the making of, by greg allen
Verner Panton chairs in prison? Custom ply built-ins? I mean, day-um.
Josef Hohensinn’s Loeben Justice Center is like Richard Meier’s Perry & Charles Street towers, only warmer inside, with some Dominique Perraultian Bibliotheque National wooden touches.
29 photos here [hohensinn-arhitektur.at via kottke and carniola]
One of my big regrets was not urban scavenging the old Bendel’s when I had the chance. My office used to be above the store during the gutjob renovation that followed the store’s purchase by Columbus-based The Limited. See, a friend’s mom had worked there way back in the day as a cosmetics buyer, so she remembered that all the cast bronze vitrines, counters, and stools had been designed by Diego Giacometti. Dozens of them. They’d been painted over and knocked around for decades, ignored, seemingly forgotten, now sold off to some Ohioans, who called in the demolition crews.
I watched the dumpsters, but never tried to seek them out, fearful, I guess, of tipping off anyone to their provenance and value. Besides, what was a 23-year-old guy supposed to do with 18 8-foot-tall, bronze-and-glass vitrines and 36 bronze barstools? I’ve never heard or seen a peep about the stuff since; these dressing table stools are the closest I’ve seen, and they’re short.
Anyway, the demolition of another interior and the impending dispersion or destruction of a host of unappreciated fixtures was on my mind one evening a couple of summers ago when I passed 2 Columbus Circle, Edward Durrell Stone’s building that had held the NYC Visitors Bureau for many years.
In 2000, when it was still in decent shape, but largely unused, I’d actually considered trying to have our wedding party in the walnut-panelled, Central Park-balconied top floor of the building. [Another, slighter regret. Not having the party there, I mean. Not the wedding. Hi, honey!]
So seeing it fenced off, ready for demolition and transformation into The Craft Museum, the ceiliingful of sweet, Bauhaus-by-way-of-Pop-Minimalism light fixtures lighted up for one of the last times, I couldn’t resist taking a picture.
The red lights remind me of a similarly shaped piece from 1966 in MoMA’s design collection by Peter Hamburger [below, l] and a simpler, 1920 design by Gerritt Rietveld [below, r].
The architectural salvage industry has grown tremendously since the early 1990’s, and 2 Columbus Circle’s preservation and gutting was high-profile enough that these lights should have a better survival rate than the Giacomettis. Still, my impulse to go ask about them was quickly squelched. The security guard saw me and my phonecam and stormed over to the window, gesturing furiously at me to stop taking pictures from the street.
Related: a series of photos of lights and light-based art Tyler Green posted today on MAN.
No sooner did Chanel let slip how they spent a whole extra million dollars to finish the sides of their narrow tower on 57th Street in granite to match the street facade, than rival LVMH announced they were building next door. They promptly tore down the 5-story 19th century townhouses, and Chanel’s property line granite was covered up by Christian Portzamparc’s faceted glass tower.
I thought of this because until I saw Hagen Steir’s photo of the Whitney Museum on Tropolism, I had literally never noticed the facade-matching-granite-faced concrete wall built along the south lotline, the way it looms over the Breuer building’s hapless little brownstone neighbors. [ed. note: Chad points out it’s just concrete. and he’s right. -ed.]
The height of the wall is keyed, not to the potential buildable height of the townhouse, though, but to the height of the museum. In fact, there’s a similar wall running along the rear, eastern lotline, too. They’re really only apparent because Breuer’s design did not conform to the street grid or maintain the curtain of facades that were the backdrop of city street life.
In fact, they serve as backdrops, scrims, a pedestal, even, for the building itself. The building is a sculpture, an object in a thoroughly delineated volume of space that just happens to be on a corner in a neighborhood of a city.
The Whitney was finished in 1966, a year after the creation of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, but long before the designation of the Upper East Side Historical District. It’s always been a part of my Upper East Side, but considering how they literally walled themselves off from the neighborhood, I can’t be surprised at the Whitney’s never-ending confrontations with the LPC&co over its various expansion plans. Even when, as in the most recent Renzo Piano plan, they involved tearing down the two adjacent landmarked townhouses–which the Whitney now owns–along with that wall.
