art – Page 182 – greg.org

Nam June Paik On Art & Boxing

Was watching this ancient panel discussion, “Time and Space Concepts in Music and Visual Art,” from Pleiades Gallery in 1978 with Merce Cunningham, but then I totally fell for Nam June Paik all over again instead. A couple of pull quotes:

In any other profession like lawyers, dentists, sanitation workers, or teachers, if you do fairly well, slightly above average, you can make a living. But only in art and heavyweight boxing, you have to be top five to pay your rent.
[laughter]
It’s strange, especially because in heavyweight boxing, you know more or less who wins. The fight can be fixed, but not as easily as in the art world.

And this one, where Paik talks about peoples’ complaints that video art is boring, and that it would be hard to write a PhD on the history of video art, because all the material you’d have to sit through would take a hundred years. It’s not the random access of an encyclopedia vs the sequential access of video, though, that’s strikes a particular chord, but the realization that the panel’s participants–Cage, Paik, Cunningham–are now gone [stay healthy, Richard Kostelanetz and Dore Ashton!]:

Life, we cannot repeat. Life is sequential access. However, videotape is changing that: life as a sequential access.
If you freeze a time and retrieve them. So you keep certain access–1967, 1955–frozen. Like an icebox. You can go access cheese, butter, eggs. And you can go back to your twentyhood, thirtyhood, childhood, in random access. That, videotape is doing. So the beauty of videotape produced now will be appreciated in 2000. It’s like antique hunting.

On another note, it’s kind of comforting/ennervating to see that the medium of panel discussion is still sequential, often boring, and characterized by audience essays in the form of a question.
Time and Space Concepts in Music and Visual Art (Part I) (1978) [ubu]

A Closer Look At Tauba Auerbach’s Pixels

I’d seen Tauba Auerbach’s text- or letter-based paintings before, but I didn’t know about her prints. She did a couple of pairs of prints using pixels last year with Berkeley-based Paulson Press. There’s a black and white set, 50/50, where exactly 50% of the pixels shown are white and 50% are black, and then there’s an 8-color set called A Half Times A Half Times A Half.
Without knowing how or why they were made, I was first drawn to the different resolutions, which she calls “fine” [above] and “coarse” [below]. [And the color ones obviously remind me of Gerhard Richter’s Farben painting series from the early 1970s, which became the basis for his stained glass window in the Koln Cathedral.]

Then I realize they’re aquatints, etchings–Paulson Press specializes in intaglio printing–and not printed digitally, so there’s an interesting transition from digital to physical. And the printing technique itself adds a layer of imperfection to a “perfect” digital original.
Of 50/50, Auerbach said [pdf]:

I was thinking about binary as a language, like binary code for computers, as well as just the binaries within the English language, and how in binary code there’s just zeros and ones.
You have to represent everything, including the ambiguous, with just those two components.

So she’s started introducing randomness. The b/w pixels are randomly placed, but it really pops in the color etchings:

I created three plates. And these three pigment primaries are like the process primaries used for printing –cyan, magenta, and yellow. And on each plate there’s a random pattern of colored squares and blank squares, and they overlap at varous probabilities to create seven possible colors–or eight if you include the white. So, the three primaries, the three secondaries, and then a seventh color where all three overlap, and then the white where none overlap.

So if I’m reading that right, each plate could be printed with any of the three colors. The plates x inks would generate a the number of permutations–though it’d be doubled if the top and bottom of the rectangular plates are reversed.
As I’m typing this, it sounds like a Sol Lewitt, too, an early, exhaustive Lewitt serialization made in the mature Lewitt’s palette. But there are at least 84 possible combinations for each print–if the top/bottom of each plate don’t matter, there are 816–and Auerbach’s edition size is only 30. Sounds like introducing a bit of randomness into the process was plenty. I’m sure her printers were relieved.
Tauba Auerbach prints [paulsonpress.com via 16 miles of string]
Tauba Auerbach prints press release – pdf [paulsonpress.com]

