Looks like Monday is Unboxing Day. Whether UPS or USPS, be sure to thank the union members who worked through the weekend to bring you your art nerdy books.
The hardback with the current cover design [updated link, see below] arrived in Mondo Blogoland. I really do like this cover, too. Patrick thinks I should change it back to the softcover version, though, so that his is more collectible. Which is a very generous and slightly hilarious thing to say.
I was also thinking of making a 2-color silkscreen print out of this cover image. Or maybe even a whole portfolio of the Prince v. Cariou exhibits. I tell you, look at Rauschenberg too long, and you’ll want to start silkscreening everything that’s not pinned down.
Oh ho, at Joy Garnett’s studio [below], they staged an impromptu reading of my “conceptual piece.” And now I’m thinking that staging a dramatic re-enactment of portions of the transcript some night could be a lot of fun. Hmm.
Meanwhile, back at Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA: Selected Court Documents &c., &c. HQ, the champagne mangoes have a new, romantically exotic friend:
Cariou’s book was apparently supposed to be available as a limited edition, with a signed print. Did not know that. It says it right there on the colophon, though: “A slipcased, limited edition of this book with a signed and numbered artwork by the artist is available upon inquiry; please contact the publisher.”
There’s also a credit to The Small Darkroom, New York for “gelatin-silver prints,” a reference, presumably, to the edition. And there’s a separate ISBN number, 1-57687-074-X, which goes basically nowhere. Which means that Cariou and/or powerHouse had planned to do a limited edition, but it never happened. Wonder why that was? I guess if I were an attorney for someone getting sued for damaging someone’s book and photography market, I might care a little more.
Apr 2011 update: At the moment, the hardcover copy is not available. Here’s a new link to order a softcover copy of the new, expanded edition, which includes Prince’s entire deposition, and additional legal documents.
Category: projects
Google Street View’s Shiny Balls
People often ask me, “What is it that makes your Google Street View Art so different, so appealing?”
Actually, no one asks me that, they just send me “Hey, look!” emails with links to Jon Rafman and Michael Wolf. But if they did ask me, I’d probably go off about Bergson and the flaneur’s gaze and Deleuzian notions of cinematic time and the panoptic surveil–
“Hey, look! Shiny object! Want that!”
Seriously, chrome that bad boy in an edition of 5, please. I’ll keep the AP.
via Behind The Scenes with Street View [youtube]
So Sue Me, I Think My Richard Prince Depositions Book Looks Awesome
Wow, can I just say that, when combined with the rapid production power of our digitized present, appropriation art is just awesome?
I just got the first hardcover copies of the first version of the book I conceived of a week ago today, Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA: Selected Court Documents from Cariou v. Prince et al, including Excerpts from The Videotaped Deposition of Richard Prince, The Affidavit of Richard Prince, Competing Memoranda of Law in Support of Summary Judgment, Exhibits Pertaining to Paintings and Collages of Richard Prince and the Use of Reproductions of Patrick Cariou’s YES RASTA Photographs Therein, and The Summary Ass Whooping Dealt to Richard Prince by the Hon. Judge Deborah A. Batts, as compiled by Greg Allen for greg.org in March 2011, and it looks rather sweet.
I’m waiting to see a paperback version [updated link info below], and to see the other cover design in person, the one reproducing the court exhibit featuring the photocopied covers of the two dueling books. I like the graphic punch of that one. But I had a hunch, and I’m seeming right, that the original un-design, the full title, laid out in giant red letters [the default setting for the annotate function in Preview, the only software I used to produce the thing] is kind of awesome. So there may be some version tweaking to be done.
Anyway, the inside is pretty nice, too. The 2×2 deposition transcript pages turn out to read just fine in a trade-size book. Which makes it perfect for the beach or wherever. And it is much thinner than I expected. 290 pages is a lot of content, but it is a pretty manageable-sized book. Also, a little sluttier, frankly. Some of those photocopied PDF’s of Prince’s paintings turn out to be pretty legible after all.
