Putting The Fun In Fundraising–With Facebook!

Hah, Michael Govan’s kickback public engagement in LACMA’s decision to suspend its film program surprised me, but not as much as seeing the museum basically organizing its own netroots opposition.
Now, barely ten days into the LACMA Film Program Deathwatch, The LA Times hears from a vacationing Govan that “potential donors have stepped up, interested in helping underwrite the series.” the whole crisis starts to feel like a manufactured fundraising stunt.
The Times has all the pieces of the story, but can’t seem to put them together.
Govan had the film program on a three-year sink-or-swim timeline, which runs out now. The museum president said continued funding of the film department has been “an issue” in budget discussions for seven years, which means the board has been interested enough to keep the department around, but that the status quo hasn’t been sexy enough to attract dedicated funding.
By floating the idea of killing–sorry, “suspending”–the program, the museum is able to gauge the public’s interest. On the off chance that no one cared, the tough budget decision would be that much easier to justify. Meanwhile, an outcry–the louder the better–would bring attention to the program, and would transform a mundane $5 million ask for operating funds into an exciting chance to save and expand a vital, beloved film program. The naming rights of which can be had for–how much would you like, Michael? “I’d love to see $10 million.”
LACMA’s Govan says donors step forward for film program [latimes]
Previously: On LACMA killing its film program to save it

You Didn’t Have To Be There, And Even If You Had

It’s now known as “Theater Piece No. 1,” and it is considered to be the first multimedia happening. It included simultaneous solos of dance, poetry readings and a lecture, along with slides, film, painting, and phonographic recordings.
But if John Cage called it anything at all, or if anyone referred to it as anything at all–and it’s not clear that anyone did at the time–it was just 1952 Untitled Event at Black Mountain College. And no one can quite agree how long it lasted, or even when it actually took place, but the best guess is probably early August, maybe on the 16th, in 1952.
The most complete synthesis of documentation and recollections of the event is probably William Fetterman’s 1996 book, John Cage’s Theatre Pieces, which says that only around 35-50 people–including faculty, students, and locals–attended.
There was reportedly? probably? no score at the time, but that wasn’t a big shock to longtime Cage collaborators like David Tudor: “He distributes a plan that you can use or not, but it’s just a piece of papers with some numbers on it. This kind of thing doesn’t get documented, and it gets lost.” Cage created the first of two complex scores for “Theater Piece No. 1” in 1960.
Here’s how Cage himself remembered it in 19:

At one end of the rectangular hall, the long end, was a movie, and at the other were slides. I was on a ladder delivering a lecture which included silences, and there was another ladder which M.C. Richards and Charles Olson went up at different times… Robert Rauschenberg was playing an old-fashioned phonograph that had a horn, and David Tudor was playing piano, and Merce Cunningham and other dancers were moving through the audience. Rauschenberg’s pictures [the White Paintings] were suspended above the audience…They were suspended at various angles, a canopy of paintings above the audience. I don’t recall anything else except the ritual of the coffee cup. (Kirby and Scheckner 1965, pp. 52-3)

The movie, black and white silent footage of a work in progress by Nicholas Cernovitch, was apparently projected on the ceiling, and then it moved down the wall. Scenes included the setting sun, and the cooks at BMC, a couple named Cornelia and George. Who, I would assume, lived in the house Lawrence Kocher designed for the kitchen staff.
There is at least one recollection that the event also included a black & white painting by Franz Kline. I’m on the road, so I don’t have my copy of Hopps’s Rauschenberg in the 1950s catalogue handy, but I remember a dispute over whether Rauschenberg’s all-white paintings were considered or used as projection screens for the event’s multimedia components. Cage credited the White Paintings with prodding him to compose 4’33”.
rauschenberg_white_paintings_life.jpg
Cernovitch summed up the various audience reactions rather succinctly: “Nobody knew we were creating history.”
And they weren’t, at least until Cage began teaching the event at his legendary New School classes several years later to students who would be among the first performance artists, including Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, and Al Hansen.
Buy Fetterman’s John Cage’s Theatre Pieces [amazon]
Or preview most of the account of 1952 Untitled Event, beginning on page 97 [google books]
[image: Bob at Stable Gallery in 1953, by Allan White for LIFE]

