E.A.T. It Up: The Pepsi Pavilion
Let’s get one thing out of the way first: I’m a Diet Coke guy. The very fact that The Pepsi Generation existed in 1970 should blow a hole in their brand’s supposed youthy credibility big enough to drive a 90-foot mirrored dome though. Oh, and what do we have here?
Holy freakin’ crap, why has no one told me The Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 World Expo in Osaka was an origami rendition of a geodesic dome; obscured in a giant mist cloud produced by an all-encompassing capillary net; surrounded by Robert Breer’s motorized, minimalist pod sculptures; entered through an audio-responsive, 4-color laser show–yes, using actual, frickin’ lasers– and culminating in a 90-foot mirrored mylar dome, which hosted concerts, happenings, and some 2 million slightly disoriented Japanese visitors?
And that large chunks of it were conceived, developed, and programmed by E.A.T., Experiments in Art and Technology, the pioneering art/engineering collaborate founded by [among others] Robert Rauschenberg and Bell Labs’ Billy Kluver? And that the four artists working with Kluver–Breer, Frosty Myers, Robert Whitman, and David Tudor–had planned months of even freakier happenings for the Pavilion, but the Pepsi gave them the boot for being too freaky–and for going significantly over budget? Still.
The least you could’ve done is tell me that Raven Industries made a full-size replica of the Pavilion out of Mylar and test-inflated it in a disused blimp hangar in Santa Ana, CA? Apparently, all it took was a 1/1,000th of an atmosphere difference in air pressure to keep the mirror inflated within the outer structure.
Because, of course, you know that Kluver was the guy at Bell Labs who helped Warhol with his seminal “Silver Flotations” exhibit in 1966 [seen here in Willard Maas’s film poem on Ubu]. And Bell Labs was involved in Project Echo, which launched and tracked two gigantic mylar spheres, satelloons, a couple of years earlier. Which makes the Pavilion’s similarities to the satellite below purely non-coincidental.
Which means that after recreating these two, earliest NASA missions as art projects, I’ll have to recreate the Pepsi Pavilion, too.
I’ve ordered by copy of Kluver et al’s dense-sounding 1972 catalogue, Pavilion and expect to be revisiting this topic in some depth within 5-7 business days. Meanwhile, if there are any other giant, mylar spheres of tremendous-yet-overlooked artistic and historical importance lurking out there, now’s your chance to come clean.
E.A.T. – Experiments in Art and Technology «Pepsi Pavilion for the Expo ’70» [mediaartnet.org]
Previously: Must. Find. The Satelloons Of Project Echo
D’oh, or else I must make the satelloons of Project Echo, which would mean I’m an artist, freak, or both
On Tomason, Or The Flipside Of Dame Architecture
Atelier Bow Wow is my favorite Japanese architecture firm. Rather than by building or proposing some kind of Roarkian vision, they first made a name for themselves [besides the catchy name they made for themselves, I mean] by observing and reporting architecture as it was inadvertently happening in Tokyo.
They put out exhaustively researched but in no way comprehensive books: Pet Architecture documented the ways structure took shape in the impossibly narrow spaces of a city where no scrap of land goes unused. Made in Toyko was about ridiculous hybrids: a department store with a driving school on the roof; a cement factory integrated with the workers’ dorms. They called these ridiculous, pragmatic spatial phenomena dame [dah-may] architecture, using the Japanese term for “no good.”
Such ad hoc, aggressively undesigned accidents stick in my mind as I read about Tomason [also spelled Thomason and Thomasson in English]. If dame architecture is the awkward result of relentless functionality, Tomason are the useless, abandoned leftovers. Stairs to nowhere are a favorite. Bricked up windows are a close second. Tomason are the flashings and detritus of the incessant churn of building, destruction, and redevelopment that characterizes the Japanese city. No clean slates here, no way.
The term comes from the art & architecture collective formed in 1986 known as Rojo Kansatsu [Roadside Observation], which counted the author/artist Akasegawa Genpei as a founding member. Rojo’s inspiration was Gary Thomasson, who was given the biggest contract ever in Japanese baseball in 1981-2, only it turned out he couldn’t hit; then he blew out his knee. He was a giant, useless lump on the bench.
