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Another In An Apparently Infinite Series

See what happens when you just ask? My posts the last couple of days about [mis]remembering Walter de Maria’s 1966 stainless steel sculpture, High Energy Bar/ High Energy Unit, is shaking loose some interesting bits of information on the work and the burst of popularity of “multiples” as a democratic, anti-elitist, market-thwarting strategy for artmaking in the 1960s. [I’m sure there are enough unsupported assumptions packed into that sentence to make a whole CAA-ful of art historians’ eyes bleed, but whatever, close enough.]
First up, de Maria discussed High Energy Bar with Paul Cummings in 1972, in his interview for the Smithsonian Archive:

WDM: …But I mean there’s some relationship between being able to go smaller and smaller through the electron microscope and at the same time still not be able to see all the galaxies in outer space. But I do think that in ten or twenty years somebody will say, well, that’s a minimal situation, or that’s a minimal or that’s minimal art. I think that that will stand. The point was that in the development of these boxes and rectangles it wasn’t just making another piece of geometric sculpture, because there’s been a lot of geometric sculpture in the last fifty years, but of the relationship between this angle and that angle or this box and that box or even David Smith’s last sculptures, you know, the boxes and cubes which in a way was a sort of three-dimensional cubism some sixty or seventy years later, fifty years later, or whatever. But, it was the idea that you could take a perfect cube, perfect rectangle such as the high energy bar, the perfect rectangle and, well, I’ll show you a high energy bar in a moment, and the notion that its ideas and its lines were so perfect and so perfectly composed and self-contained that it was perfectly satisfying to look at that one object as a sculpture without having it confused with a lot of needless relationships. It was perfectly focused on itself and implied a lot more than it was.
PC: You still make those, don’t you?
WDM: The high energy bars, yeah. I’ll make those all my life.
PC: It’s an open-ended multiple.
WDM: That’s right, and I didn’t like the word “multiple.”
PC: Did you think of them in those terms?
WDM; Well, I would say when I started making them in ’65, ’66, the ideas of multiples was just growing about that time and I thought that if a person accepted the idea of a multiple that it should be open-ended, because why, if you have mass-produced technology, why should you limit it at fifty or a hundred or two hundred, because the technology is inexpensive to make . . . .
PC: You have to want that limitation.
WDM: Yeah, and so I sort of thought if I ever did that that probably multiples should be completely continuous.

So yeah, “make those all my life,” but I also like that part up top about these perfect, reference-free metal objects and the once-future convergence of science and minimalism. The latter, of course, feels like validation of what I already think, and the former seems completely undermined by his sculptures’ formal similarities to objects like the Meter–though the PKU’s conceptual conceit that a kilogram is equal to itself does kind of close the loop nice and tightly.
Anyway, onward and upward with the arts. From a reader far more learned than myself on these matters, Kathleen Campagnolo, who is just finishing her PhD on the 1960s sculptures of Walter de Maria, and who apparently has a Google alert set for all mentions of “High Energy Bar -triathlon,” comes this:
the artist’s statement from “3 → ∞ : new multiple art,” a 1970 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, which included Virginia Dwan’s example of High Energy Bar, No. 53:

High Energy Bar
Work on the High energy bar began in 1965. A summation of my minimal investigation in sculpture going back to 1961/62 – the nature of the rectangle.
First bar issued in 1966.
This is my answer to the multiple – not a multiple. I detest multiples (in art).
Differs from most multiples in several respects:
1st) Infinite edition – not limited. I shall make them all my life.
2nd) My personal connection with each bar. With each bar is issued a certificate.
I collect the following information:
Name of owner
Address
Number of bar
And after no. 50 photograph of owner.
3rd) Bars are not transferable. The bar always belongs to the person who gets it first, i.e., if after a person dies the bar were ‘given’ to someone else – that new person would have the first person’s bar – he would not have the bar for himself, i.e., it would not be his bar.
Records of the owners of the bars are kept in a Swiss bank. Needless to say the ownership of all bars is known only to myself and never divulged.

