Just like how, once you’ve learned it, you start hearing a word all the time, now I see satelloons everywhere. Including at the Buckminster Fuller retrospective last year at the Whitney [which went on to Chicago this summer.]
Buckminster Fuller and his architecture partner Shoji Sadao mocked up this photo of a photocollage, Project for Floating Cloud Structures (Cloud Nine) , around 1960. Cloud Nines are self-contained communities of several thousand people living inside enclosed geodesic spheres a mile wide, which float over the earth’s surface.
Because the geodesic structure increases in strength as it gets bigger, and its surface increases at a power of two, while its volume increases at a power of three, Fuller hypothesized that heating the interior air even one degree will set the Cloud Nines aloft.
Obviously, as a sexy, futuristic utopian image, Cloud Nine is hard to pass up, but holy crap, Bucky, did you think for two seconds about the urban fabric and the social experience of living trapped in a floating dome? I’d love to see someone write an SF story about it. Because I think it might be a fantastically totalitarian disaster.
There are two versions of the Cloud Nine image: [the earlier?] one has smooth, silvery, featureless spheres. I’d call them satelloons, even. The other [above] has line drawings of the geodesic structure collaged onto it.
It was only now, as I get around to finally posting about them, that the relationship between Cloud Nines and satelloons might be more than formalistic. The original satelloon, Project Echo launched in 1960, the same year Fuller and Sadao designed their giant floating spheres. Could there have been a connection?
The easiest, most obvious thing to do might be to ring up Shoji Sadao. What is he up to these days, anyway? You’d think that given the recent interest in Fuller’s work, a guy who worked so closely with Fuller on so many major projects–he’s credited with the dome at the 1967 World Expo in Montreal, arguably the most spectacular Fuller structure ever realized–would be all over the place. I mean, it was only a few years ago that he gave up his position as executive director of the Noguchi Foundation in Long Island City. And then he curated that great Fuller-Noguchi show in 2006. [Sadao was also a longtime collaborator with Noguchi and the chief overseer of his legacy.] Anyone spoken with him lately?
Category: art
A Small Compendium Of Shiny Orbiting Balls
In a 1970 paper, two Harvard/Smithsonian scientists proposed A Passive Stable Satellite for Accurate Laser Ranging. Dubbed project Cannonball, the 38-cm spherical satellite would be covered with triangular reflectors and would weigh–did someone drop a decimal?–a prodigious 8000 pounds. Cannonball would be a stable laser target which would allow surface mapping of the earth with 10cm accuracy by reflecting laser light between earth base stations. It was designed to be launched using an extra Saturn rocket left over from the Apollo program, but it didn’t happen.
The passive laser reflector disco ball-lookin’ satellite trend didn’t really kick in until 1976, when NASA launched LAGEOS I [LAser GEO-something Satellite, above], which was built by ASI, the Italian Space Agency, from a NASA design. The 60cm-diameter aluminum-coated brass sphere is set with 426 cube-cornered retro-reflectors–4 are germanium, the rest are glass.
ASI built another, identical satellite, LAGEOS II [below], which was launched in 1992.
A third passive retro-reflector satellite, called LARES, was designed as an all-Italy project, and is set to launch in 2009 on an ESA rocket. LARES is smaller [36cm], made of solid tungsten, and contains 92 retroreflectors.
In 1989, Russia launched two Etalon satellites [below], which are each 1.3m in diameter and contain 2,145 retro-reflectors.
NASA launched Larets, a tiny 21cm sphere with 60 prismatic reflectors into low-earth orbit in 2003. It is very similar in design to the German GFZ-1 [below], which was launched in 1995 and burned up in 1999. They also look llike Buckminster Fuller Fly’s-Eye Domes.
The most disco ball-looking of all, though is Project Starshine, a series of three student project satellites [??] which launched between 1999 and 2003. Built from spare hardware, each Starshine sphere was covered with almost 900-1500 mirrors polished by students around the world. The satellites reflected sunlight, enabling a network of schools to track their movement. They all burned up as they re-entered the atmosphere, and Starshines 4 & 5 have been waiting for a ride into space since 2004.
