Category: art

Shallow Waters Looking To Run Deep

Malcolm Mclaren gives Artforum 500 words on the occasion of his portrait series, Shallow:

I think our culture today can be summed up by two words: authenticity and karaoke. They can both fit together, but you’ve got to be a bloody magician to make that happen, you’ve got to be some extraordinary alchemist. And some of these contemporary artists are. Many contemporary artists spend their days trying very hard to authenticate a karaoke culture.

Not quite sure I agree with Malcolm Mclaren, but he’s quotable, so I’m quoting.

The Post-Apocalyptic Open-Pit Mines Are Alive With The Sound Of Music

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Alright, so last night I made some wisecrack about a scene from Kevin Costner’s 1997 film The Postman, where a mutant general pacifies his slave army by showing The Sound of Music on a floating theater on a lake at the bottom of an open-pit mine, might be a mashup of a couple of Robert Smithson’s unrealized installations. Little did I know.
I rewatched the scene just now, and it’s positively Smithsonian. I remembered some things incorrectly. [I hadn’t seen the movie since Christmas Night, 1997, when I had a private screening–on what turned out to be opening night, whoops–at a desolate multiplex in Salt Lake City.] Like I’d forgotten how spectacular it is, really well-crafted and poetic, even, for what amounts to a single note in the film [hats off to cinematographer Stephen Windon and the wonderfully named production designer Ida Random].
And the slave soldier army isn’t floating around, watching; they’re perched on the tiers of the open pit mine; I got that mixed up with the harborside cinema scene in Cinema Paradiso: in The Postman, only the projectionist is floating, in his little booth that looks like the offspring of Smithson’s Floating Island and his Partially Collapsed Shed.
I’d also forgotten completely about Dolph Lundgren. As the scene opens, and the ersatz movie theater is revealed, the screen first fills with explosions, the opening credits of Dolph Lundgren’s Universal Soldier. But–unexpectedly!–the crowd of soldiers revolts and starts raining rocks down on the poor projectionist in his floating booth. He quickly changes the movie [beat] to The Sound of Music, and the mob is subdued.
In his Cinema Cavern, Smithson wanted to show only one film, Film On The Making [of] Cinema Cavern. But after a long day of killing in the mines, the “ultimate film-goers” in The Postman reject their own “making of” film, preferring instead the escapist fantasy of Julie Andrews, the singing, Nazi-thwarting nun.
Anyway, there are a bunch of tasty screencaps on flickr and after the jump. Enjoy.
previously: “truly ‘underground’ cinema”

Continue reading “The Post-Apocalyptic Open-Pit Mines Are Alive With The Sound Of Music”

Peter Coffin’s UFO Project In Gdansk


Spectacular. New York artist Peter Coffin flew a 7-meter, LED-studded, SMS-controlled flying saucer on unannounced trips around the harbor in Gdansk, Poland last month. The lighting and structure were created with London’s Cinimod Studio and with the help of the Art Production Fund and others. It just flew underneath a rescue unit helicopter, but it looks incredible.
Peter Coffin’s UFO Project, July 4th 2008 [cinimodstudio.com via andrewkreps]

“Truly ‘Underground’ Cinema”

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I loved Cabinet before I wrote for them, and I love them after. In the latest issue, #30 The Underground, Colby Chamberlain looks at an awesome 1971 drawing by Robert Smithson titled, Toward the development of a Cinema Cavern or the movie goer as spelunker. [Colby’s piece is not online, but Smithson’s complete drawing is at the Estate site.]
According to a contemporaneous Artforum essay titled “A Cinematic Atopia,” Smithson described the project:

What I would like to do is build a cinema in a cave or an abandoned mine, and film the process of its construction. That film would be the only film shown in the cave. The projection booth would be made out of crude timbers, the screen carved out of a rock wall and painted white, the seats could be boulders. It would be a truly “underground” cinema….

