Category: inspiration

I found a beautiful and odd book the other day, Reflections: The Story of Water Pictures, published in 1936 by Marion Thayer MacMillan.
While vacationing in the Indian territories surrounding Georgian Bay on Lake Ontario, soon after the end of World War I, McMillan discovered a Rorschach-like phenomenon where still waters would occasionally produce perfect mirror images of the craggy coastline.
Over 15-plus years studied and photographed perfectly mirrored reflections along the coastline of Georgian Bay, Lake Ontario. [She tells of teaching herself photography in order to capture these ephemeral landscape images.]
MacMillan began showing her photos around, first to the local population and Indian craftsmen, and she came to the conclusion that such visual phenomena were apparent to centuries of canoeing Indians, who drew inspiration from them for their myths and artifacts. She particularly saw radially symmetric totem poles as permanent representations of these phenomena.

Eventually, she began giving slide lectures of the photos at museums, universities, and art societies, where she drew connections between this “primitive” visual language, which was surely a common thread among all “savage” cultures, and the most advanced modernist, abstractionist movement being put forward in the art world of the day.

And so the caption on her photo, titled Child’s Head by Brancusi, reads, “The oval of the child’s face, with bend head, fingers in mouth, is so obvious that it needs no description.”
Many, or really most, of her photos are similarly titled and labeled; in her search for meaning in this optical, perceptual phenomenon, MacMillan repeatedly found “obvious” representations of artistic, literary, and religio-spiritual subjects. Which only temporarily distracts from the beauty and now-historically tinged aesthetic of the images themselves. I imagine there are some sexy, old prints out there somewhere.
The art and anthropology worlds seem to have been politely intrigued but largely unaffected my Mrs. MacMillan’s work or discoveries. Though she does mention a photographer she’d introduced the effect to had taken some accomplished Water Pictures of her own, which she showed at Julien Levy’s gallery, to generally positive reviews.
Basically, as long-lost art goes, MacMillan’s book doesn’t feel like a masterpiece, or even that important. In one way, I feel a bit implicated, as I sit here, finding or creating world-changing images and rewriting art history, in my little blog canoe. But then, it was important to her, and maybe it’s enough to recognize that.
Reflections: The Story of Water Pictures is usually available on Abebooks, though my $20 inscribed copy seems like an outlier [abebooks]
I posted a couple more images in the gregorg flickr [flickr]

I recently found a poster for a Pontus Hulten exhibition at Moderna Museet called “Utopier & Visioner, 1871-1981,” which I think may have come from Billy Kluver’s own collection.
There’s not much information online about the show with that title, but the Getty mentions it; they hold the archives for E.A.T., the art & technology collaborative Kluver founded with Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman.
Turns out “Utopier & Visioner” was the site of one node in E.A.T.’s project, Telex: Q&A, an early attempt at networked communication. E.A.T. set up public telex machines in Stockholm, Tokyo, New York [at MoMA] and Ahmedabad, India, and invited people to ask each other questions. Hulten’s show provided the theme; the dates in the title referred to the Communards and to imagining what the world would be like ten years into the future.
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Questions about the future would be daisy-chained along to the different venues to give people a chance to read and respond. [The connections were not real-time; data was only transferred 10 minutes/day.] And to prime the pump, “wise men” in each city were invited to offer their answers as well.
E.A.T. was planning to publish the resulting conversations, but I can’t see that they ever did. The Getty has several folders stuffed full of telex strips collated into roughly chronological order. It might be interesting to look through them.

Or maybe, uh, not. The Daniel Langlois Foundation in Quebec has digitized some materials from E.A.T.’s archives, including the original press release for Telex: Q&A, which contains sample questions:

1. What will the rents be like?
2. Will pot replace alcohol?
3. What will replace pot?
4. What will the ratio be between liquid & dry foods?
6. Will food be more natural (raw meat and vegetables) or more artificial (pills)?
20. Will men wear neckties?
24. What nature will bureaucracy have?
29. Where will solutions to problems lie–technology, sociology, politics?
49. Will there be a difference between work and leisure?

Maybe I do want to know Kenzo Tange’s opinion on neckties, but frankly, it’s almost interesting enough to think that in 1971, people were seriously expecting dramatic changes would sweep through society. I mean, sure, Twitter and all, but still. Pills!

Telex: Q&A was closely related to another E.A.T. project in 1971, Children and Communications. Led by Robert Whitman, E.A.T. set up kid-sized labs in the various boroughs of New York, and connected them via fax and telex, and let kids loose in them to communicate with each other.
Langlois has some of those documents up, too; it’s kind of hilarious, in that except for a tictactoe game, and an attempt at an exquisite corpse-style story, most of the interaction is about the interaction itself. Just like Thaddeus S.C. Lowe’s first telegram from a balloon to like 90% of cell phone calls today [“I’m calling from the train.”] My favorite is this drawing, which pretty much sums it up, a screen asking the kid, “Who do you love?”:

Related, interesting: Tokyo Terminal documentation for Telex: Q & A [fondation-langlois.org]

