In September, a group of artists organized as W.A.G.E [Working Artists and the General Economy] appeared at a Creative Time-organized event to talk about the economic inequities of artists’ interactions with museums and other institutions. They certainly earned their speaking fee.
The video’s here; it gets kind of angry. There’s a cooler headed Q&A at ArtCal, but the gist of it is: because the US lacks the standards or legislation of other countries, the practices of arts institutions in the US are often economically exploitative of artists they work with. It’s often unclear, but artists in the US are routinely expected to work on exhibitions and programs for free, for exposure, or for some/all reimbursement of expenses.
Frankly, I’m not surprised. A couple of years ago, I was working on a story for the NYT about the dynamics of the artist-collector relationship; reporting it out got complicated, and I eventually killed the piece in its crib. But one thing I found was an almost pathological aversion of art world participants to discussing money issues generally–and the vast economic disparities between most collectors and most artists, specifically–directly. That avoidance mechanism apparently extends into the cultures of many museums as well.
While W.A.G.E.’s point about the trade of work for exposure is valid to a point, I think there are larger dynamics afoot. Rightly or not, the art world contends that arts institutions are places apart, which operate as non-commercial havens, bastions of altruism, in contradistinction to the art market.
To a large extent, the sense of art as a luxury, something to be pursued for love, not money, is determined by collectors with the means to travel and purchase at will. But artists, dealers, curators, advisors, much of the rest of the art world readily ascribes to this notion; even if they are living hand to mouth, they feel obliged to act as if they, too, are in it solely for love. This notion can exist within museums, where modestly paid staffers and patron/volunteers work side by side, and where the default that everyone, including artists, should chip in, in places an undue burden on people for whom money is as finite as their time.
W.A.G.E.’s notion of wealthy art institutions is a bit naive, though, a point which we will no doubt see proved out when museums are hit with layoffs or even closures. Still, it would be interesting to see the impact a few major institutions could have if they stepped up and offered artists fair compensation for their time and expenses as a matter of course, not just as an extraordinary request.
Democracy In America: Democracy Convergence Videos [creativetime.org]
Working Artists and the Greater Economy at the Park Avenue Armory [artcal via modern art notes]
W.A.G.E. is having a rally/info mtg on Dec. 11th [wageforwork.com]
Category: art
On Land Art Growing Up/Old
As much as I love it, Brian Sholis’s new blog reminds me how little I actually read and think these days. Here’s a quote from an excellent essay he points to by Lucy Lippard on the changing context for the Land Art that was built in the 1960’s and early 1970’s:
I’ve lived in the New West–urban and rural–for twenty-one years now, and my sense of the earthworks I knew and touted in the 1960s has changed quite drastically. In 1995, I gave a talk in Marfa, Texas, called “Land Art in the Rearview Mirror,” in which I discussed having “gone on down the road” to preferring an art that was “place specific” rather than “site specific.” Arguing for a microview of land and art, and for grassroots connections, I realized that monumental land art takes much of its power from distance–distance from people, from places, and from issues–while my own interests had come to focus almost entirely on the nearby, on “specific places as they reflect the interactions between people and what we call ‘nature,’ which includes people.” My views of land art have changed not because I have less respect for the older work, but because the better I know the New West, the more my attention is claimed by the sideshows, or the side-of-the-road shows.
In the 1960s, when land art was new, the expansion of consciousness offered was visual and aesthetic, perhaps even social, since it brought provincial New Yorkers out of their cocoons and into the West. It would have seemed crass to demand more of an art that prided itself on isolation. Artists were thinking on a grand (sometimes grandiose) scale. There were even religious undertones along the lines of the nineteenth-century “sublime.” (James Turrell spoke eloquently at the 1995 Marfa symposium about “directing vision toward a larger sort of space” and “making spaces that see.”) Forty years later, climate change, shrinking resources, and an administration bent on destroying the environment for corporate gain have changed the rules of the game. There is a point at which artists too have to take some responsibility for the things they love, a point at which the overview of magnificent scenery gives way to a more painfully focused vision of a fragile landscape and its bewildered inhabitants.
