There are some posters, and some beer, and the gas for the motorboat had to cost a pretty penny, but that’s about it. Compared to the expensive (and purportedly expensive) public art it skewered, The Gate that chased Robert Smithson’s Floating Island up the East River a couple of months ago cost nothing. Now the Gate and the boat, and a documentary about the project will go on exhibit 11/18 at Redhead, the gallery of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
The artists–who still remain unnamed–intended their project to ask and answer the questions, “Is public art still possible? Can a cheap stunt pack a punch? Does art make enough room to laugh at itself? Yes. When money steps aside and lets the work do the talking.”
A Cheap Publicity Stunt, 11/18-12/22, at Redhead [lmcc.net via greg.org reader chandra]
Previously: Water, Gate. The Gates Bill
Category: art
The Sound Of One Hand Bidding
What with the hazmat crew required to neutralize the thousands of gallons of formaldehyde and the efforts to stabilize the rotting, soaked corpse, moving Damien Hirst’s shark costs an estimated $100,000.
Meanwhile, Mark Fletcher and Tobias Meyer ended up donating a John Bock sculpture to the Carnegie rather than keep replacing the fresh melons in it.
[Maybe they should have become Buddhists. When I was a missionary in Japan, old ladies were always offering us the fruit offerings–pyramids of oranges and melons, usually–from their butsudans, the black lacquer, gilt-edged, in-home shrines where they prayed to their departed family members.]
“These works become like devotional objects. It’s like caring for your altarpiece,” said Amy Cappellazzo, Tobias Meyer’s Christie’s counterpart.
Ephemeral Art, Eternal Vigilance [nyt]
Previously: how contemporary art is like a renaissance tapestry
Digging Dugway
Whoa. The Dugway Proving Ground is in Skull Valley, an hour and a half west of Salt Lake City. It’s where the US Army tests chemical and biological weapons and defense systems. It’s the site of an incineration program for the US’s stockpiles of bio/chem weapons. And it’s probably the greatest piece of Earth Art since the Nazca Lines.
The DoD’s alterations of the landscape–seen here in Terraserver photographs–rival the Spiral Jetty, Double Negative, Roden Crater, even, in both aesthetic power and content. Flash forward a few hundred years and ask yourself, which desert markmaking will have the most to say about the mid-20th century?
Dugway’s been dealt out of the Earth Art discussion because it’s a) functional, and b) institutional, not individual, but those seem like quaint technicalities. What if the only reason they’re not considered art–or considered alongside art, at least–is that no one’s really had access to them?
Dugway Proving Ground [pruned, via tropolism]
previously: earth art via satellite
John Powers-a-Day at Virgil de Voldere Gallery
When I first met John Powers five+ years ago, he was like a Tibetan monk with a pile of sand. Only instead of sand, he had thousands of 1-inch woodblocks, which he transformed into a huge, impossibly intricate, mandala-like sculpture that sprawled across the floor of Exit Art’s gallery. Every day throughout the exhibit, he scooted around on a little skateboard chair, replicating and altering dense patterns of blocks as he went. The work wasn’t “finished” when the show ended, and he swept the whole thing away, but that, I think was part of the point.
Now, in his latest show at Virgil de Voldere Gallery in the Chelsea Arts Building, Powers is reconfiguring hundreds? thousands? of white, Sol Lewitt-like grid modules into a new sculpture every day. The gallery’s website has pictures of the ones you’ve missed, but you can also stop by until Oct. 9th to watch new pieces come together.
John Powers at Virgil de Voldere through Sun., Oct. 9 [virgilgallery.com]
John Powers-a-Day at Virgil de Voldere Gallery
When I first met John Powers five+ years ago, he was like a Tibetan monk with a pile of sand. Only instead of sand, he had thousands of 1-inch woodblocks, which he transformed into a huge, impossibly intricate, mandala-like sculpture that sprawled across the floor of Exit Art’s gallery. Every day throughout the exhibit, he scooted around on a little skateboard chair, replicating and altering dense patterns of blocks as he went. The work wasn’t “finished” when the show ended, and he swept the whole thing away, but that, I think was part of the point.
Now, in his latest show at Virgil de Voldere Gallery in the Chelsea Arts Building, Powers is reconfiguring hundreds? thousands? of white, Sol Lewitt-like grid modules into a new sculpture every day. The gallery’s website has pictures of the ones you’ve missed, but you can also stop by until Oct. 9th to watch new pieces come together.
