Category: art

In April 1975, Burden brought something of an end to the series of extreme and/or dangerous performances that brought him such critical acclaim and notoreity. For a piece called “Doomed,” he installed himself under a pane of glass in the MCA Chicago, and refused to communicate or move until someone made a gesture to help him. 48 hours into the piece, a museum guard named Dennis O’Shea offered him a drink of water, at which point Burden got up, smashed a clock, and left.
Said Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker,

“Doomed” unmasked the absurdity of the conventions by which, through assuming the role of viewers, we are both blocked and immunized from ethical responsibility. In O’Shea’s case, the situation was complicated by his duty to maintain the inviolability of art works. There should be a monument to him, somewhere, which would commemorate the final calling of the bluff of art as a law unto itself.

What soon followed was B-Car. Burden:

During the two month period between August 24 and October 16, 1975, I conceived, designed, and constructed a small one passenger automobile. My goal was to design a fully operational four-wheel vehicle which would travel 100 miles per hour and achieve 100 miles per gallon. I imagined this vehicle as extremely lightweight, streamlined, and similar in structure to both a bicycle and an airplane.
Once the project was conceived, I was compelled to realize it. I set the goal of completing the car for two shows in Europe. I saw building the car as a means toward the end of driving it between galleries in Amsterdam and Paris as a performance. When I arrived in Amsterdam, I knew that the accomplishment of constructing the car had become for me the essential experience. I had already realized the most elaborate fantasy of my life. Driving the car as a performance was not important after the ordeal of bringing it into existence.

[A book about the B-Car was published by Ronald Feldman in association with his 1977 show of the car and its documentation. With the Internet, nothing is really rare anymore, just varying degrees of expensive.]
The B-Car‘s adolescent soapbox derby form and Burden’s deadpanned motivation for the project–“realiz[ing] the most elaborate fantasy of my life” resonates with Schjeldahl’s description of the artist as, “a boyish gimcracker diverting us by diverting himself.” In one sense, Burden’s ongoing use of toys, and his toy-like deployment of industrial machinery, equates artistic production as a reversion to childhood, a mix of “I’ve always wanted to do that!” and “my kid could do that!”
But it reminds me of another seemingly unassuming but obliquely profound artist, Peter Coffin, who said he made his incredible 2007 sculpture, Untitled (Staircase) because “it stuck in my mind.” [pdf] Of course, it also reminds me of John Ivers of Bruceville, Indiana, who built himself a roller coaster in his backyard. It’s called Blue Flash.

Previous Chris Burden: video of Beam Drop and other projects; Chris Burden’s TV ad

When I first saw Sebastian’s stunning photos of the Mona Lisa at C-Monster, I was, naturally, stunned. I haven’t been to the Louvre since 2005, when la Joconde was moved to its new, purpose-built space, designed by Peruvian architect Lorenzo Piqueras, la Salle de la Joconde.
When I’d last seen it, it was in its temporary hyperbaric chamber, and looked a lot like this picture from Steve and Sygi’s 2001 Mediterranean cruise [which apparently stopped in Paris?]:

And of course, before that, it was in its own similarly sized but nicer capsule in la Salle des Etats, where it was surrounded by several invisible paintings.
So, stunned. Despite having provided a dedicated room, with a freestanding wall, and a massive laminated podium [whose main function, it seems, is to properly position the painting’s LED footlight, which is color-calibrated to counter the yellowing effects of age], and a curved rail, the Louvre finds it necessary to add another, temporary ropeline a couple of meters farther back.
This, ironically, for a picture whose most powerful innovation, according to the Louvre curator of 16th century art Cecile Scaillerez, is “abolish[ing] the distance between the model and the viewer by getting rid of a foreground, which created a barrier in pictures of the time.”
The sheer scale of the ridiculousness of this museological condition set my mind racing. The Mona Lisa has been moved eight times within the Louvre. Wouldn’t it be awesome to do a show where each work–I don’t know what, but they’re probably some paintings or whatever, that’s not important now–is shown in a recreation of each of these various installations?
Ooh, there’d be that classic belle epoque 1911 hang it was stolen from:

You could just whip up a chair rail out of injection molded plastic or whatever, paint the whole thing White Cube White, maybe Triple Candie the vitrines and railings a bit to provide suitably ironic recontextualization.
And five or so others, I guess. What do they look–wow, searching for photos of the Mona Lisa is mind-numbingly boring. Did you know there’s even stock photography of excessive crowd control measures in front of the Mona Lisa that looks like half the photos of the Mona Lisa in the world?

Or that the other half are photos of people taking photos of the Mona Lisa? Turns out if someone isn’t actually coming to the Louvre on a pilgrimage to see the World’s Greatest Painting, they’re coming to self-consciously note their position at the vortex of the painting’s massive cultural scrum.
So the Mona Lisa and contemporary art: is there anything interesting or useful to be learned, studied or said? When you’re one of six billion monkeys who’ve stepped away from our typewriters for a bit to take in some Art, the odds that you are the one who’s going to spit out something worthwhile are pretty damn slim.
But there’s a world of difference between “there’s nothing left to say” and “there’s nothing to be said,” and what does it mean for the contemporary art world if all it can do is gawk, sneer, or sigh at the Louvre’s greatest attraction?

