Google Trike Plus One?




Google Street View Bilbao 2

Originally uploaded by artberri

I have no idea who walking man is, and ultimately it doesn’t really matter to me; the portraits of him that got inserted repeatedly throughout Google Street View ultimately stand on their own.

But at the very end of his tagalong, there’s a shot where he points across the Google Trike’s path. He’s gesturing, perhaps even to the cyclist/Trike operator himself. Which underscores the possibility that walking man did not just happen across the Google Trike; he may be involved with it somehow, as a tech, or a chaperone, or even the driver’s friend.

When I saw artberri’s flickr photos [above] of the Google Trike and Buddy circling the plaza at Arata Isozaki’s riverfront tower complex in Bilbao, I began wondering if a two-man team might be standard Google Trike operating procedure.

If so, the top of that other guy’s head might be a prominent feature when these Street View images come online. We may have a whole series of Trike-based portraits on our hands.

Whoa, Autoprogettazione X Artek Mashup

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HUGE news from on the Enzo Mari autoprogettazione X [Scandinavian Furniture Giant] mashup front:
The Finnish manufacturer Artek will announce ‘sedia 1- chair,’ “the first object from Mari’s thought-provoking project ‘autoprogettazione’ to go into production” with the company. “the first”!
Like the original “manufacturer,” Simon International, run by Dino Gavina, Artek will sell you a stack of pre-cut pine boards, some nails, and the instructions. Look at those wide boards, they’re built up, just like the tabletops on certain other autoprogettazione pieces I’ve seen from the region.
For the full press release/preview, and more shots of Mari building his own damn chair, thank you very much, go to designboom. [thanks andy]
Previously: the Enzo Mari X IKEA mashup saga

walking man – a self-portrait collaboration with Google Street View

walking man proof - 1
In the Summer of 2009, an unidentified young man came upon the Google Street View Trike preparing to map the Binnenhof, the center of the Dutch government, in The Hague. He decided to tag along.
The man walked alongside the Google Trike, persistently inserting himself in the foreground of its nine computer-controlled cameras’ panoptic fields of vision.
walking man proof - 3
Meanwhile, Street View’s automated panorama generation system read his presence as a data anomaly and consistently attempted to erase him from the photos.
walking man proof - 6
The resulting images, extracted from nearly every Street View panorama of the Binnenhof complex, reveal the history and process of their own making. They are at once a minute detail in Google’s extraordinary, ongoing portrait of the entire world, and one man’s wresting of control of his own image and his audacious assertion of his own presence.
I discovered these images in February 2010.
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At first, it was the distortions of time, space and perspective in these photos that caught my eye. As I began mapping out [sic] the scope of the project, however, I became fascinated by how this man seemed to travel almost precisely at the distance that simultaneously kept him in frame, but also all but guaranteed his algorithmic erasure.
Then I tried to understand the images as portraits, or self-portraits. As the exercise of the flaneur. The product of the flaneur’s gaze. An artifact of a moment in time, in space, evidence of the photographer’s decisions. As photos or cinema. Surveillance or subversion. Indexing, seriality. As virtual or real, documentary or manipulation, strategies or tactics. I looked at Muybridge and Marey. I went back to re-read Benjamin, Bergson, Barthes, de Certeau, Sontag, but these images seemed to thwart every attempt to put them into a critical or historical context as photographs.
And yet they’re so easy to look at and use; we all become Street View-proficient, if not fluent, within moments of our first encounter with it. And the walking man apparently made them on a whim, by doing nothing more than strolling along.
walking man - a self-portrait collaboration with Google Street View
I decided to extract, compile, and print the entire set of photographs as a book. The title, walking man, is a reference to Alberto Giacometti, whose sculptural notions of distance and vision I was studying at the time. “Self-portrait” is an acknowledgment of their subject’s creative intent, and “collaborative” refers not only to Google’s operation of the camera, but also to their first pass at selecting images, and to the crucial aesthetic impact their manipulations have on the images they ended up publishing.
The images are actually screencaptures from Google Maps in Safari that include every appearance of walking man within each panorama. Though I composed each screenshot, I consider this a found work, or a work made of found images. Which is why I’ve been looking lately at work by folks like Sherrie Levine and Larry Sultan.
With three exceptions, each of the 55 Street View panoramas in the set is represented by one photograph which includes all portrait elements. The first panorama in the series includes both the walking man and his reflection in the window of the Binnenhof security office, but they are at too wide an angle to include in one screencapture. So the images were extracted separately After sending the book to the printer, I found that another panorama also included a nearly straight-down image of walking man’s legs, which would not fit within the browser window on my laptop monitor. The other exception, below, was just too beautiful to resist, there are so many awesome things going on in this photograph.
walking man proof - 2
This proof copy was created using blurb.com. It’s 120 pages, and includes 57 portrait images and a reference Google Map, and a short introduction to the project. I thought the format might be too big, but it turns out it looks fantastic. The photos are a little dark, but that’s only because most of them were shot in the morning shade. My photos are dark because I shot them inside without a flash.
I am considering a limited print run, including editions reserved for the artist and the photographer, both of whom are currently unidentified.
There are several more shots from the proof on flickr.
Previous, related: How your Street View panoramas are made