I love it, and not just because that last part, about the bars being non-transferable, makes me feel like I was kind of right all along. If anything, this just adds a new desirability factor to the High Energy Bar secondary market. They’re like Friends of Walter trading cards. Now it’s not just a question of how low the edition number is, but who the ~~first~~ only true owner is/was.
Also, Swiss bank!
You should be able to buy the catalogue for Three To Infinity: New Multiple Art more cheaply than these Amazon dealers [amazon]

Engraved On My Memory, Perhaps

After blogging about it the other day, I thought it was high time I get the real story on the mysterious Walter de Maria stainless steel edition I’d been watching for all these years, the one which has never come up for auction or resale because the artist engraved a restriction on the work itself that it could never be resold for more than $100.
So I called the collector, Charlie Cowles, and asked him about it. Which I probably should have done years ago, because I remembered the work completely wrong.
The piece is actually titled High Energy Bar, and the only thing engraved on it is the title, the artist’s name, and the date, 1966. And a copyright notice, because I guess that’s how they used to do it back then. [Any questions, just ask Robert Indiana what he thinks about it.] But a $100 resale restriction? Charlie said he’d never heard it.
That’s when I realized what had actually been engraved where. Turns out when I’d asked about the piece 15+ years ago, Charlie had explained that he’d gotten it in 1967 from de Maria’s Los Angeles dealer, Nicholas Wilder for $100, and that because it was an unlimited edition, it’d never sell out. That price number and the idea of perpetual availability had lodged in my brain, and over the years, had gotten conflated with the object itself.

Once I figured out the mystery of High Energy Bar, I realized examples of it have been shown and sold all over the place throughout the years. [Though Betty Freeman had one, too, it wasn’t included in the Christie’s auction of her collection.]
The most recent instance pretty much pokes a hole in my market-proof $100 de Maria delusion. In May, a High Energy Bar belonging to the late gallerist Eva af Buren was sold in Stockholm. It went for 220,000 SEK, nearly USD31,000, and more than ten times the pre-sale estimate.
af Buren’s de Maria, which she acquired in 1969, was no. 49 of what the certificate calls “an infinite series.” Not only is the certificate required “in order to be operative and authentic,” but the certificate–depicted below, and let me state for the record, that is one of the snazziest artist certificates I’ve ever seen–“will be incorporated as a part of the whole work of art, to be known as the High Energy Unit.”

Interestingly, though there are hundreds of mentions of High Energy Bar, there were only two mentions of the “complete” piece, High Energy Unit. [It makes me start to wonder about the underappreciated existence our poor certificates must lead, even as they’ve become so important to the authenticity and integrity of the work. Is anyone else making sexy artist certificates–or art about certificates, even–that remain ignored or unknown by everyone but the work’s purchaser? Will an artist make a work whose aesthetic or artistic payoff is actually the [secret] certificate itself? If you have or know of any awesome certificates languishing in any file cabinets out there, by all means, let me know.]
Next step is to check with de Maria and see if these High Energy Bars are still available, or if the series’ infiniteness has become, like infinity itself, more of an abstract concept. It makes me wonder what number it’s reached. And what it sells for.
It could be possible that even if the work is still available from the artist himself, collectors could put a premium on vintage examples with low numbers and historically interesting provenance. Like how On Kawara’s older date paintings sell for significantly more than newer ones, or how Flavins with “vintage” light fixtures sell for more than those with replacements. Frankly, it seems like a valuation system that’s explicitly at odds with the artist’s concept of the work itself. And maybe it’s something that the market will slowly process and correct for as conceptually driven work becomes better understood.