Dim Bulbs

I’d ignored Artforum’s recap of the recent Süddeutsche Zeitung report that the EU’s looming ban might pose a problem for museums and artists whose work incorporates. incandescent lightbulbs. I mean, it seems like such a piddly little question, right?
Sure, artists from Moholy-Nagy to Dan Flavin to Robert Rauschenberg to Felix Gonzalez-Torres used light bulbs, I thought [and don’t try and factcheck me on Flavin; I’m talking about his early wall-mounted constructs.] But the hefty fines are only for selling light bulbs. Just buy the things out of the EU, or have someone give them to you, problem solved, right?
Wrong. According to the followup story, the light bulb ban includes importation, too. So depending on the wattage, conservators and collectors have a narrowing window in which to stockpile a crapload of light bulbs, the way they do Beuysian chocolate, fat, and felt. [For Felix’s light strings, most of which use 25w bulbs, the ban doesn’t kick in until 2012. You could fill a warehouse with light bulbs by then, no sweat.] What’ll be interesting to see is whether loaning or selling a light-bulb equipped work constitutes importation, and is thus banned.
Actually, what’s interesting to see is the complete and utter histrionic ignorance of the EU Energy Commission spokesman Ferran Tarradellas [Espuny] when asked about the issue:

Tarradellas questioned the argument that lightbulbs are as common to the artist’s materials as canvas, paint, and marble. “A visit to any museum for contemporary art demonstrates the contrary,” said Tarradellas.

“It’s utterly ludicrous to ask the commission for the sake of art to leave a product on the market that could be dangerous for the environment, health, and the consumer,” said Tarradellas. “Otherwise exceptions could be asked for when an artist wants to use antiperson landmines, enriched plutonium, or CFC.”

Ah, well since you put it that way…
The original article, which Artforum never bothers to link to: Glühbirnen in Museen | Dealer gesucht [sueddeutsche.de]
The followup does not appear to be online [yet?]

James Turrell On Earth Shadow, Anti-Twilight, And The 15-Minute Museum Experience

0300801.jpgThe newly redesigned Design Observer would’ve been awesome even without hosting the archive of Places: Forum of Design For the Public Realm, a print journal published by the architecture faculties at MIT and UC Berkeley from 1983 until Spring 2009.
One of the first pieces to be republished is an interview from 1983 with James Turrell conducted by Kathy Halbreich, Lois Craig, and William Porter. Much of the discussion is about Turrell’s “most ambitious current project,” Roden Crater, which is only now nearing completion, 25 years later. A couple of interesting parts, the first of which is only interesting insomuch as it kind of puts paid to Michael Kimmelman’s recent [sic] lament over dwindling museumgoer attention spans and how people only stand in front of the Mona Lisa long enough to take a picture. Turns out a) duh, b) duh, and c) Turrell’s been looking at looking for decades now:

Places: You’re really challenging the 15-minute museum experience. There’s a requirement, there’s a demand in this to be somewhere.
Turrell: Well, if you don’t do that, then, it’s just the emperor’s clothes. Either you do the work or you forget it. There is a price of admission and most people don’t pay it.

Now for something I didn’t know, even after decades of looking:

For instance, there’s one light event that’s every important to me: the rise of the earth’s shadow. When the sun goes down in the West and you look to the East on a clear day you’ll see this pink line, with white silvery-blue below. Actually, you’re looking at the earth’s shadow advancing up in the sky in the East as the sun goes down in the West, so you see the earth’s shadow projected in the atmosphere. What you see underneath is night rising. Night doesn’t fall. It rises.

