A Pixel Is Not A Little Square! [Except When It Is]

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Thanks to greg.org reader Fred for sending along a link to a memo computer graphics pioneer Alvy Ray Smith wrote in 1995, soon after his company Altamira [the one he founded after Lucasfilm and Pixar] had been assimilated by Microsoft.
The Title: “A Pixel Is Not A Little Square, A Pixel Is Not A Little Square, A Pixel Is Not A Little Square!” [pdf via alvyray.com, a year later, he added, “(And A Voxel Is Not A Little Cube)”] Two guesses what it’s about.
Alvy’s rant sounds exactly like what I’d expect from circa 1995 Microsoft: brilliant, self-assured, and presumptuously prescriptive. Which is not, alas, the same thing as being entirely right or even aware of its own limitations.
Because it gets a little rambling, and because I am basically arguing pixels with the guy who worked on the Project Genesis sequence in Wrath of Khan, I have moved it all after the jump.

Continue reading “A Pixel Is Not A Little Square! [Except When It Is]”

On Warhol’s Rain Machine[s]

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First up, a high five to Andrew Russeth at ArtInfo for highlighting Nicholas Robinson Gallery’s summer installation of Andy Warhol’s unusual Rain Machine (Daisy Waterfall). What a weird, wonderful–but mostly weird–work.
It’s basically a mural of shimmering, lenticular photos of flowers behind an illuminated, recirculating, double wall of simulated rain. Let’s set aside the fact that the raw mechanicality of Rain Machine makes it look like a missing Pop link in the genealogy of Olafur Eliasson’s work. The similarities are both less and more interesting than they first appear.
Begun in 1968, Rain Machine has its origins in two of my favorite pseudo-utopian art/technology events, the Osaka 70 World Expo and LACMA’s sprawling Art & Technology collaboration project, which ran through 1971.
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When Warhol was first approached for the A&T Program, which paired artists with cutting edge technology companies to realize a new, innovative work of some kind, he imagined making a wall of 3D holograms that would be barely visible through the mist. But Bruce Nauman had already nabbed RCA’s hologram guy, so Warhol fell back onto decidedly low-tech lenticular imaging.
Then the rain wasn’t working, the prints didn’t line up, the budget was a joke, the US Pavilion exhibition space was cramped, the whole thing was a potential mess. The story is recounted in glorious, play-by-play detail in LACMA’s 1971 Art & Technology Report, which is cheap to buy used, and [brilliantly] available as a free PDF download from LACMA’s online library:

Perhaps the most important decisions determining the work’s final appearance in the U.S. Pavilion at Expo were made not by Warhol but my MT [Maurice Tuchman, LACMA’s A&T curator/organizer], the Expo Design Team members, and some of the other artists in the show. The entire installation operation was characterized by a sense of crisis, and there were moments when the peice seemed simply destined to ignominious failure. In the end, somehow, it worked; many people and particularly the artists who were there installing their own pieces, felt the Warhol to be one of the most compelling works in the exhibition because of its strangely tough and eccentric quality. Robert Whitman commented that “of course Andy’s forcing everyone into the act;” the work istelf, when completed, made that conspicuously evident, and yet it was unmistakably Warhol. When it was rumored at one point just before the opening of Expo that the work might be taken out of the show, as was suggested by several of the Expo Designers and by a visiting critic who was conversant with Warhol’s oeuvre, the American artists who by this time knew the piece intimately objected strenuously.

When Rain Machine came back to LA, it had to be reworked, or debugged, and reconfigured. The most noticeable change is probably the scaled up daisy photos. As Robinson explains, the current installation follows an even newer [remastered?] set of specs developed by the Warhol Museum for its 2002 refabrication of the work.
Update: Interesting, LACMA received a set of nine lenticular daisy photos as a gift in 1999. They’re the larger, single daisy-style, which makes me think they were extras, loosies, or maybe even leftovers from the 1971 Art & Technology reinstallation. A few of these have popped up in the market over the years; they’re not that expensive, though without the rain–hell, even with the rain–they’re a little weird.
Update Update: aha, interesting. according to this auction description, the lenticular photos were commissioned in an edition of 50 for the LACMA show.