Funny, or not, that as recently as 2002, Nico Israel was still writing in Artforum as the provincial New Yorker braving the truck stop and strip mall savages of the New West as he made his Land Art pilgrimages.
Peripheral Vision by Lucy Lippard, in the 10/29/08 issue of NYFA Current [nyfa.org, reg req]
Lucy Lippard’s changing views of Land art [The Search Was the Thing]
White Cube Of Surrender?
Am I the only one who’s heard rumours of bankruptcies in diamond-encrusted skull-showing places?
update: apparently so. Last major financial transactions reported for Jay Jopling include buying £7.2 million worth of his own artist’s work at Sotheby’s in September. This, after leaking news before the auction that the gallery still had £100 million or so worth of Hirsts in inventory, no waiting. And that, before it was reported that in fact, Damien Hirst sold his £50 million [asking] diamond skull to himself, his manager Frank Dunphy, and his dealer, Jay Jopling.
So it would be interesting to speculate, perhaps, that one of White Cube’s biggest creditors could be Hirst. It would be ironic to say the least if the artist ended up owning the gallery.
previously: the making of Hirst’s diamond skull; the costing out of Hirst’s diamond skull
For The Record, I Am Not Daniel Young & Christian Giroux
Though with their combination of Ikean sculpture, reconstituted Cold War satellites, and geodesic dome playthings, I’m now not sure I’m not actually just a random projection of their collaborative imagination.
Daniel Young and Christian Giroux began making work together in 2004. The first collaboration was Fullerene, a giant, but light mobile structure of aluminum and bicycle tires that the duo rolled around Scope Miami in 2004.
Then in 2006, they showed a trio of sculptures that took the forms [and names] of US, Canadian, and Soviet spy satellites from the 1960’s. [Quirky Canada has own laws, spy satellites!] Both the spherical Fullerene, and the satellite shapes, which were originally designed for gravity-free orbit, are pleasantly disorienting riffs on the Minimalist sculptural challenges of Judd & others, who rejected a base, thereby launching objects into space.
And then this past summer, the duo’s show at Diaz Contemporary in Toronto consisted of sculptures made from custom-fabricated aluminum boxes and Ikea tables. They’re like narrower, harder-edged, and Juddier echos of Rachel Harrison’s and Isa Genzken’s sophisticated pastiches. And I mean that in the best possible way.
Daniel Young & Christian Giroux – Work [cgdy.com via tagbanger]
“Panel No. 59: In the North, the Negro had freedom to vote.”
Last week, I took my 4-yo daughter to the Phillips Collection to see Jacob Lawrence’s masterpiece, The Migration of the Negro. It turned out to be the last day of the exhibition where the entire 60-panel series was on view. [MoMA owns the even-numbered paintings, the Phillips owns the odd-numbered ones.]
We’ve grown familiar seeing it all together this summer, but in the crowded gallery, as I read the caption on each panel and held the kid up so she could see, I couldn’t help but choke up when I got to the end, the culmination of The Great Migration, where millions of citizens fled the vestiges of the Civil War–poverty, discrimination, injustice, and violence–for an opportunity to work, go to school, raise their families–and to vote.
Finding Double Negative has never been easier
Not since we programmed it into the navigation system of my in-laws’ car, anyway.
The car also has an offroad navigation feature that logs virtual GPS breadcrumbs at preset intervals along the way, but it proved unnecessary. The nearly featureless mesa where Heizer’s land artwork is sited turns out to be a road with a name: Carp Elgin Rd.
In fact, there it is on Google Maps, one of the tightest satellite shots I’ve ever seen of Double Negative. Crazy.
Update: OK, not to get all George Bush and the Grocery Scanner about it, but I just typed “Spiral Jetty” into Google Maps, and it came right up. With an upgraded photograph–and a label.
