art – Page 177 – greg.org

Art & Fear by Bayles & Orland

Whether it’s right or not, this book sounds fantastic:

Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did. In fact, if artmaking did not tell you (the maker) so enormously much about yourself, then making art that matters to you would be impossible. To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product; the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping that artwork.

Art & Fear, by Peter Bayles and Ted Orland [via kottke and kk]

In 1967 Henry Geldzahler, while lecturing the Women’s Group at the Grand Rapids Art Museum, suggested to Mrs LeVant Mulnix III that the city might do well to install a public sculpture on the plaza in front of city and county buildings being designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Mrs Mulnix promptly wrote to Congressman Gerald Ford to ask for assistance in obtaining a grant from the newly established National Endowment for the Arts for the commission.
SOM senior partner William Hartmann, who was at that time completing the installation of Picasso’s monumental sculpture in front of the firm’s Chicago Civic Center, came in to consult on the project. Alexander Calder was chosen, and La Grande Vitesse which sits on Calder Plaza, has been the symbol of the city for decades.
Grand Rapids was the beneficiary of the friendship forged between Calder and Mulnix, and in 1974, the artist made a gift to the city of Calder on the Roof, a giant red, black and white mural executed on the roof of the Kent County Administration Building.
The work was intended to be seen from the surrounding buildings, which basically means the adjacent City Hall. Of course, it looks pretty sweet on Google Maps, too.

Misconceptual Misappropriation

Tyler Green Twittered the following from the ICA Philadelphia panel discussion on the 20th anniversary of the Mapplethorpe NEA implosion:

[Rob] Storr coins ‘misconceptual’ art: artists who shortcut to the now via conceptual art without understanding history of conceptualism.

tight, tasty, and much-needed, I like Storr’s definition, but I’m afraid he didn’t coin the term.
Instead, he probably probably got it where I did, from Madelon Vriesendorp, the “playground surrealist” Dutch artist who co-founded OMA with her former husband, Rem Koolhaas. Art Review profiled Vriesendorp last year when her retrospective opened at London’s Architectural Association–the show is at the Swiss Architecture Museum – Basel through June 2009:

In Vriesendorp’s “city” of objects upstairs at the AA, you’re confronted, stared-down, and overwhelmed by a vast army of touristy trinkets: nuns, skeletons, plastic food, multiple iterations of the Statue of Liberty, aliens, snowglobes, robots, cowboys, hindus, buddhas (on phones and with headphones), body parts – especially feet, hands, tongues and eyeballs – monkeys, flies, lady birds, centipedes, snakes, and buildings, buildings, buildings caricatured and reduced to their essence in little cute models meant for the mantelpiece back home. Vriesendorp has said that she’s only interested in failed objects, and that in her global city she feels like a tourist who has been given the wrong directions, misheard them and ended up in the right place anyway. She calls this practice “misconceptual art”.

Misconceptual art: The World of Madelon Vriesendorp [artreview.com via things]

Justin Cooper’s Lines

Just discovered Chicago artist Justin Cooper’s work [thanks bevel & boss]. Some of his sculptures are these fantastic lines that have a life of their own, which is all the more awesome because it’s obviously impossible. It’s like he drew them in space, out of banal minimalist materials. Fred Sandback meets Calder by way of Mark Handforth.
Above: Giant Leis, 2008, made out of plastic leis on steel armature. Below: Thread, a half mile of garden hose over steel, which was installed at 400 Gallery last April-May.

The drawing connection is slightly ironic, because the lines in Cooper’s equally interesting drawings turn out not to be lines at all. Upon close inspection, they disappear and dematerialize, like Lichtenstein’s Benday dots, or more like ur-Chinese ideographs or doodles, which teeter right on the edge of symbol and meaning, but which ultimately only function as part of the larger whole.
Justin Cooper’s site [nessiecoop.com]

All We Are Is Hope In The Wind

Google Earthworks-meets-Sforzian Backgrounds? This is Jorge Rodriguez Gerada’s Expectation, a 650-ton sand painting of Barack Obama on the beach in Barcelona.
Here’s the site, just next to the Forum de les Cultures. Not only was the mockup done in Google Map [below],

check out the project’s Technical Specifications:

d. Visibility
Google Earth visualization agreement
Documentation from adjacent buildings
Set up of a temporary viewing tower
Bridge for control of access and delivery.

