greg.org – Page 182 – the making of, by greg allen

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.

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

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.

greg.org’s Top One Tips For Making A Book Using Blurb.com’s BookSmart Tool

So the last couple of months, I’ve been working on an idea for book, and I wanted to see a mockup/proof. It’s mostly photographs/images, with a very text introduction, and I wanted only one image per spread, like a nice little monograph. Which means a lot of blank facing pages. Which is fine if you’re printing a run of books, even a small one. But it sucks if you use an on-demand printer, which usually start charging $1-1.50 for each page over, say 20.
I decided to use Blurb.com for the proof, partly because they offer a nice variety of formats and finishes, but also because their stepped pricing structure was quite reasonable. Also, their BookSmart tool is pretty flexible for putting the book together. There’s a large selection of page layouts, which I was able to pare down and edit to my own liking. So far so good.
Here’s my first and only tip for anyone thinking about using Blurb & BookSmart: BE $)(%ING SURE AND HAPPY WITH THE SIZE AND FORMAT OF YOUR BOOK, BECAUSE IF YOU WANT TO CHANGE IT, YOU’LL HAVE TO START OVER FROM $#*(%(ING SCRATCH. HOW THE HELL CAN SOMEONE CALL AN APPLICATION “BOOKSMART” WHEN IT IS TOO )($*#%ING STUPID TO BE ABLE TO ACCOMMODATE THE MOST BASIC CHANGE OPTION OF ALL?
So yeah, the proof arrives in a few days, we’ll see how it looks [besides, too big, obviously.]

On Being Ivan Karp In 1962

The Archive of American Art’s collection of transcripts of Paul Cummings’ interviews with art world figures is always good for a firsthand account and an interesting nugget or reflection. But I don’t think I’ve ever had quite the visceral reaction I got reading Ivan Karp’s account of the emergence of Pop Art in New York in 1961-2. At the time Karp was director of Leo Castelli Gallery. Roy Lichtenstein had just brought in some paintings done from comic books, which Karp and Castelli both found extremely unnerving. Here’s an extended excerpt, but you could really read almost anything and just be hit by the sense of discovery and amusement of Karp’s story:

But we kept I think four of them. And then Leo saw them and had his own set of reactions to them. Which was pretty startling. And we both were jolted. We thought well let’s look at them again; we’ll put them in the racks and we’ll take them out again and see how they feel as the days go by. I told you earlier in the tape about how other reactions were; we showed them to people who came into the gallery. And it was not good. It was a bad scene. There were really truly unpleasant moments there because people thought that if we’d show art like that it would be the end of our situation, that we were pushing things too hard. And we said, “No, no, it’s really an intelligent and original innovation. It’s peculiar and alien and strange and we’re going to look at them some more.” I don’t know if I told you that Warhol, who was a collector to a certain extent at that point, (I didn’t know who he was ) he came in with some young men who had also been buying works from me, and I remember Warhol bought a little Jasper Johns drawing for $350. What a beautiful drawing! Wow!
[ed note: The invoice for Wahol’s Johns drawing, Light Bulb, 1958, graphite wash, 6 1/2″ x 8 3/4″, dated 8 May 1961, is in the amount of $450, which Warhol paid in installments. Here’s the sketch; it was in Sotheby’s Warhol sale in 1988, and it was resold at Christie’s in 1998.]

PAUL CUMMINGS: Warhol bought the drawing?
IVAN KARP: Warhol, yes. He came back the next week. And I said, “Oh, there’s a curious painter downstairs that I’d like you to look at; very strange.” (I didn’t know who Warhol was or what he did. All I knew was that he was a man with a crop of gray hair who came in an bought a Jasper Johns from me). He issued one of his curious little sounds like an astonished “Oh!” that he says every so often, which he still says in a state of astonishment. He said, “Good God” — or whatever he was exclaiming — “I’m doing something like this myself!!” He said, “What are these paintings doing here!” Whose work is this! What is this man! What is he thinking!” He was really shocked and at the same time he was appalled. And I think he was very troubled that somebody else was doing the same thing. And he asked me if I wouldn’t come to his studio and look at what he was doing. I said, “Do you mean to say that you’re really concerned with the same kind of images?” He said, “Yes. I actually am doing cartoon things and like commercial subjects. But they’re different, of course; they’re very different. Would you come and look?”

