Category: art

That Google Street View snafu yesterday reminded me of a still from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s 1932 abstract//constructivist short film, Lichtspiel, or Lightplay.
Normally, I’d say that’s the art-nerdiest possible free association in the world, but I’ve actually been meaning to write about Moholy-Nagy’s film for a while. Or more specifically, about his incredible kinetic assemblage/sculpture used to make Lichtspiel, the Light Space Modulator.
Light Space Modulator is a motorized sculpture made of glass, mirror, steel, and acrylic, and it was a crucial object–or project–for Moholy-Nagy for more than two decades. The dates generally given for its construction are 1922-30, but the artist worked on or with it until he died in 1946. Last fall, Alice Rawsthorn wrote in the Times about the tragicomic scene of the refugee artist fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s, family and Light Space Modulator in tow, and having to explain the sculpture to customs and border officials along the way. The original was given by Moholy-Nagy’s widow to the Harvard Museums, but more on that later.
According to the artist’s official chronology, Lichtspiel [full title: Lichtspiel schwarz weiss grau] was made around 1930 in Berlin, and first shown in 1932 [MoMA has a brochure, designed by the artist, for an exhibition and screening.]
According to MKZ:

Lichtspiel, schwarz-weiß-grau was originally supposed to consist of six parts, but only the last part was filmed. The first five parts were supposed to show different forms of light in set combinations: from the self-lighting match, automobile headlights, reflections, moonlight, and colored projections with prisms and mirrors to the production of the “light prop,” [i.e., the LSM]

This surviving segment/film, one of 7 extant Moholy-Nagy films, is listed with a 6-minute run time, but there are several excerpts and variations floating around. Here’s the original, I think:

The Times has a great account from 1952 of a screening of an “abstract art film” program organized by “Captain [Edward] Steichen” for the Museum of Modern Art’s “enterprising, energetic Junior Council,” which included both Lichtspiel and the early direct animation films of Len Lye.
But SFMoMA’s version is 5:17. The Minimalist Issue of Aspen Magazine, Nos. 5+6, published in 1967, includes a 1:40 excerpt on super-8 film. Fortunately for everyone without Aspen and/or an 8mm film projector, there’s Ubu.

I was half-watching the German artist Ferdinand Kriwet’s Apollovision, a film & sound & video collage of the Apollo 11 moon landing as American media spectacle made, incredibly, in 1969, when I heard this:

Now you can follow the Apollo astronauts as they explore the Sea of Tranquility and the Ocean of Storms!
Brillo offers you an Official Rand McNally 18×24-inch Moon Map
Just send two labels from any Brillo product
to Brillo Moon Map Offer
Let Brillo give you the Moon–free!

Which is hilarious, except that it’s completely not. How quickly did Brillo Boxes transmute from banal, everyday product to icon of Pop Art? For those who lived through the 60s, the dissonance might have been jarring, but now, Brillo just is an art object. What was it like to see it in 1969, when Pontus Hulten was, er, figuring out what to do with all those leftover boxes? Or when the folks in Pasadena and LA were asking Andy if they could whip some up, too, would he mind? It’s for a show? What was Brillo in the culture at the moment it was making Art History?

I’m not sure it was anything, or that it really cared terribly much about Art History. As I write this post, the only Google result for “Brillo Moon Map” is from a
rather simple, beautiful ad in the August 8, 1969 mega-moon issue of LIFE magazine. It’s just one of many ads with lunar tie-ins, ads for everything from frozen foods [“Everybody who’s been to the moon eats Stouffer’s”] to frozen foods [“Congratulations Neil, Buzz and Mike. We’re just glad we could help./Frozen meals provided by O’Brien, Spotorno, Mitchell, a subsidiary of the Del Monte Corporation.”] to toothpaste [Crest: “The Astronaut Dental Care Program”].
Hulten and the folks in Toronto who exhibited actual cardboard Brillo boxes got their shows up just in time, because by 1969, Brillo had redesigned its packaging. [update: in 1967, actually.] Which meant that the 1970 Pasadena boxes were now out of sync with the product they replicated; they were historic, not copies of Brillo’s boxes anymore, or even James Harvey’s, but copies of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes.
Was there any moment where Warhol contemplated keeping them conceptually linked, maybe instead of varying the size, having the 1970 Brillo Boxes fabricated to look like Brillo’s 1970 boxes? I’d guess no, but I haven’t even heard the idea floated before. Warhol made his Brillo Boxes point in 1964, and the rest is history.
But what are the conceptual implications of the Brillo Boxes, and how did they develop? They were sculptures, symbols, objects, appropriations, readymades [at least the cardboard versions exhibited were]. If they had a conceptual element to them, though, might that affect the whole Hulten Box Affair, which I obviously can’t wrap my head around?
Watch Kriwet’s Apollovision (1969) on Ubu [ubu]