The Meaning Of Maps, By Google’s Michael Jones


He’s pretty harsh on unnamed governments who complain about unblurred faces, and got more than a bit of engineer’s arrogance, which is why, I guess, he works for Google, but Michael Jones’s talk, “The Meaning of Maps,”at O’Reilly’s Where conference last week is pretty great.
Maps are not just place, they’re culture. Also, you get to see the Google Trike in action around the 13:00 mark.

CORRECTION: When’d The NGA Show Such Awesome Barkley Hendricks Paintings?

If there’s something I’m happy to be corrected on, it’s my assertion earlier this week that the National Gallery of Art has never exhibited its awesome, early, major Barkley Hendricks portraits.
It turns out they have, and here’s how we know:
I based my post on two things: the NGA’s online database of the paintings’ exhibition history, and discussions about the paintings and their documentation with folks in the archive and registrars’ offices.
Now a reader who has seen the location reports for each painting emailed to tell me they have, in fact, been shown publicly in the Gallery on various occasions. Turns out the exhibition history refers only to curated exhibitions, in or out of the NGA, in which a work is included. It does not include info on when apiece has been on public view. The location report, meanwhile, is basically a log of wherever a work has been or has been moved. And Hendricks’ paintings have been on view. Which is great.
On the real impetus for my post and my investigation, seeing if Hendricks’ paintings might turn up in the East Wing Galleries somewhere after completing their victory laps with the “Birth of Cool” retrospective, the reader was sanguine. Contemporary portraits are hard to work into the NGA’s hangs, but the appeal and buzz of the Hendrickses is hard to resist. So put that on your HOPE poster.
Thanks to my unidentified reader for the correction.

Who Knew There Was Writing Inside Those Aspen Magazines?

Making no small plans, the very first issue of Aspen contained a little booklet titled, “Configurations of the New World,”, papers, speeches, essays, discussions on the future [of cities, mostly] from 13 of the whitest guys they could find, as presented at the Aspen Design Conference. Here are a couple of quotes that caught my eye.
From “The Victory of Technique over Content,” a rumination/condemnation of the 1964 New York World’s Fair by architect and editor of Progressive Architecture, Jan C. Rowan:

The New York World’s Fair, in its planning, and its buildings, and its exhibits, shows us only what we already know: That we are creating very fast an ugly, inconvenient, depressing environment–full of gadgetry–that can occasionally hypnotize us through its razzle-dazzle and glitter, but, lacking any significant content, leaves us, in the long run, nervous, uneasy, and empty.

And from the late Interior Secretary and ur-environmentalist Stewart Udall’s optimistically titled essay, “The New Conservation Can Work,” comes this:

If we have reached the point where good design means efficiency, where investing in a good design or in a scheme of beauty is the best investment a businessman can make, we may have reached the point that Walter Gropius speculated on a few years ago when he said we wouldn’t really begin to build with greatness in this country until we had the right combination of politicians, artists, scientists, and enlightened businessmen. Maybe this is coming about.

Aspen 1, remember, was published in 1965, while the body of Park Avenue was still warm, with Gropius’s gargantuan urban disaster, the Pan Am Building, stuck in its heart. So maybe not.