Really? Really. With formulas and diagrams and everything. The anti-twilight arch, or as the Victorians called it, the “Belt of Venus,” is also new to me. If there’s anything more banally sublime than the Mona Lisa, it’s a beautiful sunset. And yet there you go.
Sounds like it’s time to break down and read The Nature of Light and Colour in the Open Air, Marcel Minnaert’s almost quixotically exhaustive and hugely influential attempt to pin down and explain all the phenomena of light in the world. Turrell mentioned it last Spring.
The photo above of a 2001 space shuttle launch at sunset shows part of the exhaust plume in the earth’s shadow, and part of it illuminated by the sun. Apparently, the shadow of the plume itself, which only appears to connect with the moon, is called the Bugeron Effect, [or Burgeron Effect?] which is apparently different from the Bergeron Effect . So that’s like three or four things I didn’t know, and one I still don’t. here’s a normal picture of the earth shadow rise. [via nasaimages.org]
Posted [sic] 07.15.83 An Interview With James Turrell [places.designobserver.com]

Frosty Myers Winners

latimes, wigwam of searchlights
Before I realized that if I wanted to see an exhibit of a 100-ft silver balloon, I’d have to make it myself, I was still just ruminating on art I hoped/wished someone would make. One of those projects I want/need to see is a re-staging of the Los Angeles Times photo of the panicked air raid searchlights that criss-crossed the sky on the night of Feb. 25, 1942. Six civilians died in that apparent, still unexplained false alarm, and the Times’ caption on the photo above described how the “searchlights built a wigwam” over the city. Wouldn’t that be fantastic?
Well, now I wonder if there is someone to get to do it.
16 Miles pointed to an awesome 2001 Art in America article by Suzaan Boettger on Sculpture in Environment, a pioneering New York City-wide show of public sculpture organized by Sam Green, the director of the ICA in Philadelphia, which took place in October 1967.
The main focus of Boettger’s article is an intriguing and prescient unmonumental work by Claes Oldenberg, and Robert Smithson’s seminal roadtrip article/work, “The Monuments of Passaic,” which [not] coincidentally, he made the day before. And the hook for 16 Miles’ post is the death of Tony Rosenthal, whose Alamo cube still spins where it was shown, in Astor Place. But there are other great details: Oldenberg had first proposed creating a traffic jam; Robert Morris’s jets of steam proposal was considered “too ephemeral.” Isamu Noguchi was still pitching his playground idea [“too expensive.”] Alexander Calder liked to help the Negros. &c. &c.
frosty_myers_searchlights75.jpg
But anyway, Boettger mentions this “a nocturnal event by Forrest Myers, who projected four carbon arc searchlights from Tompkins Square Park.” It’s not clear what they were called, but this description from a 2006 Art in America profile of Frosty Myers explains what these sculptures were:

“Searchlight Sculptures,” nighttime installations of carbon-arc searchlights that were sited at the four corners of Tompkins Square Park in the East Village in 1966, in Union Square in 1969, in a park in Fort Worth in 1979, and elsewhere. The beams tent upward to join at an apex in the manner of a vast pyramid.

Elsewhere included Artpark in Lewiston, NY, where Myers created a Searchlights pyramid in 1975 [see above]. You must admit, it does look very wigwammish.
You may know Myers from such previous greg.org appearances as: being instrumental in E.A.T. and the art/tech collaborative’s ambitious artfest-in-a-mirrored-dome, the Pepsi Pavilion at the Osaka ’70 Expo. And maybe being one of six artists whose work was secretly smuggled onto the moon on the Apollo 12 lunar module.
Remembering Tony Rosenthal, Remembering “Sculpture in Environment” [16miles.com]
A Found Weekend, 1967: Public Sculpture and Anti-Monuments, Art in America, Jan. 2001 [art in america via findarticles]
[Searchlights imagevia ekac.org]