Wherein The Inventor Of The Pixel Totally Agrees With Me, Even Though I Don’t Totally Agree With Him

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53 years later, the guy who invented the square pixel regrets the error.
In 1957, NIST computer expert Russell Kirsch scanned the world’s first digital image [a photo of his infant son, above] using the country’s first programmable computer. To accommodate the memory and processing capacity of the available equipment, Kirsch had the computer break the image up into a 176×176 grid, and to assign a binary color value, black or white, to each of the resulting 30,976 square pixels.
Apparently, it’s been eating at him ever since, because he has, at age 81, published a suggestion for increasing the “precision and accuracy in scientific imaging” by replacing uniformly square pixels with pixels of variable shapes.
I do not know enough about compression algorithms and data/information loss to know whether Kirsch’s proposed method is either necessary or superior to the state of the art. But it is most fascinating to see one of the inventors of digital imaging remain so engaged and critical of the system he helped bring forth.
And frankly, though I don’t know any of the history or the context, I don’t necessarily agree with him that the grid and the square pixel was an “unfortunate” solution. In the 50+ years since the square pixel became the irreducible unit of visual information, it has acquired its own aesthetic and cultural context.
[Looking through the NIST Museum site, it sounds like the “serious mistake” was using a binary [i.e., b/w] basis for computer scanning in the belief that it was an accurate representation of human neural activity and visual data processing. It also sounds like the NIST folks started trying to correct for it almost immediately.]
When he completely agrees with me and validates my own assumptions, however, I agree with him completely. The man is a genius and a living legend:

…we show that the usual assumption that increased precision is accomplished with higher resolution of square pixel images does not necessarily result in the increased accuracy that can be achieved with the use of variable shape pixels…

PDF: Kirsch, Russell A., “Precision and Accuracy in Scientific Imaging” [nist.gov]
Square Pixel Inventor Tries to Smooth Things Out [wired.com thanks Joerg Colberg, who has been experimenting with cooler-shaped pixels himself lately]
related? coloring the pixels of Mariner 4’s first image of Mars by hand

Chronology For, By Ad Reinhardt

How much of discovery is really just rediscovery? or learning remembering?
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I was waiting to read how editor/art historian Barbara Rose had decided to model the chronology at the opening of her 1991 book, Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, after the personal+historical “date” portraits of Felix Gonzalez-Torres:

1943 Refuses to help Arshile Gorky start a camouflage school.
1943 Wonders what Adolph Gottleib and Mark Rothko are up to when they announce, “There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.”
1943 Continues making paintings about nothing.
1944 Liberation of Paris

But then I scroll up and see that Reinhardt’s chronology was his own, and that he was constantly reworking it. The version Rose chose was published in the catalogue for Reinhardt’s 1966 retrospective at the Jewish Museum.
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So Rose didn’t get it from Felix, but that means Felix must have gotten it from Reinhardt. And sure enough. I pulled down my special 1994 edition Art & Design, which served as the catalogue for the Camden Arts Center exhibition featuring Reinhardt, Joseph Kosuth, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. And there is Nancy Spector writing about Reinhardt’s influence, both direct, and refracted through the strategies and theories of the intervening generation of conceptualists:

Reinhard’s parodic biographical exercise was, at the time of its creation, interpreted as mere ‘documentation’, as tangential to his artistic enterprise. But, because of Conceptual art’s deployment of linguistic analysis and its use of language as a medium through which to demonstrate the discursive foundations of art, a younger generation inherited the freedom to use words as a viable alternative to image-making. Therefore, Gonzalez-Torres’ various inventories of disjunctive historical incidents and private moments, followed by the year of their occurrence, can and actually do constitute his art…these ‘date’ works use now conventional Conceptual strategies to mimic the idea of an ‘Artist’s’ chronology. More importantly, however, in the over-arching equivalency of everything listed in these works, Gonzalez-Torres is underscoring a crucial reality in today’s world: that the political cannot be divorced from the personal.