‘Just Traces In The Snow In Winter’

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Dealer Leo Castelli in a December 1969 interview with Paul Cummings, discussing the early work of John Chamberlain:

Then before that, he had done those foam rubber sculptures, which were really very, very good. At that time, people were more squeamish about the durability of materials. Had he produced them now, they would have been an immense success. At that time, people just were very hesitant and very doubtful about getting things that they think or feared would disintegrate very rapidly. They turned out very well. Some people wouldn’t mind so much any more whether it would endure or disintegrate, because one has gotten used to works of art as just traces in the snow in winter.

Archives of American Art | Oral history interview with Leo Castelli, 1969 May 14-1973 June 8 [aaa.si.edu]
image: Lo-An, 1966, moca.org
Related? Aug 2008: The Making of a John Chamberlain sofa

In Xanadu Did Rauschenberg A Stately Parachute Deploy

It’s hard to say where the momentous awesomeness of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art’s 1963 Pop Art Festival first overwhelmed me.
When I learned that noted Pop Artist John Cage performed on opening night?
When I found out that Claes Oldenburg held an early Happening in the dry cleaners on P Street?
Or when I saw this picture from the gigantic dance extravaganza at the America on Wheels roller rink in Adams Morgan, organized by Billy Kluver, with Merce, Yvonne, and the Judson Dance Theatre?
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That is Robert Rauschenberg, on roller skates, with a parachute on his back, premiering his dance, Pelican, a tribute/homage to his heroes, the Wright Brothers.
Rauschenberg had been doing costumes and set design for Cunningham’s company for many years, but when the program for the Pop Art Festival performance listed him as a choreographer, he decided to roll with it, so to speak.
Well, it turns out Cage’s performance was a lecture; Oldenburg’s Happening was moved to the gallery; and this photo of Pelican is from 1965, by which point, Rauschenberg had more than a couple of days’ skating practice. But still, the magic lives on every time I go to that roller rink, which is now a Harris Teeter.
Update: Holy smokes, SFMOMA has a film clip. That’s Rauschenberg, Per Olof Ultvedt, and Merce Cunningham dancer Carolyn Brown. The SI’s Eye Level blog has comments by Alice Denney on Rauschenberg’s DC forays.

image: Peter Moore, published in Mary Lynn Kotz’s 2004 Rauschenberg Art/Life, via warholstars.org

Have You Seen Me?

Maybe that should be, “Hast du mich gesehen?”
Do you have Andrea Fraser’s Michael Asher book? Because as of Summer 2008, she would still like it back. Please mail it to her gallery, no questions asked:

I PURCHASED MICHAEL ASHER’S Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979 soon after it was published in 1983. At the time, it was the most expensive book I had ever bought. I read it from cover to cover and made lots of notes in the margins. It had a profound influence on my development as an artist. Ten years later, I included my copy in Services, a project I organized with Helmut Draxler in Germany examining the social and economic conditions of post-studio art. It was stolen from the show. If whoever took the book is reading this now, I beg you to return it to me. It is something I treasured, and the loss of it still makes me sad.

Fraser doesn’t specify where her book was stolen. According to her writeup for the show, hosted at ada’web [whoa, blast from the past], the project originated in “Kunstraum der Universitat Luneburg, January 29 – February 20, 1994. It toured to Stuttgart, Munich, Geneva, Vienna, and Hasselt, Belgium.” According to Fraser’s post-exhibition assessment of the project [sic], the first stop was a seminar format, so I imagine the book was taken from one of the later, less populated venues.
In place of your stolen version, perhaps you would consider downloading a PDF of Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979 from the other awesomely palindromic art website, Ubu? It doesn’t have Fraser’s marginalia, of course, but perhaps if you return it, she’d consider making a copy?
update: Wow, Fraser’s entire Artforum article on Asher is a great read. She makes a strong case for his comprehensive reimagining of artistic production outside the commodity-centered market model; she implicates art critics’ ignoring of economic aspects of artmaking and presentation as complicity with the market-centric system; and she delivers a thorough refutation of Benjamin Buchloh, a too-rare treat.

How’d The National Gallery Get Such Awesome Barkley Hendricks Paintings?