Publishing a book to serve as an indispensable art history reference–and which consists entirely of someone else’s work–should really not feel this fun. But I guess that’s why appropriation’s so hot these days.
UPDATE: Here’s a link to buy the new, expanded softcover edition, which now includes Prince’s entire deposition transcript, plus several other key legal documents. It’s a bit higher quality, too. New printer.
The Sun Never Sets On Your Richard Prince Depositions Shopping Cart
You know what, in my six days as a published author, out there flogging his book, I find myself thinking, again, of Cervantes and Don Quixote. I mean, I it really feels like I’m living in the Quixotian name I gave my film production company, First Sally.
The cover on the paperback edition of Canal Zone Richard Prince Yes Rasta: Selected Court Documents, &c., &c., 290 pages, $16.99
And so as I was reading Jonathan Gharraie’s post in The Paris Review, I couldn’t help but but note all the striking similarities between Canal Zone Richard Prince Yes Rasta: Selected Court Documents, &c., &c., my critically considered selection of Richard Prince’s deposition transcripts and legal filings, and Cervantes’ work. I mean just think about it:
- Both Prince and Quixote mildly shock their guests at exhibits on the Upper East SIde.
- Quixote was recently republished in a carefully crafted illustrated version by a legendary artist press; I carefully assembled the Canal Zone… PDF by hand before uploading it to lulu.com.
- Quixote’s idealistic fantasies are enabled and indulged by an all-powerful Duke for his own bemusement and enrichment; Prince shows–and goes to court with–Larry Gagosian, on whose gallery the sun never sets.
- Cervantes gave his book one of those funny, old-timey, super-long titles; I, well, just look at the cover of the paperback edition.
I could go on and on, to the point I stop debating whether I’m Quixote or Cervantes, and begin wondering whether I’m Pierre Menard or Borges. I assume all authors go through this.
Canal Zone Richard Prince Yes Rasta: Selected Court Documents, &c., &c. in hardcover, 290 pages, $24.99 [updated link, see below]
More info on Canal Zone Richard Prince Yes Rasta in the original post.
See a couple of sample spreads from the electronic edition.
Anyway, Gharraie sums up nicely the digital future where artisanal books still thrive in a tablet world:
If anything, I would rather have it both ways: the book and the blog; the lavish endeavor of the lovingly prepared new edition and the take-out convenience of the virtual text.
And I humbly announce that the future of both art and literature is here. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get to work on my book trailer.
APR 2011 UPDATE: The hardcover is temporarily unavailable, but there is a new, expanded softcover edition, which now contains Prince’s entire deposition transcript, an additional 101 pages, plus other key legal documents. Also, it’s from a new, nicer printer.
Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA: The Book
from greg.org: Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA: Selected Court Documents, &c., &c. in
hardcover, 290pp. $24.99 [updated link info below]
Because really, why not?
It’s always bugged me when I read a news story about a legal case, or a scientific report, and there’s no link to the original source material. And since I’ve been quoting from them a lot lately, I have been fielding a lot of requests for copies of the court filings and transcripts in the Patrick Cariou vs. Richard Prince & Gagosian case.
It was yesterday afternoon, though, when I was sending my fourth email [or eighth, since the attachments are so big] that I realized Richard Prince’s deposition is not only the longest interview he’s ever given, it’s probably the longest interview he’ll ever give. [Go ahead, Hans Ulrich, you just try!]
I mean, seriously, the guy talked for seven hours. Under oath. In insane detail about his work, process, and ideas. Granted, he was being grilled by a guy whose art ignorance is only surpassed by his obvious contempt for Prince, a lawyer who can’t tell a photograph from a painting from a reproduction in a book. But still, he got Prince talking.
And Prince was surprisingly [to me, anyway] and admirably consistent and credible, at least in terms of his work. Yeah, it’s a nice bit of fact-checking trivia to strip away the coy mystery crap that surrounded his Guggenheim retrospective: Prince testified that he is Prince, and that he did live in the Panama Canal Zone, but only as a very young child.