Tropolism contributes to Gridskipper’s Ugly Buildings list [tropolism]
Additional Whitney photos at Great Buildings Online [
WPS1 has posted the audio for MoMA’s recent symposium, “The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts.” Listening to a panel discussion with no access to the visuals can be a tough sell, but the two talks I heard were frankly awesome:
Artist Coco Fusco’s performance as Sargeant Fusco sounded fierce and relevant, while the Guerrilla Girls, bless their hearts, sounded a bit out of touch.
The killer, though, is Beatriz Colomina’s discussion of Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier. The thrust, if you will, of her presentation was that Corbu essentially raped Gray’s most important architectural work, E.1027, a house she built in Roquebrune/Cap Martin on the far side of Monaco, by putting murals depicting Algerian concubines throughout the house.
It’s obviously more complicated than that, and I find it remarkable that so little of what she talked about is generally known. I’ve heard people who should know better dismiss and diminish Gray’s work as recently as 2004.
Anyway, what’s also remarkable is that E1027 is still a deteriorating ruin. When I lived in Monaco in 1995-7 and set out to find it, no locals could figure out what I was talking about. The most comprehensive images I’ve seen from that era are on flickr, a photoset made by Daniel, an Irish architect, who hopped the fence in 1997 when the house was a squat [the last owner had been murdered a couple of months prior.]
I can’t find any images of Gray’s last house, Lou Perou, which was done near St Tropez, either. And I can’t find any word on the status of her own house, Tempe a Pailla, which was inland, up the mountains from Roquebrune & Menton in the village of Castellar. How is it that no modernist pilgrims have tracked and documented this stuff?
Listen to ‘The Feminist Future’ on WPS1 [wps1.org]
E1027: A Photoset by It’s Daniel [flickr]
update: Tropolist Chad points out that Colomina’s talk is an architectural classic. here’s the text of “Battle Lines: E.1027,” from 1995, for example, a lot of which she also presented at MoMA. As Chad puts it, “Of course, if I had to pick a dozen such texts to keep bandying about, that one would be near the top of the list. ” As Tropolism pointed out in Dec. 06, Colomina’s paper was also reprinted in the first issue of Pin-Up Magazine.
later update: Guy points out that Lou Perou is included in Caroline Constant’s 2000 monograph on Eileen Gray from Phaidon. I put it on my to-get list from the storage unit…
Don’t get me wrong, I love me some yurts. But like the equally lovable geodesic dome, something always seems lost in between ideal sustainable concept and hippie-dippy, style-free, domestic execution.
Finally, though, someone’s made a yurt for the Wallpaper Dwell designblog generation. That’s the Ecoshack promise, anyway. Their Nomad Yurt has a bit of a kick to it. Plus, it’s available in Plyboo, and when the bright red nylon outershell comes available, you’ll be able to set it up on the slope, and no one will snowboard into the side of you. Very important. [And not just because your yurt’s shaped like a mogul.]
The only thing wrong I can see: it’s only available in one smallish size right now–12′ across, 7′ high. Oh, and I don’t have any land to put it on.
The Nomad: “Mongolia‘s 2000-year-old portable ‘ger’ updated for today’s urban nomad” [ecoshack.com via Eames Demetrios’ dasfilmfest]
When I was a freshman at BYU, I had a hopeless crush on a girl from Hawaii. She was really nice to me, and we eventually became friends. But I never had a chance because, unlike her boyfriend at the time, I had not been an extra in Footloose, and I had not been immortalized [sic] on film picking my nose, and wearing a powder blue tuxedo.
Footloose was filmed in the wide open grain and alfalfa fields of Lehi, Utah, just north of Provo. The Lehi Roller Mills where Kevin Bacon’s triumphant school dance was held, was Lehi’s only landmark, visible from the desolate stretch of highway leading to Salt Lake City–and civilization [sic again]. There used to be a rest stop near there.
Hang gliders would sometimes soar over the southern, Provo side of the Point of the Mountain, which separated Salt Lake Valley and Utah Valley [or, as it’s also known, Happy Valley.] On the north side of the Point, above the prison where Gary Gilmore was executed by a firing squad, bikers’d stage a widowmaker hill climb [I don’t know, annually?] that’d carve deep ruts into the grass.