Tim Burton X Donald Judd

nightmare_judd_still1.jpg
Tim Burton was at MoMA yesterday, talking to media folk about a film dept. retrospective of his work, which includes an exhibition this fall of sketches, storyboards, props, puppets, etc. from his wacked out output.
I wasn’t in town for the q&a [here’s a movieline writeup via MoMA’s Twitter] , but the confluence of Burton and MoMA reminded me of one of my favorite art geek moments: spotting Donald Judd chairs in the background of a 2-second shot in the director’s 1993 stop action animated film, Nightmare Before Christmas.
That’s them in the corner there, in a montage where Jack ruins Christmas all over town. Here’s a close-up. They’re pink!
nightmare_judd_cu.jpg
I had really just begun getting interested in Judd’s furniture a year or so before this, so I was pretty attuned. In fact, several months after seeing the movie, I met Rainer Judd to talk about buying some pieces, about differences or changes with the handling of furniture that might follow her father’s untimely death.
As we chatted, I mentioned the chairs Tim Burton had put in the movie, and she was pretty surprised. She knew Burton, it turned out, and knew he was a fan of the work. And yet, she’d never heard about the chairs–or chairs inspired by the chairs–making a cameo.
Never did hear anything else about it. Hope I didn’t get him into trouble.

On LACMA Killing Its Film Program [To Save It?]

Regular readers of greg.org know it, but I’ll say it upfront: I’m Team MoMA. I’ve supported the museum for years–I feel like I grew up in it, art-wise. And film-wise. Right now, MoMA’s film department and programming are stronger than I can ever remember. It feels absolutely vital, critical. And even when the old timers SHHH! people for breathing too loud in the theater, it’s great to see a movie there.
And yet the Bing theater at LACMA is even nicer. And yet, LACMA is suspending [i.e., killing] its film program. In Los Angeles. It’s just mindboggling. They have to be planning a complete, and somehow different reboot, a makeover of some kind for which Michael Govan’s only plausible path is going cold turkey.
Two home team analogies: MoMA’s Projects series, which lived for a very long time just off the lobby as a small gallery for anointing emerging artists, but which was eventually brought back to the Taniguchi building as a roving showcase for [basically] New York debuts by global artists. Generally speaking, it seems to be working.
The other is more directly film-related: the Modern caught a lot of flak for closing its film stills collection, squeezing out the longtime curator and librarian–who happened to be active in the employee’s union, and the whole thing went down around the time of the staff strike–and shipping the whole thing off to the film center in Pennsylvania. It was a controversial action, to say the least, but [film] life goes on. What the net impact is, nearly a decade later?
So yeah, I’m alarmed by Govan’s decision and by Kenneth Turan’s outrage over it. But I also have to hope that some kind of substantial film program will return, even if it’s new and different and takes a while. Because I can’t imagine otherwise.
LACMA slaps film in the face [latimes]

Microarchitecture On ebay.fr, Only Two Days Left!

framis_billboard_house1.jpg
Estuaire is the three-time biennale in beta for the Nantes region. This year, the second incarnation includes I.C.I., Instant Carnet Island, a habitable, riverfront collection of micro-architecture which is for rent–EUR10/person/night, bring your sleeping bag–and for sale.
estuaire_for_sale.jpg
Several of the structures have been put on French eBay. Available items include both Antonin Sorel’s L’étoile de l’amour [above, left], which is several puns at once on L’étoile de la mort [the Death Star, though in Star Wars ep. IV, it was actually called l’Etoile Noire]; and Damien Chivialle’s ark for “amoreux hedonistes” [above, right]; but not, alas, Ant Farm’s time capsule/video lounge recreation of their Media Van [above, center], which could probably teach the kiddies a thing or two about hedonistes, amiright?
There are less than two full days left, and so far, with only one 16-seat picnic table by the Dutch design firm 24h Living meeting the reserve, the whole thing seems destined to be a primarily conceptual exercise.
Unless people start bidding now!
flake_house_ebay.jpg
The Flake House [above, currently EUR2310] by the Paris architects OLGGA is pretty rustic-slick, about as practical as a folly can get; and Dre Wapenaar’s Treetent [current bid: EUR2000] is a classic. But I think I’d take Spanish artist Alicia Framis’s Billboard House [top] first. The opening bid is just EUR1000 [including breakdown and loading, but not shipping or reassembly].
Originally conceived for the Land project Rirkrit Tiravanija organizes in Thailand, Billboard House consists of just three billboards and a raised floor. It threads the utopian needle very nicely. It’s unprecious and low-tech, a totally plausible-seeming affordable housing solution–for folks living the Thai, along the side of the road, do all your cooking and socializing and hygienic activities outdoors lifestyle.
Estuaire 2009 | Instant Carnet Island runs through Aug 16 [estuaire.info via thingsmagazine]
check out Estuaire09’s items on eBay France, auctions end July 31 Paris time [ebay.fr]
Billboardhousethailand (2000) [aliciaframis.com]
update: in the end, everything had at least one bid, but only two of 24h Living’s three tables sold.