But I found his explanation of his early formative inspirations, particularly Warhol and punk rock, to be both relevant and sincere. The deskilling argument that you could pick up a guitar for the first time, and by the end of the week, go up on stage and perform, with visceral effect, sounds real to me. It makes sense, at least in its own context [and in my own high school experience.]
The cover of the paperback edition includes the full title. 290pp 376pp, $17.99
Anyway, Prince’s entire deposition transcript has not been released [update: it has now; see below], but a patchwork of 250 or so pages out of about 375 were attached as supporting documents to various filings and motions in the case. So I sifted through and pulled them all out, and then placed them in numerical order. There are a lot of gaps, of course, and legalistic joustings, but there’s a lot of information, too.
Combined with his 28-page affidavit, it really is the most extensive discussion of his work, practice and biography I’ve ever seen Prince make. The fact that it’s all coming out in the context of a copyright infringement lawsuit is really too perfect to pass up.
Into this I wove the major documents and exhibits Cariou’s lawyers discussed with Prince: all the Canal Zone series paintings; installation shots from the Eden Rock hotel in St. Barth’s; Prince’s “Eden Rock Pitch,” a rough movie treatment whose characters and story fed into the paintings; and Cariou’s extensive visual comparison of Prince’s Canal Zone paintings and the YES RASTA images that ended up in them.
And for good measure, I added both sides’ memoranda, where they make their fullest legal arguments for their fair use/transformative use and copyright infringement positions. And of course, I included Judge Batts’ ass-whooping of a ruling.
In all, 290 pages, all taken–appropriated, one could say–from the court record, but organized into a clearer, more readable format. And with a focus, not on an exhaustively documenting the case itself, but on Prince and his work.
If you were to download all of this material from pacer.gov, it’s run you upwards of $24 [$0.08/page]. And then you’d still have to sort it all out. For that money, I thought, you could have a nicely printed book. And so that’s what I did.
There are hardcover and paperback editions, and electronic copies, too, which I haven’t tested yet. I’m still tinkering with the cover design. Both versions are included inside the book, as frontispieces or title pages or whatever, but right now, the b/w cover cover is on the hardcover, and the red, made-with-Preview’s-default-annotation-settings version is on the softcover.
This is definitely an experiment, so any and all feedback is welcome. But if you’re looking for the perfect book to take to spring break, or to class up your summer share, then you have come to the right place. Enjoy!
Buy your own copy of Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA: Selected Court Documents, &c., &c. in or in paperback [$17.99]. [createspace.com]
hardcover [$24.99]
APR 2011 UPDATE: OK, the response to this book really caught me off guard, so I’ve done some more work on it. The new, expanded edition now includes Prince’s entire deposition transcript, an additional 101 pages of testimony not previously released publicly, and several additional key legal documents from each side. In addition, while lulu.com was a quick and decent way to release a book almost instantly, I decided to switch to a higher quality printer for the new edition. The facsimile pages are a little smaller, which I’m still working on, but the quality of the book is noticeably higher. It now clocks in at 376 pages, for $17.99.
Richard Prince’s Spiritual America
Holy smokes, Richard Prince, Patrick Cariou, Larry Gagosian, Judge Batts, Bob Marley, Richard Serra [! I know, right?], Brooke Shields, $18 million in artwork, the fate of appropriation, the implosion of the gallery system, copyright apocalypse, there’s so much mayhem to discuss, where to start?
Let me cut to the chase here, and focus on the single most important takeaway of the Cariou v. Prince & Gagosian Canal Zone case: he won’t be suing me.
During a deposition, Cariou’s lawyer Daniel Brooks asks Prince about his 2005 work Spiritual America IV [above], for which he appropriated Sante d’Orazio’s photo of an adult Brooke Shields re-staging the 1975 Gary Gross photo of a 10-year-old Shields which Prince rephotographed and showed in 1983, in a temporary storefront gallery he rented on the Lower East Side and called Spiritual America:
Enzo Mari X IKEA + 6-Year-Old =
So I guess you could argue–and you wouldn’t be completely wrong–that no matter how many coats of hand-rubbed varnish it has, no matter how carefully calculated its design, or how flush its finishing nails, how stainless its many steel screws, a dining table which a six-year-old girl can snap apart like a pair of ramen truck chopsticks cannot, in the end, truly be considered a success.