Smithson’s interest in cinema was phenomenological: the idea that you sit there, motionless in the dark, experiencing a continuous stream of light and sound patterns. The Cinema Cavern’s closed, self-referential loop devolves into an abstract, multi-colored blur, with the “sluggish,” sloth-like movie goer none the wiser.
Colby puts Smithson’s cinema into context with the Underground-brand cinema of the day, as embodied by Stan VanDerBeek, Jonas Mekas, and friends. Which is fine and all; meanwhile, I’ve added the Cinema Cavern to the list of sketchy Smithson ideas I’d love to see realized here and now.
Part of me–the part who, admittedly, has not delved into the Smithson archives, and thus doesn’t know more than the single sketches–sees the Cavern Cinema as just as fully developed and thus, valid for realization, as, say, Floating Island. And part of me is still smarting for not getting to Les Arennes de Chaillot, the subterranean theater and couscous boite built in Paris by la Mexicaine de Perforation, a group of explorateurs urbains. [read my 2004 LMDP interview here.] And
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Also on the list: the 1973 Bingham Copper Mining Pit – Utah Reclamation Project. Smithson called for a giant, revolving viewing platform at the bottom of Kennecott Copper’s mountain-sized hole on the western side of Salt Lake Valley, all the better “to survey nature’s gradual and inevitable reclamation of man’s invasive enterprise” with, my dear.
[Every time I fly into Salt Lake, I’m reminded of this drawing/collage, which I rather impulsively bid on–and lost–when it came up for auction in 1993. I later met and became friends with the winning bidder, but I suspect I lost my chance at the drawing; its next stop will most likely be a museum.]
But what if Smithson’s visions already have been realized, and I just didn’t realize it? What if the Cinema Cavern and the Bingham Copper Mining Pit were combined and installed in the post-civilizational, entropic future, offering a front-row seat to nature’s reclamation?
I don’t know if it’s in David Brin’s original mid-80’s sci-fi novel, but in the 1997 film version of The Postman, the dopey title character, played by Kevin Costner, has a showdown with a “hypersurvivalist militia leader named General Bethlehem [played by Will Patton.] In one of the funniest scenes in the unintentionally hilarious fiasco, Bethlehem pacifies his troops–scraggly, murderous slaves who float around on rafts and inner tubes in a giant, water-filled, open-pit mine–with movies. As the battered projector whirs to life, the a battleworn print of The Sound of Music
PDF of “A Cinematic Atopia” in portuguese and english [sescsp.org.br]
Cinema Cavern, 1971 – Robert Smithson Estate – Drawings [robertsmithson.com]

Is The Spiral Jetty Visible? Check USGS Elevation Data

So the geocachers I’ve relied on to provide the link to the USGS real time data about the elevation of the Great Salt Lake have rejiggered their site.
So here’s the link I’m using to see if the Spiral Jetty is visible, submerged, or high and dry.
The Jetty’s elevation is 4,197 feet above sea level, so with the lake level at 4,194, I suspect it’ll be high and dry tomorrow.
update: it was, and it’s spectacular, black-on-white, with the shimmering water just off the outer edge of the spiral. Also, we got a flat, which I had to change at the Jetty, which sucked. The flat, of course, not the Jetty.
USGS Water Surface Elevation, Great Salt Lake near Saline, UT [waterdata.usgs.gov]
Previously: lots of Jetty goodness on the greg.org

Welcome To The Fly’s-Eye Dome

The Center for Architecture, Max Protetch and the Buckminster Fuller Institute have teamed up to exhibit two of the original Fly’s Eye domes, the last dome scheme that Fuller developed.

The original 10-ft diameter dome is at the gallery, and this vintage 26-ft version from 1976-7 is currently installed at LaGuardia Park, below Bleecker St, in the Village.

It’d take some engineering, maybe thread some systems and climate management through the structure, but I could totally see turning the largest version of the Fly’s Eye into a house somewhere. Just get some of that tasty Bosch aluminum beam and build your free-standing structure within the larger space. Sort of like FAR’s Wall House, only with a dome instead of a tent.