John Powers at Virgil de Voldere through Sun., Oct. 9 [virgilgallery.com]
Guggenheim? Good Luck With That
Tyler goes all Observer on Thomas Krens’ butt, while giving new Guggenheim director Lisa Dennison a chance to share her vision for the credibility-starved museum: “I would like the person on the street at Pastis to be able to name our top five curators.”
Personally, after seeing Dennison threaten to deaccession the work of an artist who criticised the the way she installed it, [“Well, if he doesn’t want to be in the museum’s collection, then…”] I’m sure we’ll be brunching over the Guggenheim for years to come.
Krens Relinquishes The Ramps!
Ms. Dennison To Feed Starved Gugg [observer.com]
Guggenheim? Good Luck With That
Tyler goes all Observer on Thomas Krens’ butt, while giving new Guggenheim director Lisa Dennison a chance to share her vision for the credibility-starved museum: “I would like the person on the street at Pastis to be able to name our top five curators.”
Personally, after seeing Dennison threaten to deaccession the work of an artist who criticised the the way she installed it, [“Well, if he doesn’t want to be in the museum’s collection, then…”] I’m sure we’ll be brunching over the Guggenheim for years to come.
Krens Relinquishes The Ramps!
Ms. Dennison To Feed Starved Gugg [observer.com]
Water, Gate
“So when Bob Henry, captain of the Rachel Marie, who is in charge of towing Smithson’s island, looked out across the East River Thursday afternoon and saw another piece of conceptual art gaining on him, he did not view the development kindly.”
A Miniature Gate in Hot Pursuit of a Miniature Central Park [nyt]
Water, Gate
“So when Bob Henry, captain of the Rachel Marie, who is in charge of towing Smithson’s island, looked out across the East River Thursday afternoon and saw another piece of conceptual art gaining on him, he did not view the development kindly.”
A Miniature Gate in Hot Pursuit of a Miniature Central Park [nyt]
All Things Considered, I’d Rather Be In Passaic
I guess there’s some…irony? justice? synchronicity? between Robert Smithson’s non-site works–pieces of far-off locations displaced into a gallery–and twiddling your thumbs at a boring* Smithson symposium in a college auditorium while the last 36 hours of the artist’s Floating Island tick by in gorgeous, sunny, autumnal splendor.
Net net: forget the next three sessions of the symposium (maybe they’ll be podcast), and get your butt to the river to watch the barges go by.
[*although one potential bombshell was dropped, it went seemingly unnoticed. In answer to the moderator’s question about ever rebuilding the Spiral Jetty by allowing new rocks to be piled onto it, the artist’s widow and executor Nancy Holt didn’t reject the idea.
There’s precedent, she said, because Smithson sometimes instructed Holt or other friends go get rocks for his pieces. He didn’t privilege the hand of the artist, she said. True, perhaps, but only partly relevant; more to the point is Smithson’s own intentions for the effects of entropy on the Jetty, not whether he had to be present to dump the rocks. The other factor is how to deal with increasing touristification of the site, which now gets tour buses and up to 100 visitors/day.]
All Things Considered, I’d Rather Be In Passaic
I guess there’s some…irony? justice? synchronicity? between Robert Smithson’s non-site works–pieces of far-off locations displaced into a gallery–and twiddling your thumbs at a boring* Smithson symposium in a college auditorium while the last 36 hours of the artist’s Floating Island tick by in gorgeous, sunny, autumnal splendor.
Net net: forget the next three sessions of the symposium (maybe they’ll be podcast), and get your butt to the river to watch the barges go by.
[*although one potential bombshell was dropped, it went seemingly unnoticed. In answer to the moderator’s question about ever rebuilding the Spiral Jetty by allowing new rocks to be piled onto it, the artist’s widow and executor Nancy Holt didn’t reject the idea.
There’s precedent, she said, because Smithson sometimes instructed Holt or other friends go get rocks for his pieces. He didn’t privilege the hand of the artist, she said. True, perhaps, but only partly relevant; more to the point is Smithson’s own intentions for the effects of entropy on the Jetty, not whether he had to be present to dump the rocks. The other factor is how to deal with increasing touristification of the site, which now gets tour buses and up to 100 visitors/day.]