You know, it’s really too long for the front page, so I put the rest of it after the jump.

Continue reading “On Being Ivan Karp In 1962”

What’s Happening? Nina Burleigh Takes On Claes Oldenburg

In her 1998 biography of Mary Pinchot Meyer, Nina Burleigh used Stars, Claes Oldenburg’s Happening at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art’s 1963 Pop Art Festival, as a bellwether for sophisticated Georgetown/Washington’s temperament towards contemporary art. Here’s how Burleigh described the event [from p. 202]:

Stars: A Farce for Objects Designed by Claes Oldenburg and involving twenty-one players, the happening lampooned official Washington and satirized the capital’s iconography. One pieces was a huge sewn miniature of the Washington Monument moving around by means of seven people huddled inside. One scene involved a very well-endowed naked woman coming down some steps, and included such absurdities as a roller skater, a waiter carrying a tray and spilling colored foam rubber bits, a girl brushing her teeth, two men spraying room deodorant, a woman undulating inside two mattresses, a girl ironing, and a child dishing out blue frosting. It was accompanied by drumbeats and a rendition of “Sweet Leilani.” Each action was repeated twenty-four times. It was received with annoyance by the art critic for the Washington Evening Star, who found the whole evening tedious. The show, he wrote, “will be repeated and repeated and repeated tonight.”

Here’s another rendition of “Sweet Leilani,” by the incomparable Hawaiian duo Basil and Pat Henriques.

Waiting For Gopnik

Hello, English-speaking media world! What have you been doing the last twenty years that you have not ever produced an article on Tejo Remy, the only designer to consider the borders of furniture and art?
Never mind, Blake Gopnik is here to correct this unforgivable travesty of public relations and/or poor Nexis searching skillz:

It has been two decades since Remy’s stunning debut, and this article is the first one in the English-speaking world to try to take his measure.
“We are walking a line: ‘Is it art or design?’ ” Remy says. And they are walking it almost alone.

Yes, alone except for the designer of every single item between Milan, Miami, and Moss–and half the people who passed through Utrecht in the last twenty years! But please continue, o design historian!

Even most avant-garde designers have come up with new models for comfort and ease — turning away from Victorian velvet-on-oak, for instance, to embrace Bauhaus, then Danish modern. What few designers have done is work to abolish comfort itself as a design principle, in favor of objects that disconcert. That’s the Remy and Veenhuizen model.
…
You can still order one of Remy’s drawer-piles from the Dutch distributor Droog, which sponsored some of his early work and has become much better known than Remy himself.

“Distributor”? “sponsored”? Droog began as a design collective, with Remy as one of its early members. His drawer-piles [sic], aka the You Can’t Lay Down Your Memory bundled bureau, dated 1991 and exhibited in Droog’s Milan debut in 1993, was the collective’s signature design.
I don’t begrudge Remy or any early Droog participants for seeking to build their own brands outside the increasingly corporatized Droog umbrella. In the last several years, Remy’s been using language to distance Droog from his design and process, by saying they “commissioned” the dresser. Now it’s “sponsored.” But only someone completely ignorant of the history of design generally–and of Dutch design and Droog specifically–could write something as wrong as this.
Dutch design team Tejo Remy and Ren & [sic] Veenhuizen mount first U.S. ‘solo’ show [washpost]
image and completely contradictory explanation of Droog and Remy via moma.org

The Pneumatic Nomadic Campus

Domes, inflatables, World Expos, Buckminster Fuller, every once in a while around here, it feels like I’m just blogging about whatever artist Steve Roden blogged about three years ago.
The Antioch Bubble is one of those times. [Though, to my credit, I was within range in Feb. 2008]
After its main Ohio campus was shut down by a student strike, Antioch College began establishing satellite campuses around the country. The school’s hands-on, experiential learning approach lent itself to the development of a giant, one-acre bubble structure in Columbia, Maryland to house administration, classes, and other student activities. There were domes and other bubbles inside the 32,000 sf Bubble.