1,000 Fake Giacomettis Look As Shitty As They Sound

Three people–a 59-year-old phony aristocrat and an art dealer couple in their 60’s–were arrested in Stuttgart, Germany for fraud and copyright infringement [!] after police broke up an international Alberto Giacometti forgery operation. Over 1,000 fake Giacommetis were confiscated from storage space in Mainz, outside Frankfurt. The Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeittung photographed a few of them [above] at the police’s invitation. Seriously, I don’t see how the copyright infringement charges will stick, because those things look like crap.
If I understand the Google translation of FAZ correctly, the forgers created an elaborate backstory to support the existence of so much unknown Giacometti material.
The main suspect, who hasn’t been named by police, called himself an “Imperial Count,” and claimed to have been entrusted the works by his dear, dear friend in Paris, Diego, Alberto’s sculptor brother, who died in 1985. According to the count, Diego accumulated a massive stash of Alberto’s sculptures–both casts and plaster originals–from the foundry they shared. The works were kept hidden from Alberto’s widow and heirs [Alberto died in 1966].
Why? Perhaps the answer is to be found in the 139-page book, Diego’s Revenge, which explains the history of the brothers’ rivalry and which supported the works’ authenticity. Because, of course, it had been written and published by the scammers themselves.
In their press release [pdf auf deutch, google translation], the State Crime Prosecutor in Stuttgart had some valuable advice for Giacometti collectors and other art collectors alike:

Prevention tips for the purchase of works of art:
Before you buy:

Avoid impulse buys and so-called “bargains”

Evaluate the offer for sale carefully

Find out on the basis of literature (picture books, work folders) on the Purchase

Überlassen Sie in Zweifelsfällen die Bewertung sachkundigen Dritten (Sammler, • Do not leave in doubt the valuation expert third party (picking, Dealers, museums, etc.)

Compare the offer and the prices on the art market

When buying:

Buy your art only against an invoice or purchase contract (§ 433 BGB)

Write down in a private purchase, the identity of the seller, its Address and possibly also his license plates [especially important if you’re buying a Giacometti out of the trunk of a car. -ed,]

Let the defining characteristics (originality, age, artists, etc.) be confirmed in writing.

So servicey!
Now that I think about it, there was a Giacometti Femme de Venise VI for sale last May at Santa Monica Auctions. It didn’t look like any of the published Femmes de Venise, which were numbered differently over the years, but it still has a foundry mark, and they still had a $25-30,000 estimate on it, even though SMA described it as “After Alberto Giacometti.” Never mind, I just spoke to the auctioneers, and that piece had been in a Los Angeles collection for over 40 years. Whatever it is, it’s not a German fake.
Die Gangster von Mainz [faz.net via artforum]

The SA-60 Spherical Airship

According to BoingBoing, the Sierra Nevada Corporation’s been testing its SA-60 Spherical Airship at the Reno-Stead Airport. [SNC’s the same company whose surveillance blimp was set to be mooned this month by 1,500 hundred angry Canadians in the quiet border downs of Sarnia/Port Huron. I think high winds scuttled the ballooning, and hence, the mooning.]
The SA-60 [above] was first demonstrated successfully in 2004 by a knot of gruff-sounding defense contractors–none of whose domain names work anymore. At the time, the manned, operational version–suitable for use “for both defense and homeland security purposes including surveillance of battlefields and domestic borders and ports.”–was expected to have a diameter of 76 feet. An unmanned, solar-powered version would have a diameter of 200 feet.
Since I’ve got my hands full turning satelloons and other fantastic, spherical balloon airships into art, I hope someone else will pick up the slack and start celebrating the glorious poetry that is the military industrial complex press release. God Bless America!:

Press Release: July 1, 2004
SNC Enters Exclusive Partnership with Proxity Digital Networks Subsidiary
Cyber Aerospace and Techsphere Systems on Spherical Airship
Sparks, Nevada – (July 1, 2004) – Sierra Nevada Corporation announced today that it has entered into an exclusive partnership agreement with Proxity Digital Networks subsidiary Cyber Aerospace and Techsphere Systems to provide technology, payload and sensor integration for government and commercial end users of the SA-60 Spherical Airship.
Proxity Digital Networks, Inc. and Techsphere Systems International, Inc., recently announced through Cyber Aerospace Corp., an operating subsidiary of Proxity’s On Alert Systems, that the SA-60 low altitude surveillance airship has flown at 10,000 feet altitude with a payload exceeding 500 pounds, thus satisfying all flight criteria required under existing contracts. The 10,000 ft. flight took place as Cyber Aerospace conducted contractor demonstration flights for the U.S. Navy at Captain Walter Francis Duke Regional Airport in Hollywood, St. Mary’s County, MD.

