I really didn’t follow the Metropolitan Museum’s horse race to see who would replace Philippe de Montebello as director, but I find myself caring deeply that it’s tapestry curator Thomas Campbell.
Campbell’s two shows on Renaissance and Baroque tapestries in 2002 and 2007 respectively, were some of the most unexpectedly spectacular and intelligent exhibitions I’ve ever seen. The Renaissance show was quite moving, even, which still surprises me.
So given all the possible museum world follies that could have befallen the selection, it feels very heartening that the museum has chosen someone with curatorial depth and scholarship, who’s able to make highly relevant cases for even seemingly secondary arts, and to put on truly beautiful, important shows.
Category: art
Well, I Remember The First Time I Visited The Spiral Jetty
Former NGA curator and Dia director Jeffrey Weiss writes about the state of Land Art in the latest issue of Artforum. His focus: T.S.O.Y.W., a 3-hour Earthworks road trip movie/installation by Amy Granat and Drew Heitzler shown in this year’s Whitney Biennial, and the Sculpture Center’s recent exhibition of feminism and Land Art in the 1970’s [which featured the Agnes Denes work, Wheatfield – A Confrontation in Battery Park City that I mentioned a couple of months ago.]
As Earthworks come of age, their fate has begun to look contingent and fragile. Those who are charged with caring for the sites are rightly doing what they can to forestall change; but a true poetics of Land art–given the very nature of the medium–must at least contend with the conflict between an ethic of preservation and the entropic pull of nature and culture that belongs to the content of the work. In this setting, Granat and Heitzler are melancholic visionaries. Their wheels, like reels, turn in order to draw a straight line and follow it: Their line is the road, a figure for unbounded space and inexhaustible time. But as their bike moves forward, their eyes gaze, historically, back; T.S.O.Y.W. shows us that memory has become a chief element of the temporal condition of the Earthwork. The film’s end is a running-down and out, a sudden shift from images of the infinite desert to scarred film leader, then, abruptly, to nothing at all. Forever turns out to be the ultimate conceit. [emphasis added]
Hmm, let’s ignore the conceit of a film ending abruptly while it’s actually screening on an endless loop in a gallery.
I’m intrigued by the idea that memory is a “chief element” of Land Art and its “temporal condition,” if it somehow equates to the divergence between the contemporary condition and experience of visiting the work/site and its various representations, whether in film, photograph, or documenting ephemera.
For most art audience members over the intervening decades–curators, critics, collectors and artists included– Land Art exists as books, photos, gallery presentations, and texts. At the Whitney’s Robert Smithson retrospective in 2005, one symposium panelist went so far as to argue that Spiral Jetty was primarily a film and photo work, as if the jetty itself were just a location, a bit of IMDb trivia. It sounded to me then like just the kind of critical reading that a New York art worlder would make who’d come of age when the Jetty was submerged, and who’d never bothered going to Utah in the 10+ years since it re-appeared.
With images and expectations formed in our head, actually visiting an Earthwork can be as disorienting as meeting your favorite NPR host. Or if, as Weiss points out, the work has deteriorated over time, it’s like meeting an author who hasn’t updated his bookjacket photo for a while. And the disconnect can be jarring; When Titus O’Brien made his pilgrimage to Smithson’s last work, Amarillo Ramp, he found the powerful sculptural form of the iconic 1973 photograph had become “a worn down, weed covered, neglected berm of dirt you’d just mistake for an old watering trough dam. A phantom.”
But memory is more than the gap between reality and what we think reality is; it’s the reconciliation and construction of the two. Weiss’s concerns about the complications Land Art curators face is right, but maybe not in the way he says. From Marfa to the Lightning Field to the Jetty to even Michael Heizer’s Double Negative and Turrell’s Roden Crater, the Earthworks Road Trip has matured in the last decade as both a real experience and a concept. As more people make the pilgrimages and have personal encounters with these works, not only do their memories of the works change, but other people begin to perceive the works not just as images in a book or on a wall, but as visitable sites.
I wonder how the perceptions and understanding of Walter deMaria’s Lightning Field change when they’re based, not just on John Cliett’s dramatic, official photos [via], but on firsthand accounts of the 24-hour visiting experience, very few of which appear to involve actual lightning? And how would that change if Dia and deMaria allowed visitor photographs? When it comes to Land Art in the present and future, there are still a few more conceits left to be addressed.