But anyway, it’s not worth arguing, because that’s what happened the other day. And it’s not important or even relevant to discuss exactly how it happened, or who did it. Because obviously, it’s my fault. In fact, if the Enzo Mari X IKEA autoprogettazione table survived a day in our house, it’s only because our family and regular visitors were living in fear, subjected to a constant, low-level psy ops campaign of tense looks and warnings, with suspected leaners getting regularly guided toward the table’s side seats and away from the cantilevered ends.
Because the top clearly broke on Ikea’s butt joint, and not my own is of little comfort; it broke where the fulcrum was–the base. I knew it would/could happen when I decided to make my table top from horizontally built up Ivar shelving instead of the other two options I had: 1) tracking down the original, 200cm long Ivar shelves that had just been discontinued when construction began, or 2) using the thick, pine slab head and footboards from a king-size Mandal bed. The former, I nixed because I decided that building a table from discontinued Ikea parts might hinder the vast revolution in autoprogettazione-inspired Ikea hacking that would surely follow the debut of my project. The latter, well, the bed frame came already finished, and that felt a little like cheating.
Now, of course, with a card-table sized dining table, I’m more than ready to compromise. But Ivar long shelves are still discontinued, and now, it turns out, so is the wood-intensive Mandal bed, which has been redesigned to use no headboard, or a weird, slatty thing you mount on the wall.
That means I’m going to need to re-create the table top as-is, and reinforce it underneath, and hope that it holds. Or I’ll replace it entirely, probably with some slabs of sick, slick, ultra-deluxe 500-year-old sinker pine from the bottom of some icy river somewhere. Either way, I’ll be back in the basement, varnishing something soon.
Previously: The making of an Ikea X Enzo Mari table, in many chapters
‘200 Inch Photograph’
Yeah, there’s photomurals, but anyone who’s spent some time poking around greg.org might have found my even longer-lasting photo obsession: the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey [see background and making of info here and here.] The idea is to take he 1,870 pairs of photos that resulted from this ambitious, 9-year project to systematically document the universe, into the art context. Where it had not, to my knowledge, ever been. [Thomas Ruff comes the closest, obviously.]
And so one would understand the excitement at finding this entry–right after Moholy Nagy and Wright Morris, and above Muybridge and Nadar–in the checklist [pdf] for the 1964 inaugural show in the Edward Steichen Photography Center, MoMA’s first dedicated photography galleries:
Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories
Nebulosity in Monoceros. Situated in south outer region of NGC 2264.
Photographed in red light. 200-inch photograph. December 7, 1958.
Gift of Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories.
Dude, not only was the Palomar Sky Survey IN an art context; it launched the art context. Dude, with a 200-inch photograph, it owned the art context.
So what did this look like? It must have been spectacular. But I can’t find any installation photos, or any reproduction of the work, or any writeups at all for what had to have been the biggest of the 239 photos on view in that first show, bigger, even, than Lennart Olson’s mural.
No problem, I can find the image from the artist’s [sic] side. Though it has been superseded by several far more advanced surveys, imagery from the 1950s-era POSS-1 is still available in the Space Telescope Science Institute’s Digitized Sky Survey. Here’s the red plate showing nebulosity in the constellation Monoceros on the south outer region of NGC 2264:
That’s the Cone Nebula down there at the bottom, just on the edge of the plate. Now imagine this photo printed nearly 17 feet tall, striking visitors to the newly reopened Modern with awe as they see how far photography has come.
And you’d have to imagine it, because it didn’t happen. There wasn’t a 17-foot tall photo gallery in the Museum in 1964. In fact, I’d wonder if the ceilings in the then-new Philip Johnson annex were even 16 feet.
