At the risk of devolving into an Olafur fanboi site, I’ll mention that I was flipping through Take Your Time, the photodocumentary magazine published by the studio in November. Turns out there are multiple shots of the making of for the quasi-brick tile installation in Tadao Ando’s Yu-un house project for Japanese collector Takeo Obayashi.
Here are some much-reduced screenshots from the PDF version. It’s one of the remarkable things of Take Your Time, glimpsing the extent and diversity of the indsutrial/production processes which generate Eliasson’s art objects. Outsourcing fabrication is so commonplace these days in the art world, but Olafur’s approach is the diametric opposite. He develops these highly specialized production capabilities for what’s essentially a very-low volume factory. The R&D’ll kill you, but the gross margins on those tiles has to be phenomenal.
Above: In-house production and packing of the tiles.
The installation template described by one of Eliasson Studio’s architects, which incorporates randomly generated position instructions applied to the AutoCAD diagram:
Construction crews installing the tiles in Tokyo [l] and the finished wall [r]
Previously: And what do you do, Mr. Ando?
Olafur: the Magazine??
Category: art
And What Do You Do, Mr. Ando?
He’s a tough guy and a really wonderful architect whose work has sent me on more than one pilgrimage in my life. But even so, I can’t help but feel a little sorry for Tadao Ando. The most dazzling, sophisticated and successful spatial element of Yu-un, the guest house he built for a longtime friend, is not by the architect; it’s an art installation by Olafur Eliasson. [The serial Ando client, Takeo Obayashi, is the head of one of Japan’s leading contractors and a contemporary art collector.]
Ando sounds kind of testy and defensive in the Architectural Digest profile of the project, and he seems to get far more credit for Eliasson’s work than he should:
Yu-un’s courtyard, however, is different from any Ando has designed before, and it created challenges demanding the delicacy of a diplomat. “We had some struggles with so many designers and artists on board,” says Ando. “We had many discussions with them, and it took time to find good solutions without compromising my design.”
Despite its name, Architectural Digest has always taken an extremely circumscribed view of architecture. In the magazine’s relentlessly tasteful, decorative hierarchy, every service industry employee has his place: architects define space and structure; interior designers transform, synthesize and finish; artists and tradespeople provide the raw materials for the realization of the designer’s vision; and when the client is a collector, art serves as the appropriate symbol of his wealth and taste.
The subtitle of the article–“A Surprising Modern Design Blends Ornament and Restraint”–and this awesome quote from Ando are a one-two punch for art’s function:
Of course, I work with a lot of artists. In Los Angeles, I’m making a guesthouse and exhibition space sort of like Yu-un, and we’re doing things with Damien Hirst and other people with installations on the surfaces. So it may become common with this kind of project where one installs treatments on certain surfaces.
ornament. surface. treatment. Brunschwig & Fils, meet Fischli & Weiss. Scalamandre, Carl Andre. Uh, and please use the service elevator next time.
Which goes a long way in explaining why there’s next to no information or context at all about the 7,000 oddly shaped, platinum-glazed tiles that were the source of so much Ando consternation.
So until there’s an Artistical Digest that’s at all interested in art beyond its merely sublime decorative function, here’s some background on those tiles:
The complex shape–technically a rhomboid dodecahedron, I think, and so more brick than tile, really–was dubbed a quasi brick. It emerged from Olafur’s ongoing collaboration with the Icelandic architect and former Frei Otto student and Buckminster Fuller disciple Einar Thorsteinn. Rhomboid dodecahedrons are one of five space-filling polyhedrons, shapes that can stack on themselves and fill a solid space. Like a cube, but without the regularity.
Eliasson has been interested in the form’s dualities–raw/manufactured, manmade/natural, random/ordered, mathematical/elemental–for several years and has shown it often. The artist used black, double-fired tiles for Soil Quasi Bricks inBlind Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale, they were, among other things, an evocation of the crystalline forms of Icelandic basalt columns, which are created when molten lava collided with ice. [Check out Gitte Orskou’s “Inside the Spectacle” (pdf) for more discussion of the Pavilion and a related 2-D floor installation in 2004 in Reykjavik, Frost Activity.]