I think Reinhardt makes the same case; and I agree with Spector that Rose’s interpretation is incomplete, and that the extremely politically engaged Reinhardt did not mean for his chronology to reveal art to be “a matter of small consequence” when seen from “a perspective of world affairs.”
Spector suggests another reading, that “[Reinhardt’s] inclusion of cataclysmic world affairs in an ‘artist’s biography’…bespeaks the impossibility of divorcing cultural endeavours from the social and political context in which they are pursued.” [image: Untitled, 1988]
Now about that Arshile Gorky camouflage school…

Really? Really.

I’ll confess, when I saw the tweets start flying about Mira Schor’s essay on Otto Dix, Greater NY, and Bravo’s Work of Art, I was skeptical. How the hell was she gonna fit any of those, never mind all three–at once–onto a blog called A Year of Positive Thinking?
By gum, she pulled it off.
Reality Show: Otto Dix [a year of positive thinking]

Bruno Munari’s Original Xerographies, Freshly Copied

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After I posted about Sigmar Polke’s photocopied masterpiece Daphne, Mondo-Blogo emailed the great news that Corraini has republished Bruno Munari’s Original Xerographies. I have the original Original Xerographies in a box somewhere; it’s more handbook-ish than I remembered–which is a nice way of saying I’d forgotten about it, but it looks kind of relevant and interesting now:

munari_xerographies.jpgAn original xerography is the result of an image which is moved on the plate of glass of the copier, so that it reproduces both the image and its movement. Therefore, it doesn’t consist in a mere copy, but on the contrary in an original, which is obtained through a process exploiting the whole potential of the copier. Hence it not only reproduces but produces images as well.
From this starting point Munari develops his studies and experiments about working rules of copiers, originally published in the series Quaderni di design curated by Munari himself for Zanichelli (1977).
Each factor of the copying process (with the copiers available in the 70s), from its reading limits to the concentration of the toner, is deeply and systematically examinated and experimented by Munari in every aspect and possibility. The result is a series of samples (“copies”?) that, following his research method both strict and creative at the same time, do not aim towards a specific purpose, but want to collect as many data as possible in order to describe almost every potential of the machine, including its most surprising and unexpected possibilities.

Buy the new edition of Bruno Munari’s Original Xerographies for like $17 [amazon]

Beginning With Anne Truitt’s Japanese Works

I hear blogging is out, everyone’s tweeting or facebooking now. While I don’t quite buy it, I am finding that I’m more likely to keep something I find interesting in my browser tabs for months rather than post it straightaway.
I will now attempt to clear those tabs to the general amusement and edification of my readers:
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Soon after her first solo show at Andre Emmerich, Anne Truitt followed her then-husband James to Japan for several years. While there, she experimented with making sculptures from aluminum. She showed them at Emmerich, I believe in 1966, but was not pleased with them, and rather famously destroyed them all before her mid-career retrospective at the Corcoran in the early 1970s. Had them all crushed like a soda can. All but two, apparently.
According to Kristen Hileman’s catalogue, there was an aluminum Truitt in the collection of the Trammel Crow corporation, which could not be found, and another in the collection of a Connecticut collector whose name escapes me [and my Truitt catalogue is in our other apartment, alas.] Anway, that one was apparently damaged or destroyed by exposure, it’s not clear.
I’d never seen images of these lost works, but then suddenly, I stumbled across one on the excellent Los Angeles-based art and space blog, You Have Been Here Sometime.
It turns out to have come from the official site, annetruitt.org, which is a great thing to know about. The piece is called Out and dates from 1964. There are other Japanese works, and also installation shots from the Emmerich show. More geometry and fewer right angles than in Truitt’s later work, enough to make me wonder if the artist had issues with form, not just paint, light, and color, as she explained.