Also, it turns out that the POSS-1 image of NGC 2264 was made on Nov. 30, 1951, not Dec. 7, 1958. So the 200-inch photograph does not refer to the print size. It is likely a reference to the telescope that took it, Palomar’s Hale Telescope, which was the largest in the world from 1948 to 1993. It was conceived by George Ellery Hale, who secured $6 million for the project in 1928 from the Rockefeller Foundation.
Corning cast the 200-inch mirror from Pyrex in 1934-36, and it was transported across the country by train to Pasadena where, after eleven years of polishing and shaping, the 40-ton mirror was hauled to the top of Mount Palomar and installed in the 1000-ton, Pantheon-sized rotating observatory. Edwin Hubble took the first photograph with the 200-inch telescope in January 1949.
I still haven’t found the details of the photo MoMA exhibited, but the mirror story makes up for it a little. And I thought artists were crazy.
‘Do-It-Yourself Existential Individualism’
Frieze’s 20-year retrospective of itself continues apace, and wow, it’s like running into an old flame on a train platform.
I hadn’t thought about Daniel Birnbaum’s 1996 essay, “IKEA at the End of Metaphysics” in years, but wow, it’s just all flooding back.
From a Heideggerian perspective IKEA best sellers such as ‘Billy’, ‘Ivan’, and ‘System 210’ do not represent a corruption of everyday life, but have merely formalised what is already there; the IKEA catalogue only makes the tendency towards uniformity more conspicuous. Heidegger’s global ‘levelling’ is not a critique of the common forms of everyday life as such, but of their passive acceptance. At the end of metaphysics, levelling is complete – no one questions the catalogue.
Obviously–well, now it’s obvious, anyway–my own Ikea X Enzo Mari mashup project has its origins in the critical perspective of the company and its ideology which Birnbaum mapped out 15 years ago, and which I absorbed.
Also, I’m reminded how I miss Jason Rhoades.
IKEA at the End of Metaphysics [frieze.com/20/ via ronald jones]
Shiny Balls, By Gerhard Richter
Oh no! I mean, oh yeah!
Gerhard Richter did do other steel balls. At the end of his 1973 interview with Irmeline Lebeer, he complains about my favorites of his series, the grey monochromes:
the only problem with them is that they are so beautiful.
And that bothers you?
No, but it’s like a blank canvas. A blank canvas is the most beautiful thing, and yet you can’t just leave it like that. You have to add other elements to it. If it were only a question of perfection, we wouldn’t do anything any more.
You need dynamics and a certain tension.
Without those, everything would be dead. We would all come to an agreement, once and for all, on the sphere. At home, I have these particularly beautiful steel balls.4 But it’s impossible to get any closer to perfection. But we start down that path, it’s all over.
Which is an odd place to put a footnote saying that “Indeed in 1989 and 1992 Richter produced three editions of balls made of gleaming stainless steel.”
The largest was the last, Sphere III [above, via g-r], which was done in an edition of 11. In addition to the title, signature, number and date, each ball is engraved with the name of a Swiss mountain.
Spheres I and II are 8cm [ed. 25] and 5cm [ed. 11], respectively, with no mountains involved. According to the Dallas Museum of Art, which has all of Richter’s balls, they were all published by Anthony d’Offay and fabricated by FAG Kugelfischer, which I will assume is a company. Indeed, under the Schaeffler Group’s guidance, FAG has been a leading German manufacturer of ball bearings for over 120 years.
search results: kugel [gerhard-richter.com]
Previously: Richter’s Balls, Regrets
Art Poster
Honestly, I don’t know why I didn’t see it before. The answer‘s staring me right in the face. And I was so close with the Serra, too.