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Seriously. It’s been eating at me for over a year.
Like everyone else who saw them in “Birth of the Cool,” Nasher Museum curator Trevor Schoonmaker’s retrospective, I was in awe of Barkely L. Hendricks’ straight-up full length portraits from the early 1970s, which were usually of folks who didn’t have many full length portraits painted of them.
Hendricks is a resolutely representational painter, which is not to say traditional; his figures float on empty white [or gold leaf] canvas. My favorites, like Sir Charles, aka Willie Harris, above, have a triptych/multiple exposure/montage composition. They’re not just portraits, they’re paintings, in a defiant, powerful sense.
In fact, Sir Charles, painted in 1972, won my first, second, and third vote in the winter of 2009 for paintings the Obamas should hang in the White House. You remember the criteria: the work had to be in a national museum, but borrowing it couldn’t remove it from public view.
Perfect, Sir Charles is owned by the National Gallery of Art, and the collection database showed it wasn’t on view [of course not, because it was traveling as a star of Hendricks’ show.]
And here’s where the double mystery kicked in: Sir Charles has NEVER been exhibited at the NGA. Neither has the other incredible Hendricks painting in the collection, George Jules Taylor, also 1972.
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How could this be? The National Gallery is cutting edge enough to acquire major works by The New Painting Hotness [sic] before he’s on the cover of Artforum, they make the rounds in one of the most admired museum shows of the year, and yet they never show them themselves? EVER?
[UPDATE: Uh, no. An unidentified reader has correct me, thankfully. The NGA’s location records for the Hendricks works do indeed show that they have been exhibited at various times in the Gallery. The online exhibition history apparently refers only to curated shows, in or out of the Gallery. For more details on this correction, check this post.]
The kicker, of course, was right there in the collection info page. The accession numbers for the two Hendricks paintings are 1973.19.1 and 1973.19.2, which means, obviously, that they were acquired new. In 1973, the National Gallery purchased a newly minted Yale MFA’s triple portrait of the corner drug dealer outside his New Haven studio. It completely blew my mind.
There had to be a story there, I figured, so I started digging. And came up nearly empty at every turn. I thought I’d just look in the NGA’s archive, but there was nothing there. Who was the curator savvy enough to find his or her way to Hendricks back then? No idea, it turns out the NGA did not even have a curator dedicated to modern and contemporary art until the 1980s.
The NGA website has basically everything that the institution knows about the paintings. Since I started asking around the NGA several months ago, the provenance info has been updated to say when they were acquired: May 1973. They came from the Kenmore Gallery in Philadelphia, where Hendricks had his first solo shows. They’re the only works in the collection with the credit line, “William C. Whitney Foundation.” Not a lot to work with.
But not nothing. William C. Whitney’s son Harry Payne Whitney’s wife Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney founded the Whitney Museum, where Hendricks had been included in a major–and controversial–show in 1971, “Contemporary Black Artists in America.” The show had grown out of a compromise with the black art community, which, along with important groups like the Art Workers Coalition, had criticized the persistent absence of non-white artists in the museum’s collection and program. When the black advisers to the show’s white curator quit, a large group of artists withdrew and called for a boycott. A high profile museum show might explain how Hendricks got on the art world’s radar, but not how his work made it into the NGA.
Whitney Whitney Whitney. It turns out the William C. Whitney Foundation had been created, not by the Museum Whitneys, but by Harry’s sister, Dorothy Payne Whitney in honor of their father, but for the use of her son, Michael Whitney Straight. At least according to Tragedy and Hope, by Carroll Quigley.
Get out your foil hats and turn up Glenn Beck, because Quigley is the highly influential Georgetown history professor whose controversial writings on the history of Anglophile secret societies is the tenuous basis of classic rightwing conspiracy theory. Beginning in 1970, Quigley’s work was mutated, Pale Fire-style, by Beck’s favorite Mormon wingnut academic W. Cleon Skousen, into a Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory between the Communists, JP Morgan, and everyone in between.
And guess who Mike Straight’s dad worked for? JP Morgan. And guess who Mike Straight was a spy for while he was at Cambridge in the 1930s, and later after he moved back to the US to work at the State Department? The Soviet Union.
His Communist sympathies didn’t last through the war, and when Straight was being considered for the head of the new National Endowment for the Arts the Kennedy Administration was planning, Straight came clean, exposing the rest of the Cambridge Five spy ring. Straight became the deputy head of the NEA, which didn’t require a Senate confirmation. And he wrote extensively, both about his own spy history, and about the formative people and stories of the NEA.
None of which sheds any light at all on the NGA and their Hendrickses.
Finally, after exhausting every potential archival source, I contacted Trevor Schoonmaker at Duke’s Nasher Museum. Who, it turned out, was just taking paternity leave, perhaps I’d rather talk to Barkley himself?
So a couple of weeks ago we set it up to chat on the phone. Here’s how it went down:
J. Carter Brown himself had gone to the Kenmore Gallery and asked Hendricks’ dealer Harry Kulkowitz to see some paintings for possible acquisition. The selections were made, and Kulkowitz and Hendricks brought the works to DC for consideration. “I went down with Harry, and it was a situation where the pieces were pretty large, and I had to design the stretcher to fold. So once we got down, i unfolded them and put them together. and that set the acquisition ball in motion.”
Brown apparently tapped Straight personally for the acquisition funds. I didn’t think to ask how much the Gallery paid, but Hendricks said in an interview last year that, “I had reached the $5,000 ceiling that black artists have, in 67 or 68. Someone said that once (that there is a $5,000 ceiling for black artists).” And when I asked Hendricks about the importance of being in the Whitney show, he laughed it off, saying that “Black people were fashionable at that time.”
Well, they’re kind of hot right now, too. “Birth of the Cool” wraps up at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston on April 18th. What better time for the National Gallery to finally celebrate its illustrious former director’s prescient acquisitions by finally showing a Hendricks painting or two [again, see correction above] in Washington DC?