There were fired quasi bricks on the shelf in the Model Room, the fantastical math toy-filled installation of Thorsteinn’s form-making activities which they first showed in New York in early 2003. [It’s in the SFMoMA show.] And even before that, in 2002, Eliasson showed a wall of the quasi brick forms of bent steel at Basel. Let that one get away, unfortunately. It seems so cheap in retrospect…
Anyway, Googling around, I found an account of an architect who worked in Eliasson’s studio who was involved in the Obayashi commission. It’s an enlightening look at the artist’s process, but the architect, Andreas Eggertsen, also makes a lot of interesting observations on the experience of working with an artist and incorporating science into the design process.
There’s even a description of the studio team’s struggles with Ando and the construction crew in Japan. Turns out the quasi-bricks’ apparent randomness was the problem:
The idea of the quasi brick is that it is an expression of high complexity. The quasi brick is a space filling geometry based on “fivefold symmetry”, a mathematical description of a quasi-chaotic geometry, which was found by a physicist in the 80´s.
The bricks can be rotated into 6 different positions, and put together randomly they create a very complex pattern. As the Japanese are a very thorough people they were not pleased when the construction had started and we had not supplied them with a list of how each brick should be rotated. As there were thousands of bricks, we had not figured out a way to indicate the exact rotation of each and every brick and thought that it would be easier for the construction workers to rotate the bricks themselves on site.
We did not realize that the Japanese were going to be so confused by this. They could simply not work without a drawing that showed them exactly what to do. So when we received this e-mail we got a bit frustrated. The construction had already started and in order not to delay the entire project we had to supply them with new and accurate drawings the following day.
To draw the rotation of each brick in Autocad would take us a week of work, so we had to figure out something else. We were getting a bit stressed, trying out different ideas to create a diagram that could illustrate the rotation of each brick, when the idea to use Matlab appeared to generate a random series of numbers from 1-6 dispersed over as many rows and columns as intended in the design. The numbers were then pasted into the Autocad file and soon the diagram was drawn and we could send the drawings before dawn.
Well if you put it that way… The construction workers on the boxer-turned-starchitect’s project for their boss’s boss’s boss’s house didn’t want to be the ones deciding which way the artist’s tiles faced? No freakin’ duh.
It’s all fascinating stuff, but I can’t imagine any of it ever showing up in the pages of Architectural Digest. Nor can I picture it working its way into Ando’s own practice. Though he and Eliasson share an obsession with the spatial characteristics of light, Ando’s method seems positively atavistic and instinctual compared to Eliasson’s. The sight of Ando scrawling his name and a sketch with a fat, black crayon on the wall at the opening of his 1991 MoMA exhibition was a formative experience for me. I’m fine to cut AD loose; they’re a hopeless cause. But it’s too bad that even after working with him, Ando apparently can’t see the depth behind Eliasson’s work which, while created in a totally different way, shares so many ideas with his own. But you know how temperamental these artists can be.
Tokyo Jewel Box: A Surprising Modern Design Blends Ornament and Restraint [architecturaldigest.com via tropolism]
Putting Science to Work in Art [nic’s a&d blog]
In 2005, Thorsteinn exhibited his own work on five-fold symmetry space and form in Copenhagen. Heady stuff. [einarthorsteinn.com]
[images except top, via olafureliasson.net]
Lady Madonna, Children At Her Teat
From the Great Opening Paragraphs Department, Matthew Placek interviewed NZ documentary filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly for V Magazine:
In March of 2006 I traveled with Vanessa Beecroft to Rumbek in South Sudan on two separate occasions to produce an image for her latest project, VBSS. Vanessa asked me to produce a painterly, Madonna-esque image of her wearing a custom-made dress by Maison Martin Margiela burned at the hem. There were two slit openings for her breasts in order to nurse two orphaned Sudanese twins. Vanessa was and is trying to adopt the children legally.
The vapid, superficial, self-absorbed aesthetic fetishist in Brettkelly’s new film, The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, will be instantly familiar to anyone familiar with Beecroft’s perennially hackneyed work, which has been a lowpoint of at least two Venice Biennales [the most recent one is in the film].