Annunciation After Titian, 343-1, 1973, Gerhard Richter [image via g-r]
This morning I just cracked open my Richter Bible, and started reading a 1974 interview of the bemused Richter by an insistent Gislind Nabakowski, who pressed the artist for his reasons for implicating himself in the “hackneyed language of symbols” of “the power of the hypocritical Renaissance,” and “sexual domination,” of the painting he’d recently copied, Titian’s Annunciation:
With regard to your approach to painting, you seem willing to encumber yourself with the concept of traditional symbolism, but you don’t illustrate it; you seem to be searching for your own symbolic references. Can you elaborate on this ‘illustrative realism’? Does it represent what the painter sees, or does it reveal his ‘reflections on what he has seen’ i.e., are his paintings platforms for the production of reality?
It certainly doesn’t show what one sees, because everyone sees something different, and what one sees isn’t a painting; it can only remind us of a painting. But, on the other hand, I don’t accept the principal difference between ‘pure’ pictures that only represent themselves and others that just illustrate something. If you take Ryman, Palermo or Marden, for example, in a away their paintings are also illusionistic, and you can only just identify the actual paint or the material if you have the eyes of a paint salesman.
Why did you paint over Titian’s motif and dissolve it?
Oh, I’m sure I didn’t initially plan it that way; I wanted to trace him as precisely as possible, maybe because I wanted to own such a beautiful Titian… [laughs].
That can’t be true. Not even the very first painting is a copy; you intended something else.
Sure. I only copied it from a postcard and not from the original as such. Although I must say that it is indeed possible to reproduce a painting from a postcard that is almost as beautiful as the original. Those few little details that would have been different really don’t matter–but that’s another issue.
Maybe for Richter.
Because when it comes to posters, what do people want to see more than beautiful works of art? The art poster has developed into a genre all its own. A genre and, as every museum shop, dorm quad, and Upper West Side laundry room can attest, a market.
Here is a poster I saw yesterday, Lot 270: Jasper Johns Flag I, which LA Modern is auctioning next month, with a description, “Poster based on the print,” a signature [!], a provenance, and an estimate of $1000-1500:
We demand a lot from our art posters. Posters signal our tastes and aesthetic identifications even more purely than the originals, which, by their scarcity, can only be possessed by a few, and thus can’t escape the aura of investment. Posters can also embody a history. You were there in Greenville in 1974, and Jasper signed your poster. That’s how it could look, anyway. We like our posters to faithfully approximate the experience and presence of the original.
And they must also have a significant, authentic presence–poster qua poster–of their own. Which can limit the works available to those that best fit the poster format. So you can blow up Matisse Jazz cutouts, or shrink a Rothko.
Gursky: 99 Cent, $24.95 [via momastore.org]
Like this powerful work,” Gursky: 99 Cent, a “MoMA Favorite” which pushes up against the dimensional limits of the poster medium [56″ x 34″] just as Gursky’s 207x337cm original tested the most advanced photo printing technology of its day [1999].
But that, as Richter says, is another issue. Just as you can paint a beautiful painting from a postcard, you could use a photo, tiled and transferred to silkscreens at life-size, then taped and folded into a box, to provide the authentic, transformative experience of being in the presence of the original. Assuming you open the box, that is. And that you have enough wallspace. Or maybe that’s what museums and exhibition copies are for. And your copy stays MIB.
So what’d work at that scale? Gursky, of course. But if you’re gonna do Gursky, do the 99 Cent II Diptychon, which unfurls to a positively Bus-like 207 x 682 cm:
99 Cent II Diptychon, 2001, at Philips de Pury in 2006 [image via thecityreview]
Or:
What Other Photo Of A Giant Thing Would You Turn Into A Life-Sized Silkscreen Poster?
It’s true, I like Mason Williams’ 1967 Bus for what it is.
But right now I love it for how it was made, the whole ridiculous, unanticipated, dogged, improvised, and ultimately successful process: the 4×5 negative; the 16×20 print; the 16-tile silkscreened billboard; the one-ton palletful of paper on the driveway; the cases of Scotch tape on the borrowed dance hall floor, the giant folding by hand; the warning not to open the box in the wind; the realization that after all that, most people are never gonna open the box in the first place.