Considering they’re mostly used for tennis courts and sports stadiums now, it’s interesting to how politically polarized this inflatable structure concept had once been. Ant Farm was promoting inflatable lounges for naked hippies at Altamont at the same time the USIA was building a giant, balloon-roofed pavilion for the Osaka World Expo. And at the center of a master-planned real estate development of a city, Activist/architect Rurik Eckstrom was ranting against evil corporations from his Ford Foundation-funded dome.
The Antioch Bubble was contemporaneous with it all; there was a full model and 1,000sf mockup in the bag by 1971, and the real thing started going up in the Fall of 1972. An early Nor’easter flattened it in November of ’73. Design and construction were overseen by Ekstrom, an architecture professor at UMD, and a team of 15 students.
It’s still blowing my mind a little bit that such a radical-sounding guy as Eckstrom could be spearheading a truly experimental program to rebuild America’s schools, and with widespread institutional support. And at the same time that Popular Science is announcing the Glorious Inflatable Future has arrived, and we’ll all soon be living in Goodyear houses. PopSci called it “Antioch’s one-acre Pneumatic Nomadic Campus,” and touted its inexpensive portability.
From a NY Times article on May 26, 1973 [interior photo above], it appears a bit of the educational/collaborative value of the project was lost in a rushed to complete in time to host the National Conference on Air Structures in Education, which sounds like an event created to tap a funding source:

[Student/designer/participant Mike Krinsky] said he came here in January because he thought Antioch and the bubble project might help him learn to become a “competent activist.” He said he had become, instead, a poorly paid day laborer. “I’m leaving right now feeling I’ve been used.”

An important lesson for the interns of the future.
On the bright side, when Roden posted about Antioch in 2007, there was almost nothing online about it, or about Ekstrom. That has now changed. Factory School is building an archive of historical material and first-person accounts of the Bubble, which is being helped along by the likes of Google Books.
And the DC area may see another Pneumatic Event Space yet. If the Hirshhorn’s DS+R courtyard-filling donut bubble comes to fruition, the inflatable future may yet be upon us.

[2o22 update] While the fate of Factory School’s update is unclear, I did just receive an amazing first-person account of The Bubble from Richard Benjamin:

I worked and semi officially lived in The Bubble for about a year. It was great experience. The basic idea was sound, improvisation is what kept it up. The building was fairly (tolerably?) comfortable in Spring and Fall, scaldingly hot in summer, and numbingly cold in winter. The Bubble had heating and AC, both proved a bit inadequate if memory serves…but neither were used much due to huge spikes in energy costs not anticipated by the builders. The building didn’t require a lot electric power to stay inflated…if the wind blew in the right direction you could turn off the fans. You just opened an airlock on windward side and that produced enough pressure to keep the building inflated-with a bit more sway and sag than normal.

Climbing along the main roof cables was a lot of fun. The building rocked up and down in the slightest breeze. We did a lot of climbing because the thin skin required constant patching. You sat of an inflatable mattress to make repairs…quite high above the ground, but you didn’t notice unless you were over the clear skin sections. If you fell through it would likely kill you. Nobody fell…not for lack of trying. The Bubble was located near an outdoor music venue, and music goers would not infrequently wander over to have a look. The more inebriated would decide to climb up one of the main cables. Sometimes wearing high heels. When they encountered the clear sections and realized they were maybe three stories off the ground, they would freeze in place. A rescue team with an air mattress would be sent topside to shove them to safety.

A couple of years after the Bubble went down in a fading hurricane, I went to Syracuse University to get Ph.D. in biology. Syracuse had a brand new stadium with an air supported dome. I’d sit high in the cheap seats and think “yeah, I had a part in making this fad possible.”

Epic. Thank you for your service.

Event Architecture [airform archive]
Learning from Antioch – Columbia [factoryschool.com at the internet archive, rip]

What’s Happening? Art Buchwald Lunches With Claes Oldenburg

The week before The Pop Art Festival in Washington DC, Art Buchwald had lunch with Claes Oldenburg, WGMA Assistant Director Alice Denney, and publicist John Mecklin. The topic was Oldenburg’s upcoming Happening, Stars. Buchwald wrote (in the first person plural) about the lunch in the April 16, 1963 edition of the Washington Post:

Pop art, in case you’re wondering, is the latest thing, in which artists use anything form comic strips to American flags to give a new concept to reality and illusion. (It’s more than that too, but we’re not sure how much more.)
…
“Mr. Oldenburg,” we said, “What is a Happening?”
“There is no definition. I don’t know myself what a Happening is. It’s putting all the elements and senses together and composing a picture. Sight, sound, smell, imagination. Everything plays a part.”
“I see,” we said. “How do you organize a Happening?”
“I buy things at the Goodwill Industries, the Salvation Army, and second-hand shops. Then I find a place to have a Happening in. It must have three-dimensional space and it’s best if the thing you find is characteristic of the composition you’re trying to create.
“Naturally,” we said. “Where is your Happening going to take place?”
“I’ve had a lot of difficulty finding the right spot. You see, at a Happening the place where you do it is as important as what you do. I found a rug cleaning shop which looked just perfect, since there was lots of junk in it. But the Fire Department wouldn’t let me use it. Fire Departments and Police Departments and vice squads give us the most trouble about our Happenings.”
“That’s because they’re square,” we said.
“So I’ve decided to give my Happening to the Washington Gallery itself. Now I know you’re going to say this violates the idea of holding a Happening in a typical place. But in this case the gallery is okay because the walls are white and it’s typical of the Washingtonian’s yearning for everything in the city to be white. Therefore it’s really a good place for a happening.”
…
As we left the restaurant we stopped by Mrs. Denney’s station wagon, which she had lent him to scout for things for the Happening. In the back were a baby carriage, six small footstools, a bird cage, a first-baseman’s mitt, a mirror, an iron bedstead, and two pairs of saddle shoes.
“What are you going to do with all that?” we asked.
“I don’t know,” Mr. Oldenburg said. “I might use them in the Happening and I might not. It all depends on how I feel.”

Photography Is Dead

In Frieze, Jennifer Allen [no relation] declares the death of photography. Film photography, that is:

Digitalization brings photography closer to cinema, too. The galloping horse that Eadweard Muybridge photo-graphed with 24 cameras can now be captured with one high-speed digital camera. While analogue cameras take five frames per second, the digital ‘burst mode’ can take 30 high-quality frames per second (and over 1,000 in lower quality). Photographers may keep their fingers on the button and choose the best frame later. In light of these developments, artists who made photographs look like film stills – Cindy Sherman in her series ‘Untitled Film Stills’ (1977-80) or Raymonde April in her series ‘Sans titre’ (Untitled, 1979-80) – anticipated the transformation of photography from a fleeting image to a moving one.
Yet, if a camera can take 1,000 frames per second, are the resulting images photographs, stills or clips? If an artist prints one frame selected from 1,000 is she a photographer or an editor? Words like ‘snapshot’ and brands like Kodak’s Instamatic cameras reflected the old desire to capture a moment that would otherwise disappear. With the speed and storage of today’s digital cameras, it becomes hard to miss any moment.

If photography actually is dead, I’d hope it’d get a little better sendoff. Allen’s onto something, but her piece ends before she’s even able to make an argument. The obsolescence of film- and chemical-based photo technology is undeniable–not that anyone’s denying it–but that means that photography’s really just as dead as the medium it once supposedly killed: painting.
Long Exposure [frieze.com]

Roel Wouters’ Shiny Silver Balls

Suddenly silver mirrored balls are everywhere.
Music video and filmmaker Roel Wouters created the trailer for last year’s International Film Festival Breda:

A silver sphere on an endless checkerboard floor is the default for many 3D modeling applications. It can be seen as an icon for a sterile, makeable world. Reality though, is dirty and unpredictable. By recreating this icon in reality the beauty and imperfection of real life gets emphasized.
The recording was the result of 3 people controlling different parts of the installation, Roel controlled the speed of the balls, Benoit (Eurogrip) controlled the speed of the dolly and Sal focussed and zoomed the camera. It turned out to be a play were the 3 of us playing harmoniously together.

It’s awesome. Coincidentally–actually, several coincidentallies–a selection of Wouters’ work was screened just today in Den Haag, organized by a cinema club called Cinetoko. Cinetoko is a collaborative effort between Motoko, a motion and video design studio, and <>TAG, an art/tech/culture catalyst of some kind. It happens at the Zeebelt Theater, which is safely to the west of any Google Map camo or StreetView complications. [via manystuff thanks andy]

Shiny Space Balls? Yes, Please, I’ll Take Two. No, Four.