The things you learn at church. So of course I knew that the late illustrator Arnold Friberg’s dramatic paintings of scenes from the Book of Mormon, with ripped Nephites and Lamanites striding around the Promised Land, are lodged in every Mormon’s head for the last three generations. [If you don’t believe me, as you study Friberg’g painting above, go ahead and listen to this impromptu ukelele rendition of “Abinadai” by the at least somewhat LDS ska masters GOGO13, who ask the eternal question of wicked King Noah (L), “Why you got that flower pot on your head?”]
And I knew that Friberg also did the concept studies, opening titles, and some key costume designs for Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 The Ten Commandments. What I did not know is how closely those two men–and those two over-the-top religious projects–were intertwined.

So let it be written: Brother of Jared sees the finger of the Lord, Arnold Friberg, 1951
Friberg was commissioned to make twelve BofM paintings in 1951 for the LDS Church’s children’s magazine, The Children’s Friend. Four ran in 1953 and four in 1954, but Friberg stepped away from the project for several years, after growing frustrated with doctrinal micromanaging of the images. [1]

So let it be done: Moses and the Burning Bush, Arnold Friberg, 1954
It was DeMille seeing a portfolio of Friberg’s Book of Mormon lithographs in 1954 that clinched him the The Ten Commandments gig. Friberg’s illustrations were extremely close to the finished look and feel of the movie, and in the process of working on the film, Friberg and DeMille became close friends.
Which led to DeMille meeting the President of the LDS Church at the time, David O. McKay. Who invited DeMille to speak at Brigham Young University’s commencement in 1957. Which he did. He basically gave a sermon about the Ten Commandments. As part of BYU’s The Board, a community service–meets-Mechanical Turk resource, someone named Laser Jock retyped DeMille’s entire speech from one of BYU’s two surviving transcripts. It’s available on PDF. He was quite a preacher. [DeMille’s relationship with BYU was such that after his death in 1959, his extensive archive was donated to the university. It is in the Harold B. Lee Library’s Special Collections department, which seems to be almost entirely unavailable–or even unindexed–online. Amazing.]
Anyway, Friberg went back to finish the last four Book of Mormon paintings after the film, and they were published in The Children’s Friend between 1961 and 1963. But more importantly, the paintings were included in softcover copies of the actual Book of Mormon starting in 1961. Which all but put the canonical seal of approval on them, paintings essentially functioning as scripture.
There has to be several doctoral theses worth of material about the cultural and theological impacts of Friberg’s religious superheros, and on the symbiotic relationship between one of classic Hollywood’s most bombastic religious spectacles and one of America’s most unorthodox religions. Maybe there already are.
[1] Apparently, Churchs officials [whether ecclesiastical leaders of bureaucrats, I don’t know] at the time had a strong aversion to LDS artists making portraits of Christ. They had no problem with using non-LDS artists’ naturalistic representations, though. After much back and forth, Friberg’s solution was to only show Jesus as a tiny figure descending from the sky.
This reluctance eventually faded, and there are plenty of illustrations of Christ by LDS artists in use, and even more in circulation. But I distinctly remember the frisson of faith when the Church commissioned a new portrait of Christ, and the rumor mill began churning about why it was the most accurate ever, because it was based on Christ’s ID badge for the Church Office Building or whatever. nother thesis topic, perhaps.
Brigham Young University Commencement Exercises
Commencement Address: Mr. Cecil B. DeMille
Introduced by Pres. David O. McKay
May 31, 1957 [theboard.byu.edu]
Journal of BofM Studies: The Book of Mormon Art of Arnold Friberg: “Painter of Scripture” [maxwellinstitute.byu.edu]

Larry Gottheim’s 1970 short film Fog Line is just beautiful to watch. 11 minutes of fog imperceptibly but inexorably dissipating in a rural landscape.
It reminds me a bit of Tacita Dean’s Banewl, a 63-minute fixed shot of a Cornish cow pasture during a 1999 solar eclipse–only without all the action.
In 2005, the NY Film Festival hada mini-retrospective screening of Gottheim’s work, including Fog Line.