I’d like to think that the practical problems of dome living are due to the cheap-ass, DIY nature of most of the projects, and not to something inherent in the structure. But just by virtue of it’s being cedar shingle-proof, the Fly’s Eye Dome wins the Fuller Dome Off in my book.

the Fly’s Eye Dome exhibits run through Sept 14 or so [aiany.org]
Previously: Bucky chandelier almost makes up for the severe artifact/object shortage

And That’s The Way It Was

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After seeing it posted here and there, I finally got around to reading the Times article on Rachel Barrett’s photo series of NYC newsstands.
The documentation & typology field has been well plowed, photography-wise, but I guess Barrett doesn’t have to necessarily break new ground to make good art.
Still, for my money–and I wish I’d been able to spend it, but I was literally like the fifth or sixth hold on it when it took over Andrew Kreps’ booth at the 2003 Armory Show, so I never had a chance–no newsstand-related art beats Cheyney Thompson’s spectacular, life-size painting of a newsstand on East 86th St, An Event Commencing in the Spring of 1997 (part 2).
Even back then, in 2003, when there were still newsstands aplenty, Cheyney’s work was already marking lost time; he’d painted the same newsstand three years before. Never mind that every detail–magazine covers, candies, drinks–were completely different, and yet somehow the same. And never mind the inherent futility of using an excruciatingly slow and laborious medium to capture a single instantiation of an everchanging media landscape. Or actually, mind all these things, which are embodied in the meticulously non-photorealistic brushwork.
According to the Times, Barrett’s photos have been overtaken by nostalgia for a disappearing streetscape. Fine with me; the only things I buy at newsstands are Dots and the occasional Sunday Times anyway. But Cheyney’s painting has me reminiscing about the good old days, too: the days when an art fair was a major event of discovery, where an energetic young painter would declare his presence with a work three or six years in the making, not three months. Ahh, 2003. Those were the days.
Yesterday’s News [nyt]
An Event Commencing in the Spring of 1997 (part 2), Cheyney Thompson, via Andrew Kreps Gallery [andrewkreps.com]
Michael Wilson wrote about Cheyney’s work in 2003 for Frieze [frieze.com]

Agnes Denes’s Wheatfield – A Confrontation

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In 1982, the Public Art Fund commissioned Agnes Denes to create Wheatfield – A Confrontation. She planted, cultivated, and harvested two acres of wheat on the vacant landfill that is now Battery Park City.
The image above is one of several at the Chelsea Art Museum site, relating to a 2004 retrospective of Denes’s work. She is also included in a great-looking show at the Sculpture Center right now, “Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s.” Even though, as I mentioned, Wheatfield was done in 1982. [That’s sculpture-dash-center, btw.]
Interestingly enough, this year’s incarnation of PS1’s Young Architects program is called PF1, Public Farm 1 by WORK Architecture Company. It’s a giant herb, flower, and vegetable garden suspended in a structure of giant cardboard tubes.
Also, in the From Sea To Shining Sea Department, artist Lauren Bon created Not A Cornfield a 2006 public art project which tranformed a 32-acre brownfield site adjacent to downtown Los Angeles into a, well, a cornfield for an agricultural cycle.

Paperwork: Gordon Matta-Clark & Public Art

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Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1975 film, Day’s End, is on view at MoMA right now. It documents a guerrilla project where he and a couple of collaborators cut a giant, moon-shaped hole in the wall of an abandoned sanitation warehouse on Pier 52, at the end of Gansevoort St in the Hudson River. Matta-Clark said of the necessary illegality of the project:

I had no faith in any kind of permission … there has never, in New York City’s history, with maybe one or two minor exceptions, ever been any permission granted to an artist on a large scale.

via ny mag
Day’s End is also showing at the incomparable Ubu Web. [ubu]