Rojo exhibited at the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2006 [i.e., the architecture biennale, not the real one. heh], but I found out about Tomason from an essay on neojaponisme. Like everything there, it’s too long by design. The image below from neojaponisme, of a store shutter without a storefront, is from one of Akasegawa’s original books. It reminds me of some of the Powerless Structures sculptures by Elmgreen & Dragset.
There’s also a rather nice photopool on flickr. here’s the japanese tomason tag and here’s the thomason group.
Roadside Observation [neojaponisme.com]
And In Further Platinum Rhomboid Tessellation News…
At the risk of devolving into an Olafur fanboi site, I’ll mention that I was flipping through Take Your Time, the photodocumentary magazine published by the studio in November. Turns out there are multiple shots of the making of for the quasi-brick tile installation in Tadao Ando’s Yu-un house project for Japanese collector Takeo Obayashi.
Here are some much-reduced screenshots from the PDF version. It’s one of the remarkable things of Take Your Time, glimpsing the extent and diversity of the indsutrial/production processes which generate Eliasson’s art objects. Outsourcing fabrication is so commonplace these days in the art world, but Olafur’s approach is the diametric opposite. He develops these highly specialized production capabilities for what’s essentially a very-low volume factory. The R&D’ll kill you, but the gross margins on those tiles has to be phenomenal.
Above: In-house production and packing of the tiles.
The installation template described by one of Eliasson Studio’s architects, which incorporates randomly generated position instructions applied to the AutoCAD diagram:
Construction crews installing the tiles in Tokyo [l] and the finished wall [r]
Previously: And what do you do, Mr. Ando?
Olafur: the Magazine??
And What Do You Do, Mr. Ando?
He’s a tough guy and a really wonderful architect whose work has sent me on more than one pilgrimage in my life. But even so, I can’t help but feel a little sorry for Tadao Ando. The most dazzling, sophisticated and successful spatial element of Yu-un, the guest house he built for a longtime friend, is not by the architect; it’s an art installation by Olafur Eliasson. [The serial Ando client, Takeo Obayashi, is the head of one of Japan’s leading contractors and a contemporary art collector.]
Ando sounds kind of testy and defensive in the Architectural Digest profile of the project, and he seems to get far more credit for Eliasson’s work than he should:
Yu-un’s courtyard, however, is different from any Ando has designed before, and it created challenges demanding the delicacy of a diplomat. “We had some struggles with so many designers and artists on board,” says Ando. “We had many discussions with them, and it took time to find good solutions without compromising my design.”
Despite its name, Architectural Digest has always taken an extremely circumscribed view of architecture. In the magazine’s relentlessly tasteful, decorative hierarchy, every service industry employee has his place: architects define space and structure; interior designers transform, synthesize and finish; artists and tradespeople provide the raw materials for the realization of the designer’s vision; and when the client is a collector, art serves as the appropriate symbol of his wealth and taste.
The subtitle of the article–“A Surprising Modern Design Blends Ornament and Restraint”–and this awesome quote from Ando are a one-two punch for art’s function:
Of course, I work with a lot of artists. In Los Angeles, I’m making a guesthouse and exhibition space sort of like Yu-un, and we’re doing things with Damien Hirst and other people with installations on the surfaces. So it may become common with this kind of project where one installs treatments on certain surfaces.
ornament. surface. treatment. Brunschwig & Fils, meet Fischli & Weiss. Scalamandre, Carl Andre. Uh, and please use the service elevator next time.
Which goes a long way in explaining why there’s next to no information or context at all about the 7,000 oddly shaped, platinum-glazed tiles that were the source of so much Ando consternation.
So until there’s an Artistical Digest that’s at all interested in art beyond its merely sublime decorative function, here’s some background on those tiles:
The complex shape–technically a rhomboid dodecahedron, I think, and so more brick than tile, really–was dubbed a quasi brick. It emerged from Olafur’s ongoing collaboration with the Icelandic architect and former Frei Otto student and Buckminster Fuller disciple Einar Thorsteinn. Rhomboid dodecahedrons are one of five space-filling polyhedrons, shapes that can stack on themselves and fill a solid space. Like a cube, but without the regularity.
