Category: inspiration

Walter Hopps’ 1991 exhibition at The Menil, Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s, changed my art life, basically. Bob and Cy trekking around Italy. Bob and John and Merce collaborating. Bob and Jasper, whoa. Did not hear much about that at BYU’s Art History Department.
Anyway, Merce Cunningham and John Cage’s art collection is now being sold at Christie’s to support the late choreographer’s foundation. Some of the stuff is fantastic, and some is slightly precious.
Here’s Clay Painting (For John Cage and Merce Cunningham), Rauschenberg’s 1992 recreation/replacement of the seminal 1953 work, Dirt Painting (For John Cage), which the artist borrowed for a retrospective and never returned. He was working on it when Cage passed away in 1992.

Rauschenberg’s original dirt painting was created after his visit to Alberto Burri’s studio in Rome. But while Rauschenberg has acknowledged Burri and his material aesthetic as a central influence on his later Combines, the original dirt painting, with its notion of growing mould defining the form and composition of the work, probably owes more to the influence of a work like Marcel Duchamp’s Dust Breeding of 1920. Duchamp was an important presence behind the creative thinking of both Cage and Rauschenberg who, in 1953, collaborated on a number of projects, most notably perhaps their Automobile Tire Print — a printed drawing made by Cage driving a truck with a painted tire over a series of paper pages laid down by Rauschenberg. In this later dirt painting, Rauschenberg has chosen to use unfired clay as the material for this newer version of his earlier self-defining painting. In this work which, like many of Cage and Rauschenberg’s works is dependent on the passage of time for its resultant form, the cracks that have appeared in the dried clay this time recall more closely the later Cretti paintings made of earth that Burri was to make in the 1970s.

Can you believe Cage driving the car? Automobile Tire Print is like a Zen scroll painting, action painting, a Newman zip, and Pop Art stunt all in one.
Nov. 10, NYC, Lot 5: Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled, 1953-1992, est. $200,000-300,000 [christies.com]
Also: Lot 6: No. 1, 1951, a 50+yr black painting colabo between Rauschenberg and Cage, est. $800,000-1,200,000
Related: Alberto Burri’s Cretto on greg.org

Unbelievable. The Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica refused to sell his work; his estate, the Projecto Helio Oiticica, held an estimated 95% of his entire output when he died in 1980. The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston had a truly spectacular, history-shaking show of Oiticica’s work in 2007, which traveled to the Tate. Roberta Smith said in the Times,

This show is like a large stone dropped into the calm waters of European-American art history. With its thick, lavishly illustrated catalog, it presents an enormously productive artist, writer and thinker whose work effortlessly spans the gap between Modern and Postmodern, Minimal and Post-Minimal. Reflecting inspirations from Mondrian to the samba music of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (slums), it also bridges first- and third-world cultures in a way that has seldom been equaled.

Now O Globo reports [via artforum] that a fire in Oiticica’s brother’s house has destroyed “an estimated 90%” of the PHO’s holdings. Some installations and conceptual projects designed to be recreated are fine, of course, but his paintings and sculptures, including his incredible bolides [above], minimalist experiments in experiential color from the early 60s that remind me of Anne Truitt’s genre-breaking works, are gone.
Apparently, PHO–which is controlled by the artist’s two younger brothers–was in an ongoing dispute with the municipality of Rio over the government’s inadequate storage conditions and late exhibition payments for the work. As a result, PHO removed the work to the house–where it just burned up. This just tears me up inside to think about it.
A multi-year digitization project for Oiticica’s work and prodigious archives was nearly complete, though, and presumably the 7-volume catalogue raisonne will keep the artist’s seminal ideas in circulation. Without the works themselves, though, Oiticica could end up a digital ghost, haunting artists and art historians of the future.
update: O Globo has photos of the aftermath. The loss may be closer to 75%.
The exhibition catalogue for the MFAH show: Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color [amazon]

Turns out the IPK is on the cover of one of Andy‘s favorite books, The Best Book Designs 1997, designed by Simon Davies:

Also, from Metric Views, a blog of “commentary about the British measurement muddle,” a PDF of “Standard Kilogram Weights – A Story of Precision Fabrication,” an article by Johnson Mathey’s F.J. Smith, published in the 1973 issue of Platinum Metals Review. Of the 1889 First General Conference of Weights and Measures where the IPK was officially adopted, he wrote with metallurgic confidence:

The kilogram was redefined arbitrarily in terms of the new International Prototype Kilogram so that our present standard of mass has a permanence dependent only upon the stability of the iridium-platinum alloy.