Heh, Joghurtbecher

Not only is Becher German for gridding up large assortments of black & white photos of similar things in a self-consciously futile attempt to catalogue the entirety of the built environment, it also means cup!
Beierle + Keijser’s joghurtbecher [beikey.net via kottke]

Stephen Shore Interview At Vice

Here are some dots I never would have connected. When Stephen Shore took his photography-changing 1972 road trip from New York to Amarillo, was he going to see Stanley Marsh 3?
No se, but as this portrait shows, Shore definitely made it [back?] to Marsh’s by 1975:

I’ve been a huge fan of Shore’s work for a long time, and I have a hard time seeing myself asking a single one of the questions Steve Lafreniere asks. Maybe that’s why this interview is so interesting.
Stephen Shore interviewed by Steve Lafreniere [viceland.com]
image: Stephen Shore, Stanley Marsh and John Reinhardt, Amarillo, Texas, February 15, 1975 [viceland.com]

July 24, 1973 Was A Tuesday

I was researching a project just now, came across this, and then noticed the date:

ROBERT SMITHSON, 35, A SCULPTOR, IS DEAD
July 24, 1973, Tuesday
Page 41, 227 words
Robert Smithson, a sculptor, was killed in the crash of a light plane on Friday, along with the pilot and a photographer, as they were inspecting one of his “Earth works” under construction on a ranch near Amarillo, Tex. He was 35 years old and lived at 799 Greenwich Street.

[The New York Times]

On Billboards, Or More Precisely, Not On Billboards

Damn, but that is one fantastic propaganda billboard. James Hill shot it for the NY Times. Apparently, it’s in Abkhazia, and the two guys are the presidents of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two breakaway provinces of Georgia.
LAXART curates an art billboard pretty well, and I guess the medium’s appreciated more there, but I’m really surprised at how rare are the instances of traffic-stopping, naturalistic [sic] photography on a billboard.
There’s Felix, of course, and maybe he’s part of the problem, because he set my expectations so high with his 1992 MoMA Projects show, which consisted of a photo of his and Ross’s unmade bed on billboards around Manhattan. Coming across those things in the cityscape blew my tiny little mind.
But then, it was the early 90s, and Benetton was certainly making use of naturalistic or photojournalistic imagery in its advertising. We’re so inured to the standard billboard vocabulary–Alive! Newport compositions, supergraphics, 3D gimmicks, blownup print ads–that they stop registering, if not become completely invisible. And yet unless we go to Abkhazia, all we get is Patrick $#*%ing Mimran’s vapid fortune cookie sayings.

Convergence

If I’m a little high right now, it’s just because these conservators just hit like every art button I have:

To photo-document Spiral Jetty, we used a tethered helium balloon about 8-10 feet in diameter, attached to a digital camera that would take an image every few seconds until the camera’s memory card filled up. Each of us let out string from a spool and sent the balloon up anywhere from 50 to 600 meters, depending on what we were trying to capture and other factors such as wind and amount of helium to give lift. The results were absolutely amazing! Now I have a low tech, low cost way to take aerial images of the sculpture — something I plan to do on an annual basis. These images can be paired with data that we collected using a Total Station survey instrument in order to create scaled 3D maps and diagrams of the Jetty and its materials.

Extending the Conservation Framework: A Site-Specific Conservation Discussion with Francesca Esmay [art21.org via man]

For the Record, The Spiral Jetty First Re-Emerged In 1994.

Not 2004 when the state put up a sign pointing to it. Not 2002, when my sister first took a college date out to see it but Artforum’s Nico Israel couldn’t find it. 1994.
After a Salt Lake City artist friend, Patrick Barth, told me that Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty was partially visible in mid-summer 1994, I drove to the Jetty in my sister’s car–no way I’d take my own car–in early August 1994. The larger rocks were visible, forming a fragmentary outline of the structure. They were all covered in glistening salt crystals.
So please, enough with the, it re-emerged whenever the New York Times first found out about it nonsense.