I totally remember seeing John Cage’s The First Meeting of the Erik Satie Society in the summer of 1994. An unbound version was on view at the Fuller Building on 57th Street. Susan Sheehan Gallery. It was on during Cage’s phenomenal retrospective/exhibition/performance, Rolywholyover: A Circus, at the Guggenheim SoHo. [I followed that show around the country like a Phish head, from MoCA, to the Menil, the Guggenheim, to the Philadelphia Museum. The PMA show coincided with my graduation from business school, and I had a couple of weeks where I was able to go every day, and watch the museum’s art handlers perform their I Ching-generated list of reinstallations. A formative experience, one of the absolutely greatest museum exhibitions ever, and probably the greatest catalogue I own. Reproductions of works, poems, and texts are packed loosely in a mirrored aluminum box. It’s a good segue to the Satie Society, and ‘m going to go pull it out right after I post this.]
Anyway. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company just sold a copy of The First Meeting of the Erik Satie Society at Christie’s last week, and I’m a little surprised at how vague the description is. Apparently, Cage’s box set of artist books, drawings and prints was supposed to be an edition of 18, or 9, but then the edition of 9 is described as unrealized, plus an “unbound” edition of 6… Sounds a bit of a mess.
The gist of the piece is that in 1992 Cage invited artists to a birthday party for the French composer who influenced him so profoundly, and the gifts are the artworks, which Cage combined with his own Satie-themed mesostic/acrostics based on writings he admired, too. It’s basically an exercise of homage, inspiration, collaboration, and transformation. Folks like Johns, Rauschenberg, Sol Lewitt and Robert Ryman contributed works, and Cage used texts from the likes of Joyce, Duchamp, Thoreau and McLuhan. The whole thing came in a steel-framed, broken-glass valise, a reference to Duchamp’s famously cracked Large Glass.
I’m going to guess that the version I saw was unbound, because the elements were mounted between freestanding glass panels around the gallery. So there’s one. How there could be ambiguity about work produced by this constellation of major artists just a few years ago–holy crap, almost 20 years ago–is a mystery to me.
Sale 2441, Lot 177: The First Meeting of the Erik Satie Society, by John Cage, est. $90-120,000, sold for $116,000 [christies.com]
Holy crap, $500? Rolywholyover: A Circus on Amazon [amazon]
Previously: Richter’s 4900 Colours and Cage’s Rolywholyover via sippey

A 1968 NY Times review of Robert Rauschenberg’s giant Autobiography edition by Hilton Kramer was titled “Art: Over 53 Feet of Wall Decoration.” And the abstract mentioned simultaneous installations at the Whitney and MoMA, so I was interested to see what else Kramer hated. Turns out it wasn’t a Rauschenberg or a Broadside Art project at all: it was Mason Williams’ Bus.
Mason Williams’ Bus is one of the most awesome photomural/artist book/oddball objects of the Los Angeles 1960s. I love it. It is a life-size photo of a Greyhound bus, folded up and put into a box. It was made in an edition of 200, but existed primarily as a joke, or a poster, or a decoration, and only rarely has it been perceived as an art object.
Which is hilarious–and hilariously wrong–because Williams is a childhood friend and longtime collaborator/co-conspirator with Ed Ruscha, whose deadpan artist books were busy not being recognized as art–or as proper books–at the same time.
This lack of critical appreciation may have something to do with Williams’ primary occupation, which was TV writing and composition; he was the head writer for The Smothers Brothers and wrote “Classical Gas.” Bus was an irreverent stunt, though he took it very seriously.
[For a rare, serious look at Bus, there’s no place better than Design Observer, where Lorraine Wild wrote about it in 2008; Michael Asher had donated his copy of Bus to MOCA, and the museum had just installed it. Wild has Williams’ making of story, the hilarity of which is only hinted at in the parodic text Williams included with each numbered edition:

Actual size photograph of an Actual bus.
10 ft. 3 1/2 in. x 36 ft. 2 in.)
Weighs 10 pounds, 7 ounces.
Conceived by Mason Williams.
Photograph by Max Yavno.
Enlargement made from a 16×20 print of a 4×5 negative. Printed on billboard stock in 16 sections by silk screen process. Printed by The Benline Process Color Company of Deland, Florida and Pacific Display of Los Angeles, Califfornia. [sic] Hand collated, rolled and transported early in the morning by three people (two men and one woman) in one car over a period of several days. Each copy individually hand assembled by three people, using hands, feet, tape sissors [sic] and a Barlow knife. Assembled with 120 ft. (per copy) of Scotch Brand double-faced tape (No. 666).
Folded by hand and foot by three people.
Assembled and folded quietly on television sound stages on Saturday mornings in Los Angeles, Califfornia [sic]. Assembly time, nine man hours per copy.
Cover concept by Bob Willis. Designed from a box found under his bed by his wife. Cover constructed of corrugated fiberboard, 200 lb. test, #1 white. Printed and fabricated by Nehms Company of Los Angeles, California.
Published on the 24th of February, 1967 in a limited edition of 200 copies.

Love that so much, I want to start silkscreening and double-taping life-size photos of things.
Anyway, MoMA installed a copy of Bus in the lobby in Jan. 1968, and then invited graphic designers participating in the Museum’s upcoming poster show to tag the bus with graffiti. Here’s a photo of the result, as seen on the cover of Go Greyhound magazine.

100%, Lorraine Wild [designobserver]
Art Projects by Mason Williams [masonwilliams-online]
Awesome LIFE Magazine photo of Bus at Reference Library