‘Waking Up, It Was The First Thing I Saw’

Thanks to Paul Schmelzer at Eyeteeth for pointing to Bob Nickas’s great 1999 interview with Maurizio Cattelan. Good times.
I really wanted to focus on his experience with painting, so this excerpt starts kind of in the middle of the story of Maurizio not having enough time to do a show at de Appel in Amsterdam, so he breaks into the Galerie Bloom, steals everything in it, and exhibits it instead:

BOB: Whose work did you take?
MAURIZIO: Actually we took everything from the gallery …
BOB: Like the fax machine and all the stuff in the office?
MAURIZIO: Everything. We rented a van, and just filled it up.
BOB: This was in Amsterdam?
MAURIZIO: Yes, at de Appel. They wanted me to do a piece in a week. But I’m not used to working so quickly. So I thought the best way to get something that fast was to take the work of someone else.
BOB: That’s a new take on the readymade. [indeed, the show was called “Another F___ing Readmade” -ed.]
MAURIZIO: Well, when you don’t know what to do …
BOB: But didn’t the people at de Appel ask, “Where did all this stuff come from?”
MAURIZIO: The story finished quickly, because the police came and there were problems …
BOB: Were you arrested?
MAURIZIO: No. This is why I did the piece in Holland.
BOB: [laughs] Imagine doing that in New York.
MAURIZIO: It took a while for everyone to calm down, but then we became very good friends and they even asked me to do a show with them.
BOB: But that’s your ultimate punishment — you had to figure something out for another show.
MAURIZIO: Yeah, it’s true.
BOB: Crime doesn’t pay.
MAURIZIO: But I can tell you about the worst punishment I received. Once, I was talking with a collector, and he said, “I really would like to have a painting made by you.” And I thought, “Yes, let’s take this opportunity for once to see how difficult it would be to make a painting.” So I said, “Send me a canvas and some colors and I’ll do it.” He said, “Whatever you want to do, it’s fine for me.” A week later, I received a white canvas — that’s probably still in my apartment — and it was the most horrible nightmare for a year. It was there every morning. Waking up, it was the first thing I saw. After a year, I gave up.

Maurizio Cattelan with Bob Nickas, 1999 [indexmagazine.com]

Vinyl Wrapped Art Car Update

First, the good news: The Jeff Koons BMW Art Car ran in Le Mans!
The bad news: it totally sucked and crapped out after just a few hours. I know how it feels, Jeff. I once helped organize an all-female driver race team in Le Mans that crapped out after just a few hours, and had to swap a borrowed engine overnight, which the Lloyd’s guy said was covered, no problem, and then when the car wrecked, another insurance snake said there was no coverage, so we and our sponsors were gonna have to eat it, and it devolved into an international lawsuit, all because of this one insurance crook boyfriend of one of the drivers, what a disaster. But an absolute blast nonetheless, so a glass to Koons.
Now more good news: it’s only been a couple of weeks since I put out the call, and already, an artist has deployed the latest digital printing & vinyl wrapping technology to create his own art car!
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And the bad news: it was Damien Hirst. Before we complain about people cut-n-pasting inaccurate press releases from Rush Limbaugh’s wedding singer about “Hirst spin painting” a new Audi A1 “in his studio,” let’s make one thing clear: Uh, no.
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And one more thing: no matter what you think about Jeff Koons or his artwork, you gotta admit, at least his vinyl wrapping crew can match a seam. [via designboom, and propagating fast]
And finally, the good news: I got my fine copy of the first issue of Eye Magazine, and now I can read all the details about that Make Your Own Psychedelic Art Car In 4-Hours With These Stickers! article.
The bad news: Yes, it was Peter Max.