Don’t Go Chasing ‘Waterfalls’ Before Lunch
The water that falls half as long falls twice as bright.
If the best part of Olafur’s New York City Waterfalls is how their manmade nature is emphasized by their somewhat arbitrary schedule, well, they just got twice as arbitrary, and so twice as good.
The Public Arts Fund has announced a 50% cutback [from 101 hrs/wk to 50] and revised operating hours for the waterfalls after complaints that the salty mist is killing shrubs in Brooklyn.
Beginning Sept. 8th, the new hours are:
5:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays and Wednesdays
12:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.
Please plan your dog walks accordingly.
Hours Are Cut for ‘Waterfalls’ [nyt/ap]
No One Cares About An “Arts Policy” This Year
I’ve had some intense conversations with people who wanted to know what the US presidential candidates thought about the arts, who is advising them, and what their policy statements were on the matter. Frankly, I couldn’t have cared less at the time, and now that I know the answer, I can hardly think of a less significant or important issue on which to base a decision. What the two presidential candidates do and say in other realms–in fact, their entire governing philosophies and the way they would lead the country–will have exponentially greater impact on US’s culture, arts, and artist communities than whatever handful of legislative bullet points they throw out in a campaign.
Which incorrectly makes it sound like both candidates have even thrown out some bullet points. John McCain’s arts policy is apparently not to have one. His website doesn’t mention the arts, arts education, or federal arts organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts at all. His stated education policy makes no mention of the arts at all. I have a hard time trying to imagine an issue that would matter less to McCain and his campaign, much less to a McCain administration, and when the campaign can’t pull together a comprehensible policy for technology and the internet, an articulated arts policy seems unlikely to come during McCain’s lifetime, even.
In place of any official position of the McCain campaign, I took a look at the GOP’s 2008 Party Platform. Which turns out to be a kind of grass roots/YouTube stunt to allow everyone to write the platform together. Interactively! There are five submissions that mention the arts. One is a cutnpaste 10-point “bipartisan” position paper from Americans for the Arts.
John from Damon, TX recommends eliminating most cabinet-level government departments including the “department of veterans affairs (I think the world of our veterans, but they don’t need a cabinet position), and if you need more, take out the department of engery (they haven’t done anything use full to date). then turn our attention to social programs. Most should be eliminated over time. Grants to the fine arts should be eliminated NOW (including PBS).”
Two others mention liberal arts in school, and then there’s Stephen from Coopersburg, PA:
I would like to see martial arts added to the standard curriculum in schools, Not only because I teach Tae Kwon Do to kids age 4 & up, (and that would be a sweet job) but because it teaches them to focus, helps them with agility, and cardiovascular training, instills self confidence, dicipline, and teaches them how to overcome obsticles & fear (as well as kick Butt if needed).
I don’t see McCain’s folks improving significantly on these proposals, frankly. I think they should just go with these.
As reported on Artsjournal, Barack Obama does have an arts policy, freshly drafted by a 33-person arts advisory committee. The policy, grandly titled “A Platform In Support Of The Arts,” [pdf] closely mirrors the issues championed by the Arts Action Fund, an advocacy group and PAC associated with Americans for the Arts that’s hosting the document. It’s a tiny bundle of noncommittal platitudes and proposals [“reinvest in arts education,” create an inner city “artists corps”], expressions of support for existing programs [public/private school partnerships, the NEA], general campaign issues that impact the arts world [universal health care, US stops acting like a total dick to rest of world], and a tax code tweak proposed by Senator Leahy that lets artists donate works to museums at fair market value. That’s it. You feeling the Obamamentum yet?
The advisory committee, too, seems as slight as the platform they propose. It’s headed by the veteran producer/director George Stevens Jr., whose name you might recognize because he was an uncredited PA on two of his father’s landmark films, Giant and Shane. His own work tends toward the Kennedy Center Presents programs, celebrations of what passes for culture in Washington, DC. The other co-chair is Margo Lion, the Broadway producer behind Hairspray. Then there’s Michael Chabon, and a raft of arts industrial complex types: foundation directors, a few philanthropist/trustees, arts council and university folks. Despite the prominence of the artist tax deduction–it’s the only legislation in the proposal–there doesn’t appear to be a single person affiliated with a museum or associated with fine art.
update: poking around Americans for the Arts’ website, I found ArtsVote 2008, an attempt to raise awareness during the presidential campaign and conventions for the arts industrial complex. There’s a page with links to policy statements by all the candidates. All the candidates who responded and submitted them, anyway. Which is to say Obama has three statements. McCain, none. Also, John Baldessari made a poster.
