Gerhard Richter used a randomizing computer program to place the 11,500 hand-blown squares of glass in 72 different colors in his 2007 stained glass window for the Cologne Cathedral.
He used the same program at the same time to create 4900 Colours, a work which revisits the color chart and color chip paintings he made in the 1970s. For 4900 Colours, square acrylic paint chips were glued to Aludibond, a European brand of aluminum composite panel.
4900 Colours, Version II, shown at the Serpentine Gallery last fall, consists of 196 panels, each nearly 1m square and containing 25 computer-placed chips. The panels were hung in randomly selected groups of four to make one work comprised of 49 panels. Hans Ulrich Obrist talks about the work and its various versions in this video.
I can’t get over how gorgeous they look, even in the crates. Watching the installation and listening to the several random elements Richter deployed reminds me of John Cage’s rolywholyover exhibit from 1993-4. Using a a list and map created each day by an I Ching-based program, the museum’s art handlers would essentially perform by installing, moving, and removing artworks selected for the show. When not on the walls, paintings and such were stored on rolling walls, still visible, in a roped off section of the gallery. One of my absolute favorite art experiences ever.
Category: art
So They’re Surrealist Dutch Landscapes?
Been trying to think about where the idea of painting an intentionally obscuring, computer-generated, institutionally applied abstract pattern onto a systematically produced aerial photographic map of the entire world fits into the historical painting/photography, abstract/representational context.
From Andre Bazin’s 1945 essay, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” [pdf]
…[P]hotography ranks high in the order of surrealist creativity because it produces an image that is a reality of nature, namely, an hallucination that is also a fact. The fact that surrealist painting combnes tricks of visual deception with meticulous attention to detail substantiates this.
No Redwoods Were Harmed In The Making Of That Serra?
In 1969, Allen Ruppersberg created Al’s Cafe, a detailed, functioning facsimile of an archetypal diner, which was to operate/perform one night a week. Allan McCollum, who was making work in Los Angeles at the time, wrote about Ruppersberg and Al’s Cafe in a 2001 catalogue essay:
I would like to explain a little of why this piece was so significant in L.A. in 1969. “Site” works and “performance” pieces were proliferating at the time; in 1970, for instance, Richard Serra would create an outdoors-brought-indoors installation at the Pasadena Art Museum, in which three immense California redwood logs were leant upon a fourth, and their cantilevered ends were sawn off and allowed to crash to the floor. The aftermath of this action created an enormously dramatic display, and the project was much talked about. Elsewhere, a number of artists of these years were crowding into their cars and heading out to the deserts to work with natural processes, the results of which were often brought back from such alternative, poststudio locales to wind up in the same clean white gallery spaces that the artists seemed to have abandoned so pointedly. Robert Smithson had worked to point out the dialectical relations between the “nonsites” of the urban galleries and the peripheral “sites” of marginalized geographic territories: slag heaps, rock piles, dry lakes, landfills. He and others who followed took to the Midwestern plains and the Western deserts, executing projects in the middle of nowhere, and bringing back aerial photographs, sketches, documentation, and truckloads of residues and samples from these relatively exotic, empty regions of the American map to display in the populated cities. A new vocabulary was building, and an exploration of how our culture’s richness and complexity have always been framed and defined by our fantasies of the sophistication of our urban centers, and the purity of their showplaces and shrines, in relation to nature’s marginalized and boundless emptiness.
A dilemma was beautifully revealed by these pioneering artists–and clearly spelled out for the younger artists–and the question (“naturally”) arose: isn’t our idea of nature just another idea? Another concept? Another cultural artifact? Does moving out of our urban habitats to make art really accomplish anything beyond promoting a further alienation, a further fiction, another kind of imperialism, a new imaginary idea of purity? It was within this growing discourse that Al’s Cafe offered to sell a “JOHN MUIR SALAD (BOTANY SPECIAL),” or “GRASS PATCH WITH FIVE ROCK VARIETIES SERVED WITH SEED PACKETS ON THE SIDE.” In Al’s Cafe, Ruppersberg answered the growing mannerisms of Earth art with a slyly symbolic display of nature as always mediated, always already determined by the culture that processes it–both literally and figuratively–for its own use. He presented nature as a commodity for consumption, without the pretense of any pure “natural” vision.
I really planned to just quote the Serra description [emphasis added]. I’d heard references to the work before, but never to the process and content of the piece. Which means, I guess, I’ve never seen the catalogue for Serra’s one-man Pasadena show, which documented the making of the work, which was titled: Sawing: Base Plate Template (Twelve Fir Trees). Also, I don’t think they were redwoods.