The East River School

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I’m out of town, so I haven’t seen Olafur Eliasson’s New York City Waterfalls in person yet. But even though I’m a fan and a friend of the artist, I’m getting a kind of relieved, embarrassed enjoyment reading the underwhelmed reactions to the project.
There’s something about “public” art that just gets under peoples’ economic skins in ways that art on display in public doesn’t. Do Aby Rosen or Damien Hirst get grief for the comparably priced statue of a dissected pregnant girl that’s been on view at Lever House for the last few years? Are the owners of the $100 million worth of Koons sculptures parked on the Met’s roof taking heat for not funding public schools instead?
If the oft-quoted number of $13-15 million is right, the Waterfalls cost about as much as a decent 3BR on the park. On a monthly basis, the 4-month project is about twice as much as the $20 million/year, $1.67/mo. Citi pays the Mets for naming rights to their new stadium [which is being built with 450 million taxpayer dollars.]
But whatever, if NYC Waterfalls‘ boring comparisons to the empty, execrable spectacle of The Gates only exposed of the pitfalls of the existential argument for Art as Economic Development, it would be a success.
Waterfalls are supposed to be Nature’s most spectacularly wild destinations, yet on the East River, they’re tame to a fault. Never mind the futility of trying to upstage the wonder that is the Brooklyn Bridge; in the competition for inspiring American scenery, Olafur’s cobbled-together waterfalls invariably lose to the cityscape he put them in. Which I suspect was part of the plan all along.
cole_kaaterskill_falls.jpg, warner paper collection
Here’s Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School, in his 1836 “Essay on American Scenery,” explaining how the divinely anointed wildness is the first point of evidence of God’s favor on His Country [Waterfalls, by the way, are point 3.b., listed under “3. Water” between “a. Lakes” and “c. Rivers.”]:

[Wildness] is the most distinctive, because in civilized Europe the primitive features of scenery have long since been destroyed or modified–the extensive forests that once overshadowed a great part of it have been felled–rugged mountains have been smoothed, and impetuous rivers turned from their courses to accommodate the tastes and necessities of a dense population–the once tangled wood is now a grassy lawn; the turbulent brook a navigable stream–crags that could not be removed have been crowned with towers, and the rudest valleys tamed by the plough.
And to this cultivated state our western world is fast approaching; but nature is still predominant, and there are those who regret that with the improvements of cultivation the sublimity of the wilderness should pass away: for those scenes of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted, affect the mind with a more deep toned emotion than aught which the hand of man has touched. Amid them the consequent associations are of God the creator–they are his undefiled works, and the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.

Though both varieties evoke “the beautiful, but apparently incongruous idea, of fixedness and motion,” Olafur’s waterfalls are the diametric opposites of The Hudson River School’s. As unabashed works of Danish-Icelandic Man the creator set in the sublime mess of the East River waterfront, they cast the mind into the contemplation of mundane, daily, man-made things.
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So far, I haven’t seen my favorite aspect of the perfectly cultivated Waterfalls discussed anywhere at all: their schedule. The waterfalls get turned on every day at 7 AM, and turned off at 10pm. Except, as it happens, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when they get turned on at 9 AM. New Yorkers have nothing against communing with nature’s sublime majesty, as long as you can guarantee we can squeeze it in on the way to work, or maybe during a smoke break. [One by-product of this schedule is the impossibility of reproducing the NYT’s Vincent Laforet’s lush photos of the falls in the dawn’s early light until the very last days of the project, and only then if they turn the lights on in the morning.]
But the idea of turning waterfalls on and off to suit human needs is not limited to the Public Art Fund. One of the biggest controversies in Iceland the last decade or so has been the Karahnjukar Dam, which was built on a pristine glacial river solely to generate electricity for a massive aluminum smelting plant run by Alcoa. Opponents criticized the project, not just for drying up 100 scenic waterfalls, but for planning to turn them back on from June to September during the summer tourist hiking season.
church_niagara.jpg corcoran museum
Even the “uncontrollable power” of the Hudson School’s favorite, Niagara Falls, is cut by 50-75% at night and during the off-season to power upstream hydroelectric plants. Cole got a little moist: “In gazing on it we feel as though a great void had been filled in our minds–our conceptions expand–we become a part of what we behold!” Which goes the same for Olafur’s waterfalls, too; the only difference is what we become a part of.