NY Magazine has a nice takedown recap. It puts the interview in fashion-friendly V into interesting perspective; Beecroft’s collaborator and the outsider director make what are rather contorted attempts to be nice and non-judgmental about what is a transparently repulsive, self-damning project. Good stuff.
Filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly on artist Vanessa Beecroft’s new quest in the Sudan [vmagazine.com]
‘Art Star’ Vanessa Beecroft: Slammed at Sundance [nymag]
“Display Of Paintings, None Less Than Six Feet In Length”
Choire’s got me hooked on the NY Times archives. Here’s the headline of an April 2, 1947 review of a MoMA show that contains an early mention of Jackson Pollock:
UNUSUAL ART SHOW OPENS AT MUSEUM; Display of Paintings, None Less Than Six Feet in Length, Is Offered at Modern Art
That the show was titled, “Large-Scale Modern Paintings” makes it only slightly less interesting.
Gerhard Richter’s Cologne Cathedral Window Up-Close
Seriously, the Cologne Cathedral is so on my list of places to visit, once the sunlight returns. I love this photo.
Undoing The Ongoing Web-based Invisibility Of Triple Candie’s Jacob Lawrence Show
installation shots via triplecandie.org/archive.org
Yesterday Holland Cotter wrote a glowing review of Triple Candie’s current exhibition of the largely white art world’s history of misrepresenting the work of Jacob Lawrence. The show consists of full-size reproductions of all 60 panels of Lawrence’s masterpiece, The Migration of the Negro, which the artist painted in Harlem when he was just 24.
Lawrence was sort of the Jackie Robinson of the white art world, the first African American artist to have a show at a major gallery, and as any young artist, he was expected to be thrilled when the Museum of Modern Art expressed interest in buying his work. Or half of it, anyway.
I don’t know anything about it, but now I have to find out, because it seems that the responsibility for the breakup of The Migration Series–the first instance of what Triple Candie calls the work’s “Ongoing Bastardization”–rests squarely with the Modern’s offer to buy only half the panels.
Triple Candie’s press release for the show has some tantalizing information, but it’s all embedded in a giant, un-indexable web graphic. So I’ve retyped it below, as it appears on the TC site, just to get it out there more. Hope that’s alright.
[2013 update: TC’s website looks to have gone offline this year, though it’s still in the Internet Archive. Glad I got this when I did.
2020 update: Triple Candie lives on, in various project forms and online, cf., a page about this show.]
Last Days Of Disco Balls
Rhonda Lieberman on the opening of Helmut Lang’s exhibition, “Next Ever After,” at the Journal Gallery in Williamsburg:
If a New Yorker cartoon had to sketch a perfectly “hip” awkward situation, they couldn’t have done a better job: a bunch of not particularly friendly people lurking around a fallen disco ball in a space too small for them not to feel conspicuous. It was fabulous.
Nearly two weeks ago, the Times’ Horacio Silva had described the disco ball as “found,” which has had me envisioning a world of perpetual morning-after, littered with disco balls, where the main activity consisted of squinting at the unexpected sunlight and picking glitter out of each other’s hair like a troop of overdressed baboons.
Or not. It turns out the ball was from Lang’s boutique, which makes it as “found” as one’s car. And it had been left outside “on Long Island,” the slightly too self-conscious, “a little school in Boston” way of saying “the Hamptons.”
Which completely changes the question of the disco ball from, “Where the hell’d he find it?” to “why the hell’d he keep it?” A dazzling symbol sentimentally yet unceremoniously hauled out and dumped on an 18-acre beachfront estate in East Hampton and left to weather away in over-fabulous isolation. With a 4-foot disco ball in tow. [ba dum bum.]
Lang didn’t make the Brooklyn opening. As his assistant told Lieberman, the artist was “on Long Island.” Just like, Lieberman did not add, Brooklyn itself.