Eliasson has been interested in the form’s dualities–raw/manufactured, manmade/natural, random/ordered, mathematical/elemental–for several years and has shown it often. The artist used black, double-fired tiles for Soil Quasi Bricks inBlind Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale, they were, among other things, an evocation of the crystalline forms of Icelandic basalt columns, which are created when molten lava collided with ice. [Check out Gitte Orskou’s “Inside the Spectacle” (pdf) for more discussion of the Pavilion and a related 2-D floor installation in 2004 in Reykjavik, Frost Activity.]
There were fired quasi bricks on the shelf in the Model Room, the fantastical math toy-filled installation of Thorsteinn’s form-making activities which they first showed in New York in early 2003. [It’s in the SFMoMA show.] And even before that, in 2002, Eliasson showed a wall of the quasi brick forms of bent steel at Basel. Let that one get away, unfortunately. It seems so cheap in retrospect…
Anyway, Googling around, I found an account of an architect who worked in Eliasson’s studio who was involved in the Obayashi commission. It’s an enlightening look at the artist’s process, but the architect, Andreas Eggertsen, also makes a lot of interesting observations on the experience of working with an artist and incorporating science into the design process.
There’s even a description of the studio team’s struggles with Ando and the construction crew in Japan. Turns out the quasi-bricks’ apparent randomness was the problem:
The idea of the quasi brick is that it is an expression of high complexity. The quasi brick is a space filling geometry based on “fivefold symmetry”, a mathematical description of a quasi-chaotic geometry, which was found by a physicist in the 80´s.
The bricks can be rotated into 6 different positions, and put together randomly they create a very complex pattern. As the Japanese are a very thorough people they were not pleased when the construction had started and we had not supplied them with a list of how each brick should be rotated. As there were thousands of bricks, we had not figured out a way to indicate the exact rotation of each and every brick and thought that it would be easier for the construction workers to rotate the bricks themselves on site.
We did not realize that the Japanese were going to be so confused by this. They could simply not work without a drawing that showed them exactly what to do. So when we received this e-mail we got a bit frustrated. The construction had already started and in order not to delay the entire project we had to supply them with new and accurate drawings the following day.
To draw the rotation of each brick in Autocad would take us a week of work, so we had to figure out something else. We were getting a bit stressed, trying out different ideas to create a diagram that could illustrate the rotation of each brick, when the idea to use Matlab appeared to generate a random series of numbers from 1-6 dispersed over as many rows and columns as intended in the design. The numbers were then pasted into the Autocad file and soon the diagram was drawn and we could send the drawings before dawn.
Well if you put it that way… The construction workers on the boxer-turned-starchitect’s project for their boss’s boss’s boss’s house didn’t want to be the ones deciding which way the artist’s tiles faced? No freakin’ duh.
It’s all fascinating stuff, but I can’t imagine any of it ever showing up in the pages of Architectural Digest. Nor can I picture it working its way into Ando’s own practice. Though he and Eliasson share an obsession with the spatial characteristics of light, Ando’s method seems positively atavistic and instinctual compared to Eliasson’s. The sight of Ando scrawling his name and a sketch with a fat, black crayon on the wall at the opening of his 1991 MoMA exhibition was a formative experience for me. I’m fine to cut AD loose; they’re a hopeless cause. But it’s too bad that even after working with him, Ando apparently can’t see the depth behind Eliasson’s work which, while created in a totally different way, shares so many ideas with his own. But you know how temperamental these artists can be.
Tokyo Jewel Box: A Surprising Modern Design Blends Ornament and Restraint [architecturaldigest.com via tropolism]
Putting Science to Work in Art [nic’s a&d blog]
In 2005, Thorsteinn exhibited his own work on five-fold symmetry space and form in Copenhagen. Heady stuff. [einarthorsteinn.com]
[images except top, via olafureliasson.net]
BF Dome In BF Louisiana Gets BS Treatment
As they say in the bayou, when it comes to preserving our modernist architectural heritage, you can’t trust a hillbilly as far as you can throw him.