An Artist In The Medium Of Fake Fireworks
No doubt, Cai Guo-Qiang has always had a tricky line to walk, working in the ephemeral, unpredictable medium of explosives and fireworks and all. The expectations for spectacle get built up in the art world among collectors and work/performance sponsors, and ideally, there’s a payoff, a takeaway, something received in return for one’s outlay. If it’s not the breathless experience of watching something explode [beautifully, one hopes], then at least there’s the scorched canvas or charred hull or whatever that can be sold or donated later as, ironically, ephemera.
[Let me say I speak with experience, as someone who felt painfully but predictably sandbagged by Cai’s rainbow firework arc across the East River, a work commissioned by MoMA to celebrate the temporary move to Queens. It is not easy to turn Kiki Smith riding a sedan chair into a highlight, but Cai’s instantly underwhelming piece somehow managed to pull it off.]
Anyway, I was never too worked up about NBC’s use of fake, computer-generated fireworks footage for Footsteps of History, the foot-shaped firework march across Beijing during the opening ceremony. Rewatching the scene, it was clear by the announcers’ careful descriptions of the magic that they were trying not to get busted for claiming it was real.
But Cai himself issued a statement that tries to declare the CG, which, by his description, amounted to a backup video for the broadcasters, as a valid work of art itself:
From my own perspective as an artist, there are two separate realms in which this artwork exists, as two very different mediums have been utilized. First, there is the artwork that exists in the material realm: the ephemeral sculpture. This was viewed by people attending the ceremonies inside the stadium and standing outside on the streets of Beijing. This artwork was documented from various vantage points on video, which has been broadcast by many international media outlets.
Second, there is a creative digital rendering of the artwork in the medium of video. It is a single version of the event viewed by a large broadcast audience. Such a conceptual work can exist simultaneously in these two separate realms. And perhaps to also take Footprints of History into this second realm was necessary because in many of my explosion events, such as Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters, the very best vantage point is not the human one.
Uh-huh. So essentially the work is designed for viewing by some omnipresent TV eye, yet the actual work isn’t good or resolved enough to be shown, only its virtual mockup? I guess it’s his prerogative, but creating CG’s of fireworks seems like a vastly different medium, substantively and conceptually, from the artist’s sculptural/performative work.
The video above shows Footprints from the human vantage point, a crowd in Tianenmen Square. Frankly, it works; it’s pretty cool, in fact, though the footprints march across the vast space and are gone before some folks in the crowd even realize they’re there. I would hope Cai managed to capture footage or images from his intended [sic], god-like vantage point. But in the mean time, the fleeting human view of Footprints of History needn’t be discounted; it’s interesting enough.
Cai Guo-Qiang Responds to Olympics Fireworks “Controversy” [art21.org via c-monster]
More Beckett On Film, Or Stop-Action Animated Video, Anyway
Awesome. a Lego Mini-Fig interpretation of the first scene of Beckett’s “Endgame.” The grandparents are just hilarious. [youtube via choire]
Waiting For Godot Times, Thursdays At 8, 9 Central
Daniel Birnbaum in Artforum, discussing “Beckett/Nauman,” a Spring 2000 exhibition at the Kunsthalle Wien
The organizers of “Beckett/Nauman,” Kunsthalle Wien curator Christine Hoffmann and art historian Michael Glasmeier, aren’t really out to prove anything, but their juxtaposition of works by the two artists provides ample ground for comparison and analysis of thematic affinities. This is not a major Nauman show in the ordinary sense, even if a number of important pieces–A Cast of the Space under My Chair, 1965-68, lots of videos, and two “corridors,” one shown for the very first time–are effectively installed. It’s not a major Beckett show either, for there’s no such thing. This is something else entirely: a gray inventory of impossible connections or an archive of discontinuities. It’s a genealogical space rather than a show. Full of detailed information–manuscripts, drawings, notebooks, and sketches–the exhibition piqued curiosity and made the viewer attentive. I liked it a lot.