Re-Visiting MoMA’s Re-installed Contemporary Galleries
greg.moma reporting: The Modern has reinstalled the contemporary galleries on the second floor, and it’s an invigorating pleasure and a huge improvement. Seeing it again yesterday with my mother, I found myself paying less attention to the show’s conceptual and art historical underpinnings [Kelley’s and Ray’s juxtaposition with the Viennese Actionist photos of a doused bride, for example] and more to its sensory pleasures [or, in the case of Nauman’s cacophanous drum/rat maze piece, its assaults].
You don’t need to write for October to appreciate the nods to respective senses: the visual saturation of Yinka Shonibare’s batik costumes in front of Dana Schutz’s giant painting; the aural power of Janet Cardiff’s 40-Part Motet*; the threatening touch of a dense carpet of pins (which echoes nicely the greyscaled image on Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ billboard); or the leaching of sensory inputs as you move through a gallery of black/white works (including Yayoi Kusama’s photocollage of dot paintings, a Richter-scale masterpiece, if you ask me) into James Turrell’s inky darkness [where you’re immersed in red light, of course.]
While it’s nice to see MoMA has important works like Marina Abramovic’s early video and Charles Ray’s prop pieces, it’s even better to see them exhibited in coherent, engaging way that signals the museum isn’t tone deaf when it comes to contemporary art.
* Cardiff’s choral piece was last shown in NYC at PS1 in October 2001. It was an overwhelming, mournful piece then when the city was still in shock; yesterday, I found myself choking up repeatedly and involuntarily as I walked around it. Cardiff didn’t set out to create a memorial to September 11th, but for some of us, her work seems destined to remain inextricably linked to the immediate aftermath of September 11th. [here’s what I wrote about that first installation.]
Smithson Symposium Saturday 9/24
New York Is Smithson Country this week, what with the Floating Island and the Whitney retrospective and the Smithson Symposium all day Saturday. What symposium, you say? Actually, that’s what I said. I had no idea.
Anyway, over four sessions, artists, curators and historians will discuss the Spiral Jetty, Smithson’s writings, films, travels, and influence [HUGE, in case you can’t make it]. Me, I’m going to hear Nancy Holt and folks talk about the construction and evolution of the Jetty; and Chrissie Iles and Joan Jonas talk about road trips and film.
Schedule and reservation info is in the sidebar at Whitney.org [whitney.org]
Smithson on greg.org [or greg.org on Smithson, actually]
Bonus Smithson: Tyler Green reports from the launch of Floating Island for the LAT
Speaking At A.I.R. in Chelsea Tuesday 9/20 at 630pm
I’ve been invited to speak Tuesday evening (tonight) at A.I.R. on the subject of women’s art and the marketplace. A.I.R. is the oldest artist-run gallery for female artists in the city, and it was established for the purpose of fostering an audience and environment for showing and making art without the overriding commercial motivations that usually accompany gallery-based work.
It’s an interesting venue to discuss these subjects, which I wrote about last spring in the NYT, especially in light of the current, superheated art world/market where quality is often equated with marketability and desirability. Jerry Saltz just wrote (again) about the need for an antidote, when most people don’t even acknowledge that there’s a disease right now, at least in public. I may end up just reading Jerry’s piece and opening it for questions [kidding].
If you’re around 511 W 25th st, suite 301 this evening at 6:30-8:00, stop by, listen, and throw in your two bits.
Night A.I.R. Series, organized by A.I.R. Fellow Sarah Blackwelder [airnyc.org]
Tote That Barge
Randy Kennedy has an article on the making of Robert Smithson’s Floating Island, a tree-filled barge which will chug around lower Manhattan for a week or so:
Smithson’s project is just as intimately connected to Central Park, which he regarded, in all its artificial pastorality, as a conceptual artwork of its own. (He revered Frederick Law Olmsted and said that he found him more interesting than Duchamp.) While not nearly as monumental as Smithson’s most famous work, “Spiral Jetty,” a 1,500-foot-long curlicue of basalt jutting into the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the island – which resembles a rectangular chunk of Central Park, neatly cookie-cuttered out – is a further twist on Smithson’s career-long fascination with displacement. This generally meant taking art outdoors and bringing pieces of the land back indoors, into galleries. In the case of “Floating Island,” the displacement is all outdoors, an exploration of land and water, urban and rural, real and recreated, center and periphery. As a paean to Central Park, it can be seen as a kind of artificial model of an artificial model of nature.
It’s Not Easy Making Art That Floats [nyt]
Even cooler, though, at nytimes.com/robertsmithson, Times makes a raft of its Smithson coverage, dating back to 1982, available (for who knows how long). [greg.org coverage of Smithson, alas, only goes back a couple of years.]