Smithson himself had installed a Non-site, Dead Tree, which consisted of just one tree, in the Dusseldorf Kunsthalle in 1969. Joe Amrhein and Brian Conley’s 2000 re-creation of Dead Tree in Pierogi 2000 was a classic. [Here’s a Frieze review by David Greene.] What’s been written–or exhibited–about these two guys’ early history together?
Feigned The Warhols!
You know what we haven’t been hearing much news about lately? That’s right, art crime. No Pebble Beach “Pollocks” bollocks, no Find The Warhols! updates from LA…
So it’s a relief to hear that hilarious Warholian scams haven’t all disappeared. A man and a woman in Utah were recently busted for trafficking in fake Warhol paintings. In February 2008–wow, take your time reporting that one–a California man paid $25,000 toward the $100,000 purchase of six supposed Warhol paintings, made in 1996, of Matthew Baldwin, aka The Lost Baldwin Brother. Never mind that Warhol died in 1987 and Matthew Baldwin is actually the writer of Defective Yeti.
After an appraiser pointed out the fakes, the woman tried to exchange them for a painting “she claimed was worth nearly $70 million.” Hey! I know two guys who just lost a supposed $70 million painting!
This is officially the best Fake Warhol In Utah story since the artist sent an impostor to deliver a lecture at the University of Utah in 1968. [Sorry, aging Salt Flats hippie who’s trying to sell the Warhol garbage bag he took home from the Factory.]
Couple charged with trying to sell fake Warhols [sltrib]
Neuester Himmels-Atlas, By Christian Goldbach
Just another, particularly beautiful, addition to the list of sky atlases throughout history which showed the entire universe. Or the known universe. Or the known universe that they could show:
Zwillinge (Twins : Gemini), a 1799 constellation map by Christian Goldbach from his book, Neuester Himmels – Atlas . Here is some discussion of Goldbach’s depiction and technique, from the Linda Hall Library, where a full scan is available:
“The print style and technique was unusual. White stars are shown against a black background. The first pressing was made before the constellation figures and text details were added. These prints looked like a night sky. Then the finished plate was printed once more, providing a comparison with figures. The copper plates were printed in relief rather than the more common intaglio. While not the first to use this technique, his atlas was very influential on those that followed. His maps represent the stars with a Flamsteed projection.”
[image via USNO rare book library by way of bibliodyssey]
Shaquille O’Neal Curates An Art Exhibit
Well known Twitter pioneer Shaquille O’Neal is curating an exhibition next February titled “Size DOES Matter,” which will look at the issue of scale in contemporary art. The show will take place at the Flag Art Foundation, which was founded by the collector/greg.org friend Glenn Fuhrman. In reporting on Bloomberg’s initial report, the LA Times’s David Ng talked a little critic trash:
One has to wonder how much “curating” O’Neal actually did for the exhibition and whether the whole thing is just a savvy publicity stunt for the Flag Art Foundation, whose main backer is collector Glenn Fuhrman, a co-managing partner of MSD Capital LP.
Since no one put scare quotes around “curating” or questioned the Louvre’s motives when they asked non-curator Umberto Eco to curate an exhibition, I will assume that Ng is really referring to the way everyone from bloggers to windowdressers are curating now.
Shaquille O’Neal, art curator? [latimes.com, original hed: “Shaquille O’Neal says curating is no slamdunk” ]
Umberto Eco Curates An Art Exhibit
‘We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die’
The headline was glib enough that I waited several days before actually reading it, but Spiegel’s interview with Umberto Eco does turn out to be worth it.
SPIEGEL: But why does Homer list all of those warriors and their ships if he knows that he can never name them all?
Eco: Homer’s work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that. We have always been fascinated by infinite space, by the endless stars and by galaxies upon galaxies. How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn’t have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see. Lovers are in the same position. They experience a deficiency of language, a lack of words to express their feelings. But do lovers ever stop trying to do so? They create lists: Your eyes are so beautiful, and so is your mouth, and your collarbone … One could go into great detail.
SPIEGEL: Why do we waste so much time trying to complete things that can’t be realistically completed?
Eco: We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.