In fact, here are complete driving directions to the Jetty from 213 Park Avenue South, the former location of Max’s Kansas City. [note: there is a weird little, unnecessary jog at the very end that I couldn’t fix, but I’m not worried. Given the rate at which technology is iterating and altering the way once-isolated land artworks are experienced and perceived, I expect a realtime Google Streetview of the Jetty is already being planned on a whiteboard somewhere in Mountain View.]
Clearly, Google has been augmenting its map search with information found on the rest of the web. An otherwise seemingly Googleproof project like Michael Heizer’s City, which he sited as remotely as he could, is pinpointed by latitude and longitude coordinates published on a Land Art site. City also has newer photos.
Roden Crater’s there, under “Roden Crater, AZ,” but it still has the quaint, old-timey satellite photo from 2005 or whatever. I hope they’ll get around to upgrading it by the time Turrell finishes.
“Possible” By Jonathan Hoefler For Artists For Obama
“For as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible.”
I just bought Jonathan Hoefler’s poster from the Barack Obama store. If you hurry, 4799 more of you can do the same.
“Possible” by type designer Jonathan Hoefler, $60 donation [store.barackobama.com via daringfireball]
Walter De Maria’s Las Vegas Piece
Here’s Walter De Maria describing his early land art work, Las Vegas Piece, to Paul Cummings in 1972. According to the Center For Land Use Interpretation, the piece is off Carp/Elgin Road in the Tula Desert, one exit north of Double Negative‘s Overton exit on I-15. The work is now “apparently” lost:
it takes you about 2 or 3 hours to drive out to the valley and there is nothing in this valley except a cattle corral somewhere in the back of the valley. Then it takes you 20 minutes to walk off the road to get to the sculpture, so some people have missed it, have lost it. Then, when you hit this sculpture which is a mile long line cut with a bulldozer, at that point you have a choice of walking either east or west. If you walk east you hit a dead end; if you walk west you hit another road, at another point, you hit another line and you actually have a choice. At that point you decide which way to go and so forth, then you continue, you walk another mile and at another point you walk another half mile so and at a certain point you have to double back. After spending about four hours, you have walked through all of the three miles of the thing and you would have gotten your orientation because the sun will also be setting in the west and this is lined up so that all the lines are either east-west or north-south. Now I did this piece in 1969 and I haven’t done an article on it because I didn’t find a way to photograph it properly. You can only photograph in multiple views, you know, like this is looking east and this is looking . . . .
PC: A satellite shot.
WDM: Well, that’s true, but that’s a different experience because that’s an experience like a drawing but this is an experience at ground level, it’s a different experience.
PC: How wide are the lines?
WDM: Ten feet wide, eight or ten feet wide.
PC: And they are how deep?
WDM: Oh, it’s about a foot deep, two feet deep and about eight feet wide. The point I’m making here is that the most beautiful thing is to experience a work of art over a period of time. For instance, architecture we know has always thought about this. You go into the palace, you go into the house, you experience the different floors, you sit in certain rooms for certain amounts of time and when, after an hour or half hour or four or five hours you walk out again. You’ve experienced all of the proportion and relationships; you’ve experienced something over a period of time. Well, most sculptures have always been confined to being a single object, no mater what the style of configuration — expressionist or figurative, whatever.
PC: You look at it from this point and that point.
WDM: You look at it and maybe walk around it and, basically, let’s face it. How much time does a person spend with a piece of sculpture? An average of perhaps less than one minute, maximum of five or ten, tops. Nobody spends ten minutes looking at one piece of sculpture. So by starting to work with land sculpture in 1968 I was able to make things of scale completely unknown to this time, and able to occupy people with a single work for periods of up to an entire day. A period could even be longer but in this case if it takes you two hours to go out to the piece and if you take four hours to see the piece and it takes you two hours to go back, you have to spend eight hours with this piece, at least four hours with it immediately, although to some extent the entrance and the exit is part of the experience of the piece. So what happened, though, which was very interesting in connection with the idea of theatre or film is that to build one of these pieces becomes a major logistical economic undertaking. Like if a person wants to make a movie, we all now that it takes sixty or eighty thousand dollars to make a feature film of any kind, black and white, not too much original music and not too many name stars, and it takes four or five hundred thousand dollars to make any medium size picture and a million to two million dollars to make any decent type of major film. Well, the notion that maybe a piece of sculpture might take an investment of forty or fifty thousand dollars and . . . but when it’s finished, it gives the person an experience with could take him several ours or several days to experience is something I’ve been fighting now for the last four years, starting now the fifth year.