The work was executed Oct. 27, 2008. So I don’t know if its not appearing in Google Maps right now is because it doesn’t exist anymore, or it was gone by the time the satellite made its latest pass, or the system just hasn’t refreshed yet.
Expectation photos and artist statement [artjammer via coudal]

Is NOT! Is TOO!

Explain to me how Shephard Fairey can still be a sellout if he got arrested for tagging on the way to his museum show.

Amen To All That Theanyspacewhatever

It’s not even a participatory artwork, just a single parenthetical, but Brian Sholis hits the nail on the head in his review of Nancy Spector’s theanyspacewhatever “relational aesthetics” show at the Guggenheim:

(To be clear, I myself am sympathetic to the art’s ends, skeptical of many of the means employed by the artists, largely disappointed by the art’s effects and suspicious of the ongoing credibility afforded several of them despite this gap between rhetoric and accomplishment.)

Since I couldn’t get a reservation in the hotel room, my favorite part of the show was Pierre Huyghe’s iron-on transfer book, which I plan to use to make a baby blanket.
‘theanyspacewhatever’, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, ended 7 January [afterall.org]

Georgia Republican Saying Arts Workers Aren’t “Real People” Hits Nerve

From a Boston Globe article, “Stimulus funding for arts hits nerve”:

Representative Jack Kingston, a Georgia Republican, wants to transfer the proposed NEA funding to highway construction. He failed to get the House to vote on his proposal, so he is now trying to get on the conference committee that will determine the fate of the funding. “We have real people out of work right now and putting $50 million in the NEA and pretending that’s going to save jobs as opposed to putting $50 million in a road project is disingenuous,” Kingston said in an interview yesterday, adding the time has come to examine all of NEA’s funding.

It’s funny how, a few months ago, a city’s economic viability was measured by its ability to attract and keep workers in the “creative economy,” a definition which has the arts as a core, but extends far beyond the narrowestm, NEA definition of the term. And museums and other cultural institutions always made the case for themselves by demonstrating the high ROI that every dollar spent on culture generated for the local economy.
And where is any of this analysis and advocacy now, when at least one congressman says arts workers aren’t even “real people,” and shouldn’t be subsidized by the government at all? This from a politician who defines his district by its [government-funded] military base and its relevance to cultural production? [Fourth of four points: “The First District has also a been a background for top films including Academy Award Winning Best Picture Forrest Gump…”]?
I thought the $50 million stimulus proposed for the NEA was embarrassingly low, and I expected arts institutions to be contacting their congressional delegations to explain their supposedly dire financial situations, and umbrella organizations would make the case for emergency stopgap funding to keep performing arts organizations alive until the economy improves. Where has that been?

Dana Gioia, a poet who was NEA chairman until last month, recalled that when top Roosevelt aide Harry Hopkins was asked why the government wanted to hire so many artists and writers, he replied, “Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people.”
Gioia, reflecting on that comment, said, “As far as I’ve heard, nothing has changed about the dietary needs of artists.”

Gee, with powerful, articulate advocacy like that, I guess I needn’t have worried.

Note To Self Re: Dome Projection Using Spherical Mirror

There’s nothing specific on the horizon, but the way things are going, what with all the domes and mirrored domes and Buckminster Fuller and movies and all around here…
I mean, you never really know–and by you, I obviously mean me–so I thought I’d just go ahead and put this link to Paul Bourke’s patented system for projecting onto a dome using a spherical mirror, which he developed in 2003.
Actually, it seems to use a hemispherical mirror, and there are apparently inflatable domes for all your portable indoor planetarium needs–according to the FAQ, a 3m inflatable dome is ideal for half a dozen adults or a dozen children–and seamless works better than paneled.

Another note to self: I don’t care what they call them in Wollongong, but I will not be calling them Sphemirs. And probably not Mirrordomes, though that is much better.
Dome projection using a spherical mirror
Variously referred to as “sphemir” or “mirrordome”,
Conceived by the author in 2003 [uwa.edu.au via city of sound]

Google Earthwork: JR’s Projet Women Of Kibera

Well that didn’t take long. From the always awesome Wooster Collective comes word of a new work by the underground artist JR, Projet Women of Kibera, part of his ongoing 28 millimetres series he has been working on since 2004.
JR shot portraits of women in Kibera, a poor neighborhood alongside the train tracks in Nairobi, Kenya, and printed them on roof-sized vinyl, which was installed on the womens’ roofs. The photos are visible from the train–and from Google Earth–and the vinyl also helps keep the rain out.