That last point should negate the question I’ve been pondering, then, which is, if you were to make a giant photomural poster this way today, what image would you use? Assuming–or asserting–that it mattered, and that even though you’re doing it for the process, you’re not just going to use random image noise. [Though that is one option.]
Anyway, a bus is obviously out; you might as well do a reissue of Williams’ original. And though a whole host of large vehicles would be interesting–a dump truck, a train, a plane, perhaps a collector’s G5 as a commission–it might also be a little derivative.
Mondo-Blogo suggested “the ‘dirtbergs’ all over the city now. Facinating how the snow gets so black, and so filled with the most disgusting things.” And I do like their scale, ephemerality and banality, and the combination of abstraction and landscape.
You can’t go too architectural without treading on William Anastasi’s toes, or without aping Urs Fischer’s totalizing wallpaper. But an interesting structure or storefront does have its appeal, even though the idea is a print that feels more like a picture of something, and not an environment or space. It’s objectification through photography, and in turn, turning that photo into an [ultimately, probably] unseen object in a box.
Cheyney Thompson’s epic lifesize painting makes me want to do a newsstand, though.
And since these are objects, why not a large sculpture? Like the gilded Gen. Grant at Grand Army Plaza? Or Simone Bolivar on Sixth Avenue, for that matter? Why not a Torqued Ellipse? Imagine all the ink that silkscreen’d take.
Or maybe a rock or a tree.
What am I not thinking of? I’d be interested to know. What would you like to see? If I make one of them, I’ll be glad to send you a copy. Though if involves a shipping pallet, I may ask for your FedEx account number first.
Calm Center, By Ray Johnson
I’ve been focusing so much time on Johns, I fear I’ve been neglecting Johnson. But I wonder if he’s alright with that. Maybe Ray Johnson’s collage blends so seamlessly into Rauschenberg’s Short Circuit because collaboration, transformation, and subsumption were so central to Johnson’s own highly advanced, collaging practice. It’s enough to make me wonder what, if any, influence Johnson had on Rauschenberg during those early Black Mountain and combine days. Hopefully, there are theses on this already, or at least already in the works.
Meanwhile, I’ve had Johnson’s remarkable 1951 painting, Calm Center, open on my desktop for a couple of weeks now. It’s just beautiful. And the seriality, the grid, the geometry, the pixels, in 1951! I mean, wow. This what he dropped to start his correspondence and pop? Johnson could have been any major artist he wanted to be, and I think he was.
I’m gonna rewatch How To Draw A Bunny right now.
Previously: Ray Johnson on greg.org
Google Ramp View, Or My Google Art Project, Part 2
Sometimes I can’t tell when something is obvious, or when it’s just obvious to me.
But whichever this was, the idea came to me as soon as I figured out that the unidentified guy who was photographed at least 62 times in Google Street View’s mapping of the Binnenhof in The Hague was almost certainly a Google employee and not, in fact, a tourist who happened upon the Google Trike, figured out what it was up to, and followed along, quietly but persistently inserting himself into the company’s massively ambitious effort to map, photograph, and simulate the entire world.
Obviously, someone should quietly but persistently insert himself into the company’s massively ambitious effort to map, photograph, and simulate the entire world. And if the algorithms that stitch those panoramas together are going to erase everything but the top of that guy’s head, it might as well be me.
Google Trike and Google Guide at Kasteeltuinen, the Netherlands
Not to say that the Binnenhof Walking Man didn’t plan and execute his awesome portrait series–an inside job–but just to make sure, it’s important to re-create it by following a Google Trike somewhere. But where? Google’s been using the Trike as a non-threatening promotional tool, running contests to gin up excitement about where it should roll next. So anywhere the company would be likely to go on its own is already, by definition, a somewhat compromised artistic context.
And just angling to get your picture on Street View’s no good, either. There are plenty of people who ambush the Street View camera, or who react to or engage it, whether as an act of protest or “Look, ma, I’m on TV!” giddiness.
man with panda puppet, others waving at the Street View car in Sydney [via smh]
So it would need to be an art context. That’s a Google Trike no-brainer, or at least Google Trike-compatible. Ideally, it’s interesting in its own right, spatially, architecturally. If it had some spiraling and doubleback elements that could help replicate the atemporal incongruities of Walking Man’s walk around the Binnenhof. Is it obvious yet?