The Union Tank Car Dome, the first industrial-scale geodesic dome, built by Buckminster Fuller in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1958, was demolished without notice in November 2007 by its current owner, the Kansas City Southern Railroad. The dome had been the subject of some local preservationist attention for several years, and it would have been eligible the National Register of Historic Places this month.
At 384 feet in diameter, the Union Tank Car Dome was the largest dome in the world when it was built. The 80-foot glass dome inside it was a superfluous flourish, added just because they could. [image below via bfi.org]
While we all lament the loss of such an architectural treasure and bemoan the predictable philistinism of the owners, let’s also take a quick look at a few mitigating dome factors:
The dome was in the middle of freakin’ nowhere, and I don’t just mean Baton Rouge. Even by Baton Rouge standards, the dome’s in the middle of freakin’ nowhere. The kind of nowhere that’s only 2000′ away from Google Maps’ lo-res image cutoff.
KCS had had the dome for sale for years, dirt cheap [see point above], and willing to go cheaper. In 2001, when a local architect spearheaded an early preservation campaign, the whole place was just $500,000, negotiable. But then the guy moved to England. Oh well.
If the international community of Fuller True Believers can’t rally a measly $500k within 10 years, or entice an architecture collector to buy in the industrial fringes of hillbilly country, just how long should we expect said hillbillies to wait around?
Union Tank Car Dome, RIP, where’s another kick-ass Fuller structure with an ignorant owner just dying for someone to offer to take it off their hands? Architecture’s collectible now, right? So where are the dealers? Where is the registry of sweet, OG modernist landmarks for sale? We’ve seen this with the Paul Rudolph houses, where the only outrage is too late and from people not willing or able to pony up.
What Buckminster Fuller needs is an Eric Touchaleaume and a few Robert Rubins. Touchaleaume’s the guy who dropped into Congo in the middle of a civil war to airlift three of Jean Prouve’s Maisons Tropicales out of the line of fire. With collector-scholar Rubin’s help, he restored and placed two with museums–and sold the third to Andre Balasz for $5 million.
The real problem, though, is that Fuller attracts too many hippies, and anyway, evangelizing organizations like the Buckminster Fuller Institute are more interested in the number of domes and the problems they solve–“Today over 300,000 domes dot the globe.”— than in preserving the currently obsolete artifacts “by” Fuller. If there’s a Fuller Preservation Crisis, they don’t seem too concerned about it.
Demolition of historic “Bucky Dome” a stain on KCS [kansascity.com via things]
On The Table: Buckminster Fuller Chandelier
Buckminster Fuller wha?
It was the photo caption in the photo spread of the Foreign Office Architects country house project in the November 2007 World of Interiors on the coffee table. I snapped a quick phonecam photo, thinking I’d look it up later and find some random product Fuller had licensed, and then I’d pick one up on eBay some day, but no. Oh, no.
Now I have to track down this one, the only one, a wedding present of some renown.
From Maggs, the rare books and art dealer who apparently sold the Margaret/Snowdon Fuller Chandelier some time in the Internet era [I’m guessing around 2004] to its current owner [an art dealer, so there’s hope, at least]:
Designed by Buckminster Fuller, and made by James & Gill Meller as a wedding present for Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon.
A basketweave geodesic sphere, of perspex (aka lucite) prisms wired together with steel fishing line, served with crimps and electrical terminals, the crimps threaded into cut out venturi.
89 cm in diameter, just over ten kilograms in weight.
Attractive and practical [!?], this is a unique three-dimensional souvenir of the great maverick philosopher-inventor Fuller and a remarkable manifestation of a period when Britain, against the odds, embraced and integrated the ideas of this most awkward and inspirational member of the American avant-garde into a new school of radical architecture…
Snowdon, it will be remembered–or in my case, learned–collaborated with Fuller supporter Cedric Price and the engineer Frank Newby on the tensile architecture of the London Zoo aviary. Architect James Meller built the thing with prisms “from The Perspex Shop” and “eighty pound plastic-coated trace wire) and crimps from Farlows in St. James’.”