Nam June Paik On Art & Boxing


Was watching this ancient panel discussion, “Time and Space Concepts in Music and Visual Art,” from Pleiades Gallery in 1978 with Merce Cunningham, but then I totally fell for Nam June Paik all over again instead. A couple of pull quotes:

In any other profession like lawyers, dentists, sanitation workers, or teachers, if you do fairly well, slightly above average, you can make a living. But only in art and heavyweight boxing, you have to be top five to pay your rent.
[laughter]
It’s strange, especially because in heavyweight boxing, you know more or less who wins. The fight can be fixed, but not as easily as in the art world.

And this one, where Paik talks about peoples’ complaints that video art is boring, and that it would be hard to write a PhD on the history of video art, because all the material you’d have to sit through would take a hundred years. It’s not the random access of an encyclopedia vs the sequential access of video, though, that’s strikes a particular chord, but the realization that the panel’s participants–Cage, Paik, Cunningham–are now gone [stay healthy, Richard Kostelanetz and Dore Ashton!]:

Life, we cannot repeat. Life is sequential access. However, videotape is changing that: life as a sequential access.
If you freeze a time and retrieve them. So you keep certain access–1967, 1955–frozen. Like an icebox. You can go access cheese, butter, eggs. And you can go back to your twentyhood, thirtyhood, childhood, in random access. That, videotape is doing. So the beauty of videotape produced now will be appreciated in 2000. It’s like antique hunting.

On another note, it’s kind of comforting/ennervating to see that the medium of panel discussion is still sequential, often boring, and characterized by audience essays in the form of a question.
Time and Space Concepts in Music and Visual Art (Part I) (1978) [ubu]

A Closer Look At Tauba Auerbach’s Pixels

auerbach_paulson_1.jpg
I’d seen Tauba Auerbach’s text- or letter-based paintings before, but I didn’t know about her prints. She did a couple of pairs of prints using pixels last year with Berkeley-based Paulson Press. There’s a black and white set, 50/50, where exactly 50% of the pixels shown are white and 50% are black, and then there’s an 8-color set called A Half Times A Half Times A Half.
Without knowing how or why they were made, I was first drawn to the different resolutions, which she calls “fine” [above] and “coarse” [below]. [And the color ones obviously remind me of Gerhard Richter’s Farben painting series from the early 1970s, which became the basis for his stained glass window in the Koln Cathedral.]
auerbach_paulson_2.jpg
Then I realize they’re aquatints, etchings–Paulson Press specializes in intaglio printing–and not printed digitally, so there’s an interesting transition from digital to physical. And the printing technique itself adds a layer of imperfection to a “perfect” digital original.
Of 50/50, Auerbach said [pdf]:

I was thinking about binary as a language, like binary code for computers, as well as just the binaries within the English language, and how in binary code there’s just zeros and ones.
You have to represent everything, including the ambiguous, with just those two components.

So she’s started introducing randomness. The b/w pixels are randomly placed, but it really pops in the color etchings:

I created three plates. And these three pigment primaries are like the process primaries used for printing –cyan, magenta, and yellow. And on each plate there’s a random pattern of colored squares and blank squares, and they overlap at varous probabilities to create seven possible colors–or eight if you include the white. So, the three primaries, the three secondaries, and then a seventh color where all three overlap, and then the white where none overlap.