Cage Match

I was reading Calvin Tomkins’ 1963 New Yorker profile of abstract sculptor Richard Lippold, who was a favorite of the International Style and High Modernist architecture crowd. Depending on your mood, Lippold’s giant, intricate, and ambitious metal & wire works were breaking Important Art of The Future out of the twee confines of the gallery and museum. Or he was making quintessentially aggrandizing corporate lobby art, built-in Bertoias for barons and bankers.
lippold_the_globe.jpgMost of the article tells the crazy story of the creation and installation of Lippold’s best-known work, Apollo and Orpheus, which tumbles through the lobby of Philharmonic Hall [now Avery Fisher Hall] at Lincoln Center. But this remarkable bit is from May 1962, and the making of his most-seen work, The Globe [later changed to Flight], the shimmering, golden wire sculpture in the Vanderbilt Avenue lobby of the Emery Roth, Gropius & Belluschi’s Pan Am building [now Met Life] behind Grand Central Station:

Lippold was also engaged at this time in a curious negotiation with his Pan Am patrons. He had discovered that the building had been wired throughout for Muzak. Muzak has long been one of Lippold’s particular abominations, and, with his customary directness, he voiced his dismay at a cocktail party given by the late Erwin S. Wolfson, the New York investment builder who had largely conceived and financed the Pan Am Building. If the building had to have music at all, Lippold suggested jokingly, why not let him commission some contemporary music by John Cage? Wolfson floored him by saying, “Go ahead.” At the time, Lippold told a friend, “Wolfson belongs to the new breed of industrialists who respect artists. He trusts them, he’s willing to let them do what they want without interference. But, my God! Think of it! Cage is still too avant-garde for the concert halls, and here’s a chance for his music to be played to an audience of thousands and thousands a day! It will be the first time in history that music has been commissioned to go with architecture–or at least, the first time since the medieval cathedral Mass.” Wolfson said he would take care of persuading his board of directors, and Lippold got Cage started thinking about the project.

Not sure what’s more unsettling: the “new breed of industrialists” gladhanding, or the Richter-meets-Kinkade-style paradox of Cage doing Muzak.
But whaddya know, the project went forward. As one might have expected of an artist working in ambient sound, Cage had invested years of thought in solving The Muzak Problem. In his 1998 article in The Musical Quarterly on Cage’s approach to silence, Douglas Kahn makes an interesting analysis of Muzak’s connection to the development of Cage’s best-known composition, 4’33”. In a lecture he gave in 1948, four years before creating 4’33”, but which he never republished, Cage talked about another silent composition, Silent Prayer:…which would consist of 3 to 4-1/2 minutes of sustained silence (the maximum time being just three seconds short of 4’33”) to be played over the Muzak network.