There’s Still A Lot Left Untold In This Article About BYU’s Art Collection Shenanigans

The scale of the scandal of the management of BYU’s art collection was becoming clear just as I entered the art history program there in the late 1980’s. For years, the collection had been ignored by everyone except one professor who served as an ersatz administrator/curator. Without a museum or any galleries to show it in, and without even an inventory or an institutional awareness of what was in it, the collection was just left unattended. Faculty could go grab a Homer drawing or a Rembrandt etching for their offices. The always-open conference room where we met for our contemporary art seminar had a Mark Tobey painting on a hook.
By the time the University announced plans to build an art museum and had begun a computerized inventory, they found that almost 10% of the collection, over 1,200 objects, had gone missing, 900 through theft, fraud, forgery, misplacement, unauthorized sales or trades, or returns to original donors. As this long, fascinating, but maddeningly incomplete article in the Deseret News reports, a couple of folks at BYU have been doggedly pursuing the return of the artworks since 1986.
The story focuses on a couple of high-profile cases where unscrupulous dealers seduced or duped the BYU professor in charge of the collection. A NY dealer named Dion O’Wyatt took a Monet and some Homer drawings from Provo to NYC, ostensibly for appraisal in advance of an unapproved sale. Then he had a street artist copy the works, and he quickly sold the originals. The forgeries went undetected for 16 years.
To their credit, BYU went public and disclosed the full scale of their mismanagement. Al the missing works have been entered into the Art Loss Register. Some works, like a Julian Alden Weir painting now in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection, have been located, but their return or ownership are in dispute. The article has no mention of any of the donors who got/took work back, or of the other dealers or instigators of this fascinatingly obtuse escapade. I’m glad the movie mentioned in the story didn’t get made, but I’d love to read a fuller accounting.
Stolen art — BYU searches the world to recover pilfered pieces [deseretnews.com via mom]

The Future Can’t Come Fast Enough

Brian Eno and Kevin Kelly traded outrageous predictions for the future back in 1993. Here’s one of Eno’s I will definitely be looking forward to:

* 2025 AD: A social archaeologist discovers a cowshed built from nineteen old Julian Schnabel paintings.

Of course, it kind of reminds me that in 1993, I glued all the pages of my extra copy of Madonna’s Sex book, then jigsawed the center out of it to make a box. So the future’s mocking me to the tune of about $800 right now.
Unthinkable Futures [kk via jk]

Cellarius’ Celestial Atlas, Harmonia macrocosmica

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Christie’s is calling Andreas Cellarius’ Harmonia macrocosmica “PROBABLY THE FINEST CELESTIAL ATLAS EVER PUBLISHED.” But then, they would; they have a first edition from 1660 they’re hoping will sell for $80-120k next week.
Cellarius compiled the celestial maps of Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe into one exquisitely illustrated volume which was reprinted first in 1661, then after Cellarius’ death in 1708, and in a couple of contemporary re-editions up to and including Taschen’s reproduction.
Plate 10 [above]: CORPORUM COELESTIUM MAGNITUDINES – The sizes of the celestial bodies.
Plate 17 [below]: SOLIS CIRCA ORBEM TERRARUM SPIRALIS REVOLUTIO – A map showing the pre-Copernican theory that seasonal changes were attributable to the sun’s spiral orbit around the earth.
cellarius_solar_spiral.jpg
LOT 50: CELLARIUS, Andreas (ca 1596-1665). Harmonia macrocosmica, est. $80,000-120,000, June 17 at Christie’s [christies.com]
There are several scans of Harmonia macrocosmica online: the University of Utah Library has one; and so does The Warnock LIbrary in A’dam. The images above come from scans at the extensive Cellarius site published by R.H. van Gent at the University of Utrecht.
Buy the Taschen reissue of Andreas Cellarius’ landmark 1660 celestial atlas, Harmonia macrocosmica, at Amazon [amazon]