On The Art Of Failure And Vice Versa

I’ve had Christy Lange’s long 2005 Tate Magazine essay about revisiting conceptual art systems open in my browswer tabs for weeks now, but I hadn’t read past the Walter deMaria section that first led me to it. Well, it’s just wonderful, and it builds to a wonderfully satisfying failure of an ending. Here are a couple of paragraphs on Jonathan Monk:

In Return to Sender (2004) Monk co-opts On Kawara’s series I Got Up (1968-1979), in which Kawara sent postcards to friends and colleagues systematically reporting his whereabouts. Tearing the pages out of a catalogue that documented the work, Monk dutifully sent the pages back to the original addresses, hoping for responses, yet knowing Kawara had long left the location. “That’s something where the possibility of failure is there before you start,” says Monk. Using Kawara’s own system as a point of departure, he created another, more illogical system, resuscitating a work from the past.
…
What contemporary artists such as Ström, Landers and Monk tap into is not the cold rationalism of conceptual artworks, but the cracks in their objective systems, or the vague, fleeting appearance of insecurity or doubt. Combined with their own conflicts about the system of the art world, what they allow us to see is not the patent successes of previous works, but their occasional futility and failure. While some conceptual art is rigorous and methodical, intellectual and distanced, it can also be paradoxical or daft, emotional or romantic. There is something fragile and fallible about taking on a project that can’t be finished, performing an act that can’t succeed, or creating a work that will never be seen. It is the repeated, unsure attempts and predictable small failures that constitute the self-effacing and endearing quality of meaningless work.

I guess I’ll have to get the book, but Kawara’s I Am Still Alive is typically described as a series of telegrams, and none of the examples I’ve ever seen include a return address. Still, great stuff.

Here’s a tidy description from the book [published in 1981 in an edition of 800] of Kawara’s daily process, which I guess would be easy enough to reverse engineer from his various bodies of work:

Kawara’s days in New York were no different in any respect from those in Mexico. As soon as he awoke, he prepared and sent off his I GOT UP postcard. He spent six or seven hours painting the date. He typed years B.C. on his typewriter. From time to time, in answer to requests for his work or as private communications, he would send telegrams to places around the world saying: I AM STILL ALIVE ON KAWARA. And then, before going to bed, with a slash he would cross off the day on his hundred year calendar.

The book reproduces all of Kawara’s ‘I am still alive’ telegrams through the end of 1977 in original size and chronological order.
Also, this: Variations on I am still alive On Kawara, by Sol Lewitt, pub. 1988 [image via bookendless]

Bound to Fail, Tate, Summer 2005 [tate.org.uk]
Related to the exhibition, “Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970”, which ran through Sept. 2005
Also related:

Julius Shulman Is Dead! Long Live Julius Shulman!

Like everyone else, I see modern architecture–the whole modern world, or at least the West Coast of it–in glorious black and white, thanks to Julius Shulman. Just as Hugh Ferris’s smoky charcoal skyscraper renderings defined Gotham a generation earlier, Shulman’s has been the formative, definitive lens through which postwar Los Angeles has been seen and understood.
So even as I miss him in one human sense, I’m kind of relieved he’s finally gone. Now maybe a new perspective of modernism has a chance to take hold. Or maybe an old one, who knows? Just something, anything besides relentless Shulmanism.
Christopher Hawthorne has a couple of open-eyed remembrances of Shulman and his double-edged relationship to the city he documented so long and loved so much:

Shulman’s vision of modern, stylish domesticity was in many respects an airbrushed one. It’s hard to believe anybody actually ever lived the way the carefully posed models in his photographs seemed to, carrying a tray out onto a poolside terrace, or sitting in perfectly pressed suits and dresses on the edge of a Mies van der Rohe chaise longue, city lights twinkling in the distance.
But his images were impossible to resist as a kind of mythmaking, even for the most tough-minded observers of life in Los Angeles. To look for any length of time at a Shulman picture of a great modern L.A. house is to get a little drunk on the idea of paradise as an Edenic combination of spare architecture and lush landscape.