Tract houses have long since crept along the foothills and over the fields on both sides of the Point, but it’s always been an empty, rural place people pass by, around, through, on their way to the city. That’s the mental image, anyway, of folks who lived in or visited Utah more than ten years ago.
Next week, though, Brandt Andersen, a 29-year old software & real estate developer from Provo, who owns the local franchise for the NBA Development league, will unveil the plans for an 85-acre plot in Lehi, just south of the Point, and right across the freeway from Thanksgiving Point, a large entertainment/recreation development by the WordPerfect folks.
The mixed use project will contain ” a 12,000-seat arena, a five-star hotel, high-end shopping, restaurants, offices, a wakeboarding lake, and a massive residential community.” The architect for the project is Frank Gehry.
Said Gehry, whose other mixed-use urban center project, Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, has met considerable opposition, he likes the absence of a “big city bureaucracy.” Says it’s nice to be able to just have lunch with the mayor when you need to. Gets things moving along.
For his part, Lehi Mayor Howard Johnson is “most excited about the project’s proposed lake, which Andersen has agreed to let Lehi use as a secondary irrigation reservoir. The city would be able to store water in the lake and use it when necessary. ‘That is of a rather sizable financial value to Lehi,’ Johnson said.”
For my part, I’m hoping Andersen will throw in a Gehry-designed church or two for all the Mormons moving into his massive residential project. Back in the day, before business school, when I was high on his architecture [just as the Weisman Museum opened in Minnesota, but long before Bilbao] and feeling low about the bland, utilitarian, sameness of contemporary Mormon buildings, I decided I was going to just commission Frank Gehry to design a chapel. Then I’d build it, and hand it over to the Church, fait accompli. I hadn’t thought to build the Mormon neighborhood required to go with it.
When he was introduced to such bigwigs are there are in Lehi at the moment, Gehry was self-effacing, and promised not to airdrop in some flashy, Bilbao-y blob. “We won’t build something that people won’t buy into. It’s subtle how culture translates into architecture. And there is a culture in Utah.” Amen to that.
Lehi goes postmodern with Frank Gehry [harktheherald.com via archinect]
Legendary architect agrees to design a big Lehi project [deseretnews.com]
A n unofficial rendering of the massing plan [skyscraperpage.com]
Philip Nobel encapsulates my hate-to-love/hate relationship with Rem Koolhaas and his work in this greatly entertaining Metropolis Mag column, “I ♥ IIT… But I Still Don’t Like Rem”. [1]
Rem may have changed my thinking about China with a late 1990’s Columbia lecture that should’ve been called Delirious Pearl River Delta, but after being disappointed by supposedly seminal buildings from Utrecht to Lille to Prince Street and more, I can really find no excuse anymore for his antics.
And besides that, the Prada Parfums website is an AGONIZING, MIND-NUMBING EMBARASSMENT. A.M.Oy. [fortunately for the world, no one’s seeing it.]
[1] My tab bar shows that “|” is actually a “[heart]”, but I think a “|” is better, especially for Mies’s IIT. Kind of like those “I [square] Judd” stickers they sell in Marfa.
Damn, I just hate when that happens. I hate when some sick poseur geezer company who makes SUV’s for orthodontists or whatever totally rips off and corrupts the free, utopian, non-commercial, creative spirit of youth–of the future, even. As if cool were simply something you could buy, or order up by the square foot. As if you could capture the real spirit and meaning of a place like Burning Man in a Beverly Hills storefront. That’s not what it’s all about, man. We go to the playa to get AWAY from our parents’ Lexuses.
Look what Lexus has done, shamelessly copying the indescribable, ephemeral beauty and power of the Uchronia Project, and turning it into the backdrop for the launch of their new flagship model, the LS 460 sedan.
Forget the ethics of such a blatant act; I want to know logistics. How did Lexus’s agency even have mobilize in time to steal the work of a such a globally visionary and idealistic artist when it only landed at Black Rock City a few weeks ago? It’s as if–what’s that, you say? It’s the same guy?
Well. Hate the playa, not the fame, I guess.