Continue reading “The SA-60 Spherical Airship”

While We’re On The Subject Of Polished Metal Objects: Walter De Maria

And speaking of conceptually loaded minimalist objects of precision-crafted metal, here are a couple of early Walter de Maria works I was looking at a few months back:

Betty Freeman bought Melville [1967, above] in 1968. It’s a polished, book-sized tablet of stainless steel engraved with the opening lines from Herman Melville’s 1857 novel, The Confidence Man:

At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the water-side in the city of St. Louis.
His cheek was fair, his chin downy, his hair flaxen, his hat a white fur one, with a long fleecy nap. He had neither trunk, valise, carpet-bag, nor parcel. No porter followed him. He was unaccompanied by friends. From the shrugged shoulders, titters, whispers, wonderings of the crowd, it was plain that he was, in the extremest sense of the word, a stranger.

As Christie’s noted when they sold Melville last May [$266,500, including premium], de Maria began producing industrially finished stainless steel sculptures in 1965, with the aid of collector Robert Scull. In 1966, he made Instrument for LaMonte Young , a 3 x 5 x 36 aluminum box with contact mics and an amplifier built in to pick up the sound of a metal ball rolling along inside the channel. Freeman picked that up in 1970. [And Christie’s sold it for $80,500.]

The early de Maria metal sculpture I’ve been most interested in over the years, though, is a little, 1-ft metal bar, an edition, which is engraved with a restriction that it can never be sold for more than $100. I first saw one in a collector’s loft in SoHo around 1992, and I’ve waited ever since for one to turn up for sale somewhere. So far, no. Go figure.

Making The Scene With Le Grand K

Turns out the IPK is on the cover of one of Andy‘s favorite books, The Best Book Designs 1997, designed by Simon Davies:

Also, from Metric Views, a blog of “commentary about the British measurement muddle,” a PDF of “Standard Kilogram Weights – A Story of Precision Fabrication,” an article by Johnson Mathey’s F.J. Smith, published in the 1973 issue of Platinum Metals Review. Of the 1889 First General Conference of Weights and Measures where the IPK was officially adopted, he wrote with metallurgic confidence:

The kilogram was redefined arbitrarily in terms of the new International Prototype Kilogram so that our present standard of mass has a permanence dependent only upon the stability of the iridium-platinum alloy.

Since then, Johnson Matthey “has been called upon regularly to supply” national prototypes and working standards, objects of extraordinary craftsmanship and exquisite, minimalist form, which will soon be obsolete.
Just like this original platinum kilogram standard, a sister to the Kilogramme des Archives, fabricated in 1795 by Marc Etienne Janety, a former goldsmith to the court at Versailles:

Similarly, historically speaking, a meter was measured against a one-meter rod–THE one-meter rod–first fabricated out of platinum, then, after 1889 executed in a globally distributed edition of 30 rods of iridium-platinum alloy, which:

Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what art and its context were meant to be. Somewhere, just as the platinum-iridium meter guarantees the tape measure, a strict measure must exist for the art of this time and place. Otherwise art is only show and monkey business.

Donald Judd wrote that about his project in Marfa in 1987. The meter was redefined in 1983as the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458th of a second. The show and monkey business continues undisturbed.

The International Prototype Kilogram, Or Le Grand K

Caught this on the CBC last night. I always assumed a kilogram is equal to the mass of a liter of water. But it turns out to be messy/tricky/complicated to measure water accurately enough, plus, some scientists decided to change the definition soon after it was decreed, so a kilogram is actually equal to the mass of the kilogram, the International Prototype Kilogram, or IPK, also known in France as Le Grand K. It’s the only unit of measure, says Wikipedia, “that is still defined in relation to an artifact rather than to a fundamental physical property that can be reproduced in different laboratories.”