The comparisons to architecture and cinema are both eye-opening. Minimalists like Judd and Flavin spoke of sculpture as space, but De Maria’s talking about sculpture as time. Which is worth remembering when you sign up for a 24-hour stay at the Lightning Field.
Backroads Backstory: Walter De Maria On Michael Heizer
I started poking around a bit on the making of story of Michael Heizer’s Double Negative. I’d known that it was commissioned by Virginia Dwan, the incredible gallerist who was also behind Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Here’s a bit of her story from Michael Kimmelman’s 2003 visit with her:
She contracted him to do a work. He disappeared. Months later it was done. ”Double Negative” is a 1,500-foot-long, 50-foot-deep, 30-foot-wide gash cut into facing slopes of an obscure mesa in Nevada, a project that required blasting 240,000 tons of rock. ”It cost under $30,000,” Ms. Dwan says, ”pocket change for art today. I saw it only after it was finished. That’s how I operated. If I believed in the artist I trusted him.”
Then I came across an interesting 1972 Smithsonian interview Paul Cummings with Heizer’s earthwork colleague, Walter De Maria, two artists who romanced the desert together. I love the unselfconscious references to Kerouacking and creating an art movement. No way you could pull that off today:
WDM: Well, I drove across the country with Mike Heiser who I had been spending a lot of time with in ’67. So we had this chance to have the great American Kerouac experience of driving, you know, drive, drive and it never stops and four or five days later you can make it if you drive night and day. When I had first driven the country in the summer of ’63 from New York back to California, it was the most terrific experience of my life, experiencing the great plains and the Rockies, but especially the desert, you know. No, I would say the drive through Nevada in ’63 was the first time I was in the desert. And that memory was to come back in the crisis. Where is the best place in the world? It’s what I saw in Nevada. So it was a chance to go back to the desert for a second time and this time to start going out there often. We met flyers and we learned what it was like to fly small planes and drive trucks on these dry lakes and stuff.
…
We had a lot in common; we knew the whole situation so that gave us something to talk about and from that point it became interesting that he would change from shaped canvas painting to sculpture, and I was at the point of changing from steel sculpture into the land sculpture. So it was a move that we both wanted to make at the same time. We have both been developing the land sculpture simultaneously since that time, five years ago, just about until today. We’re really starting the sixth year. I mean, you know, we did it. It’s something that two people could do that one couldn’t, really, create a movement, because if one person does it, it is almost an eccentricity, but if two people are doing it and then they influence two others or three. It takes no more than three or four or five people to make a movement and then those people of course can have a hundred or two hundred or five hundred or a thousand following them. But the key idea is to develop two or three people. But it’s not necessary, sometimes three or four or five people could be working simultaneously. Like this guy Richard Long was working in England, walking around in the fields in ’68 also. That was completely independent simultaneous development…
The mention of flyers and deserts reminds me of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, which I’ve been watching lately. James Turrell is another flyer–and land art biggie, what with the Roden Crater and all. Don’t think I’ve heard much mention of that. Of course, there was Smithson and The Plane, but that wouldn’t be till ’73. Anyway, here’s more De Maria on one paradox of land art:
We’ve fought a lot of the same people; we’ve shared some of the same patrons, the same gallery like Dwan, Frederich for a while in Germany. Now he has another gallery. And all of our same problems remain, like to make earth art exist in the face of a lot of the same structural problems that still exist. Galleries are not set up to back major sculptures.