Lexus 460 Degrees Gallery [lexus.com via tropolism]Previous
Uchronyism on greg.org:
9/04: to think, there was a day–just one, but still–when it was just about the architecture
9/13: Uchronian partisans and Burning Man roast me for criticizing the Uchronspolitation
9/16:Branding Man [speaks for itself]
10/15: The King of Uchronia meets the Queen of Belgium
Update: There’s a debate raging among burners on tribe.net over whether artist burners should be taking money from corporate sponsors for their work. The answer is obvious: yes, if they want to, but it’s also irrelevant here. The Uchronia project was completely self-funded at BM [i.e., they didn’t get any art grants from BM itself like other projects], and its workers were paid, not volunteers.
What I suspected at the time has, I believe, been proved true now: Uchronia was built as part of an extensive marketing and promotional campaign which used Burning Man as a backdrop and platform to be leveraged externally after the fact. I originally thought it was just a self-promotion scheme for Arne Quinze and his firm, but I think the fully realized Uchronian Lexus Gallery appearing just weeks after BM shows who the real client was.
More evidence: one of the many burners who emailed me a month ago defending the Uchronians shared some of Quinze’s own explanations of his artistic bona fides, “[He said] he’s been selected to be the artist of the year at the upcoming Basel-Miami Art Fair.” Now I may not know Black Rock City, but I do know Basel, and Basel-Miami, and let me tell you, every single attendee there thinks he is “____ of the year.”
But according to Lexus’s gallery touring schedule, their 2-wk/city tour puts them in Miami right around the opening of ABMB. And while he was at BM, Quinze was already planning on taking MB by storm with his unstoppable new marketing technique.
Recently returned from abroad and holding court at Interieur 06, a trade show, HSH Arne XV, Emperor of Black Rock City and King of The Uchronians received HM Paola Queen of The Belgians. They presumably traded tales of the quaint customs of the exotic natives in the outer reaches of their respective realms.
And perhaps they talked of their palaces.
The Emperor’s magnificent palace, of course, was burned down, and exists now only on flickr and in a forthcoming promotional book/DVD, produced in a strictly limited edition of 50,000.
For her part, the Queen’s palace features a remarkable work commissioned from artist Jan Fabre, which consists of the shimmering carapaces of over 1.4 million jewel beetles affixed to the ceiling and a chandelier in the Hall of Mirrors.
Previously: Arne Quinze: Branding Man
Standing too close to the fire at Burning Man
uh-on, I hope PS1 doesn’t find out about this
Curator Nancy Spector described Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque, which the Guggenheim acquired in 1999 from the artist’s estate [controlled by his widow Nancy Holt and represented by James Cohan Gallery] this way:
Hotel Palenque perfectly embodies the artist’s notion of a “ruin in reverse.” During a trip to Mexico in 1969, he photographed an old, eccentrically constructed hotel, which was undergoing a cycle of simultaneous decay and renovation. Smithson used these images in a lecture presented to architecture students at the University of Utah in 1972, in which he humorously analyzed the centerless, “de-architecturalized” site.
Extant today as a slide installation with a tape recording of the artist’s voice, Hotel Palenque provides a direct view into Smithson’s theoretical approach to the effects of entropy on the cultural landscape.
Smithson’s lecture combines deadpan delivery with absurdist architectural/archeological analysis of a contemporary ruin, a critique–or a spoof–of the kind of academic jargon-laden travelogue usually reserved for slideshows of “real” architecture like the nearby Mayan temple complex.
The lecture is available in several formats: the Guggenheim version was included in the recent MoCA/Whitney retrospective; an illustrated transcript was published in Parkett #43 in 1995; and the incomparable UbuWeb has a 362mb film of the 1972 event for download. [update: uh. ] There was even a “cover version” “performed” by an artist last year in Portland.
But re-viewing the “original” really makes me wonder. The differences between various posthumous incarnations and interpretations of the “Hotel Palenque” lecture seem significant enough to make me question what Smithson actually intended for the lecture, how it was originally received, how it has been contextualized today, and if it is even a “work” at all.
The medium through which art is experienced inevitably influences its perception and interpretation. For an entire generation while it was submerged, the Spiral Jetty “existed”–or was experienced–only through memory, history, text and photo documentation, and, importantly, the artist’s own “making of” film. Once the actual work started re-emerging in 1993-94, its experiential aspects have shifted; now The Visit, the spatial situation, environmental conditions and entropic forces at the site, and the interplay between the Jetty‘s manifestations come to the fore.