I could feel Mondo-Blogo was baiting me as I scrolled through the photos from MoonFire, Taschen’s luscious 2009 commemorative book for the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. He was amped about the text by Norman Mailer, and the multiple insane limited edition versions of the book–with or without embedded lunar asteroid fragments and lander-style display cases–designed by Marc Newsom. I, meanwhile, was sensing some ur-satelloon spheres coming on, and–BOOM. This photo above.
But what was it? I couldn’t tell the mission, and I couldn’t find the same or similar images of such Sputnik-like satellites in progress, no matter how hard I Googled. And from the preview, neither Mondo nor I could read the captions. The trade edition of the book wasn’t out yet, at least in the stores–and space bookshops, and the National Air and Space Museums–I visited last week. What to do? I asked Taschen’s publicist for help, and voila. Project Vanguard.
This is a previously unpublished 1957 image from LIFE Magazine photographer Hank Walker of the Project Vanguard team at the Naval Research Laboratory, hard at work on the world’s first “earth satellite.” [Well, not quite the first, as it turned out.] But almost no one in the US knew about Sputnik on June 3rd, 1957 when LIFE ran an excited cover story about Vanguard’s development [“Man-Made Moon Takes Shape,” “Shell of Satellite Mirrors its Makers”] That’s Vanguard scientist Alexander Simkovich, by the way.

Walker’s other LIFE photos of Project Vanguard from the Spring of 1957 are just as awesome. Some of the most artistic highlights:
The crating: Apparently, at least 35 Vanguard and Vanguard II satellite shells were manufactured in Detroit by Brooks & Perkins, then shipped to Washington for assembly. I have to wonder what Eva Hesse was doing while these things were being packed:

The see-through model: Instead of an internal sphere full of scientific instruments, the 20-inch Vanguard II satellites were designed with a suspended, miniaturized, stacked core, as this plexiglass model showed:

This looks remarkably like the cutaway drawing for the first patent ever issued for a satellite structure. Satellite team leader Robert C. Baumann filed the patent in August 1957, and it was granted in 1958. In the mean time, of course, the Soviet Union had launched two Sputniks and the rocket carrying the first, grapefruit-sized Vanguard satellite, had exploded on the launch pad on live television [that satellite was recovered intact and is on view at the Air & Space Museum, btw]:

The making of: Brooks & Perkins manufactured the vanguard shells from sheets of magnesium [below], then plated them with gold. A remarkably detailed Time Magazine article from April 15, 1957 explains the rest of the manufacturing process:

When the satellites came from their manufacturer, Brooks & Perkins, Inc. of Detroit, they were thin-skinned magnesium spheres plated with gold. Aluminum is better for reflecting sunlight, but since aluminum will not stick to gold, the gold had to be covered with a thin film of chromium. Aluminum will stick to chromium, but it also mixes with it and loses part of its reflecting power. So the chromium film in turn had to be coated with glassy silicon monoxide, and then with aluminum.
The delicate work of depositing the coatings was done by the Army Engineers at Fort Belvoir, Va. Each satellite was put in a vacuum chamber and turned, like a chicken on a spit while the materials in the coatings were evaporated electrically and deposited on its surface. The final coat was a second layer of silicon monoxide.

In terms of the Space Race, Project Vanguard was only a fair success, and it was quickly superseded. A Vanguard II satellite launched in 1958 is currently still in orbit and is the oldest man-made object in space. So that should mean that at least a couple dozen of these iridescent masterpieces still roam the earth–or are stuck in crates in NASA scientists’ grandchildren’s garages waiting to be liberated and exhibited. The search is joined.
Oh, look, here’s one that’s off the list: a 1958 Vanguard Lyman Alpha replica or flight spare on display at the National Air & Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy site at Dulles.