Thomas Struth, Musee du Louvre, IV, 1989
It seems folly to carve it out and claim it’s irrelevant. Did you know that the official American artscape [sic] of the last two generations–blockbuster museum exhibitions and the NEA and NEH included–is a direct result of Jacqueline Kennedy seducing Andre Malraux into loaning the Mona Lisa to the National Gallery and the Met in December 1962? And that Jackie enlisted Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and Andrew Wyeth [?] in her plan? I did not. Until I read Bob’s blog post about Margaret Leslie Davis’s book, Mona Lisa in Camelot. Here’s a picture from Davis’s website of the Mona Lisa getting off the boat in New York:

Of all the work in the Met’s Pictures Generation show, Jack Goldstein’s surprised and intrigued me the most, but I liked Louise Lawler’s the best. That Pollock/soup tureen photo that’s been making the marketing rounds for the show is smart and sublime.
But I was annoyed enough by the smugness of this wall text on another Lawler that I had to write it down. [And my iPhone typing technique was so bad, it’s taken me until now to decode what I wrote–and it turns out to be published on the Met’s site anyway]:

Arranged by Donald Marron, Susan Brundage, and Cheryl Bishop at Paine Webber, Inc. is both deadpan and poignant. Unlike the trophy paintings and sculpture hung proudly in reception areas, this trio of Lichtenstein multiples is lower down on the value scale and thus suitable for the decor of an office. The pictures hover like flies vying for the attention of a pair of anonymous bankers who ignore the “art” while struggling to send a fax. Lawler’s diminution of her role as an “author” is meant both to highlight the collaboration of others (here, Paine Webber CEO, Castelli Gallery rep, and corporate curator) and to direct the viewer outside the boundaries of the image and toward the real life of which art is always a part. It is unlikely, however, that any of the arrangers appreciated the irony that Lichtenstein’s pictures, originally meant to acknowledge (with a wink) their own status as commodities, now adorned the walls of an office copy room. What Lawler reveals is that the meaning of the artwork lies not in its origins but in its destiny. [emphasis added on the condescending, insidery part]

Really? And why, exactly, is that unlikely? I don’t know Brundage or Bishop, and I’ve only known Don Marron a bit over the years through my fundraising work at MoMA. But it doesn’t take a masters in curatorial studies to appreciate the ironies at play here; if anything, there are several layers of irony that seem to have been invisible from within the privileged wall text scriptorium at the Met.
First, there’s that wink. When Lichtenstein put Benday dots on a painting, it was an ironic commentary on art’s commodity status. When he cranked out prints for sale in editions of 250, not so much.
[One unintended irony: the two Lichtenstein comic panel prints, from 1965, are among his earliest and most important works. The artist himself considered “Sweet Dreams, Baby!” which was produced for the Original Art portfolio, “11 Pop Artists, vol. III,” to be among his first successful “Pop prints.” So while prints generally are considered to be “lower down the value scale” monetarily, these prints by this artist are in fact, quite significant art historically. Not that anyone at the Met is likely to appreciate that (wink).]
The fact that there are labels next to the works tells me they were selected and installed by Bishop or her Paine Webber staff, and that makes sense for a space that is probably not an office, but a common area or trading floor. But in the art-collecting corporations I’ve worked in, the commoditized nature of art–and viewer–was made exquisitely aware to you.

The Met’s curator may not know this, but it’s not unusual for employees to be permitted to choose the artwork for their office, and to have the value of the artwork be based on his seniority or profitability. First pick from the corporate collection can be as much of a perk or as the view or number of ceiling tiles you get.
But none of that is the reason the Met’s wallquote bugged me so much. As awesome as I’m sure it is to be there, or to have your work shown there, or in the collection, the Met–any museum, really–is still a mausoleum for art. Lawler’s work is so fascinating precisely because it explores the life [sic] of art outside of the white-glove, white cube of the museum, and it gains power from the unexpected resonance between the autumnal colors of a Pollock and the Limoges; between a Lichtenstein print and a fax machine. It should be a reminder of what gets lost when art’s only presumed destiny it do end up in a museum. But it’s unlikely that anyone at the Met can appreciate that irony.
update: Louise Lawler, on the other hand, sounds awesome. As does the late Mrs. Burton Tremaine, whose Limoges and Pollock that was. In conjunction with a 2007 show in Geneva reuniting the Tremaine Series, Andrea Miller-Keller, the Wadsworth Atheneum curator who gave Lawler her first museum show and who introduced her to the Tremaines, has compiled a pdf of articles, interviews, and documentation about the series and the people. Mrs. Tremaine provided the subtitle, “You’re going to love the thermostat next to the Miro.”