LAGEOS I also contains a plaque [below] designed by Carl Sagan and drawn by Jon Lomberg. It consists of three maps showing the position of the continents in the distant past, the present, and 10 million years from now, when the satellite is expected to re-enter earth’s atmosphere. The idea being, I assume, to let whoever retrieves the beautiful, shiny artifact from space some time before that happens know that we totally knew they were going to do that.
Share Your Bed
I’ve steered way clear of architect’s Michael Jackson Monument Competition because–hello, in what universe does that decision actually require any explanation? Because.
Anyway, after seeing the winners, I just have to raise a single, ungloved–and as yet unmittened, hold that thought–hand in apology and salute. They’re kind of hilariously fantastic. Kottke is all tight between the winner [a nice copyright play] and second place [the perpetual desert disco dance floor powered by a gold-plated windmill].
Me, I find the third place entry, by an architecture student named James at the University of Utah, to be borderline brilliant. Its title, “Share Your Bed,” comes from testimony Jackson gave during his trial for child molestation: “Why can’t you share your bed? The most loving thing to do is to share your bed with someone. It’s very charming. It’s very sweet. It’s what the whole world should do.”
The jurors liked the “almost cheeky minimalism” and transformation of “an ordinary domestic object,” apparently forgetting that these are both now standard-issue for memorials [c.f Oklahoma City bombing=chairs, Pentagon = benches]. For his part, James cites the “dialectic manner Michael lived life by,” where “Innocence clashes with social ideals.” I’d rank not molesting children a bit higher than an “ideal,” but he’s right that the bed is a potent site and symbol of personal/political, private/public paradox.
Beginning in April and running through the end of 1969, Yoko Ono and John Lennon conducted bed-ins as peace protests in hotels around the world. First was their honeymoon bed in Amsterdam, where the press converged, expecting to see the couple have sex. Instead, they were talking about peace all day. In bed. “Give Peace A Chance” was recorded in bed at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal that June.
And of course, there’s Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ classic billboards showing a couple’s–his and his partner Ross’s–unmade bed, which were installed across New York City in 1991. Either way, not artists or works I’d have ever thought to associate with Michael Jackson.
Whoops, I almost forgot. Huge shoutouts to etoile’s King of Pop In Orbit, the plan to launch Jackson’s shiny, gold coffin into space, which I have to love for obvious shiny-objects-in-space reasons–and to CUP’s The Michael Jackson Mitten Jamboree, for which the whole world knits themselves a pair of MJ mittens. Again, explanation is neither needed or possible.
Show Me The Monet
The [Modern] bought its first large waterlily painting — at 18 feet across, the widest painting to enter the collection up to that point — in 1955, for the equivalent of $11,500. A mere three years later it paid the equivalent of $150,000 for the triptych, acquiring it as a replacement for the first work, which was destroyed in a fire at the museum.
Arriving at the museum in poor condition, the triptych was extensively restored and put on new stretchers. Dorothy Miller, one of the museum’s early curators, gave Monet’s original stretchers to three young New York painters: Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman and Fred Mitchell. Those were the days.
Roberta Smith, referencing Ann Temkin’s essay on Monet’s waterlily paintings, which are now on exhibit together at MoMA.
I just checked back to the quick acquisition history I wrote two years ago of the Met’s and Modern’s giant Pollocks. 1955 was also the year Barr first attempted to drum up acquisition funds ($8,000) to buy a Pollock, Autumn Rhythm (1950), from his own trustee, the dealer Sidney Janis. He couldn’t shake the money loose, and the work went to the Met in 1958 for $30,000. Also taking place in the middle of the Modern’s Monet purchases: Frank O’Hara’s 1957 Pollock show, which the artist did not live to see.
Whether it’s out of fashion for art historians to read premonitions of postwar New York School action painting in Monet’s waterlilies, those histories from the 50’s onward were together at MoMA.