Ball Drop [artforum]
Now Hanging [sic]: Helmut Lang’s Artwork [nyt]
The Journal No. 21 contains an interview with Lang by Neville Wakefield [thejrnl.com]
Previously: Miuccia Pravda
An Object Tossed Back And Forth From One Country To Another
Though my reflex was to read David Antin’s Artforum review of Lawrence Weiner’s Whitney retrospective as a bit of an overshare:
…these readings are as slippery as rain and evaporate fairly quickly. Take [a 1962 work] “an object tossed from one country to another.” In 1962 it could have read as an ironic invitation to think of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now it could suggest a case of extreme rendition—a Canadian citizen kidnapped by the CIA and flown to Syria for torturing. But “tossed” is a casual term, unlike “hurled,” and less energetic or violent even than “thrown.” So perhaps the most meaningful reading would invoke this casualness more directly, even while taking into account the relation between countries, for which the passage of anything from one to another almost immediately suggests borders and contraband and anything-but-casual concerns with immigration.
you gotta love any story that involves Weiner and Joseph Kosuth and Conceptual champion Seth Seigelaub dropping by a California border town for lunch and Marlboro-tossing.
And yet I can’t resist making my own thoroughly subjective associations–like Border Volleyball.
Last summer, Brent Hoff, the editor of Wholphin, McSweeney’s DVD magazine, packed up some friends and a ball and headed for a pick-up game of volleyball at the mouth of the Tijuana River, which empties into the Pacific at the US-Mexico border.
For an hour or so, Hoff and Joshuah Bearman played volleyball across the 30-foot border fence with Jerry and Larry. Bearman wrote about the trip for LA Weekly last summer, but I found the documentary short on Wholphin #3.
I’ve been late to the Wholphin game, partly on purpose; though it involved work by some of my own filmmaker mancrushes [David Russell, Alexander Payne], I felt the need to resist McSweeney’s fanboy syndrome. I should’ve given in earlier. After watching through all the Wholphin issues to date the last few months, I’m quietly blown away, even though there’s nothing that feels particularly essential [one exception, just a minute].
Short films are like that; they’re a take it or leave it medium that’s so inconsequential, even a maker of short films has to wonder what the point is sometimes [ahem]. And yet, Wholphin makes shorts feel organic, logical, and enjoyable. Some of the best moments are actually in between the films: the navigation menus and transitions are all microshorts and unusual footage, programmed in a way that makes you want to explore, as opposed to all the overproduced studio DVD navigation which inevitably feels like it’s keeping you from what you want to do, which is just watch the damn movie.
Anyway, after buying all the back issues, I’m caught up, and now I’m a Wholphin subscriber, and I’d be happy to suggest you should be, too.
But about that essential DVD content: Wholphin Nos. 2-4 each include, on a separate DVD, the three parts of Adam Curtis’s mindblowing documentary, made for the BBC in 2004, The Power of Nightmares. Curtis traces the parallel, intertwined rise of militantly conservative Islam and emergence of Al Qaeda and the American Neo-conservative movement which, he argues, dishonestly supports and exploits the existence of an Islamist Threat to further its own political and ideological ends. It’s a cogent and disturbing read of history–and the present–that Americans should be aware of, not only because it’s so full of dots that remain unconnected in our country’s mainstream analysis, but because those dots aren’t even in the picture our over-consolidated media provides.
Lawrence Weiner at the Whitney through Feb. 10 [artforum]
Check out Wholphin overall or just a clip of Walleyball [wholphindvd.com]
Joshuah Bearman’s LA Weekly account of the game and the making of the short [laweekly]
Painting Was Not Dead: Manfred Kirchheimer’s Stations Of The Elevated
Wow. I can’t believe this was shot in 1977. Stations of the Elevated, Manfred Kirchheimer’s remarkable documentary–is art documentary a genre?–of New York City’s graffiti-saturated trains and their environs is a total throwback feast. The film puts graffiti into the larger context, contrasting the tagged-up trains with the visual cacophony of officially sanctioned paintings of the day: billboards. For 45 engrossing minutes, the lost texture of mid-70’s New York rolls by, accompanied by a Charles Mingus soundtrack.
A Washington Heights native who might’ve been expected to criticize the poor, non-white graf artists who moved into the neighborhood, Kirchheimer instead provides a sophisticated and persuasively sympathetic view of a visual language that challenged the corporate marketing machinery on its own terms: painting.