PC: Right.
WDM: There’s nothing set up to sell major sculptures. Museums do not commission major sculptures, even though they go off and spend five million dollars on an old painting. And not only that, a lot of people don’t believe that it really exists. There is still a lot of misconception that it exists only for the photograph and not for itself. It’s so far away that maybe everyone in the art world knows about our sculpture but not even one thousandth of one percent of a person has ever seen one of the pieces with is a very interesting conceptual and visible aspect of something that is massive. So, with all of these confusions and contradictions still inherent in the work, one could see another five years of good problems and hopefully some good solutions coming up. [emphasis added]
And it turns out that De Maria created his own trench-in-the-desert land art in 1969, Las Vegas Piece, which is just up the road from Double Negative. Or should I say “road.” CLUI says it’s located on Carp/Elgin Road, which, according to my father-in-law’s GPS navigation, is the same dirt road that passes alongside Double Negative.
De Maria talked about Las Vegas Piece in the Smithsonian interview. But when he reports Dwan’s account of visiting it, it is Kimmelman who waxes a little romantic:
It consisted of dirt paths he cut into the Nevada desert, going nowhere. In my mind — maybe Walter would say this is untrue — the desert setting, the heat and sun and emptiness were so important to the work because you were made to feel absolutely alone. First, it was a safari to find it, and when you did, you were separated from everyone else if you wandered down the paths, because the land was uneven, although it looked flat from far away, so you would find yourself on the far side of a rise, alone in the desert.
”I love the sense of isolation and solitude. But at the same time Walter’s art almost pushes a spectator away, as if he’s saying, ‘Stay back.’ ”
And so it goes that the foreboding environment of the desert itself moves to the foreground of the land art experience. It’s part of the mythology and story of the piece, told and retold without firsthand confirmation by the 99.999% of art world citizens who don’t actually go. Like this NY Times travel article starring Dave Hickey and his wife as daring land art tour guides:
Mr. Hickey’s wife, the curator Libby Lumpkin, had suggested that Chris and I drive into the desert to see Michael Heizer’s earth art piece from 1969-70, “Double Negative” (doublenegative.tarasen.net). A work I was curious to see, it was famously hard to find. She had us meet her at the Las Vegas Art Museum, where she is the consulting executive director, to get directions.
…
She warned us to take plenty of water. People had died, she claimed, after losing their way on Mormon Mesa, where “Double Negative” is carved. The Internet directions she’d handed us turned out to be more precise on paper than in the featureless landscape. After driving an hour and a half northeast to Overton, we followed a dirt road up the side of the mesa.
Rocks on top threatened to puncture the oil pan on the Neon, so I parked. We stumbled around, visoring our hands against the sun. Nothing in sight looked like art.
We flagged down two cars but no one had ever heard of the work. Discouraged and clueless, we were heading back to the city when we saw an S.U.V. The driver, an elderly man from Overton, had been to “Double Negative.” He pronounced it a “tax dodge,” but agreed to lead us there anyway.
Now I want to go back and see what’s up with De Maria’s Las Vegas Piece, but not only is CLUI’s coordinate map hopelessly vague [“The site is 37 miles down the road, off another small trail.”], not even they can be bothered to confirm its continued existence. All they say about it is, “Apparently, no longer visible.”
Went To See Double Negative Yesterday. Film At 11
So all this time I imagine that Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, dug into the edge of Mormon Mesa, is like the lost earthwork, no one can get to it, no one can find it, &c., &c.
Turns out the thing’s an hour outside Las Vegas, like 15 minutes from cheery downtown Overton, which is an exit on I-15. At least I assume downtown Overton’s cheery; we didn’t actually make it that far. Turned off by the airport, took Mormon Mesa Rd. across, then turned left onto, uh, Double Negative Way, just before the cattle guard.