What’s Happening? Tracking Stars, Claes Oldenburg’s 1963 Washington DC Happening

It’s been a few months, and now I’ve been researching it so many places, I can’t remember exactly where I first discovered that Claes Oldenburg did a Happening in Washington DC. And an early one, too. He was invited by Alice Denney, the assistant director of the fledgling Washington Gallery of Modern Art, for The Pop Art Festival she was organizing alongside her pioneering show of Pop Art, “The Popular Image Exhibition,” which opened in April 1963.
Pop was still barely being defined. By including a lecture/tape recorder performance by John Cage and a multi-ring dance event organized by Billy Kluver and featuring Yvonne Rainer and the Judson Church crew, Denney’s expansive view seems to have equated Pop with early 60s avant-garde. If there’s a thread that persisted, it was the artists’ engagement with the popular culture, in contrast to the prevalent self-referential mode of Abstract Expressionists. [The WGMA had just opened with the first Franz Kline retrospective.]
Anyway, it’s a bear trying to find out what this Happening was all about. There was one, there were two. It/they happened at a rug cleaners off of Dupont Circle, and/or in the Gallery itself. It was called Stars and/or Cleaners.
The confusion is partly the ephemeral, had-to-be-there nature of the medium, and partly the fragmented, subjective nature of the accounts I’ve collected so far. Whether written in anticipation of the event or in its aftermath, PR-excited or cynical, they’re incomplete and/or inconsistent. And none is definitive or gives a clear picture of Oldenburg’s intentions or plans, or even what happened. And of course, there are few-to-no substantive reviews.
And then there’s the art historical blind spot that DC inhabits in the art world, and that the art world inhabits in DC. [The Kennedy era seems to be one of the few times that official Washington seemed interested, not just in contemporary art, but in art as it was happening. And that obviously didn’t last, though the institutional vestiges of Camelot and the WGMA linger on, from the NEA to the Art In Embassies program to the Washington Project for the Arts, which is on its third or fourth life right now under my friend Lisa Gold.]
So rather than just write up some mega-post posing as an MFA thesis, I’m going to post an anthology/bibliography for Stars, which will include the articles and accounts I’ve found, plus some interviews I’m doing with folks who were involved with the Happening itself. I’ll keep this post updated with links as I go:
Claes Oldenburg: Raw Notes (1973) contains “Documents and scripts for the performances: Stars, Moneyhouse, Massage, The Typewriter, with annotations by the author. It was republished in 2005.
It turns out Stars was originally called Cleaners, after its first chosen/intended venue. The dates were April 23 & 24, 1963:

This is a town of initials, automobiles and cleaners to mention some important things. Also long dresses + monuments. I will be asked no doubt in what way does what i do here reflect Washington…
My pieces have two titles, the first being one which describes the form of the piece…The second title is the thematic title.

Oldenburg selected Aristo Rug Cleaners, located on P Street around the corner from the WGMA. His notes mention the activity of the site, and how “the interaction of white shirts and brown and black (employees)” embodied the city itself.

After a visit to Washington for the purpose of using the place [the cleaners], I did form the title STARS, already more specific than the first stage. This came from seeing very clear stars in the sky on the last moment of my visit and seemed to concentrate certain physical properties of the place, f. ex. the patriotic motif. The radiated way the streets are built. But the title was still abstract in that it was achieved part from a particular place in Wash. where the piece might be done.

Then Oldenburg set out to design the event, collect props, and cast all his players during a two-week preparatory visit. Next up will be a friendly preview of the performance from that prep period by Washington Post columnist Art Buchwald.

We’re All Chris Burden Now

Through The Night Softly was a 1973 performance piece-as-latenight-TV-commercial by Chris Burden. It’s a 10-second video of the artist, in a Speedo, inching on his stomach across a parking lot full of broken glass. [View it on UbuWeb.] Burden wanted to be on “real TV,” and 10 seconds after the local LA news was all he could afford at the time.
[clarification after watching it again last night: Through The Night Softly is Burden’s title for the actual performance and/or the video of it, which goes on longer than 10 seconds. TV Ad is the clip of TTNS on TV.]
More than the cringe-inducing action itself, which is closely related to other works he was making, Burden talks about the piece in terms of its context–its startling juxtaposition and inexplicability among shampoo commercials and Movies of The Week. In the EAI video compilation above, he also talks about how hard it was for the TV station to take him seriously, even though they both realized he was a “small customer.”
Well, consider that problem solved. Slate’s Seth Stevenson has a fascinating video about Google TV, which lets you buy actual TV ad time the way you buy AdWords: a few DIY clicks at a time.
Stevenson made a goofily paranoid 30-second commercial out of vintage stock footage, then spent just $1,300 to run it 54 x/wk on Fox News, where it was seen by several hundred thousand 1.4 million [!] people.
They got a thousand people to visit their website, which is a horrible conversion rate, but who cares? You could have a dozen more interesting goals and invitations to the viewer that make more sense. Or none at all. Can you imagine what the video art world could or should be doing with this? The mind reels.
Assuming Google would allow it, of course. When AdWords first came out, I regularly used it for publishing, not advertising. I’d write little haiku-like ads keyed to search terms that had no ads at all, like, at the time, Agnes Varda. [Hmm, nearly eight years later, a Google search for “agnes varda” still returns no ads.]
Anyway, it lasted until Google announced their IPO, and they instituted a new TOS for the program. It’d be interesting to see what the contours of Google TV’s commercial standards are, and how they affect content.
I suspect Chris Burden’s original ad wouldn’t fly today. But I’d love to be proved wrong. And I’d love to see these ads run, then get taped and uploaded in context to YouTube, where they could continue to reach an audience. LAXArt organized a series of artist-produced billboards around Los Angeles. And Creative Time programs video art onto giant monitors in Times Square. Where’s the public art organization curating and running 10-30 second video art on cable? What about an artist or group of artists creating programming for the format and airing it themselves? BHQF-TV, anyone? Stick a sponsor slide on the end for a couple of seconds and the piece pays for itself.
How I Ran an Ad on Fox News [slatev.com via @joygarnett]