It’s ridiculous to say it out loud, but I’d forgotten that they used to paint billboards. It’s incredible how familiar yet utterly alien the advertising landscape of Stations is to 2007 eyes. Those billboards are stunning, as if the whole of the Bronx were painted by Mel Ramos.
As recently as 30 years ago, painting was not [just?] a twee, aesthete’s diversion, cloistered in the museum; it was a mass medium of daily communication. When graffiti artists took up their paint, it was the default medium of expression, not only in galleries, but right there along the tracks.
Stations of the Elevated was screened at the 1981 NY Film Festival, and it’s been released before on VHS. According to a letter the filmmaker wrote to the NY Times last fall, Stations and a follow-up doc, Spray Masters were supposed to be released on DVD in the spring of 2007. So far, though, there’s nothing online.
The entire film is on YouTube at the moment, chopped up into the Tube’s mandatory <10 minute segments. It's a great taste, but it'd be so worth it to get a clean transfer on DVD.
Stations of the Elevated, in 5 parts [youtube, images, too]
On The Table: Buckminster Fuller Chandelier
Buckminster Fuller wha?
It was the photo caption in the photo spread of the Foreign Office Architects country house project in the November 2007 World of Interiors on the coffee table. I snapped a quick phonecam photo, thinking I’d look it up later and find some random product Fuller had licensed, and then I’d pick one up on eBay some day, but no. Oh, no.
Now I have to track down this one, the only one, a wedding present of some renown.
From Maggs, the rare books and art dealer who apparently sold the Margaret/Snowdon Fuller Chandelier some time in the Internet era [I’m guessing around 2004] to its current owner [an art dealer, so there’s hope, at least]:
Designed by Buckminster Fuller, and made by James & Gill Meller as a wedding present for Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon.
A basketweave geodesic sphere, of perspex (aka lucite) prisms wired together with steel fishing line, served with crimps and electrical terminals, the crimps threaded into cut out venturi.
89 cm in diameter, just over ten kilograms in weight.
Attractive and practical [!?], this is a unique three-dimensional souvenir of the great maverick philosopher-inventor Fuller and a remarkable manifestation of a period when Britain, against the odds, embraced and integrated the ideas of this most awkward and inspirational member of the American avant-garde into a new school of radical architecture…
Snowdon, it will be remembered–or in my case, learned–collaborated with Fuller supporter Cedric Price and the engineer Frank Newby on the tensile architecture of the London Zoo aviary. Architect James Meller built the thing with prisms “from The Perspex Shop” and “eighty pound plastic-coated trace wire) and crimps from Farlows in St. James’.”
Geometrically speaking the sphere is a truncation of a truncated icosahedron, a form which results in a polyhedron with 12 pentagons, 20 hexagons, 60 triangles, 90 vertices, and 180 edges. It works tremendously well as a chandelier, as the Perspex components function as refracting prisms and produce subtle rainbow coloured patterns. It is currently suspended on a simple rope harness, with no light source supplied.
Or at least it was. Now it’s sitting on a table in what used to be the cheesemaker’s living room. If anyone has a fuller [heh] image of the chandelier, I’d love to see it. And if you have a royal, hand-wired, geodesic chandelier you’ve grown weary of, do call.
A ? THE! A Geodesic Chandelier [maggs.com]
The Purpose Of Art Is To Make More Art
As the art market began heating up and becoming much more fashionable a few years ago, I started to wonder what the effect of all this demand would be on the art that was produced. Surely, 95-plus percent of the objects and paintings would not ever be made, projects wouldn’t be conceived, much less realized, in the absence of an insatiable-seeming market.
Sure, like Morris Louis and Clyfford Still before them, painters and drawers might produce work at a grueling pace, then roll them up and stuff them in a barn–or their parents’ suburban attic crawlspaces or whatever the equivalent is today. Conceptualists might follow Dan Flavin’s footsteps and design all their work and file it away for execution in the event anyone ever actually bought it. And that might be happening.
But there are giant works with cost- and labor-intensive production requirements; public commissions for new cultural capitals; hundreds of linear miles of art fair booth walls to be filled; follow-on rounds of loft and country home renovations proceeding apace. The art market needs product.