Since then, Johnson Matthey “has been called upon regularly to supply” national prototypes and working standards, objects of extraordinary craftsmanship and exquisite, minimalist form, which will soon be obsolete.
Just like this original platinum kilogram standard, a sister to the Kilogramme des Archives, fabricated in 1795 by Marc Etienne Janety, a former goldsmith to the court at Versailles:

Similarly, historically speaking, a meter was measured against a one-meter rod–THE one-meter rod–first fabricated out of platinum, then, after 1889 executed in a globally distributed edition of 30 rods of iridium-platinum alloy, which:

Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what art and its context were meant to be. Somewhere, just as the platinum-iridium meter guarantees the tape measure, a strict measure must exist for the art of this time and place. Otherwise art is only show and monkey business.

Donald Judd wrote that about his project in Marfa in 1987. The meter was redefined in 1983as the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458th of a second. The show and monkey business continues undisturbed.

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:

Apparently, it’s Chris Burden day. Kottke just posted a clean clip of Chris Burden’s 1979 work, The Big Wheel, in which a massive, 19th century iron fly wheel is set into rapid motion by a little motorcycle wheel. I think he took it from this longer video of a 1989 Burden retrospective, which includes Samson, in which the museum visitors passing through a turnstile slowly expand a 100-ton jack which is pushing against the gallery’s loadbearing walls; and his awesome-looking B-Car, 1976, a 200-lb bicycle/car hybrid with a fabric skin. More of which later.

So no sooner did we finish watching his flying steamroller installed last year at Tate Britain,

than an email announcement arrived for Burden’s retrospective at the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp. The “climax” of which, I’m told, will be–or was, since it happened last week–a re-creation of Beam Drop, a work originally executed in New York in 1984 at Art Park. Using a remote controlled latch, Burden dropped steel I-beams into a pit of wet cement.
The Belgian sponsors rather over-enthusiastically proclaim Beam Drop Antwerpen to be at once a “performance,” an “action painting” and a “large abstract expressionist sculpture using coincidence and gravity.” My favorite part of the videos of the all-day construction is the audience’s polite clapping after each beam is dropped, as if they’re watching an oversized game of lawn darts. Or quoits. It’s Europe, after all.

“Beam Drop” on flickr [flickr]

In its first iteration in 1984-5, The Territory of Art I was described as “a sixteen part series of half-hour radio programs that explored issues of contemporary art and design through commentary, interviews, original drama, and new music from more than 140 artists, designers, performers, composers, and critical thinkers.” It was produced by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and curator Julie Lazar was the managing editor.
The first two episodes were hosted by Whoopi Goldberg. The third, titled “The Collectors,” contained an interview with Benjamin Buchloh, alas, not by Whoopi Goldberg. Also, Gene Schwartz, Leo Castelli, Count Panza, John Weber, Barbara Rose, some corporate art consultant I don’t remember, and David Salle, who didn’t say much. Someone, I think it was Weber, contrasted art that collectors buy to challenge themselves with people who just want something “tasteful in the Lily Tomlin sense.” Except for that lost-on-me reference–and the implausibility of the idea that anyone might actually want a Schnabel–the discussion could have taken place last year.
Several episodes, including No. 3, are available as mp3 files.
By 1994, when she was on a Pew Fellowships in the Arts panel, Lazar’s bio was calling The Territory of Art, by then in its fourth and final iteration, “an ongoing program of commissioned works for radio.”
I’m inclined to accept this transformation from program to work, and not just because Lazar curated what is I still consider one of the best museum exhibitions I’ve ever seen or heard of with the greatest exhibition catalogue I’ve ever seen, John Cage’s “Rolywholyover.”
The fifth program of Territory of Art IV was “just to rolywholyover: John Cage in memoriam,” written by Klaus Schöning. Though it’s nominally an interview with Cage, the program is also a remarkable and entrancing work of art. I bought the CD ten or more years ago, but just unwrapped it this morning to rip into my new iPod. Fortunately for everyone who is not me–which is most of you–MOCA offers the mp3.