Interviews and breathless features about Eco are popping up everywhere because he has been a “Special Guest Curator” at the Louvre. The resulting show, “The Infinity of Lists,” [1] is open through Dec. 13. Previous Special Guest Curators include Robert Badinter, Toni Morrison, Anselm Kiefer and Pierre Boulez. The Special Guest Curator program is absolutely not a publicity stunt. As Jean-Marc Terrasse, Eco’s handler at the Louvre for the last two years explains in The Art Newspaper:
Umberto Eco is an ideal guest for many reasons. He is a man who has worked in all the artistic disciplines and who thinks at great speed and has thousands of very lucid ideas. He is a particularly interesting personality because he has a very clear, erudite vision of the art world, combined with a particular ability to marry high culture and pop culture, the sublime and the profane, the arcane and the new.”
The Louvre’s next Special Guest Curator is film director Patrice Chareau.
[1] Actually, the show turns out to be called “Vertige de la Liste.”
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]
Correction: A Serra NOT Named Bellamy
So last winter, after finding Jake Dobkin‘s, and Nathan Kensinger’s photos during my search for Richard Serra sculptures visible on Google Maps, I got a little fascinated with the massive Cor-Ten sculptures Richard Serra stores in a riverfront machine yard in Port Morris, the Bronx. Google Maps showed a Torqued Spiral as well as several long, arced steel pieces [above]. A presumably more recent image from Microsoft Live/Bing [below] only shows the spiral.
After talking to some friends at Gagosian and because there is a giant I-beam with “Bellamy” on it, I’d originally deduced that the Torqued Spiral was Bellamy one of Serra’s first spiral sculptures, which he’d shown in the fall of 2001.
But that turns out to be wrong. Writing about her visit to the stored Serra for the journal Afterall, Mary Walling Blackburn reports that it is not Bellamy after all. Bellamy is currently in England.
The “Bellamy” I-beam on-site [visible in Nathan’s photos], is apparently not a nametag or some such. Instead, they are used for stabilizing the curved pieces during transport and installation. They can be seen in use in Art21’s series of photos of Joe being installed at the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis.
So that begs the question: what Torqued Spiral is it, then? Inquiring minds might want to ask the artist next time they see him. I know I will.
What I Looked At Today [Until My Eyes Glazed Over] – Goethe
I don’t know who Bruce MacEvoy is, but his is the most exhaustive series of comparative analyses of various theories of color theory I’ve found. [aha. A web guy/artist who sold YHOO better than I did.]
As I debate in my mind whether to order paint colors for my Dutch Landscape paintings or to mix them myself, I find once again that painting, which I thought I knew something about, has deep historical, theoretical, and practical tranches which I’d never seriously considered.
Anyway, here’s a tiny bit of MacEvoy’s discussion of Zur Farberlehre (1810), the monumental, idiosyncratic, combative, and too-obscure treatise/polemic on color that consumed Johann Wolfgang von Goethe for nearly two decades:
This approach is exemplified in the watercolor Color Magnet (right), painted after a long evening discussion about the “polarity” of color with the poet Friedrich Schiller. The short vertical bars (far right) represent primordial yellow and blue refraction fringes (discussed below); the curved bars (at left), which are drawn to resemble the curve of iron filings across the opposing poles of two magnets, show the mixtures that result when “attracting” fringes are overlapped to produce the “union” mixture green (below) and the “deepening” extraspectral mixture purpur (above). These combinations produce Newton’s spectrum (horizontal bar, center bottom) and the extraspectral purples (horizontal bar, center top). Linking all mixtures together end to end, just as bar magnets can be linked at their opposite poles, produces the central vertical bar, the circumference of the hue circle, with the light emitting colors of sun and sky at the center. There is an almost mystical simplemindedness in this pursuit of patterns, resemblances and associations, but it is the essence of the Goethean approach to color.
Unfortunately, Goethe’s ambitious project has been rendered incoherent both by the deleted sections and by the English translation title: Farbenlehre simply means “chromatics,” with no “theory” implied (just as Sprachlehre means “grammar” and not “theory of speech”). Given Goethe’s sensitivity to language, it is not irrelevant to note that the root meaning of lehre is “lesson,” “teaching” or “learning from experience”. In the same way that a grammar of language simply describes the patterns in how we speak, Goethe wanted to develop a holistic “grammar” of color that describes how color behaves. He was looking for patterns in color experience — not for a theory of colors extracted from physical experiments. This makes his book an important precursor to German phenomenology. All these complexities have disappeared from the truncated English version of the book.