That photo a few weeks ago in the Times of yet another near-life-sized inky tree by Ugo Rondinone being art handled into place was a clincher; it accompanied an article about bankers and hedge fund managers compelled to quit their dayjobs in order to manage their serial seven- and eight-figure remodeling projects. Can someone please explain why I should care about art whose most salient feature is its ability to anchor a handrubbed plaster wall in a townhouse that never gets lived in?
I was pleasantly surprised to find that Richard Prince is a source of wisdom on this question of art world demand. Like the Dalai Lama, my problem isn’t with the man himself, but with his Richard Geres. And at this Conde Nast-LVMH-Guggenheim-Phillips dePury moment, the man has way too many Richard Geres.
Yet in the 4-part video follow-around on VBS.tv, Prince is very convincing when he says he doesn’t give a damn what anyone thinks about his work, and the good thing about people wanting to buy it is that it helps him make more work. Whether the world is a better place with a dozen more nurse paintings in it actually feels beside the point, even if it’s not. To see a nurse painting propped nonchalantly in the background, and to know that Prince could make another tomorrow–or not–imbues these now-precious objects with an unshakable arbitrariness, entirely subject to the artist’s prerogative. Which is entirely at odds with the disintermediating artifice of the primary dealer and her waitlists–and with the even more intense simulation of rarity of the auction block. And still we come.
It makes me think, too, of Olafur Eliasson’s work, but for entirely different reasons. As the scale, complexity and spectacle of Olafur’s work has expanded, most dramatically since his 2004 Turbine Hall installation, it’s sometimes seemed that literally any idea or iteration or object that crossed through his head could be realized. The question became, “should it?” With no apparent physical, production, or economic constraint, does the artistic process get inverted and lose the refinement, iteration, editing, and winnowing steps that presumably results in the strongest work?
Is any/every possible configuration of hanging prism, spotlight, and rotating motor equally “good”? Do we weigh the significance of each element and decision differently if we know it’s the only one or if we know that every other variation exists somewhere, too, in a European private collection? Or is “uniqueness” as misplaced an object of our artistic rapture and devotion as “authorship”?
MIT art historian Caroline A. Jones pulled back the curtain on Olafur’s prodigious studio practice in an article for last month’s special Production issue of Artforum. Somehow threading the needle between the art world’s post-object conceptualism and the art market’s dazzling luxury consumerism, the studio has made experimentation and research its main “product”; which makes the saleable works something of a “by-product,” by-products which fund the ongoing idea production of the studio.
It feels like an imperative transposition for an artist to make, especially when cognizance of the demand for one’s work can create an existial crisis. I mean, I buy the stuff, and it often feels superficial, decorative, and money-flaunty; I can only imagine how it can feel to be making it.
And just as the mechanical means–lights, tripods, scrims, scaffolds, motors–used to create the natural phenomena have always been open, discoverable parts of each work, now Olafur’s studio is making its own process and mechanisms known.
Take Your Time is the Studio’s magazine. Vol. 1, Small spatial experiments, goes behind into the scenes, documenting several recent high-profile projects, including the Serpentine Pavilion, BMW’s Art Car, the Music Hall in Reykjavik, Pinault’s Venetian Christmas decorations, and some that could actually be considered small.
I don’t know if it’s coming to a Barnes & Noble near you, but I imagine it’ll be at the galleries. And it’s available as a nice, fat PDF file from the Studio website.
Take Your Time, Vol. 1, Small spatial experiments [olafureliasson.net]
Sata-Koons
Alright, the clock is ticking, only hours to go until Jeff Koons’ largest work to date, a 53-foot high balloon based on his 1986 sculpture, Rabbit, bobs down the west side in Macy’s parade. It was made using a new material intended to replicate the original sculpture’s mirror-like stainless steel surface. Said Koons in a Macy’s press release, “I think one of the reasons why Rabbit is an iconic work, a popular piece, is because it’s so reflective. It reflects the needs of culture and society and can represent so many different things to the viewer.”
Courant’s critic wonders what I wondered, which is what other art balloons have been in Macy’s “Blue Sky Gallery” series? I can’t find any previous artists mentioned.