Geometrically speaking the sphere is a truncation of a truncated icosahedron, a form which results in a polyhedron with 12 pentagons, 20 hexagons, 60 triangles, 90 vertices, and 180 edges. It works tremendously well as a chandelier, as the Perspex components function as refracting prisms and produce subtle rainbow coloured patterns. It is currently suspended on a simple rope harness, with no light source supplied.
Or at least it was. Now it’s sitting on a table in what used to be the cheesemaker’s living room. If anyone has a fuller [heh] image of the chandelier, I’d love to see it. And if you have a royal, hand-wired, geodesic chandelier you’ve grown weary of, do call.
A ? THE! A Geodesic Chandelier [maggs.com]
The Lego Builder And The Dead, Same Guy
Hello, what??
from Page Six via Gawker, we learn that Norman Mailer “built a 15,000- piece “City of the Future” with two pals in his Brooklyn apartment – but where it will go next, nobody knows.”
The obvious answer is “onto flickr.” The next most obvious answer is, “onto a Microserfs fan site.”
Architecture As Art History
I guess when you’re a hammer, everything looks like MoMA. It’s “Subverting The Dominant Installation” Week at Modern Art Notes, where Tyler is taking inordinate pleasure in shadow boxing with an opponent who retired long ago: Alfred Barr’s rickety, linear [sic] march of Modern Art history as experienced in the gallery walk at MoMA. As Tyler condemns it, Barr/Rubin/MoMA put Postwar New York at the center of Art, and annointed Jackson Pollock to lead everyone else to abstraction’s Promised Land. [But wait, maybe I can solve this problem before I even get started complaining. What if Clyfford Still is Moses, then Pollock could be Joshua!]
Tyler’s exercise interesting and–in this case–harmless, but it’s also artificial almost to the point of irrelevance. Set aside the discussion of just how much “dominance” MoMA’s installation has or should be granted in the polyvalent art world of 2007 [I’m a longtime MoMA supporter and fundraiser for whom the Museum functioned as an ersatz graduate school of modernism, which may be why I feel so strongly that the art world should have outgrown the self-inflicted notion of centralized canonizing authorities by now. And except for when we play these kinds of curatorial parlor games, I think most people have.]
The sequence of galleries on MoMA’s fifth floor forms the basis of MAN’s “dominant installation” theory:
MoMA’s installation, which is in part an accident of architecture and in part not (someone put all those Pollocks together and banished everyone else), encourages us to see Pollock as the titan, the artist who, along with Picasso and Matisse gets a MoMA gallery to himself. The not-so-subtle suggestion is that everything else in American hero painting stems from Pollock, that it all comes after him, that no one else is worthy of sharing his space. As proof, at MoMA those other artists all are after Pollock, not with him.
OK, but that’s not how it happened…
Tyler has been spending the last few days expanding on that by showing what other artists’ momentous works from 1950 which were created alongside [i.e., concurrent with] Pollock’s, but which MoMA baldly puts in other rooms.
Rather than simply point out what seems to me an inherent flaw in Tyler’s premise–unless you’re talking about Jerry Saltz’s curatorial fantasy of lining up all the works in the collection by the date they left the studio, the march through architecture does not only ever equal the march of time; in fact, since its conception before the MoMA2000 era, the Taniguchi building & installation has been intended to alleviate, if not obviate, the outdated, pedantic, this-begets-that, historicist puzzle-solving–I’ll counter with a lost installation example from the, uh, Bad Old MoMA that I think unproves Tyler’s point today about Barnett Newman’s massive painting, Vir Heroicus Sublimis. It also happens to be one of the most sublime juxtapositions of art I’ve ever seen.
In the old MoMA’s 4th floor galleries, Pollock did have a gallery to himself, but it wasn’t the apotheosis of anything. The Pollock room was off to the right, with One: Number 31, 1950 on the main wall, while History marched on to the left; to the architectural determinists in the audience, Pollock was a dead end.