Unlike the silence of 4’33”, in which not playing is the means for the audience to hear the sounds surrounding them, Kahn wrote that Cage saw Silent Prayer more like an intermission, a “reprieve” from Muzak’s unobtrusive yet pervasive performance.
He also makes a fascinating point about Duchamp’s readymades and the length of Silent Prayer [and, by a 3-second extension, 4’33”], which was based on the standard duration of commercial music.
Back to Pan Am. With the technical assistance of Bell Labs [Kluver? Anyone? Aha, Max Matthews. see the update below.] Cage’s Muzak project had made it to the “elaborate presentations” stage, and by August 12, 1962, the idea was fully developed enough for Raymond Ericson to report the details in the Times:

[Cage] decided to “make use of the things that were right there” in the lobby. This was to include the supply of Muzak, for which Pan Am had a contract; the necessary speakers in the walls, and a set-up of television screens with photo-electric cells for keeping an eye on the passers-by.
Mr. Cage devised a system whereby the people going through the lobby would activate the photo-electric cells. These in turn would release the Muzak music, which would become pulverized and filtered in the process. Even people getting in and out of elevators would have a part in producing the sound. Since the cells would never be activated in the same way, the results would be constantly in variation.

Rather than underscore the pervasiveness of Muzak by giving its unwilling audience a temporary reprieve, Cage would make the pedestrian throngs aware of their collective selves, by giving everyone the power to toggle the Muzak off and on.
Unfortunately, Wolfson, the new breed of industrialist, died in July, and the reason the Times was writing about Cage’s piece was because the old breed of board members had just rejected it. “As one vice president said: ‘The American business man and the esthete do not always see eye to eye.” Really.
Ericson’s kicker makes me want to head up to Bard and start digging through the archive at the John Cage Trust: Mr. Cage does not feel particularly disappointed in the failure of his plan. He believes his ideas are sufficiently in the air to be acted on someday.
UPDATE: Apparently, in the Spring 2008 issue of Representations, the University of California Press Journal, Herve Vanel wrote an article about Cage’s relationship with Muzak titled, “John Cage’s Muzak-Plus: The Fu(rni)ture of Music.” which I would buy for something less than the $14 UCP is asking. [UPDATE UPDATE: it seems like I’m the only guy without a subscription, better get on board. Thanks to Douglas and Brian for loaning me their pdf version of Vanel’s article.]
Some interesting finds from Vanel’s paper: Cage had been thinking about a Muzak composition, called Muzak-Plus, in 1961, which I would imagine his friend Lippold would have known about. It was Bell Labs computer music pioneer Max Matthews who collaborated with Cage on the Pan Am Building, not Billy Kluver. But Matthews’ photo-electric switch and mixer design apparently resurfaced as a dance device in 1965 when Kluver participated in Variations V with Cage, Merce Cunningham, David Tudor, and Stan VanDerBeek. Which is like the best Merce & John clip on YouTube.
On the downside, is that renovation related to the 2005 purchase of the Met Life building by Tishman Speyer? Or have security retrofits destroyed whatever spatial integrity the lobby had? Do we know need to wonder what a John Cage piece based on the random, unimpeded flow of crowds into a lobby would sound like before and after September 11?

What’s Happening? Claes Oldenburg’s Stars Via Time And Alice Denney

I’ve already mentioned the May 3, 1963 Time Magazine article about the Washington Gallery of Modern Art’s Pop Art Festival; it’s really not much, but it contains the most extensive contemporary account of Claes Oldenburg’s 1963 Happening, Stars. Here’s how they reported the grand finale:

Red Gee String.
As the evening wore on, slides of naked women were projected, suggesting that pornography has its place among the neo-Palladian splendors of the alabaster city. Waiters spilled bits of plastic from trays onto the audience. A woman came on wearing a shredded American flag on her head; her spine was as stiff as a flagpole. It had to be, since it was part of the monument to the victory at Iwo Jima, and three soldiers held her at the appropriate tilt. A 14-year-old boy in a Lincolnesque beard entered the room, was shown to his seat, and sat there waiting to be shot. Zow.
For the closing number, Miss Washington, stacked like the melon gallery, appeared in a mass of red taffeta. She pulled her rip cord, and there she stood–after all, it is the nation’s capital–not quite nude. An aw-gee string. A suggestion of red taffeta there-there and there.
She turned and bolted like a moose, followed by official Washington, gurgling hip-hip for happenings.