Perfect Lovers (Forever), By Tobias Wong

I only met Tobias Wong a couple of times, but it took me aback to see so many people I do know were described or quoted in Alex Williams’ NY Times piece as Tobi’s friends.
Tobi liked to give other artists’ and designers’ work a sardonic or critical twist. But the first photo in the Times’ slideshow featured a work that was different, an idealistic, almost geekily romantic “fix” of an iconic Félix Gonzalez-Torres sculpture.
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Perfect Lovers [actually, Perfect Lovers (Forever) (2002)] is a remake of Félix’s “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), 1991, a pair of identical, white wall clocks which begin in sync, but which invariably diverge over time.
For his new and improved version, Tobi attached a radio receiver to each clock that syncs it with the official US Atomic Clock. They’ll stay in sync within a second over a million years.
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Félix made at least six of his pairs of clocks, which, if they weren’t exactly self-portraits, referred to him and his partner Ross Laycock. Tobias’s references the white version [on a wall painted light blue], which is now in MoMA’s collection, dates from right before Ross’s death, and is listed in Félix’s catalogue as unique.
Before that, in 1990, Félix made “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) with black clocks in an edition of three. The date given for those works is 1987-1990, which is probably to account for the existence of earlier work.
White Columns has a pair of white clocks hanging behind the desk, officially undocumented, it seems, which were included in a 1988 exhibition as coming from an edition of three.
And at the time of Félix’s death, a 1987 work [officially listed as “additional material,” not work] titled Perfect Lovers, was in the collection of his former partner Jorge Collazo. It consists of a pair of wall clocks, signed, titled, and numbered, “1/3”.
Knowing that Félix made Perfect Lover clocks for all his boyfriends [sic] throws a layer of complexity onto the typically poignant interpretation of the work: yes, they’re identical and in sync (for now), but they’re also mass produced. And replaceable. You can pick one up at the corner. Of these conditions, the one Tobias chose to “fix” in his version was the eventual slipping out of sync.
as always, an update: Turns out there is also an AP of the 1987-90 edition. And the Renaissance Society in Chicago has reportedly left their locally made exhibition copy of “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), made in 1994, up in their offices. And in 2007, Glenn Ligon wrote in Artforum that he still had the “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) he made in 1996, soon after learning of Félix’s death.

Say Amen, Yves Klein!

I may have something to write later about Yves Klein, I don’t know. Peter Schjeldahl summed up what I’d already noticed, that the art discourse is very uncomfortable–or at least largely silent–on the topic of Klein’s apparently deep or abiding religiosity/spirituality. I thought that again at the Hirshhorn discussion when Kerry Brougher would actively ignore or steer the heavily spiritualist, cosmic comments made by the artist’s widow Rotraut Klein-Moquay.
klein_lp_waxidermy.jpgBut that’s not important now. What I’m fascinated by at the moment is the very end of this 1959 recording of Klein himself speaking at the Sorbonne. I can’t quite tell what this is–I found it at Ubu.com, but the slightly loopy text and original mp3 rip appear to come from Waxidermy–a commenter calls it a conference on “L’Architecture de L’Air,” but the quote below matches an artist’s text of the same name published in Mon Livre. So it’s likely he just read his texts.
Klein’s talking about the “monochrome propositions” he showed at the Galerie Apollinaire in 1957 and how, though they’re identical, each one is received differently by the public. Then the kicker:

l’observation la plus sensationelle est c’est des acheteurs. Ils choississent parmi les onzes tableaux exposés, chacun le leur et ils le paient chacun le prix demandé–et les prix sont tous différents, bien sûr.
The most sensational observation is of the buyers. They chose among the eleven paintings shown, each to his own, and they each paid the price demanded–and the prices were all different, of course. [my translation]