Malibu Air: Lens Color Cast Corrections
House exterior (test)
Malibu, CA
Kitchen
Malibu, CA
Ian James is a recent CalArts graduate. He posted a series of images–photos–of Lens color cast correction on his blog. which are kind of fantastic:
Lens Color Cast is an dilemma specific to digital photography. Digital sensors are incredibly flat and are designed to receive light straight on. In the case of ultra wide angle lenses, light reaches the sensor diagonally and creates wild color casts and flares which are incredibly difficult to fix in Photoshop. Thus to the only way to correct is at the time of shooting by utilizing a particular lens filter that is a combination of diffusion and a translucent diamond pattern that evens out the light coming hitting the sensor. This image is saved in capture software as an adjustment setting and then applied to all related images as a set. A new LCC image must be made everytime the camera is moved into a new lighting scenario.
The images generated for the LCC are thus abstract functionaries of a larger endeavor. The LCC images in this set were all generated from an architecture shoot of the ins and outs of a Malibu beachfront home. Each image relates to one particular setup, such as master bedroom, guest bedroom, office, kitchen, outside patio, front exterior, etc.
They remind me a bit of Bruce Nauman’s monochrome photographs of the Los Angeles sky, which he published in a couple of artist books: CLEA RSKY (1968-9) is all blue skies. Which is fine.
But I like L A AIR (1970) better. The point/joke is that the smog-filled air of Los Angeles produced a much more varied and interesting range of colors. Both were included in “Elements and Unknowns,” a beautiful little show of enigmatic artist books organized last fall by May Castleberry, the contemporary editions editor at MoMA’s Library Council.
Lens Color Cast Correction [ian james eats photographs]
Public Art On The Mall: Centerbeam & Icarus
While we contemplate the Colombian Heart Attack that has befallen Washington DC, it might be worthwhile to remember the good old days, such as they were, when the National Mall was the site of ambitious public art projects. Projects like Centerbeam and Icarus.
Centerbeam was the result of a 22-artist collaboration organized by MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies under the leadership of the artist Otto Piene. It was a 144-ft long 128-ft long [in DC] steel sculpture resembling a radio tower on its side, which served as a platform for an array of artistic deployments of cutting edge technologies, including laser projections on steam, holograms, neon and argon beams, and electronic and computer-generated music. And giant inflatable sculptures.
After a highly acclaimed debut at Documenta 6 in 1977, Centerbeam was reinstalled on the Mall during the Summer of 1978. The site was the open space north of the newly opened National Air & Space Museum, and directly across the Mall from the just-opened East Gallery of the NGA [where The National Museum of the American Indian now stands].
Centerbeam gave nightly performances/happenings/experiences throughout the summer, culminating in two nights’ performance of Icarus, a “sky opera” in steam, balloons, lasers, and sound created by Piene and Paul Earls.
Based loosely on Ovid, Icarus cast Piene’s 250-ft tall red and black flower-shaped sculpture as the title character; another red anemone-shaped balloon was Daedalus, and Centerbeam was the Minotaur.
Centerbeam was officially sponsored by the National Park Service, which has jurisdiction over the Mall, and the Smithsonian. The directors of both the NGA [Carter Brown] and the Hirshhorn Museum [Abram Lerner] are thanked for their encouragement in MIT’s 1980 catalogue of Centerbeam, but no Smithsonian art museum–and no art curator–appears to have been involved in the presentation of the work. Most of the coordination was handled by Susan Hamilton, who worked in the office of Charles Blitzer, the Assistant Secretary for History and Art. In fact, the Air & Space Museum’s director and staff gets the most effusive praise and seems to have been the most closely involved with the project, even to the point of using the NASM as Centerbeam‘s mailing address.
The Washington Post did not review Icarus, and in the paper’s only feature on the opening of Centerbeam, Jo Ann Lewis cited anonymous critics who “generally saw it as a big, endearing toy, but not art. There seems no reason to amend that conclusion here.”
Of course, no one cares what the Post says about art, and Piene and his CAVS collaborators probably did not mind the absence of more traditionally minded art worlders. Since his days as a founder of Group Zero in the early 1960s, Piene had been self-consciously seeking a path that would lead art out and away from the rareified, precious object fixations of collectors and museums.
Group Zero was ahead of several curves, and their place in the story of conceptualism, minimalism, Arte Povera, and other important developments of art in the 1960s is getting a boost. And Piene’s work looked pretty nice and strong in Sperone Westwater’s very fresh-looking Zero show last year. Are Centerbeam and Icarus really just wonky art/science experiments, examples of the played out model of unalloyed, Utopian technophilia that spawned earlier collaborative dogpiles like the Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair?