Henry Brant’s “Orbits” performed in the Guggenheim rotunda in 2009 [via nyt]
The real problem I saw for taking the Google Trike into the Guggenheim and up the ramp was neither logistics nor permissions. The Google Trike’s first outing was offroad, on far rougher, steeper terrain than Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda would offer. And the Guggenheim has obviously made itself available for artists’ productions, from Matthew Barney to Vanessa Beecroft to Francesco Vezzoli.
via newyorkinfrench.net
Even curatorially, the obstacles did not seem insurmountable. In 2010 Nancy Spector launched Intervals, a site-specific projects series that was inspired by, among other programs, Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Migrateurs projects at the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris. In a 2009 interview Spector did with Sarah Hromack, she tapped one of my formative memories of the Museum:
SH: It’s a compelling space. Frank Lloyd Wright tucked many interesting details into the museum’s tertiary areas; they are so easily overlooked.
NS: The triangular staircase, for instance, is a beautiful space. It has been rarely used by artists-in fact only twice if I recall correctly: in theanyspacewhatever exhibition Douglas Gordon installed his phrases in the stairwell. And Felix Gonzalez-Torres installed one of his light strings in 1995.
She went on to describe Intervals as interesting artistic responses to “situations that could be perceived as marginal.” Forget marginal; there’s nothing more marginal than not appearing in the museum in the first place. I figured that the best way to execute Walking Man was to not exhibit it at all, but just to let it appear, and be found organically on Street View itself. No announcement, no press release, no opening; one day it’s just there to be discovered.
And that is where I was confounded. The biggest obstacle I saw was persuading Google to ever be interested in adding the interior of any building–even one as awesome and iconic as the Guggenheim–to Street View.
via keithbradley’s flickr
When I went to the YouTube Play event at the Guggenheim last fall, I’d discussed a bit of this with Spector, and later, when talking about the Binnenhof series with a Google PR, I floated the idea of bringing the Trike up the ramp. In retrospect, now that I know the Google Art Project was well under way, and Street View images from 17 museums were already in the can, her bemused and slightly cagey responses make more sense.
via rhino8888’s flickr
So now the idea’s out there, but the context is somewhat changed. Seeing the Guggenheim’s rotunda on Street View would now generate less surprise than it would have a couple of weeks ago. But the modernist, curved abstractions and planes would still make for the most spectacular interior on Street View. Better than Versailles, you ask? Well, let’s put the Gugg on there and find out!
Oh look, there’s the guy pushing the Street View camera through the Hall of Mirrors!
And it really is and should be about the space. The other idea that seemed crucial to me was shooting the rotunda empty, focusing on the architecture [and avoiding the rights clearance issues that blurred half the artworks on MoMA’s Street View foray.] That means mapping while the rotunda is closed for deinstallation of a show. Have it full of crates, or workers–populate the panos with the staff themselves, make it a [blurred out] portrait of the Museum as an organization and a network as much as a space.
Anyway, that’s the idea.
My Google Art Project, Part 1A
Here’s the introductory text I wrote last Spring for Walking Man – A Collaborative Self-Portrait With Google Street View. I made some proofs, but I’m still figuring out the best size. If I do decide to publish it, I may polish up the title a bit.
And I’ll probably revise it. Street View’s imagery and technique seems to me to turn a lot of critical thinking about photography on its head, but as much as the theoretical implications fascinate me, every time I start writing about them, I feel like a poseur.
As ongoing enhancements and even promotional stunts like Google Art Project affirm, Google executives are working to make Street View the primary tool for us “visual animals,” a browser for the physical world. Robert Smithson wrote about studying massive infrastructures like dams to discover “unexpected aesthetic information.” Google is creating the most massive visual infrastructure project right now, and it is chock full of unexpected visual information.