And then there’s this bit from further down, which seems to sidle up to the edge, to so speak, of these discrete polygons of algorithmic color I will paint:
Next, in what he motivates as a pedagogical move, Goethe illustrates the “primordial” shadowing or distorting of images with the colors produced by a prism. These illustrate what is probably the central analogy of his book: that color, to the extent it has an external, physical origin, results in the blending of edges or boundaries between dark and light; edges are both the essential element of an image and the primordial cause of color appearance:
“[When viewed through a prism], we have found all unbroken surfaces, large or small, to be colourless, yet at the outlines or boundaries [edges], where the surface is relieved upon a darker or lighter object, we observe a coloured appearance. Outline, as well as surface, is necessary to constitute a figure or circumscribed object. We therefore express the leading fact thus: circumscribed objects must be displaced by refraction in order to exhibit an appearance of colour.” (¶197-198)
Not that Goethe was at all correct, of course. [Or as MacEvoy puts it, “Even when charitably summarized, Goethe’s theory of color is incomplete, inconsistent and incomprehensible.”] But it’s still kind of fascinating.
Fischer Foul?
Is Charlie Finch feeling left out? In his new column on artnet, Finch downplays the New Museum’s Dakis controversy–by throwing out several blind items he thinks are even bigger, yet unacknowledged scandals, including a claim he made in his Urs Fischer smackdown two weeks ago that, apparently, no one noticed, cared about, or believed:
The Fischer show is nothing but market driven, specifically by one collector with a heavy position in Fischer who has contributed mightily to the cost of the show and will handsomely reap the awards at future auctions. This is why Fischer provides the gullible, conformist art crowd with a whole floor of shiny boxes bedecked with consumer images, that is nothing more than a dull rehash of Andy’s Brillo boxes.
Do you see the difference in subversive mojo between a jarring one-off like [Warhol’s] Tunafish Disaster, which continues to project real dread and uncertainty, and a charlatan like Fischer regurgitating the Duchampian template for the cynical purpose of market domination? It’s not that difficult, pass me a spare rib.
I can’t think of anything less eyebrow-raising than a collector who buys a lot of an artist’s work also supporting his museum show. But Finch somehow sees Fischer’s case as atypical. So who’s the manipulator? Looking at the list of sponsors, it could really be anybody [anybody but Dakis, he says]: I see Peter Brant, Adam Lindemann, Eugenio Lopez, Francois Pinault, Steven Cohen, and David Teiger. Pinault’s already given Fischer a show in Venice. Lopez, Cohen, and Teiger aren’t really speculator types, at least on Fischer’s level or the compressed time frame Finch is hinting at. So that leaves Brant and Lindemann. And Finch’s “spare rib” non sequitur could be a reference to Adam.
But then, so what? Adam’s not hiding his Fischers; he puts them on his lawn. And he’s not ducking the market, either. He backed a gallery, then married one of the partners, and he rather famously netted $15 million by flipping a Koons heart sculpture, via Sotheby’s, right back to/through Gagosian. Whoever they turn out to be and however big or small the scandals, Finch’s blind items are really just meant to bolster his own insider status when the larger conversation seems to be passing him by.
The Player
I can’t say how I feel about Francesco Vezzoli’s work; that’s not how my mama raised me. I will grant though, that he’s extremely smart and astute and has successfully identified an elemental dynamic of the art world and makes highly successful art that taps into that dynamic. OK, fine. his work embodies almost every superficial, vapid, self-unaware, pseudo-celebrity, luxury consumerist aspect I hate about the VIP Preview art world.
So bully for him that he’s turning the MoCA gala benefit tonight into the set for a performance/piece? This faux-ambivalent account of Vezzoli, his date/star Lady Gaga, and the preparations for the event in the LA Times makes for hilarious reading. I’m sure the event will be the biggest, starchasing cluster$%#& at MoCA since Tom Ford and Naomi Campbell turned the Takashi Murakami dinner into a commemorative plate-stealing riot.
Alas, Vezzoli’s use of art to hustle celebrities into working for free unfortunately reminds me of someone I actually like: Robert Altman. To shoot the benefit scene in The Player, where Tim Robbins’ murderous studio honcho Griffin Mills is honored by several hundred of his best celebrity friends, Altman threw a real fundraiser for LACMA, complete with black & white dress code, then hustled all his celebrity friends to attend–then he filmed them for scale for his movie.
At least now I can finally make sense of Lady Gaga: she is post-op Cher.