Or is there a real history of “real” art by Piene and his collaborators that needs to be looked at again? Despite the apparent indifference of its official art world at the time, was Washington DC actually the site of some significant artistic production that did not involve freakin’ Color Fields? Inquiring balloon-sculpting minds want to know.
District Of Colombia??
W. T. F.???
The National Mall is ringed with Smithsonian museums, none of which seem to have programmed a piece of public art or sculpture outside their own walls in at least a generation.
Washington DC has no public art program to speak of. And that’s not just because you can’t call those insane “parades” of paint-a-pandas and paint-a-donkey/elephant “art”; they’re tourist marketing, pure and simple.
And yet. Another such parade seems to have miraculously materialized on the District of Columbia’s streets. A parade of hearts. There was one in front of my family’s hotel when we picked them up to do the tourist circuit. There were three along our walks to the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Smithsonian’s American History Museum.
Each is painted with quotes and factoids about Colombia, the country. They turn out to be part of Colombia es Pasion, an official [Colombian] government branding campaign designed, according to a regurgitated press release in the Examiner, “to educate and show the world the true Colombia.” In addition to the three we saw, there are 37 other giant fiberglass hearts which “appear along city streets in high-traffic areas. They will be hard to miss, standing eight feet tall, featuring colorful, hand-painted designs that showcase a particular aspect of Colombia that may surprise visitors.”
Visitors and locals both. Who the hell gave this thing the green light? The campaign was created for the Colombian government by BBDO Sancho, the Colombian subsidiary of the global ad agency, and was designed by another Bogota agency called Sistole. But there is absolutely no one–no agency or overseeing organization or authority from Washington DC or the US mentioned in the press release/article.
I can think of approximately one thousand art projects that would be better to see on the streets and plazas of Our Nation’s Capital before a bunch of South American heart-shaped billboards.
So the only way I can make sense of their presence is that Washington DC is now an open, international platform for sculpture, art, whatever! The way Houston has no zoning laws, and you can build whatever the hell you want next to whatever the hell is already there, Washington’s many complex, overlapping bureaucracies have thrown out the rulebook and thrown open the streets for whatever cockamamie scheme you’ve been cooking up. Bring’em down and set’em up!
An invitation to Discover Colombia Through Its Heart [examiner.com]
Colombia llegó a Estados Unidos/ Colombia came to the US [and just dumped their marketing bullshit on our street corners] [colombiaespasion.com, google translate]
Fall 2009 NY Events Calendar
For anyone interested in improving his chances of running into Brian Sholis at a brainy and/or arty event, he has compiled a rather awesome calendar of openings, symposia, talks, readings, screenings, and other happenings in New York.
Me, I just loaded it onto my iPod Touch calendar, so I can be reminded nearly every day that I’m missing something interesting. Though I definitely plan on going to James Welling’s talk with Jan Dibbets at MoMA on–well, it’s right there in the calendar.
Fall 2009 New York Events Calendar [briansholis.com]
Now I Know Where That Idea Came From
Grain Edit has some truly spectacular gouache/lithograph-based advertising work done for the late TWA by the late David Klein. It’s one truly beautiful poster after another, starting with this piece featuring the Gateway Arch.
Tyler Green just got back from St Louis, where he was blown away by Saarinen’s arch, and rightly so. It is a sculptural and engineering marvel. Seeing as how I’d just loaded up the ol’ blog here with shiny stainless steel sculptures by Walter de Maria, Tyler put forward an interesting idea, namely that there might be some significant-but-under-acknowledged [or under-examined] connection between Saarinen’s arch and de Maria’s own truly great addition to the shiny, dropdead gorgeous Western Sublime, the Lightning Field. Very interesting.
Meanwhile, for my part, I realized that I might have been inadvertently quoting a Klein myself. Because way back when I was still a hardcore suit and setting up private equity funds for whichever giant retailers, I had a crazy idea to make some paintings [I know, right?] of Times Square, where all the billboards were replaced by floating, perspectival parallelograms of solid color.