Only, of course, it wasn’t. When you turned around and looked through a couple of enfilade doorways, there was Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis facing you–and the Pollock to your back. I forget what was in those galleries–late Matisse, maybe? who could care?–because these turning back and forth between these two giant paintings made the same year was too engrossing. Newman wasn’t taking the “next-steps of American high-abex,” he was making his own powerful arguments longside/against/in response to [sic] Pollock’s painterly actionism.
When you got into the room with the Newman, though, things really heated up. On the right/west wall [recreated above in Photoshop] hung another 1950 Newman, The Voice [above, l], and next to it was a Clyfford Still. If the timeline were the arbiter, it’d be 1951-T No. 3, a work whose reused abstract composition Still dubbed a “replica.” [Let’s see Pollock try that.] But I’m almost certain it was the much earlier–d’oh, and thus asynchronous–1944-N No. 2 [above, r].
The greatest touch, though, was the most seemingly controversial: the insertion of a European sculpture, Giacometti’s Standing Woman, from 1948, which functioned visually as, of all things, a humanoid zip. I’ve never looked in the literature, but I can’t imagine how this time- and continent-and style-hopping installation could be considered anything but heresy to those who insist that someone’s insisting on brightline, AbEx and The American Way art history. And yet, there it was, right there in the heart of MoMA. Did anyone complain? Or did it just look too awesome? Or was there always more to the Newman et al. story, like what artists themselves thought, even at MoMA? from Vir Heroicus Sublimus‘ page at MoMa.org:
Newman admired Alberto Giacometti’s bone-thin sculptures of the human figure, and his stripes, or “zips,” as he called them, may be seen as symbolizing figures against a void.
Taniguchi’s MoMA makes some attempt to break up the classical, enfilade march of galleries, but it’s obviously not perfect. The classical vista and the faceoff have been replaced by the turn and the oblique glimpse as the museum’s spatial and viewing modes. When they hung the new galleries, MoMA’s curators programmed in these pans and the distant glimpses of resonant works afforded by all the new, non-dogmatic doorways.
But even if you don’t buy into this attempt at mixing it up, can anyone realistically expect that MoMA would destroy itself as a historically continuous institution “merely” to accommodate the fifth renovation of its space? Should the ghost of a building known as the Dorset Hotel hold sway over Art History, its circumstances defining the shapes and flow of the galleries much as the one-by-one acquisition of the townhouses that once occupied the original 53rd Street site did? MoMA’s linearity, both spatial and intellectual, is a historical phenomenon as driven as much by these palimpsest floorplans as by Barr and Rubin’s schematic diagrams.
And this received wisdom is actually influenced as much by the trustees and collectors and tastes of the era, too; remember, despite several attempts by dealer/trustee Sidney Janis to place it there, Barr and MoMA refused Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm, which finally ended up at the Met. And it wasn’t until 1967, well into the Rubin era, that they could even manage to acquire One, No. 31, 1950 at all. If people actually knew more about the messy, cantankerous, and wrangling processes of how that “dominant installation” came to be, they may not be so inclined to let it dominate them.
And if they’re going to be strict architectural literalists in their interpretation of a the symbolism of a museum installation, they might as well look back to the Old Testament MoMA as well. And they might as well note that Newman’s painting currently hangs in the same spot as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon on the floor below. Maybe Newman is Moses and Pollock is just Aaron. Or Pollock’s John the Baptist, and Newman’s–well, I’m sure Newman would’ve been pleased with the spot he got.
Dude, Under Siege, Blackwater Takes On Air Of Dwell Magazine!
Modular, prefab, minimalist, outdoor space, nice matte finish, shipping containers… Just slap a couple of solar panels on the roof and get a book stylist in there to add a Moholy-Nagy monograph to the coffee table, I think we have our January cover!
Under Siege, Blackwater Takes On Air of Bunker [nyt]
So Apparently, We’re Moving To Strandvagen, Sweden
where we’ll live in this unused 1954 Shell station by Peter Celsing. It’s so funny, I always imagined Sweden was cold and dark, but just look at this picture, taken at 3AM. Now we know that Ikea gets its blue from the color of the always-sunny Swedish sky.