Similarly, Palenque is consistently described in hindsight, through the sophisticated conceptual contstruct of Smithson’s writings, but to watch it, Palenque actually sounds like a dorky, rambling joke, more parody than pronouncement. The only real jargon he uses are “situation” [in the architectural sense] and “de-architecturization.” Otherwise, the real/only humor comes from the juxtaposition of his blandly weighty assertions of importance and photos of torn plastic roofing, piles of bricks, and a room propped up by shaky-looking poles [“this is how we approached the site; our car is right there, see between those two columns?”]
The lecture is described as funny, but the only laughter I could hear sounded nervous, or at least tentative. And without knowing anything of how the lecture came to be, and how it was received and reviewed at the time, I can’t help but imagine that some people, like Smithson’s hosts, or his audience, might have felt like the butt of some smart-alecky New York artist’s practical joke. Overall, I guess I find it hard to reconcile Smithson’s sophomoric performance with his hallowed reputation; the lecture fits more neatly with his early, critically challenging “high school notebook doodle” drawings of busty angels than it does with his heavily theoretical Artforum articles.
[It’s worth pointing out that Smithson’s photo/slides, on the other hand, feel very resolved and coherent. I was repeatedly reminded of Gabriel Orozco’s photos of “found” sculptural scenarios and moments, as well as of Smithson’s own Passaic series and other photographs. We have a favorite photo, a top-down shot of a pile of bricks, that he did after returning from the Yucatan; the man does have a way with rubble.]
But the most problematic issue about Palenque could be a non-issue for almost any conceptual artist, but it seems paramount given Smithson’s own ideological concerns with the gallery/museum space and system: to what extent should the lecture be considered “performance” or a “work of art” itself? The Guggenheim’s version of Hotel Palenque consists of a slideshow and an audiotape, which plays in polite form in a museum gallery.
But before/besides that incarnation, the lecture “existed” [or was experienced] as a filmed version, made with a handheld camera seated somewhere in the crowd in Salt Lake City. Smithson himself is off camera, and several times, the slides themselves are, too. The film is a bootleg only to the extent Baltimore artist Jon Routson‘s self-consciously askew video recordings of movies are, which is to say, “not at all.” The amateurish, sometimes forgetful framing and the handheld jitters heighten the experiential, audience perspective. There’s one passage where the camera bobs up and down in synch with its operator’s breathing. These are all central, even overwhelming, elements of the Palenque film, and they’re utterly absent from the “institutionalized” version, just as Smithson’s delivery is lost in the Parkett transcript [a version which no one would mistake for anything but documentation or reportage.] It’s enough to make me wonder just what the Guggenheim bought–or just what the Smithson estate sold–with Hotel Palenque which, by 1999, had to be one of the few significant “pieces” or, less problematically, holdings, left in the estate.
The Guggenheim also bought, at the same time, nine slides of Yucatan Mirror Displacements, iconic images of landscape interventions which Smithson made on the same 1969 trip. But these slides–which illustrated an Artforum essay and are widely reproduced in print–have never existed to my knowledge in artist-sanctioned formats like traditionally editioned prints. I’d be very interested to see documentation or scholarship on this question–which is also a fancy way of saying I have no idea or direct knowledge at this point–to see just how closely Smithson’s definition of defined, purchasable work jibes with notions operative in 1999 among art dealers and museum acquisition committees.
Because there have already been plenty of cases where Smithson’s ideas, his works, and his estate’s interpretations of them sometimes seem out of synch. Had Smithson not died suddenly and tragically the next year would this offhand-seeming ramble be treated with even a fraction of the reverence it has received? And if there had been more sculptures and clearly identifiable “work” to sell in the estate when Smithson’s star re-emerged in the late 1990’s, would Hotel Palenque ever have made it out of the archives and into a major museum’s collection?
Previously: UT gov’t decides to clean up the Jetty site
Nancy Holt floats the idea of “restoring” the Jetty
“The Spiral Doily”: What if sprawl is the real entropy?
Other Smithson-related posts on greg.org
Elsewhere: Brian Dillon’s appreciation of the lecture as artform in Frieze
When I grow up–scratch that, IF I were to ever grow up enough, I wish I could write with half the force of Ada Louise Huxtable.