Anyway, Gallery or not, the Satelloon would not be able to appear in Macy’s parade; Manhattan’s avenues were laid out to be 100 feet wide, the same as the Satelloon itself. What with the streetlights and trees and whatnot, it just wouldn’t fit.
Still, I hope it’ll make a nice, intimate venue for Koons’s modestly scaled work.
Money quote: “A giant silvery rabbit that looks like a massive bunny-shaped UFO? [courant, also top image]
Rabbit inflation test shot via fashionweekdaily [fashionweekdaily.com]
Previously: The Satelloons of Project Echo
If I Were A Sculptor, But Then Again…
Architecture As Art History
I guess when you’re a hammer, everything looks like MoMA. It’s “Subverting The Dominant Installation” Week at Modern Art Notes, where Tyler is taking inordinate pleasure in shadow boxing with an opponent who retired long ago: Alfred Barr’s rickety, linear [sic] march of Modern Art history as experienced in the gallery walk at MoMA. As Tyler condemns it, Barr/Rubin/MoMA put Postwar New York at the center of Art, and annointed Jackson Pollock to lead everyone else to abstraction’s Promised Land. [But wait, maybe I can solve this problem before I even get started complaining. What if Clyfford Still is Moses, then Pollock could be Joshua!]
Tyler’s exercise interesting and–in this case–harmless, but it’s also artificial almost to the point of irrelevance. Set aside the discussion of just how much “dominance” MoMA’s installation has or should be granted in the polyvalent art world of 2007 [I’m a longtime MoMA supporter and fundraiser for whom the Museum functioned as an ersatz graduate school of modernism, which may be why I feel so strongly that the art world should have outgrown the self-inflicted notion of centralized canonizing authorities by now. And except for when we play these kinds of curatorial parlor games, I think most people have.]
The sequence of galleries on MoMA’s fifth floor forms the basis of MAN’s “dominant installation” theory:
MoMA’s installation, which is in part an accident of architecture and in part not (someone put all those Pollocks together and banished everyone else), encourages us to see Pollock as the titan, the artist who, along with Picasso and Matisse gets a MoMA gallery to himself. The not-so-subtle suggestion is that everything else in American hero painting stems from Pollock, that it all comes after him, that no one else is worthy of sharing his space. As proof, at MoMA those other artists all are after Pollock, not with him.
OK, but that’s not how it happened…
Tyler has been spending the last few days expanding on that by showing what other artists’ momentous works from 1950 which were created alongside [i.e., concurrent with] Pollock’s, but which MoMA baldly puts in other rooms.
Rather than simply point out what seems to me an inherent flaw in Tyler’s premise–unless you’re talking about Jerry Saltz’s curatorial fantasy of lining up all the works in the collection by the date they left the studio, the march through architecture does not only ever equal the march of time; in fact, since its conception before the MoMA2000 era, the Taniguchi building & installation has been intended to alleviate, if not obviate, the outdated, pedantic, this-begets-that, historicist puzzle-solving–I’ll counter with a lost installation example from the, uh, Bad Old MoMA that I think unproves Tyler’s point today about Barnett Newman’s massive painting, Vir Heroicus Sublimis. It also happens to be one of the most sublime juxtapositions of art I’ve ever seen.
In the old MoMA’s 4th floor galleries, Pollock did have a gallery to himself, but it wasn’t the apotheosis of anything. The Pollock room was off to the right, with One: Number 31, 1950 on the main wall, while History marched on to the left; to the architectural determinists in the audience, Pollock was a dead end.
Only, of course, it wasn’t. When you turned around and looked through a couple of enfilade doorways, there was Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis facing you–and the Pollock to your back. I forget what was in those galleries–late Matisse, maybe? who could care?–because these turning back and forth between these two giant paintings made the same year was too engrossing. Newman wasn’t taking the “next-steps of American high-abex,” he was making his own powerful arguments longside/against/in response to [sic] Pollock’s painterly actionism.
When you got into the room with the Newman, though, things really heated up. On the right/west wall [recreated above in Photoshop] hung another 1950 Newman, The Voice [above, l], and next to it was a Clyfford Still. If the timeline were the arbiter, it’d be 1951-T No. 3, a work whose reused abstract composition Still dubbed a “replica.” [Let’s see Pollock try that.] But I’m almost certain it was the much earlier–d’oh, and thus asynchronous–1944-N No. 2 [above, r].