And when Google Maps takes a higher-resolution pass over the slums of Nairobi, it’ll be visible there, too.
JR Finishes His Most Ambitious Project Yet [woostercollective]
JR’s portfolio site [jr-art.net]
See a whole slew of Kibera photos as the 28 Millimetres site [28millimetres.com]

Richard Serra Sculptures On Google Maps

The whole thing about the only human construct you can see from space is the Great Wall of China will be amusing to people growing up in the Google Maps era, where you can’t hide anything from the satellite’s surveilling eye. It’s the geospatial equivalent of explaining TV before remotes and cable: it’ll just make you sound old.
So kudos to Richard Serra for being ahead of the curve [no pun intended] on making work that turns out to be well-suited for viewing from our new conveniently God-like vantage point.
I started to make a list with the Torqued Ellipse in front of Glenstone, Mitch Rales’ foundation in Potomac, and the suggestion from Guthrie of T.E.U.C.L.A., a torqued ellipse in the Murphy Sculpture Garden behind the Broad Art Center at UCLA, described at its installation in 2006 as “the first public work by sculptor Richard Serra installed in Southern California.”
And that reminded me that the Broads have had a Serra titled No Problem in their backyard for a while, which, thanks to Google Maps, is now public. Searching for that image led me to pmoore66’s collection of bird’s eye view Serras around the world at Virtual Globetrotting. If you count Robert Smithson’s Amarillo Ramp, which he helped complete after ~~Serra~~ Smithson’s death [!], pmoore66 has sighted 44 Serras around the world using either Google Maps, or Microsoft’s Bird’s Eye View, plus another four shots on Google Streetview. [Here are the search results on Virtual Globetrotting for “Richard Serra”, but that link looks a little unstable.]

With more than 1,700 entries so far, pmoore66 appears to be almost single-handedly pinning down the modernist canon for architecture and outdoor sculpture. This warrants some looking into. Stay tuned.
The more oblique angles of birds-eye-view seems to suit Serra’s sculptures better, and they remind me of a series of little desk tchotchke-sized versions of monumental sculptures called minuments that I saw in the ICA London bookshop a few years ago. As soon as I can figure out how to get Google to stop spellchecking for me, I’ll get the artist’s name.

Serra From The Block

Someone is storing his Richard Serra sculptures along the East River in the Bronx. As massive, vertiginously curved steel plates are wont to do, they tend to stand out, and so they get noticed or discovered periodically.
Jake Dobkin spotted them recently, and posted pictures of one of the Serra sculptures behind a barbecue and a busted fence. It’s a Torqued Ellipse [1] with the steel plates curled in a bit tighter than normal. Jan included a shot of the works on Google Maps, where they look nice sitting next to a collection of steel gas tanks. It appears that the other sculpture, a collection of six arced slabs in graduated sizes, is the disassembled–and ironically titled–Blindspot, presumably purchased from the artist’s 2003 show at Gagosian.

[Note to self and/or someone else: figure out how many Serras are visible on Google Maps? Former Dia chairman Leonard Riggio’s got one parked on his front lawn in Bridgehampton; Wave is installed at the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle; Joe, the first Torqued Ellipse, is in the courtyard at the Pulitzer Foundation; St Louis also has Mark Twain, a much earlier Serra downtown; I’m sure the list goes on.]
The first mention I can find of these ersatz Bronx Serras is from a 2005 NY Sun story about redeveloping public park space along the waterfront in Port Morris. The lot owner, Curtis Eispert, whose main business is storing cranes, quotes the sculptures’ owner: “He says, ‘I love the way it rusts in the salt air.'” [Hmm, it also says, “One piece, a wide band of curved and rusting iron that sold for $2 million, sat on a flatbed truck waiting delivery.” Could Serra be the “someone” storing his Serras in the city?]

Eispert also mentioned an “‘artists’ loft'” [the Sun’s scare quotes, btw] across the street, so “artists” must be aware of the Serras, too. Sure enough, In August 2006, a group of artists put on a show inside the Torqued Ellipse. Lan Tuazon and Marie Lorenz curated Invisible Graffiti Magnet Show, which consisted of magnetic works attached to the Serra for one Sunday morning. The exhibit persists, of course, as a press announcement and a flickr photoset. Above: works by the collective Dearraindrop and Matt Lorenz. Below: an LED throwie constellation by Virginia Poundstone.