Then the crowd oohs and roars in approval, Hallelujah! It’s like a good old-fashioned tent revival there in the Sorbonne.
On the one hand, there’s Klein’s presentation of the prices, the transactions, the market interaction, as somehow central to the concept of Klein’s monochromes, as dispositive evidence of–what? I’ll go with the artist’s privilege to characterize his own work and its attributes, of his collectors’ readily accepting [indulging?] his value/price-related constructs. The market, of course, has been the other third rail [sic] of art history. Does the market still honor Klein’s price differentials for these monochromes, I wonder? Somehow I doubt it.
But it’s the other hand, the audience reaction itself, that has me thinking. I made the preacher reference because it seems germane to Klein’s charisma and penchant for showmanship. But the give & take also makes me think of a [possibly peculiarly French?] appreciation of rhetoric as spectator sport; the crowd wasn’t enthralled by the monochrome paintings, per se, so much as by the deftly argued [and proved! by the market!] monochrome propositions. Klein ran the market gantlet and survived with his propositions intact.
The oohlalas reminded me a bit of Ridicule, Patrice Leconte’s classic film of the court at Versailles, where wit and mastery of small talk and jeux de mots are essential to social/political/cultural success.
And the existence of Klein’s art in that time and that milieu made me wonder about the historical popular context contemporary art inhabited in the US. What was the perception and reception of art in post-war America? Today we bemoan art’s loss of primacy as a touchstone of cultural expression, and the decline of art appreciation among the general public. The art world has become, we’re told, too insular and self-absorbed, abandoning its common touch and the concerns and interests of real people. But is that how it went down?
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One specific example: I wonder what the role of LIFE Magazine was in shaping the broader view of art, and of influencing artists’–and the art world’s–views of themselves? Surely there are worthwhile dissertations on this topic, either written or in process.
The New York-based LIFE seemed to operate as–or at least consider itself–both a kingmaker and a tastemaker. But LIFE seemed to want it both ways: to declare a trend from its privileged vantage point, and then to proclaim its empathetic bafflement on behalf of John Q. Public. LIFE’s 1949 anointing of Jackson Pollock as “America’s Most Important Living Artist” began a decade of incredulous coverage of Abstract Expressionism as THE American Art.
Just yesterday, I found a 1965 article about Buffalo’s Festival of The Arts Today, a remarkable assemblage of avant-garde theatre, music, film, art, and dance, that drew an equally remarkable, diverse-sounding crowd of over 165,000 people in a remote city whose population at the time was just over 500,000:

Can this be Buffalo?
The far-out Festival of the Arts Today was as full of come-ons as a county fair, running from a nude dance number to orchestral works with popping paper bags, to four bizarre plays by Ionesco, to kinetic art that often looked like pinball machines on a jag. Buffalo took it all–the hokum and shocks included–with healthy curiosity and good-humored appreciation, proving how refreshing the arts can be when approached for genuine enjoyment instead of for genuflection.

How well did LIFE’s editorializing about far-out hokum and county fair come-ons capture the persepctive of the people who attended the Festival, and how much of it was projected upon them from Manhattan?
The photo next to this paragraph showed a pair of nuns standing in front of a Larry Poons painting at the Albright-Knox:
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Walking Man? What Walking Man?

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Alberto Giacometti’s figures look the way they do because he tried to capture what he called, “The moment I see them” and the way “they appear in my field of vision…” Arthur C Danto said this accounted for “the somewhat ghostly feeling of his figures, as if they were persons whose bodies had been all but erased.”
These ideas of figures, distorted, hovering on the edge of perception were very much in my mind when I found the incredible-looking sequence of [self] portraits of a man in the Google Street View panos of the Binnenhof, the Dutch Parliament complex in The Hague. The guy is almost certainly a Google Street View worker who accompanied the new Google Trike as it scanned and photographed the pedestrian-only area.

walking man proof - 3

By walking alongside the Trike, the guy ended up inserting himself into thousands of photos, and basically every stitched-together panorama. The stitching algorithm, though, often tried to erase him, or replace his photo with a better [i.e., unobstructed] image of the same spot. The result is a series of fragmented collage portraits, disembodied heads, hairdos and limbs.
I gathered full-sized screenshots from every pano, focusing not of the site itself, but on the guy, and then I bundled them into a book, which I titled, after Giacometti, Walking Man. That was in mid-April.
As I’ve been tweaking the book the last few weeks, though, I found that several of the Binnenhof panoramas have been removed from Google Street View, including all the coverage of the inner courtyard, and every one I illustrated in my blog post.
Google has been getting heat in Europe for its Street View datagathering practices. I’d suspect that investigations in Germany and across the EU–and now even in the US–for surreptitiously collecting personal data across wi-fi networks is a bigger issue for them than ye random blogger’s artbook-ish attempt to fit Street View into critical history of street photography. And yet.
Google had already had the Binnenhof in the bag when they announced the Google Trike last summer, and invited the public to suggest where it should shoot first. Whatever else it was, this seemed like a canny move designed to deflect any possible political heat from the Street View effort: we’ve already got the Parliament on board, who wants to be next?
Now, though, it seems like someone, either within Google or within the Dutch government, or both, is actively deciding it doesn’t want people to examin either the Binnenhof OR the Street View process too closely. And that includes Walking Man, whose portraits are being all but erased.