So if I’m reading that right, each plate could be printed with any of the three colors. The plates x inks would generate a the number of permutations–though it’d be doubled if the top and bottom of the rectangular plates are reversed.
As I’m typing this, it sounds like a Sol Lewitt, too, an early, exhaustive Lewitt serialization made in the mature Lewitt’s palette. But there are at least 84 possible combinations for each print–if the top/bottom of each plate don’t matter, there are 816–and Auerbach’s edition size is only 30. Sounds like introducing a bit of randomness into the process was plenty. I’m sure her printers were relieved.
Tauba Auerbach prints [paulsonpress.com via 16 miles of string]
Tauba Auerbach prints press release – pdf [paulsonpress.com]

Stephen Shore Interview At Vice

Here are some dots I never would have connected. When Stephen Shore took his photography-changing 1972 road trip from New York to Amarillo, was he going to see Stanley Marsh 3?
No se, but as this portrait shows, Shore definitely made it [back?] to Marsh’s by 1975:
stephen_shore_stanley_marsh.jpg
I’ve been a huge fan of Shore’s work for a long time, and I have a hard time seeing myself asking a single one of the questions Steve Lafreniere asks. Maybe that’s why this interview is so interesting.
Stephen Shore interviewed by Steve Lafreniere [viceland.com]
image: Stephen Shore, Stanley Marsh and John Reinhardt, Amarillo, Texas, February 15, 1975 [viceland.com]

July 24, 1973 Was A Tuesday

I was researching a project just now, came across this, and then noticed the date:

ROBERT SMITHSON, 35, A SCULPTOR, IS DEAD
July 24, 1973, Tuesday
Page 41, 227 words

Robert Smithson, a sculptor, was killed in the crash of a light plane on Friday, along with the pilot and a photographer, as they were inspecting one of his “Earth works” under construction on a ranch near Amarillo, Tex. He was 35 years old and lived at 799 Greenwich Street.

[The New York Times]

On Billboards, Or More Precisely, Not On Billboards

Damn, but that is one fantastic propaganda billboard. James Hill shot it for the NY Times. Apparently, it’s in Abkhazia, and the two guys are the presidents of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two breakaway provinces of Georgia.
LAXART curates an art billboard pretty well, and I guess the medium’s appreciated more there, but I’m really surprised at how rare are the instances of traffic-stopping, naturalistic [sic] photography on a billboard.
There’s Felix, of course, and maybe he’s part of the problem, because he set my expectations so high with his 1992 MoMA Projects show, which consisted of a photo of his and Ross’s unmade bed on billboards around Manhattan. Coming across those things in the cityscape blew my tiny little mind.
But then, it was the early 90s, and Benetton was certainly making use of naturalistic or photojournalistic imagery in its advertising. We’re so inured to the standard billboard vocabulary–Alive! Newport compositions, supergraphics, 3D gimmicks, blownup print ads–that they stop registering, if not become completely invisible. And yet unless we go to Abkhazia, all we get is Patrick $#*%ing Mimran’s vapid fortune cookie sayings.

Convergence

jetty_ball_art21.jpg
If I’m a little high right now, it’s just because these conservators just hit like every art button I have:

To photo-document Spiral Jetty, we used a tethered helium balloon about 8-10 feet in diameter, attached to a digital camera that would take an image every few seconds until the camera’s memory card filled up. Each of us let out string from a spool and sent the balloon up anywhere from 50 to 600 meters, depending on what we were trying to capture and other factors such as wind and amount of helium to give lift. The results were absolutely amazing! Now I have a low tech, low cost way to take aerial images of the sculpture — something I plan to do on an annual basis. These images can be paired with data that we collected using a Total Station survey instrument in order to create scaled 3D maps and diagrams of the Jetty and its materials.

Extending the Conservation Framework: A Site-Specific Conservation Discussion with Francesca Esmay [art21.org via man]