Given the notoriety of the site, a passionately observant and deeply involved public, and the proven financial advantage of what goes by the dreadful name “starchitecture,” Mr. Silverstein’s move from standard commercial construction to high-end high style required no great sacrifice or philanthropic awakening. Good design makes excess palatable. Marquee names command higher rents. These are all virtuoso performances–architecture as spectacular window dressing and shrewd marketing tool for the grossly maximized commercial square footage that has remained the one constant through the perversion and destruction of Daniel Libeskind’s master plan, a process in which vision succumbed early to pressure groups and political agendas. Call it irony or destiny, the architecture once rejected as a costly “frill” is now embraced for its dollar value.
The Disaster That Has Followed The Tragedy [wsj via archinect]
It is really hard, apparently, to come away in a good mood when you’re a freelancer charged with writing about starchitects’ hyper-deluxe modernist loft developments where the price per square foot is more than your fee.
In Vanity Fair, AA Gill does a whiny but funny but ultimately tedious takedown of the lifestyle purveyors like Andre Balasz and Ian Schrager [and their Nouvel and H&dM lifestyles, respectively], which, in turn reminded me of an article in Departures, the American Express magazine on nearly the same subject.
Curbed quotes Gill very well, so I’ll leave him be [but not without pointing out that he’s romanticizing our homeless street freaks from the cozy charmes of his apartment in London]; but Penelope Green’s AmEx article, though far more civilized, thank you very much, essentially validates Gill’s thesis that this extremely expensive, modern, luxe, minimalist lifestyle is not “about” New York; it’s a global phenomenon distributed along the flight ranges of Gulfstream V’s.
Below are some choice tidbits from Green’s piece [which may or may not be accessible online to non-Platinum and Centurion Cardmembers, so apologies in advance if you get stiff-armed for your demographic undesirability]. It all makes me wonder where all the billionaire freelancers are who can write about this stuff from a practical perspective, free of all the baggage of raging unattainability and deflated despair that inevitably creeps in. Please, billionaires, won’t you write more magazine articles?
The Venice Biennale of Architecture may have been a critical bust–both the Times’ and the Guardian’s people panned it, complaining that it’s a book in exhibition format, or text and videos but no architecture–but I have to say, it works OK for me as a blog.
MoMA’s A&D Dept. and some other folks–a lot of other folks, actually–have whipped together the Venice Super Blog, with a veritable DVD-ful of audio interviews, video clips, and Giardini gossip. It’s a bit too inside football sometimes, and sometimes the posters are a bit too pleased with themselves for attending [gee, if the “entire Architecture World” really is under the stairs of the British Pavillion with you, who’s supposed to be reading this?], but there’s interesting enough content to make it worth reading/listening/watching.
Some personal picks: Olafur Eliasson talking about his collaboration with architects, including work on the Icelandic Concert and Conference Centre, and David Adjaye’s pavillion for an OE installation. Here’s a wrap-up of a panel discussion about the pavillion project, Your Black Horizon. And here’s a photo of a 1:1 mockup of the IC&CC semi-reflective crystalline facade. [above]
Rem Koolhaas and his thinktank side, AMO, did a presentation on resort developments in Dubai–Olafur calls it “Rem talking about his golf course project in Dubai”–and the modernist building boom throughout the Persian Gulf. Here’s a brief interview, and here’s an even briefer recap.
Besides more useful tags or navigation, it’s the one thing VeniceSuperBlog could’ve done better: raw, liveblogged info. Maybe it’s a problem of too many chief curators and not enough interns.
I know a lot of you have been asking yourselves, “Hey, what’s been going on with Greg and the Belgian Waffle?” No? Too bad. Cuz I’ll tell you.
The Burning Man curator known as LadyBee and I have been going back and forth in email over whether Uchronia’s creators co-opted Burning Man as a backdrop for their own alternabrand-enhancing PR, whether the 1,000+ photos on flickr tagged with Uchronia constitutes a brand now, or whether Arne Quinze and his co-designers are just sending out 50,000 books and DVD’s to “people in important or influential positions who help shape the socio-economic landscape and can make a difference” anonymously and with no expectation of personal benefit.