Francesco Vezzoli escorts Lady Gaga to MOCA’s gala [lat]
Project Echo & Satelloon Conservation
The first Project Echo satelloon may have started out as a 100-meter sphere, but it didn’t stay that way. Echo IA launched on August 12, 1960, and it stayed in orbit and visible to the naked eye until May 24, 1968. It inflated successfully, but as a paper in Bell Labs Report, Sept. 1961 explains, by May of that year, its shape had already been somewhat deformed in orbit:
On several early passes the average “scatering cross section” was equal to that corresponding to a perfectly conducting 100-foot sphere. From this it is assumed that the balloon inflated as planned.
There apparently has been a long-term decrease, of a few db, in the average “scattering cross section.” As of last May, Echo I [technically IA, since Echo I burned up soon after launch in March 1960] was probably an approximately spherical object with a diameter of no less than 70 feet, and a somewhat wrinkled skin. There may have been a few flattened areas, as indicated by occasional deep fades in the radar signal, but voice communication was then still possible as shown by successful tests with NRL on May 25.
One factor may have been the solar sail effect, the slight pressure generated by photons from the sun bombarding the satelloon’s skin.
image: The Odyssey of Project Echo [history.nasa.gov]
What I Looked At Today – Alex Brown
Though they’re pixelated abstractions, and though they’re almost as likely to be landscapes as people, Alex Brown’s paintings feel a bit like the opposite of what fascinates me about the Dutch Landscape paintings I’m working on.
From a q&a with Brown that accompanied his most recent show this February at Feature:
.who or what are some of the things that inspired your interest to have your work delve into the interdependent relationship of representation and abstraction? Lack of skill as a painter in a more traditional sense of the word? Unwillingness to give you a clear picture of what’s really going on in my brain?
That relationship is a direct result of the manner in which I have chosen to paint. I have always been confused by abstraction. Confused because of a lack of orientation. Taking something realized and turning it into something unrecognizable makes sense to me. I try not to think in those terms so much. They’re all just paintings and some look more like something that you’ve seen in your experience than others do. It all trickles down in varying degrees from a clear source image to finished painting. My abstractions are really just less than overly clear realizations.
Brown developed his approach after realizing he can’t paint straight; he deploys a grid and a filter on an undistorted source image, then painstakingly transfers the result to canvas. I imagine it’s a process similar to Chuck Close’s, whereby a photo is reconstituted, pixel-shaped abstract blob by pixel-shaped abstract blob.
But the distorting abstractions that unmoor the image from its specific subject and turn it into a painting are all Brown’s. The abstract polygons in these Dutch Camo Landscape images have all been put there by someone else–who wants to obscure and despecify the underlying representation. In an odd, inverted sense, paintings of them will look abstract, but will be representational.
Anyway, there are many more wonderful images of Brown’s work at Feature’s website. Above: Fairgrounds, 2008 [featureinc.com, thanks 2 coats of paint for the reminder]
What I Looked At Today – Hiropon Factory
I didn’t realize it until I surfed across this half-pixelated Takashi Murakami painting, but I have Murakami’s factory lodged in my brain as a model of digital-to-analog painting and production.
Back before the whole Louis Vuitton thing, even before Kaikai Kiki, I used to go to Hiropon Factory, Murakami’s Brooklyn studio, somewhat regularly. It seems quaint now, compared to the scale of the Murakami machine. But there’d be teams of painters carefully translating computer-generated illustrations to canvas, one mixed-and-matched color at a time. It was a Superflat paint-by-numbers.
For all the hype, there’s something refreshingly cynical about Murakami’s practice, which I think looks quite different in a Japanese/Asian context than it does from within the Western Art World.
The group show this painting was in, “Hi & Lo,” was curated by trendchasing fashion guru Hiroshi Fujiwara at the Kaikai Kiki space last October. It included Murakamis and works from Fujiwara’s collection, as well as works by Fujiwara fabricated by Murakami’s staff. And there was merchandise–jeans, tote bags, t-shirts–“which used the paintings as a foundation.”
Except that the paintings themselves are based on something: Murakami’s underlying IP–his characters, visual language, design elements, etc. It’s the same basis which gets translated into products and media from paintings to plush toys to cell phone charms, all at different price points. In the Japanese context, there is no distinction between craft and object and art. It’s a perspective that makes me weigh my own assumptions and motives for making a painting vs a photo vs a print, an edition vs a unique work.
for this image and many more: “Hi & Lo” Curated by Hiroshi Fujiwara and Presented by Takashi Murakami [slamxhype.com]
Hi & Lo Opening [kaikaikiki.co.jp]