Hawthorne also wrote another, more personal reminiscence of Shulman:

He was known for a certain blunt irascibility by that point in his life – he was 94 when we met, for God’s sake – but I never saw that side of his personality. He was dogged in his view that life in Los Angeles, as he told me once, was “simply glorious,” and that put him at odds with the generation of photographers, architects and artists who followed him, many of whom were more interested in exploring a grittier, less elevated vision of what it meant to be here.

The one time I met Shulman was after a public event, where his cantankerous charisma was turned up to 11. It was impossible not to be rooting for him all the way that night, even though I kind of regretted it in the morning.
That phrase, though, about others who “were more interested in exploring the grittier, less elevated vision of what it meant to be here [i.e., in Los Angeles]” gets to me. Hawthorne saw Shulman as a promoter; I’d probably go with evangelist. But the point is, sometimes it’s not a matter of exploring what it means to be someplace, it’s a matter of just being there and seeing what’s around you. It’s like Shulman knew what he’d see before he ever got there.

You Had Me At Muschamp in Monaco

Herbert Muschamp in a giant weather balloon movie in Monaco WHAT?

This is something we did in Monaco where we put Herbert Muschamp’s text, “Bubbles in the Wine,” to film. It was my job to go out and find these weather balloon manufacturers that had these funny-shaped screens that had projectors inside them. And what Peter with Imaginary Forces did was to figure out how to cut a nine-screen film simultaneously so you sometimes get a single image, you sometimes get multiple images on the balloons.

That’s Greg Lynn, speaking last year at MoMA’s “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibition, as presented by Seed Magazine.

Sure enough, he wasn’t making it up. In 2006, Germano Celant brought in Lisa Dennison to help curate, “New York, New York,” a giant summer show at the Grimaldi Forum. Lynn, Imaginary Forces, and UN Studios worked as United Architects, the collaborative they formed for the World Trade Center rebuilding competition.
Here’s the brief:

UA created an immersive space that told the story of the last 50 years of New York Architecture through an animated narrative, scripted by Herbert Muschamp. Eight synchronized films and a uniquely New York soundtrack told a story of the past, present and future of the city. By suspending eight 20-foot balloons with interior projection from the ceiling and walls, IF transformed the balloons into a new architectural media delivery system.

And here’s IF’s quick making of video, which Warner Music Group unceremoniously stripped the soundtrack from:

Hmm. First off, this all sounds straight from the Eameses’ expo playbook. Their collaboration with George Nelson, for example, at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow. Glimpses of the USA was a 7-screen film epic of American material awesomeness, shown in a dome pavilion, and designed to blow hapless Commie minds. [My mind was blown a little bit just by this photo of the Eameses standing inside a mockup of the pavilion. via]

And of course, the Eameses went on to make approximately one million movie/slide/multimedia presentations and exhibitions for IBM, a format which was later cloned in every Park Service visitors center I went to as a child. So on the bright side, there’s no need for a proof of concept!
All told, the installation as realized, with the balloon screens seemingly dispersed on either side of the narrow, Nauman-esque exhibition space, doesn’t seem to have quite the impact that UA originally imagined. Check out the drawing over Lynn’s shoulder above, where the balloons are all clustered like sperm around an invisible egg. [Which would have been you, by the way, the viewer. You were the egg. And Joe Buck was the sperm. Muschamp is whooping in Heaven right now at the thought, I’m sure.] Point is, the panoramic wall is closer to what UA realized in their “New City” installation at MoMA.
Meanwhile, there’s not much online about “New York, New York,” which was subtitled, “Cinquante ans d’art, architecture, photographie, film et vidéo.” From the Art in America writeup, it sounded like a sprawling mess and a bit of a trophy dump, not necessarily a bad thing. Of course, half the article is about expo logistics and insurance and transporting masterpieces [sic], so who knows? Also, I can’t find this Muschamp “Bubbles” essay anywhere online. Please tell me someone somewhere’s working on a collected works.
Monaco starts around 3:30: Seed Design Series | Greg Lynn: New City [seedmagazine, thanks greg.org idol john powers for the tip]
Experience Design | Bubbles in the Wine, 2006 [imaginaryforces.com]