If Spiral Jetty was this easy to visit, there’d be a day spa there by now. Or at least a Cracker Barrel.
driving directions to get you almost all the way to Double Negative, then you just drive slowly north along the scalloped edge of the mesa, three scallops, and you’re there!
October Surprise
I was talking with an artist friend yesterday, and he made a reference to “Krauss’s ‘Sculpture and the Expanded Field’,” and I was all, “huh?” And he was all, “WHAT?” And so I was like, “Don’t know it,” and he was all, “Dude, it’s canon. First handout they give you when you get into art school.” And I was like, “And who reads October unless they’re being graded on it?”
Still, once he explained her postmodernist proposition for sculpture, I was like, “Expanded Field? We’re soaking in it!”
So I read it, and yeah, I knew that; it’s basically the idea that in the late 1960’s, artists challenged and expanded the definition of sculpture, or to flip it around, the logical structure of artists’ practice expanded beyond the finite, inherited modernist definition of sculpture. There’s even a fancy diagram to explain why what Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, Robert Morris, and others of the era were doing is not modernism, but is sculpture.
Anyway, here’s a PDF version of Rosalind Krauss’s “Sculpture and the Expanded Field”. Get an education so you don’t embarrass yourself like I did. [sic and/or heh]
You Have A Stingel? No Way! I Have A Stingel!
In 1989, artist Rudolf Stingel published Instructions, an illustrated booklet showing how to make one of his silver paintings. “He challenges the process of creating a painting and questions the concept of the canvas and that of authorship,” says Christie’s in a paraphrase of the curator Francesco Bonami. Christie’s is selling a 1998 silver Stingel painting [whatever that means, we’ll get to in a second] in London in a couple of weeks. Christie’s explains how they’re made:
The works begin with the application of a thick layer of paint in a particular colour, in the case of the present example silver enamel, to the canvas. Pieces of gauze are then placed over the surface of the canvas and silver paint is added using a spray gun. Finally, the gauze is removed, resulting in a richly textured surface. When seen in conjunction with the DIY manual, the Warholian nature of Stingel’s work is difficult to refute: technical methods of factory-like production, which are openly communicated and question authorship, contrast the provoked coincidences that result in individual monotypes. Particularly, a parallel to Warhol’s so-called Piss Paintings comes to mind: both artists test the methods of what can be considered painting, while simultaneously emphasising the carnality of the practice by combining coincidence and will in a process solely focused on the canvas’s skin. With Stingel’s works, the aggravation of the derma creates the rapture.
I love it, except that the challenge to authorship is merely a conceptual pose, one refuted most immediately by Stingel’s signature on this painting and its £120,000 – £160,000 sale estimate.
Bonami reads the Instructions as “tricking you into learning how to do a painting for someone else.” Which, though, is the neater trick: following the artist’s instructions and making a Stingel for myself, or getting someone to spend £200,000 on an identical painting from the artist’s factory because it has Stingel’s autograph on the back?
The invocation of Warhol and the Piss Paintings is illuminating, and not just for the works’ focus on a painting’s surface or skin–or derma. Such process-oriented practice, which embraces a degree of randomness, conveniently results in serial works of unfakeable uniqueness. They don’t need stamps of authenticity; the object is its own fingerprint. With minimal documentation at the time of creation in his studio, Stingel’s collectors will never face scandals of authorship like those engulfing the Warhol Estate’s authentication board. According to the board’s self-contradictory interpretations of Warhol’s Factory processes, mass-produced silkscreens that Warhol never saw can be accepted as works, while a documented self-portrait can be rejected repeatedly.
On the flip side, though, if Stingel really wanted to challenge authorship and treat each painting as a “cell” that only gains meaning from its connection to countless others, he’d get more traction by treating the world’s DIY Stingels as intrinsic parts of his own work. Locate, document, and show them in galleries and museum retrospectives. Let them be bought and sold in the secondary [primary?] market. Then when one of those works shows up at Christie’s, we’ll talk again about questioning the concept of authorship.