Emphasis added on the part I liked a lot. But wait, there’s more…
Birnbaum makes the argument that Beckett and Nauman aren’t actually intergenerational inspirational source/recipient, but contemporaries. Did you know Beckett adapted a play for the BBC in 1977, and produced several teleplays and what must be considered video art pieces for TV as late as the Eighties? Here’s a clip of Quad I & II, a wordless experiment in rhythm and rulemaking created for the German broadcaster Süddeutscher Rundfunk. Come to think of it, yeah. When was Mummenschantz again? Oh, wait, I thought I was totally kidding.
Film, meanwhile was Beckett’s first and only film screenplay. 40 pages, comprising notes and diagrams around a “fairly baffling when not downright inscrutable six-page outline,” Becket wrote it in 1963 and shot it in New York in 1964. Film dealt with E and O [for Eye and Object, apparently] and “the question of ‘perceivedness,’ the angle of immunity, and the essential principle that esse est percipi: to be is to be perceived.” For 20 wordless minutes, a camera follows an aged Buster Keaton as he tries to avoid being seen.
Is Film online? Of course it is, thanks to UbuWeb. [There’s also a clip on YouTube.] Ubu also has director Alan Schneider’s account of making the film, where I got the quotes in the previous paragraph.
[thanks reference library]
The Making Of A John Chamberlain Sofa
More 1970’s video awesomeness from Anton Perich’s YouTube channel: this time it’s John Chamberlain with a flensing knife in The Dakota.
The site is a smallish, park-facing room in writer John Hersey’s Dakota apartment. Much of the space is taken up massive, chest-high foam blocks lashed together with cords, which a gruff Chamberlain, dressed in full Pacific Theatre-veteran style–work shorts, mermaid tattoos, back hair, and suspenders–casually carves into one of his trademark sofas as a clutch of jaded groupies look on.
Unlike the low-slung prototype Chamberlain famously made for Donald Judd, Hersey’s couch stays high enough to climb into.; and it has two seating pits, not one; also, it doesn’t get the sleek, silk parachute cover, just a bunch of striped navy sheets, probably from Bloomingdale’s. Also, as far as I can tell, no one videotaped the inaugural line of coke being cut on Judd’s sofa.
The scale of Hersey’s sofa, plus the rawness of its fabrication remind me of Andrea Zittel’s space-filling Raugh Furniture series in a way that both Judd’s and Yvonne’s more furniture-like sofas don’t.
And watching Chamberlain, it’s impossible not to think of whale blubber being carved, either, which brings to mind–of all people–Matthew Barney. For all the car crashing of Cremaster 3 and the Vaseline-slice&molding of Drawing Restraint 9, I’d never thought of these two sculptors together before.
Anyway, if you’ve always wanted a Chamberlain sofa, but didn’t want to spend five figures for it, this is a great how-to video.
2025 update: Perich re-uploaded a slightly improved version from the one 16 years ago:
The Sound Of One Hand Patting Itself On The Back
Just, wow. John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Louise Nevelson, and yet the sycophancy and superciliousness of this 1974 interview in SoHo by a couple of early Interview contributors is almost unwatchable. Almost. I just watched it again:
R. Couri Hay: My name is Couri Hay. Tonight Anton Perich and I are in SoHo, and we’re very privileged and happy to be at Louise Nevelson’s house where we’ve just had a fabulous extravaganza in black and white, a benefit. party for Merce Cunningham and his dance studio. We’re gonna hear–talk tonight with John Cage, who has done much of the fabulous avant-garde music for Merce’s work. And of course, in the middle, we have Louise Nevelson sculptress extraordinaire, and then, of course, Merce Cunningham, who I guess has been the star of the party.
Merce Cunningham: [laughing] Louise Nevelson has been the star of the party. Look at her! What more do you have to see?
Louise Nevelson: [talking over]
MC: What am I supposed to say, should I thank–
CH: No, no, just tell me: did you have a great time?
John Cage: [running interference] Everyone has been a star, we’ve had practically, what, 200 stars?
LN: We’ve had 200 stars, but some stars shine more than others.
And on it goes, for like 35 minutes. I listen to every Cage interview I can dig up, and I have never found one so content-free. I guess it’s good to be reminded of the social context in which even the people you revere had to work.
[via artforum/video]
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
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”
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
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