Now I Feel Twice As Useless About My Shirtboards

Gay Talese writes everything everyday on shirtboards—

INTERVIEWER
Do you use notebooks when you are reporting?
TALESE
I don’t use notebooks. I use shirt boards.
INTERVIEWER
You mean the cardboard from dry-cleaned shirts?
TALESE
Exactly. I cut the shirt board into four parts and I cut the corners into round edges, so that they can fit in my pocket. I also use full shirt boards when I’m writing my outlines. I’ve been doing this since the fifties.
INTERVIEWER
So all day long you’re writing your observations on shirt boards?
TALESE
Yes, and at night I type out my notes. It is a kind of journal. But not only my notes–also my observations.
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean by observations?

–including the outline for the Greatest Magazine Article Ever?
Robert Rauschenberg developed his abstract/pop collage techniques on shirt boards, while traveling to Italy and Morocco with Cy Twombly in 1951-3. The pair [couple?] of young artists fresh from Black Mountain College were traveling on Twombly’s grant money, which meant Rauschenberg had next to nothing to buy art materials with.
So he collaged cheap prints, newspaper, feathers, drawings, and random stuff onto the shirtboards from their laundry in an irreverent twist of his teacher Josef Albers’ technique.
In 1990, just as Walter Hopps’ incredible show, “Robert Rauschenberg the Early 1950s” was preparing to debut at the Menil, the artist collaborated with Styria Studio to produce meticulous replicas of 28 of the shirtboard works in an edition of 65.
Within the first five minutes of walking into the Menil for the first time, I met Cy Twombly standing in front of his chalkboard painting in the lobby. He had just completed his interview for Hopps’ catalogue. Needless to say, I made it back to Houston for the opening, and then saw the show multiple times at the Guggenheim SoHo.
Beyond instilling a deep appreciation for Rauschenberg’s interest in abstraction and conceptualism both, that show changed the way I look at shirtboards forever. Not that I’ve ever done anything about it, of course, just that it hits a nerve. What’s worse about Gay Talese: he lives in my old neighborhood, so we might even share a shirt laundry.
a nice discussion of the Shirtboard works [icallitoranges]

Do Tell

Solicitors for the National Portrait Gallery are apparently threatening legal action against a US Wikipedia user for downloading 3,300 digital photographs of paintings in the UK museum’s collection, and then uploading them to Wikipedia. Says Londonist:

All of the paintings are thought to be from the Victorian era or earlier, and are therefore in the public domain. The rather gristly bone of contention, however, is whether the high resolution images of those paintings are protected by their own copyright.

Seems that the NPG is claiming both copyright infringement for its photographs and database right infringement. Neither of these rights currently exist under US copyright law.
Obviously, I’ve been thinking quite a bit latelyabout the issues around reproducing artwork and the incipient loss/cost/penalty when art is transmitted in a copyright culture. It was always my understanding that museums which hold public domain works–which is the vast amount of material in museums, basically everything over 95 years old–tried to control reproduction of the work by limiting access to the work itself, or by requiring contracts for shooting work, or for using authorized reproductions. [Monticello, for example, has an insane, draconian, and expensive shooting policy that practically requires you to hire a gardener to follow behind and refluff the grass where your tripod had been standing.]
According to the NPG’s solicitors, at least, US and UK laws differ on whether a photograph of an artwork has a copyright in itself, something distinct from the artwork being depicted. Should be interesting.
National Portrait Gallery To Sue Wikipedia User? [londonist via momalearning’s twitter]

ORLY? Did The River Cafe Really Sue Over Eliasson’s Waterfalls?