Lot 319: Rudolf Stingel (b. 1956),
Untitled
signed and dated ‘Stingel 98’ (on the reverse)
oil and enamel on canvas
32 x 32in. (81.3 x 81.3cm.)
Executed in 1998
Estimate: £120,000 – £160,000 [christies.com]
Rudolf Stingel – Selected works [paulacoopergallery.com]
So How’s That Spiral Jetty Doin’?
Is he done? I think so. Tyler Green has turned Modern Art Notes into State of Spiral Jetty Notes this week, and it seems clear to me that the biggest entropic threat Smithson’s masterpiece faces is not natural, but institutional.
Green looks at the mining and commercial interests with development plans for the Great Salt Lake; Utah state government officials who court industry and economic development and who are only beginning to grasp the Jetty’s global significance; local conservation and environmental groups whose shoestring grassroots efforts were the only thing that stopped the oil drilling near the Jetty this past spring; and last and unfortunately least, Dia, the art institution which is steward–and in many cases, commissioner–of many Jetty-vintage earthworks.
I wonder if it means anything that Smithson’s widow and estate representative, Nancy Holt, isn’t really discussed or quoted in the otherwise exhaustive series? Or that there’s no mention of Dia’s total ball-dropping in regard to the state’s apparently unilateral decision in 2006 to “clean up” the shore line near the Jetty, a process which involved removing several dozen truckloads of “junk,” including some industrial ruins that Smithson referenced in his siting of the piece.
Dia’s lack of involvement and strategic vision for the Jetty is complicated at the moment by the institution’s own turmoil and leadership transition, but I can’t help but feel worried even calling Dia an “institution.” Even under Michael Govan’s high profile leadership, Dia has always felt like a virtual organization, an instantiation of the whims of whatever deep-pocketed funder was around at the moment. [Wow, was MIchael Kimmelman’s look at Dia’s manic history really from 2003? It feels much longer ago than that.] The kinds of political and coalition-related imperatives that Tyler discusses–and on which the Jetty’s very survival apparently now hangs–seem completely alien to a bauble like Dia.
MAN Series on Preserving Spiral Jetty [modern art notes]
Previously: Oil drilling was part of the picture when Smithson sited the Jetty
Cleanup crew: 1, Entropy: 0
Related rumination: What if sprawl is the real entropy?
Films, Fax Murals & More: Stan VanDerBeek At Guild & Greyshkul
I first encountered filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek’s work in Aspen Magazine. His 1964 collaboration with Robert Morris, Site, combined dance/performance, art, and film. Performers create a physical, 3-D approximation of camera wipes and reveals using large black and white panels. Though Morris and VanDerBeek made it years before, it reminds me of early video art work from WGBH that explored the functions and visual properties of the new technology.
Throughout his career, VanDerBeek was an “advocate of the application of a utopian fusion of art and technology.” [That’s from his E.A.I bio on Ubu, btw.] Which would be interesting enough on its own. But until I get down there to see the actual show, what I find most fascinating about Guild & Greyshkul’s current survey of VanDerBeek’s varied output is the intricacies of how his family began dealing with it after he passed away.
Two of G&G’s artist-owners are VanDerBeek’s children, and the process they went through–part biographical, part familial, part art historical, part archive/conservational–is just awesome. Sara VanDerBeek’s discussion with Brian Sholis is at Artforum.com.
The image above is Panels for the Walls of the World, a 153-panel “fax mural” which VanDerBeek sent from MIT to various places around the country in 1970. Phase I, above, was transmitted to the Walker Art Center. There were four “phases” of Panels, and it’s possible that a significant percentage of all the fax toner in the country in 1970 was exhausted printing out VanDerBeek’s murals.
Stan VanDerBeek runs through Oct. 18 at Guild & Greyshkul; Navigate from this crazy page, too [guildgreyshkul]
500 Words | Stan VanDerBeek by Sara VanDerBeek [artforum]
Films of Stan VanDerBeek [ubu]
Overheard On 24th Street
“Hi, this is Dash.”