The greatest touch, though, was the most seemingly controversial: the insertion of a European sculpture, Giacometti’s Standing Woman, from 1948, which functioned visually as, of all things, a humanoid zip. I’ve never looked in the literature, but I can’t imagine how this time- and continent-and style-hopping installation could be considered anything but heresy to those who insist that someone’s insisting on brightline, AbEx and The American Way art history. And yet, there it was, right there in the heart of MoMA. Did anyone complain? Or did it just look too awesome? Or was there always more to the Newman et al. story, like what artists themselves thought, even at MoMA? from Vir Heroicus Sublimus‘ page at MoMa.org:
Newman admired Alberto Giacometti’s bone-thin sculptures of the human figure, and his stripes, or “zips,” as he called them, may be seen as symbolizing figures against a void.
Taniguchi’s MoMA makes some attempt to break up the classical, enfilade march of galleries, but it’s obviously not perfect. The classical vista and the faceoff have been replaced by the turn and the oblique glimpse as the museum’s spatial and viewing modes. When they hung the new galleries, MoMA’s curators programmed in these pans and the distant glimpses of resonant works afforded by all the new, non-dogmatic doorways.
But even if you don’t buy into this attempt at mixing it up, can anyone realistically expect that MoMA would destroy itself as a historically continuous institution “merely” to accommodate the fifth renovation of its space? Should the ghost of a building known as the Dorset Hotel hold sway over Art History, its circumstances defining the shapes and flow of the galleries much as the one-by-one acquisition of the townhouses that once occupied the original 53rd Street site did? MoMA’s linearity, both spatial and intellectual, is a historical phenomenon as driven as much by these palimpsest floorplans as by Barr and Rubin’s schematic diagrams.
And this received wisdom is actually influenced as much by the trustees and collectors and tastes of the era, too; remember, despite several attempts by dealer/trustee Sidney Janis to place it there, Barr and MoMA refused Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm, which finally ended up at the Met. And it wasn’t until 1967, well into the Rubin era, that they could even manage to acquire One, No. 31, 1950 at all. If people actually knew more about the messy, cantankerous, and wrangling processes of how that “dominant installation” came to be, they may not be so inclined to let it dominate them.
And if they’re going to be strict architectural literalists in their interpretation of a the symbolism of a museum installation, they might as well look back to the Old Testament MoMA as well. And they might as well note that Newman’s painting currently hangs in the same spot as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon on the floor below. Maybe Newman is Moses and Pollock is just Aaron. Or Pollock’s John the Baptist, and Newman’s–well, I’m sure Newman would’ve been pleased with the spot he got.
Olafur’s Home Movies
Hello, Olafur Eliasson’s studio has a YouTube channel. A couple of months ago, right before the show opened at SFMOMA, he/they posted three videos that show various behind-the-scenes activities from your mobile expectations, the BMW Art Car project. Actually, part 1 has several shots of other works and studio activities, too. [Hi, Einar!]
They’re rather casually edited together, with no apparent arc and no narration, but they’re an interesting glimpse into Olafur’s studio process, which has expanded rather significantly in the years since I last visited. The videos are a nice complement to the Artforum article on the same topic, minus the elaborate contextualizing discourse, of course.
1/3 Studies for your mobile expectations – bmw h2r project
2/3 Studies for your mobile expectations – bmw h2r project
3/3 Studies for your mobile expectations – bmw h2r project
http://youtube.com/user/olafureliasson [youtube]
Cabinet’s Got Huge Balls
The Joshua Foer photo timeline, “A Minor History of Giant Spheres,” that got me all hopped up on Satelloons, is now online. It’s in the latest issue of Cabinet Magazine.
And while you should always buy or subscribe to Cabinet, the photos online are, on average, much bigger. The curse of the printed timeline format, I guess. [via kottke]
Previously: I will someday install a Satelloon in Grand Central Station, the Pantheon, and/or the Piazza San Marco.
“the most beautiful object ever to be put into space”