So earlier this week, the NY Post’s Adam Nichols reported that the owner of the River Cafe, was suing for $3 million damages caused by Olafur Eliasson’s The New York City Waterfalls:

Their suit, filed in Brooklyn Supreme Court last week, demands that the project’s creators — New York’s Public Art Fund and Danish artist Olafur Eliasson — be ordered to cough up the cash for repairs.
“There were 90 to 120 days of saltwater rain coming down on us,” restaurateur Buzzy O’Keeffe said.

[Waterfalls ran 110 days, from June 26 to Oct 13, 2008, but for the last six weeks, the operating hours were cut in half.] ArtInfo, CityFile, New York Magazine, and some blogs picked up the Post’s story.
BUT. I’ve searched through the relevant court filings, both for the Kings County – Brooklyn Supreme Court and Civil Court, and I can’t find any record of an actual lawsuit.
Then on Thursday, the Brooklyn Paper’s Mike McLaughlin talked with O’Keeffe for a story titled, “Buzzy prepares his sue-fflé over arborcidal artwork” with details [“The complaint, filed in Brooklyn Supreme Court on June 29…”] which make things even less clear:

The suit says that the River Café, owned by Michael “Buzzy” O’Keeffe, “continues to suffer damage and business loss as a result of the defendant’s negligence.”
Despite the court paperwork seeking $2.983 million in damages, O’Keeffe told The Brooklyn Paper that “the River Café is not suing anyone.” He declined to elaborate.

So what began as a dispute over prematurely browned leaves last summer has now become extensive salt-spray-related structural damage and a year of lost business. And at least two reporters appear to have received, or been shown “court paperwork” by O’Keeffe, but there’s nothing independently verifiable from the actual court.
I’ll be honest, I started digging in this story to find some interesting/entertaining details buried in the lawsuit filing. But so far, it seems like the real story is just a whiny crank with a sweetheart lease talking smack because business is down in a depression and his city-funded arborists don’t come around enough.

After After After

From Linda Yablonsky’s article on The Pictures Generation in Art in America:

Bloom remembers seeing Levine’s appropriated Walker Evans photos and thinking, “Oh my God, that is so radical and so insane. It was also brilliant. Sherrie didn’t address any of the esthetic issues, just narrowed it down to the most essential idea about what constitutes ownership of an image, and that was it.”
Joel Wachs, now president of the Andy Warhol Foundation, was a city councilman in Los Angeles in the ’80s and an avid collector of art. In 1984, he saw Levine’s “After Walker Evans” appropriations from 1981 and became the first person to buy one. “I remember having a hard time accepting it at first,” he says. “What was this art, copying someone else’s pictures? Then it started to open me up to a much broader way of thinking about art. The art itself had all the formal qualities I liked and also made people think about male dominance in the art world. Sherrie’s work was $300 and Cindy’s was $800, but some male painters were getting $75,000. When Kruger said, ‘Your body is a battleground,’ that was a clarion call for a political movement.”

Also, hmmm:

In 1936 Walker Evans photographed the Burroughs, a family of sharecroppers in Depression era Alabama. In 1979 in Sherrie Levine rephotographed Walker Evans’ photographs from the exhibition catalog “First and Last.” In 2001 Michael Mandiberg scanned these same photographs, and created AfterWalkerEvans.com and AfterSherrieLevine.com to facilitate their dissemination as a comment on how we come to know information in this burgeoning digital age.

Copying as a creative strategy carries within it the assumption of other copies.
Photo Play [artinamericamagazine via afc]
related: Untitled (300 x 404, after Untitled (Cowboy), 2003 by Richard Prince)