[via andy]
Here are photos of the Shell station when it was still in use. [zlattes.com]
Previously: I want to live in a gas station
If I Were A Sculptor, But Then Again…
Yes, I do have a ton of other things I should be doing, but I can’t seem to get Project Echo out of my head. I really want to see this, 100+ foot spherical satellite balloon, “the most beautiful object ever to be put into space,” exhibited on earth. But where?
When MoMA was designing its new building, a lot of emphasis was placed on the contemporary artistic parameters that informed the structure. The gallery ceiling heights, the open expanses, the floorplate’s loadbearing capacity, even the elevators, everything was designed to accommodate the massive scale of the important art of our time: Richard Serra’s massive cor-ten steel sculptures.
And they did, beautifully, until just a few days ago.
But is there anything more anti-Serra, though, than a balloon? Made of Mylar, and weighing a mere 100 pounds? And yet at 100 feet in diameter, a balloon of such scale and volume, of such spatially overwhelming presence, it dwarfs almost every sculpture Serra has ever made?
The original Echo I was launched into space, but it was explicitly designed to be seen from earth. It was an exhibition on a global scale, seen by tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of people over eight years. People from the Boy Scouts to the king of Afghanistan organized watching parties. Conductors stopped mid-outdoor concert when Echo passed overhead.
L: Hayden Planetarium = 87-ft diam. R: Pantheon = 142-ft. HEY!
What would an Echo satellite do to the art space it would be exhibited in? Are there even museums or galleries who could handle it? Or is the physical plant of the art world still organizing around the suddenly smallish-feeling sculptures of, say, Richard Serra?
Echo satelloons were first seen–or shown, isn’t that why there’s a giant NASA banner draped across it?–in a 177-foot high Air Force blimp hangar in North Carolina. There are plenty of non-art spaces where an Echo could be exhibited, but that misses the whole point.
What art spaces in the world are able to physically accommodate an 10-story high Echo? A gallery or museum would need unencumbered, enclosed exhibition space of at least 120 feet in every dimension:
Suddenly all these atriums and rotundas you think are just grossly oversized turn out to be too small. I guess the art world’s space limitations will be the constraining parameter for my Project Echo exhibition.
Maybe the only thing to do is to show it in a non-art-programmed space after all. Grand Central Station’s concourse is 160 feet wide and 125 feet high in the center. And as a bonus, a US Army Redstone rocket was exhibited there in mid-1957 [via wikipedia]. It was lowered through a hole cut in the constellation-decorated ceiling.
And then there’s the Pantheon, which is built on a 142-foot diameter sphere. As readers of Copernicus, Walter Murch, and BLDGBLOG will know, the Pantheon “may have had secretly encoded within it the idea that the Sun was the center of the universe; and that this ancient, wordless wisdom helped to revolutionize our view of the cosmos.” What better venue for displaying a satellite which indirectly helped revolutionize our view of the origins of the cosmos? And not that it’s necessary, but it even already has a hole in the roof.
Unless I do it outside, Maybe in the Piazza San Marco, where Gregor Schneider’s 46-foot, black, shrouded Venice Cube sculpture was supposed to be installed during the 2005 Biennale. But would a recreation of a relic of American military and media propaganda be any more welcome in Venice than a replica of the Kab’aa? [So I just follow Schneider and install it two years later in the plaza in front of the Hamburg Kunsthalle? I’ll get right on that.]
Or maybe the answer’s right in front of me, and I just don’t want to admit it. Here’s what I wrote last winter about the Sky Walkers parade staged last December by Friends With You [and sponsored by Scion!]
It’s what I’ve always said Art Basel Miami Beach needed more of: blimps.
The only art world venue which can accommodate a 100-foot satelloon is an art fair.
Also of interest: A 1960 Bell Labs film, The Big Bounce, produced by Jerry Fairbanks, tells a very Bell-centric version of the Project Echo story. That horn antenna is something, though. [archive.org, via Lisa Parks’ proposal to integrate satellites into the traditional media studies practice]