The IPK is made of a platinum alloy known as “Pt‑10Ir”, which is 90% platinum and 10% iridium (by mass) and is machined into a right-circular cylinder (height = diameter) of 39.17 mm to minimize its surface area. The addition of 10% iridium improved upon the all-platinum Kilogram of the Archives [originally made and adopted in 1799. -ed.] by greatly increasing hardness while still retaining platinum’s many virtues: extreme resistance to oxidation, extremely high density, satisfactory electrical and thermal conductivities, and low magnetic susceptibility. The IPK and its six sister copies are stored at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in an environmentally monitored safe in the lower vault located in the basement of the BIPM’s Chateau de Breteuil in Sèvres on the outskirts of Paris. Three independently controlled keys are required to open the vault. Official copies of the IPK were made available to other nations to serve as their national standards. These are compared to the IPK roughly every 50 years.

The IPK is stored under three bell jars, and its six sister copies are each stored under two.

The IPK and two other cylinders were manufactured in 1879 by Johnson Matthey, assayers and refiners for the Bank of England. [IPK is the third, KIII.] Johnson Matthey made 40 replicas in 1884, which were calibrated to IPK. 34 were distributed in 1889 to signatories of the Meter Convention for use as national standards. Two of this original batch, K4 and K20, are in the US. K20 was designated the US ~~standard~~ prototype in 1889.
The process and protocols for comparing these replicas to IPK, known as “periodic verification,” have evolved over the years. The BIPM was apparently not so distracted between 1939 and 1946 that they couldn’t develop “The BIPM Cleaning Method,” which involves a chamois, ether, ethanol, and steam cleaning with bi-distilled water. [Considering the Metric system itself was implemented in the midst of the French Revolution, and proceeded even as key scientists were being guillotined, I guess it’s not so surprising.] Models have developed to describe the rate of surface contamination.

What has become clear after the third periodic verification performed between 1988 and 1992 is that masses of the entire worldwide ensemble of prototypes have been slowly but inexorably diverging from each other. It is also clear that the mass of the IPK lost perhaps 50 µg over the last century, and possibly significantly more, in comparison to its official copies.

Given this variation and divergence, much of which cannot be explained, the CIPM [Committee &c.] in 2005 recommended redefining the kilogram as a constant of nature. So far, a suitably stable, reproducible constant has eluded metrologists.
One method is to define the number of carbon-12 atoms in a 1kg cube. Another, part of the Avogadro Project, is to create a single-crystal sphere of silicon, then measure the sphere radius and its internal crystal lattice with interferometry, and then polish it with single atomic level-accuracy to reach 1 kg. A sample is presented here with rather dramatic flair by a master optician at the Australian Centre for Precision Optics:

Its appearance might look familiar to regular readers of this website.
The human attempt to account for the world through exacting science results in a minimalist object that transcends other Minimalist objects, all while inhabiting a conceptual framework that transcends Conceptualist frameworks.
And I want some. And when I get my kilogram[s], I’ll put them on the shelf next to my satelloons and my photos of the entire universe from the Palomar Sky Survey.
Kilogram, Grave [wikipedia]
photos of the International Prototype Kilogram [bipm.org]
“The kilogram and measurements of mass and force,” Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Jan-Feb, 2001 [findarticles.com, PDF original at nist.gov]

Pedro Friedeberg, “Hairless Hearts Of Some Hairy Nuns”

My step-father bought this crazy Pedro Friedeberg painting in 1966 in Mexico City. It’s ink and paint on board, and the title is Hairless Hearts Of Some Hairy Nuns.
Here’s a large detail of the central rooster, who is saying “Pseudo-Cybernetics.”