Now, as you can imagine, an MBA, ex-consultant, ex-banker would have a hard time taking a credible stand against marketing, branding, or PR, but that’s not my point, and it hasn’t been. I don’t think there is anything intrinsically wrong with marketing per se, but I give Burning Man the institution full credit for not launching Black Rock Consulting, but instead sticking to their non-commercially exploitative guns.
But it’s naive of me to have thought as I have all these years, that Burning Man somehow exists apart from the society it sought to leave behind. Just as the environmental and resource impacts of the playa can’t be overlooked–they do still share a planet, an atmosphere, and a Wal-mart distribution infrastructure with the rest of society, after all–the notion that what happens in Black Rock City stays in Black Rock City is a fantasy. And all the bartering in the desert won’t change the fact that Burning Man is a brand and an institution in itself now, and it has associative value that the Uchronians identified and skilfully leveraged–and they did it in a way that has Burning Man veterans defending them.
While LadyBee has been pretty engaging, if resolute in her defense of the Uchronians, [“of course Arne puts them on his resume – and why shouldn’t he? He designed and built the thing. All our artists do that. If it strengthens his portfolio, fine. What marketing scheme do you think they’re going to unleash? Selling imported radiators to burners?” (Arne Quinze’s co-creator Jan Kriekels has a radiator company)], and she backed off a bit from her first email [“subject: greg – get a clue!”], the Belgian she roped into our exchange started with a really petty, thin-skinned personal attack.
Burning Man’s foundation is the idea that everyone could and should make art or express herself creatively. BRC is built on that creative exchange. Great. But Burning Man also has a curator, and a grant-making and evaluation process, which they use to dole out a portion of gate receipts to art proposals. It’s an institutional system that bears a remarkable ressemblance to the non-playa-based art world.
Uchronia itself was funded completely outside that institution, as LadyBee explained in an email to Burning Man’s staff [who’d apparently had some questions about the project, too.] And its team included between 45 and 60 “volunteers,” who, it turned out, were employees of the creators’ companies, and who worked at full salary, plus expenses, on the project. By that definition, Star Wars was a “volunteer” project, too.
Again, this is all totally cool, but it seems to me that if what happens at Burning Man doesn’t stay at Burning Man after all, and there are curatorial decisions being made and business transactions being done, then these people could respond a little better to criticisms, alternative interpretations, or a response that’s anything less than sheer, uncritical gratitude and ecstasy.
When Christo “gave” the “Gates” to the world, he kept trotting out his figure for how much he spent–$20 million, he said–while the boost the project gave his own art sales and holdings–in a private, pre-“Gates” interview, Jean-Claude claimed they had $400 million–was almost never mentioned.
The “Gates” was what it was, and Uchronia is what it is. But one of the things it is is a page in a portfolio for a “creator of atmosphere” who sells his own brand of edgy counter-cultural buzz to corporate clients like Compaq, Diesel, and Rem Koolhaas.
In a previous post, I characterized the Belgian designers behind Uchronia, a giant pavilion at Burning Man constructed by an army of their firms’ employees and others of new wood and then burned to the ground, as “self-aggrandizing eco-idiots.” Christine Kristen, aka LadyBee, the curator of art projects at Burning Man, takes issue with my characterization. The designers are not, it turns out, eco-idiots. Greg.org regrets the error.
LadyBee:
The Belgian project at Burning Man was a stellar example of community and generosity, funded by two Belgian business owners who regularly do community based art projects worldwide. The wood they used was last-quality Canadian wood destined for the dump. Additionally they are planting trees in Belgium equal to the wood used, and all leftover wood was donated to Burners without Borders, a Burning Man group that does relief work in Louisiana and Mississippi.
Get your facts straight before you criticize. You mean-spirited comments make you seem…petty and vindictive. I managed this project for Burning Man and there was virtually nothing objectionable in it. In fact these two business owners are trying to promote community through art-making and are very generous and forward thinking.
Though her explanation doesn’t entirely contradict Treehugger’s description of the wood used as “virgin pine,” it is a welcome correction.
For the rest of my response to LadyBee, see below. And for documentation of the Uchronia brand, check flickr.
Continue reading “Standing Too Close To The Fire Of Burning Man”