Muybridge Had A Posse

Now before we get too far, let me state for the record that so long as there’s no thievery or lying involved, but appropriate credit or consideration is, I got no problem at all with a man who takes another man’s photograph, tweaks it a bit, and re-presents it as his own.
That said, I am blown away by the awesomeness of Tyler Green’s investigative interview with photography curator Weston Naef that questions the attributions of many early photographs in the Eadweard Muybridge retrospective at the Corcoran.
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Naef has a pretty compelling, I’d almost say irrefutable, argument that before 1872, Muybridge published many photographs under his name [or his brand, really, since the questions arise about the period from 1866-1872, when Muybridge worked under the name Helios Studio] which were actually taken by others, including his friend and frequent business counterpart, the great Carleton Watkins.
Green and Naef cite specific examples of Muybridge photos slotting right into the missing slots in Watkins’ photo sequences. There are even cases where the shots are identical.
The implications for the Corcoran’s show–the first Muybridge retrospective ever–and the history of photography are pretty significant. Which doesn’t necessarily take away from the exhibition or the catalogue, though Philip Brookman’s account of Muybridge’s career will certainly come in for revision.
I saw the show on opening day, and it is fantastic, an incredible accomplishment, and a wealth of wonderful photographs and stereographs. It was the show and the catalogue that catalyzed Naef’s preliminary research, and the whole thing opens a very interesting window on the development of photography in the US, and especially in California, in the 19th century. There’s much more research and analysis and discovery to be had here. And it’ll be interesting to see how the show changes on its next incarnations at Tate Britain and SFMOMA.
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But I know what you’re all thinking: what does this mean for me? And by me, I do mean me, not you. Well, it means that now I don’t know who made one of my favorite oddball images from the Corcoran show, a stereograph from Woodward Gardens, an early zoo/amusement park in San Francisco. It shows a slightly generic garden scene, but the focus is on a mirrored garden ornament–in which the photographer’s own self-portrait is visible. That thing looks so much like a vanguard satellite, or a satelloon mockup, I am powerless before it. And now I find out it might not be Muybridge at all.
The intro to the 3-part interview: The Newest Eadweard Muybridge Mystery [modern art notes]
Looks like they picked the wrong week to name their otherwise awesome exhibition catalogue: Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change [amazon]
The Corcoran show runs through July 18. [corcoran.org]
note: detail of the mirrored garden orb from UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, via Calisphere [thanks for that, too, Tyler]

Found The Warhols?

Last fall, I was looking for a way to paper the art world with giant versions of the awesome PDF wanted posters the LAPD Art Theft Detail had created for Richard Weisman’s stolen Warhol Athletes Series paintings.
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So I created a tongue-in-cheek Kickstarter project to print up a thousand posters. But satirical altruism for cagey Bel Air collectors wasn’t a big draw, and then mysteriously, Weisman dropped his insurance claim, so his company withdrew the $1 million reward offer. [Which you’d think would make the posters all that more collectible. But anyway. I have my proof, I’m content.]
Weisman, who commissioned the series in 1977, said he was not interested in subjecting his family to the invasive scrutiny of the insurance investigation. And it’s not like he’s really missing the works: he and his family still owns several sets of the paintings, and he has donated several more to museums and sports halls of fame.
Bring it up to the present, and the LAPD still lists the works as stolen. But a couple of weeks ago, the NYT’s Virginia Heffernan wrote about a couple of art theft blogs, including Art Hostage.
Had we only known. Barely a week after the heist, Art Hostage chief Turbo Paul had the case all sewn up: “Not Stolen, A Domestic Kidnapping !!!!!”
Which, when combined with Weisman’s subsequent actions, makes it sound like he knows who, if not exactly where, and doesn’t want to pull that thread.
Now if only there were a break in the Pebble Beach “Pollock” case….