At the time I was thinking Malevich, especially the photo of the gallery installation of his paintings with that one square black one tucked up into the corner. As I describe it, it probably sounds a little Mehretu-ish, but she wasn’t on the scene yet.
But as I look at it in my head, I recognize it now as the billboards in David Klein’s New York TWA poster–which has been in MoMA’s A&D collection for over 50 years. It’s like I’m running a private install of fffound! in my head, and it takes this long to figure out where all the images actually come from.
David Klein Vintage TWA Posters [grainedit.com]
Fly TWA, David Klein, 1956 [moma.org]
David Klein Art [davidkleinart.com]
Isolated Depiction of the Passage of Time
As Antoni helpfully pointed out in an email, Canadian artist Brian Jungen has created a work wherein he carves a design into the gallery wall with a router, which leaves a bevel-edged channel which, as one viewer in Vancouver described it, “revealed all the coloured layers of paint like layers of sediment.”
Sounds awesome, and awfully similar to Huyghe’s and ___?__’s pieces. And Jungen’s one-man show did travel to the New Museum’s temporary Chelsea location in 2005. [Which is kind of problematic: did the New Museum’s 22nd Street space walls even have hundreds of coats of exhibition-related repainting to expose and contemplate? And so what happens to this work without the supposed burden of Art History lurking right behind that fresh coat of paint? Please tell me there’s more to a piece like this than expedient aesthetic pleasure.]
And anyway, I didn’t see Jungen’s show. Which is really too bad, because this piece sounds kind of sweet. Isolated Depiction of the Passage of Time, 2001:
consists of a handcrafted cedar pallet that is surmounted by neatly stacked cafeteria trays in several colors. While the form can be understood in terms of the classic minimalist cube, it is also a facsimile of an escape pod that was fashioned by an inmate at one of Canada’s largest prisons. Knowing that the cafeteria trays were delivered by truck to another facility for cleaning, the prisoner had built up and glued together many cafeteria trays, leaving a void at the center in which he could hide while the trays were being transported. In this sculpture the void is taken up with a television playing daytime programming and soap operas.
Hmm, not getting the TV aspect, but still. It’s got some nice Tony Feher-meets-Swiss Baroque-period Judd-meets-early Michael Phelan vibe going on. Also, and obviously, the title just backed into me in the lunch line.
The Passage Of Time Obscures The Past Somewhat
And speaking of “The Quick And The Dead,” I swear I’ve seen a nearly identical piece to Pierre Huyghe’s Timekeeper, 1999, before.
I thought it was at the 1995 Whitney Biennial, on the east wall of the central gallery, opposite the Ellen Gallagher paintings. Only instead of sanding down the layers of paint on the gallery wall to reveal the space’s history like tree rings, the Whitney version was chiseled or routed out, leaving a smooth, beveled edge.
Did it make a shape like a striated, inverted Mayan pyramid? Or was it more of a trench, like a miniature LA River running horizontally across the wall? Was it by Lawrence Weiner? Am I right on the wall, but wrong on the show and date?
Above The Weather
Clearly, I miss some good things that are posted to the Walker Art Center’s blogs in between my visits. Such as Peter Eleey’s discussion last April on the opening of “The Quick And The Dead,” the Walker’s exhibition of conceptual art and the limits of our knowledge and experience.” Whoa, no small plans, then.
From the page above, it’s not clear that Jason Dodge’s Above The Weather is actually included in the show, but it sounds rather nice. He commissioned an Algerian weaver, Djidjiga Meffrer, to make a tapestry from a length of thread that can reach “to where the weather ends-essentially the border with outer space,” Eleey said. “Though it leads your mind to the outer reaches of the atmosphere, the cloth turns out to be much smaller than you might think.”
According to the Kadist Collection in which this piece [example?] resides, the color is the color of a night in 2007. Which is either interesting or a typo; the piece itself is dated 2005.