Actually, ignore the “artists’ loft”; after reading up on Marie Lorenz’ fascinating Tide and Current Taxi project, I’m sure she spotted the Serras from the water, not the land.
Port Morris, scroll down for the Serra links [bluejake via x-ref]
Bomb the Serra! [triplediesel]
richardlovesmagnets’ photoset [flickr]
[1] 2/17 update: OK, now we know it’s a torqued spiral, not a torqued ellipse. photographer/filmmaker/Jake Dobkin accompanier Nathan Kensinger revealed that the sculpture is Bellamy, a spiral first shown in 2001.

La Monte Young, Mormon Composer

The contemporary art world’s three most [only?] prominent Mormon artists are Wayne Thiebaud, Paul McCarthy, and La Monte Young. Of the three, I’d have to say Young is at once the least well known, the most highly influential, and, surprisingly, the most intrinsically Mormon in his work and outlook. I suspect that most people who know Young’s work–and Young himself, for that matter–would agree only with the middle statement.
Young is best known for his minimalist musical compositions, which use extended harmonic tones to explore concepts like time and duration. His work sits alongside other major music figures like John Cage and influenced younger minimalist composers like Terry Riley and Philip Glass. Technically, because he composes music, and because his greatest prominence comes from the minimalist classical music world he helped pioneer, you could argue Young’s not really an artist artist. He certainly doesn’t sell art in galleries for six and seven figure prices like Thiebaud and McCarthy. But Young does make and show work. For decades he has collaborated with Marian Zazeela to create light and sound installations that would be recognized as art in any contemporary art world sense of the word.
But that’s not all. By Young’s account, he was instrumental to the founding of Fluxus and conceptual art and Happenings as well. Young and Zazeela operate the Mela Foundation in Tribeca, which hosts performances and sound pieces in Dream House, an immersive, meditative light installation created by Zazeela. Like other permanent downtown art esoterica–i.e., Walter de Maria’s Earth Room and Broken Kilometer—Dream House has been supported by and/or affiliated with the Dia Center.
Young is also very clear about the Mormon environment in which he–and his work–developed. Most interviews with him include the story that the first sound he remembers was the drone of the icy wind whistling through the cracks in the wall of his Mormon farmer family’s log cabin in Idaho. From this mixture of elementalism and nostalgia, Young created music that aspires to the eternal, using just-tones and intervals that are some greater, universal, divine truth.
Almost every reference to spirituality in Young’s work is not to Mormonism, however, but to Indian music. Since the 1960’s Young and Zazeela have been both disciple and guru for the propagation of Indian sitar music, with its accompanying drones, tones, and ragas.
But a doctoral candidate and musicologist named Jeremy Grimshaw, who is also LDS, has made a highly persuasive study of La Monte Young’s concepts of the divine, time, and the nature of heaven, which grounds them in esoteric but orthodox Mormon doctrine. Grimshaw quotes Young on the just-intonation system he employs:

“The sensations of ineffable truths that we sometimes experience when we hear progressions of chords and intervals tuned in just intonation, may indeed be our underlying subliminal recognition of the broader, more universal implications of these fundamental principles.” In short, Young believes that intervals based on the harmonic series resonate with the macrocosm in a way that irrational intervals cannot. “When I hear intervals in equal temperament, it’s like they remind me of the truth,” says Young, “whereas when I hear intervals in just intonation, it’s as though I’m hearing the truth.”

In 2001, Grimshaw published a paper called “The Sonic Search for Kolob: Mormon Cosmology and the Music of La Monte Young” in the musicology journal repercussions. It’s available via the Internet Archive.] Heady stuff.

Rose C’est La Vie?

What a weird, insane s**tstorm is brewing around Brandeis University’s sudden announcement that it’s closing the Rose Art Museum and selling off its 6,000 piece collection. All the usual outrages and condemnations are moved and seconded, of course, but there are some things about this disaster-in-motion that just don’t make any sense:
First up, it’s not at all clear why such a drastic action is even necessary. A $10 million forecast operating deficit is a problem, but it’s not the kind of thing you sell your institution’s soul for. Greg Cook looked at the last three years of Brandeis’s financial statements and found they university was running healthy surpluses.
Obviously, the recent plunge in the financial markets has to have an effect on Brandeis’s endowment, but I haven’t seen any announcement of what the impact was. There has been talk of a Madoff Effect, with several key donors being hit hard by the evaporation of his hedge fund Ponzi scheme. What I haven’t seen is any direct exposure of the Jewish university’s own investments. If Brandeis’s endowment suffered a mortal blow, you’d think word would get out.
But what’s up with this comment to the NY Times from Robert Mnuchin, the former Goldman Sachs partner-turned-dealer, who also happens to be the son of pioneering donors of the Rose, Leon and Harriet Gevirtz-Mnuchin? It was their contemporary acquisitions fund that enabled the young museum to stock up on the works of emerging Pop Art stars in the early 1960’s, paintings which Mnuchin fils is now trying to get a piece of:

[Mnuchin] said he had no idea of Brandeis’s plans until he read about them. “It’s such a shame, particularly at this time in the world,” he said, adding, “Obviously as a dealer I’d like to be involved either in buying them or selling them. It’s emotional for me.”

So a dealer eager to broker his parents’ legacy, and this, the history of the Rose from the museum’s website, what is up with this? It’s just odd. Have you ever seen a museum give a chattier, tackier account of its own story, including discussion of what a great deal they got, and how much their stuff is worth now?

A miracle of another kind also occurred during a four month period in 1962 and into 1963. As Hunter describes it, “Leon Mnuchin called from New York one day to announce that he and his wife, Harriet Gevirtz-Mnuchin had inherited a sum of $50,000, with which they wished to fund a contemporary art collection at Brandeis.”With what has happened in the art market since, that’s like Bill and Melinda Gates calling one day and saying they have $150,000,000 to start a contemporary art collection!
Hunter reports that he and “Leon immediately set out to explore the galleries. We often made gallery rounds with Robert Scull, a friend of Leon’s and a prominent New York collector,” especially of Pop Art. During their rounds (which included studio visits during which they bought directly from artists) they managed to gather early and important works by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Tom Wesselman, James Rosenquist, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, among many others. Their limit was $5,000 a painting (which meant several were bought for much less). Warhol had already become a bit expensive, Hunter says, so they went for one of his lesser works from the “paint-by-number series.” If the term “miracle” may be evoked for a third time, a couple of years later, Hunter’s successor at the Rose, William Seitz, exchanged that Warhol (Do It Yourself Sailboat, 1962) , for Saturday Disaster, 1964. Collectively, at this writing, the Gevirtz-Mnuchin collection along with the Warhol, are worth in excess of $200,000,000
It is important to remember that Hunter and Mnuchin went in search of art, not market value…

Mmhmm. What were you saying? You lost me at “paid $5,000, now worth $200 million.” Turns out that’s not the woman next to you who talked your ear off the entire flight to Palm Beach. The history’s by the current director, and it appears to be a speech transcript, from a celebration, ironically, in advance of the Rose’s 50th anniversary in 2011.

Will The Owner Of The Chrome Car Parked At The Hirshhorn In 1974 Please Come To The Information Desk?

LIFE Magazine’s digitized photo archives includes a few sweet pictures by Gjon Mili from the opening party at the Hirshhorn Museum in 1974. [here’s a great shot of a whole gallery full of Giacomettis. Do they still have all those Giacomettis?]
Besides the fashion and the hair and the realization that the Hirshhorn came into being in the Nixon and Ford administration, [The opening was in October 1974, a couple of months after Nixon resigned.]–well, actually, that’s quite a lot.
Anyway, I’ve tried and failed to figure out the artist who made this chrome Formula 1 race car sculpture. If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them. Or I could ask Jeff Koons about it; didn’t he work as a valet parker at this party? [see the full size image]
Trova. Mister Ernest Trova Thanks to Peter Reginato for identifying Study: Falling Man (Carman), 1965, one of Ernest Trova’s series of Futurist-meets-Surrealism Falling Man sculptures which explored the changing nature of man in the technological age. Carman is the largest of the 14 Trova works [three sculptures, a portfolio, some other prints] that were part of Joseph Hirshhorn’s initial bequest. It wasn’t included in the Boca Raton Museum of Art’s 2007 Trova retrospective; maybe they used another of the edition of six.
As Peter points out, a streamlined, nickel-plated Falling Man study used to be in the lobby of the Whitney “forever.” I tried to look it up, but–is this right?–the Whitney Museum’s collection is not searchable online? I remember the Whitney being one of the first museums on the web, hosted at my old ISP/BBS, echonyc.com/~whitney. But that was 15 years ago. It seems like they’ve been behind the curve ever since.

2018 UPDATE: In the last 9 years, the Whitney has worked on their website. cf. Ernest Trova, Study, Falling Man. Thx AW

Category: art