All these activities map very closely to Oldenburg’s script, which was transcribed and published with his Raw Notes in 1971. But these incomplete accounts generate as many questions as they answer about how Stars took shape, what actually happened, and what happened afterward as a result.
I finally decided to go to the source. Last week I spoke with Alice Denney, who organized the Pop Art Festival and curated the Popular Image show it accompanied. She was generous and awesome, and not a little bemused at my questions–or that I was asking them at all.
How many Happenings were there? When and why did the site move from the cleaners to the Gallery, and how did that affect it?

AD: We thought we could do it in the rug cleaning place on P Street, but a few days before, a couple of the trustees came in and said, “You couldn’t do it there, there’s no egress.” So we moved it.
…
[The content] didn’t change, even though the space was much tighter. We used the stairway so that Olga Kluver could come down.

Ah, so Olga Kluver was the one in the red taffeta dress. In 1963, though she was living with Billy Kluver, she still went by Olga Adorno. Kluver, of course, had helped organize another major event for the Festival, a multi-stage dance performance by the Judson folks at a roller skating rink in Adams Morgan. Meanwhile, in 1964, Andy Warhol threw a party to celebrate Adorno and Kluver’s marriage.
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Adorno appeared in at two of Warhol’s Screen Tests, ST184 and ST185, both in 1964. She also performed in Happenings by Allan Kaprow, Red Grooms, and Robert Whitman. Apparently, Adorno’s still going strong, creating enigmatic performance works from her base in Nice, France. But back to Mrs Denney, who was the gallery staffer mentioned in Time as making blue ice cream and serving it on picnic plates, and whose son was the stand-in for Lincoln:

…It was all about Washington: the monuments, the dinner parties…
Everybody wanted to go, and all the fancy folks wanted to be in it.
But it was pretty much my gang of crazies, [Claes] didn’t want society ladies.

And it turned out to be quite popular. The reservations filled right up for all three Happenings [one on Wed., Apr 24, and two on the 25th]. Mrs Denney mentioned that in addition to performing in Stars, Claes’s first wife, Patty [Pat Muschinski], worked on many of Oldenburg’s soft sculptures and costumes, and wrote a memoir of the Happening for Art in America. And so the chain continues.

How Your Street View Panoramas Are Made

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I’ve been looking into how Google Street View panoramas are made, and it’s been kind of awesome. Each equirectangular panorama is stitched together on the fly out of 21 photos.
Equirectangular projection, or plate carrée (flat square), is a technique that maps coordinates onto an evenly spaced grid of latitude and longitude, which produces significant distortions, especially along the perimeter. Like how Antarctica ends up looking bigger than the rest of the continents put together. Flickr user swilsonmc’s images of flattened out Street View panoramas show the axis of distortion quite nicely.
I think there are other distorting elements in Street View, though; it appears that each panorama is anchored to a specific set of lat/long coordinates. [The Street View data layer on Google Earth shows this beautifully by plopping these 3D pano bubbles down on its own 3D landscape. (top) It’s like simulation-within-simulation. Also, they look like inverted satelloons, only they’re projecting back their surroundings from the center, rather than reflecting from the surface. I mean, just check out the highly reflective surface of the PAGEOS global mapping satellite for a minute. Am I right? Wait, did someone say mapping?]
Anyway, the panoramas pull together the best images of that spot, which are not necessarily taken at that spot. Google’s roving cameras are shooting constantly, so there images approaching and leaving a particular panorama site. This introduces multiple POV and perspectival distortions into a single panorama. Which can result in awesome, zig-zagging thickets of tree trunks, fence posts, stanchions, and disembodied pedestrians. And which all remind us that these panoramas are not photos, but photomontages.

But wait, that’s not all! swilsonmc also created a php script that turns every flattened Street View panorama into a frame of video. The flickr video above shows the trip up the Long Beach Freeway in LA, from Seal Beach to Glendale. It reads as a continuous trip, of course, but if you watch the traffic and the clouds, the other Street View distortion–time–so obvious it’s invisible, becomes clear: there are photos taken on different days.
Roland Barthes described photography as “the presence of a thing (at a certain past moment).” The always didactic John Berger said,

Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. A photograph is a result of the photographer’s decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen

and on the intrinsic temporal content of photography, he said, “This choice is not between photographing x and y: but between photographing at x moment and not at y moment.” I think it becomes clear that in the traditional, theoretical sense, whatever Google Street View images are, they are not photography.