The Quick and The Dead runs through Sept. 24 [walkerart.org via briansholis.com]
Things Fall Apart: Au Centre Cannot Hold
Ouch. As if things weren’t bad enough in the art world last October, a 1969 Brice Marden diptych titled Au Centre fell off the brackets in its travel crate while in transit from Moscow to New York. The fall apparently went unnoticed until the painting arrived, which meant its fragile oil and beeswax surface jostled and rubbed against the inside of the crate all the way home. It was destroyed, and now after paying out the $3 million claim, the insurer AXA Art is suing the hell out of everyone who ever touched the painting or the crate. [The case just moved to federal court in Manhattan after a couple of months in NY State Supreme Court.]
The owner is/was Gagosian Gallery. According to the NY Post, the painting was en route to Manhattan to be sold at Sotheby’s. Which is odd. The original court filings had Au Centre leaving Moscow on October 9, 2008. [Actually, the date is listed as October 9, 2009. Which, if it were true, means AXA could just make sure someone’s properly escorting the painting in the future, and there’d be no trouble at all.] Gagosian had just opened a major show in Moscow a couple of weeks before, a nearly encyclopedic survey of contemporary art. Which did not, though, officially include the Marden. So maybe it was there for a back room showing, or as extra inventory? Who knows?
But we do know that the crate makers named in the suit are from Brooklyn. And the painting had last been seen in New York–at Sotheby’s. Despite its general awesomeness as an early Marden, Au Centre was a notable disappointment in the fall 2006 contemporary auction. The painting had both a high estimate [$3.8-4.5 million] and a guarantee [?], but it went unsold.
And it’s not so clear that Larry just snapped it up on the rebound, either. The painting is listed as coming directly from dealer Yvon Lambert, who had purchased it from his own 1969 show in Paris of Marden’s work. Yet Artforum seems to imply in their coverage of the sale that Bob Mnuchin was the “constipated”-looking seller.
Maybe he was the buyer. In 2006, Sotheby’s had yet to institute a disclosure policy for third-party guarantees, or as they eventually called them, “irrevocable bids.” In the late boom, third-party guarantees were a popular, if dodgy way for auction houses to extend guarantees to sellers while mitigating their own risk. But they were also a great way to reward big collectors and financiers, who reaped a significant portion of the surplus if a work sold beyond the guaranteed price. In other words, the guarantor was paid hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars not to buy the work. And they provided the sure public appearance of a sale, preventing the work from acquiring the aura of, uh, damaged goods.
Though I guess that didn’t happen here. And somehow Larry gets an early Marden for $3 million. In New York at the beginning of 2007. Given that auction history, it seems odd to me that in the Fall of 2008, with the art market bubble popping, Gagosian would really have been planning to put the painting back into play at Sotheby’s New York.
Stickin’ It To The Man
Classic. Throw it on the compost pile; it is done. Burning Man’s official delusional complicity in its own cynical corporate exploitation is now complete.
This year, the Man has been set atop a pyre [above] made of 2x4s swirled into a fantastical, organic architecture designed by Rod Garrett. The design is an explicit reference to Uchronia, aka the Belgian Waffle [below], from the 2006 Festival.
The Waffle was controversial for many reasons: it was built in the open playa, not in the city. It was burned the night after the Man burned. At the time, the Waffle’s Belgian designer/marketer Arne Quinze claimed his 100-person crew were all volunteers, but it turned out they were all paid employees. Because it was later revealed that the entire Uchronia Project was an experiential branding campaign organized and executed by Quinze’s agency for the launch of the newly redesigned Lexus L460 luxury sedan.
See, Burning Man turned out to be only the opening act, the precursor for several Lexus pop-up showrooms with mini-Waffle installations, including one in Beverly Hills and another in Miami Beach which was timed to coincide with Art Basel.
At the time, I got a lot of grief over my criticism of Quinze’s spectacle, and burners, including the BM organization’s official curator, were in angry denial about what had really happened. [My inbox got predictably quiet after the rest of Quinze’s elaborate Lexus installations were unveiled.]
All that mattered was for burners to believe–even if just for a few days–that there was still a chance to escape the consumption-obsessed world, and to create, free from advertising and logos and clients and bullshit corporate sponsors and their moneygrubbing agendas.
And now, just three years later, the namesake of the festival is built on a replica of the biggest corporate punking and co-option ever. Congratulations.
Working for the Man; The State of the ART [top image via blog.burningman.com]
Relive the complete greg.org Uchronia=Lexus saga here.
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]