Friedeberg is an esoteric, dada-esque, surrealist probably best known for his large, hand-shaped chairs. He seems like quite a character, sort of a Mexican Dali making spritist Vasarelys.
Hairless Hearts… was included in an exhibition at the Antonio Souza Gallery organized as a cultural sidebar to the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.
Here is a list of the other paintings in the show:

“A Machine Made to Frighten Tailors (Also Can Be Used To Slice Water)”
“Luis XIV’s Discotheque”
“Tehuana Orphanage”
“Confessions of An Iconoclastic Sea-Urchin”
“Madame De Pompadour’s Electric Chair”
“The Aristocrats’ Lighthouse”
“The Head of “Chez Twiggy,” An Old Peoples’ Home, In Her Pseudo-Cybernetics Style Uniform, ORders The Immediate Expulsion Of All False Optimists, In Inverse Alphabetical Order”
“Good Morning, Miss Watermelon”
“The Pockmarked Czarina Becomes Indignant Over The Statistics Presented By The Minister of Oceans And Clouds During A Round-Table Discussion On Eskimo Astrology At The Congress of Natural and Applied Pornography”
Left Hand of the Viceroy Gumersidno Sirloin and The Hand of His Niece The Disreputable Marchioness Brujulilla De Bourbon”
“Paganini’s Bath”
“What We Found In Aristotle’s Pyjamas”
“Orphanage for Squint-Eyed Children Sponsored By Baron Von Pipian”
“Socrates’ Garbage Pail”
“An Hermaphrodite Baby Elephant Learning Russian”
“Afternoon Outing Of Little Beige Riding Hood”

Rethinking Ai Weiwei, Who Was Just Detained And Beaten By Chinese Security

I’ve never thought much of Ai Weiwei’s work; despite some of its undeniable power, he’d been compared to Warhol a few too many times for me to take him seriously. Well, it’s time for me to rethink that.
First and second, there was Ai’s refreshing seriousness and political boldness as a counterpoint to the apparent insufferable Japanese superciliousness [Hiroshi Sugimoto, I’ve been a fan for 15 years, but I’m looking squarely at you here] at the opening of his exhibition at the Mori Art Museum at Roppongi Hills. From Philip Tinari’s report for Artforum:

Artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, like Ai a self-taught architect, closed the day’s events with a lengthy encomium to his own recent projects, including a museum he designed and the first show–“naturally of my own work”–to be staged there. “Will there be a second show?” Ai rejoined.
Not surprisingly, the conversation often came back to Ai’s recent brush with the law that led to the closure of his much-loved blog in early June. He jovially recounted a tale of calling the Caochangdi village police station to report the secret agents who were staking out his home and studio and who refused to show him their badges. (One of the plainclothes turned out to be the brother of the local patrolman–so much for that plan.) Many speculate that the troubles owed ultimately to the “citizen’s investigation”–staffed by volunteers and mobilized via his blog–that canvassed the Sichuan disaster zone throughout the spring, collecting names and vital statistics on fifty-one hundred of the earthquake’s youngest victims. For Ai, the unresolved carnage–60 percent of parents have not been able to reclaim their children’s remains–owes much to shoddy school construction, and thus to party corruption. Under this pressure, the government released a figure of 5,335 dead schoolchildren just before the one-year anniversary of the May 12 quake. Asked point-blank by architect Shigeru Ban why he bothered to pursue this seemingly self-destructive personal campaign, Ai looked around at the hundreds of eyes fixed on him and replied bluntly, “If I don’t use my social privilege to do this, I feel ashamed.”

Wow, Shigeru Ban, I hope that wasn’t as bad as it sounds.
Now the AP reports that Ai and several other activists for earthquake victims were detained and “roughed up” by police in the Chinese city of Chengdu, in order to prevent them from attending and testifying at a trial of another earthquake protestor, Tan Zuoren. Tan, Ai, and others pushed for nearly a year to force the government to release the names of over 5,000 schoolchildren killed in last year’s quake.
I can’t think of another artist of Ai’s prominence–he was credited with the idea for Herzog & deMeuron’s Bird Nest stadium for the Beijing Olympics–who has put himself and his reputation on the line politically to such an extent. It’s remarkable, but it also makes me wonder just what the comparable artist and political issue would be here.
Eye for an Ai [artforum]
Chinese police detain supporters of quake critic [ap/google via artforum]

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”.

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

The 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.

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

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!

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.