Sehgal, Herzog, Patel, Oldenburg: Some Links I Like

A great post on language & progress, Claude Levi-Strauss & TIno Sehgal. Some of the most interesting commentary I’ve read on discerning the actual structure and contours of Sehgal’s This Progress, too. [futureofthebook.org via @briansholis]
Which makes me wonder: do the works come with NDAs? Are they secrets? Trade secrets? Can the instructions be shouted from the rooftops? Could the unwritten transmitted/purchased instructions be performed or recited publicly as entertainment, as part of a critical discussion, or in an effort of collective preservation? Are they really just a couple of lines [“Roll around kissing constantly. Every few minutes, strike a pose from a famous work of art.”] or are they more elaborate? Obviously the parties concur that there is some intellectual property right being transferred, but what is the implication for the artist–or his dealer or a collector or museum–either disseminating the instructions or refusing to do so?
Ramin Bahrani’s short film Plastic Bag tells the story of a lone plastic bag’s Odysseus-slash-V’Ger-like journey to find home and its creator. Werner Herzog stars as the plastic bag. Seriously. [via mrdanzak, thanks andrew]

Speaking of epics, Grain Edit has a wonderful interview with Sanjay Patel, the Pixar animator/illustrator/Charles Harper fan who went from self-publishing the awesomely kawaii Little Book Of Hindu Deities to creating a modernist graphic version of the Ramayana. [grainedit]
I’m liking what I can see of Eamon O’Kane’s paintings about Le Corbusier’s somewhat dickish relationship with and interventions in Eileen Gray’s architectural masterpiece, the E-1027 Villa at Roquebrunne. They’re at See Line Gallery, but the big pictures are at the LATimes. [Related: at a 2007 MoMA conference, Beatriz Colomina called Corbu’s alterations of E-1027 an architectural “rape”.]
I’ve been doing some research on early Happenings staged in Washington DC by Claes Oldenburg. More on that as it develops, of course, but there’s no need to wait on sharing this very self-amused Time Magazine account of “The Pop Art Festival” organized by the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in April 1963:

Blue Wrench.
Happenings are old stuff in the artiest alcoves of Manhattan, but of course that means nothing in Washington square. This one was prepared by Artist Claes Oldenburg, who makes those huge sailcloth hamburgers. Washington society prepared by getting itself puffed, powdered and sloshed. Little dinners were eaten intimately in Georgetown. The jolly crowd then collected at the gallery to see what was going to happen. Nearly everyone sat on campstools–White House Art Adviser Bill Walton, FAA Administrator Najeeb Halaby, Mrs. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Those. [sic]
A member of the gallery staff announced that she had successfully achieved blue ice cream. She had mixed blue dye and vanilla ice cream with a monkey wrench. The New Frontier moved an inch forward on its stools.
This was obviously going to be some happening.

Does anyone know how Time and others [Old Media types, mostly] insert the unique tracking url into my copy&pasted quote of their article? I assume it’s to prevent/track automated scraping and republishing, but from their page code, I can’t figure out how they do it.
And lastly, I went to hear John Gerrard talk about his time/duration-intensive work at the Hirshhorn last week. He’s got a very different project going on, what with the environment, and the orbit of the sun and energy and industrialization and video game engines and what not, but it was nice to see that he’s nearly/slightly as engrossed with using Google Earth as a creative tool as I am. He pulls colors from the satellite images to create site-specific palettes for his digital landscape re-creations.
Which, whoops, come to think of it, may be problematic. Just yesterday, Stefan at Ogle Earth laid out a not-insigificant case for why it matters that–whoops–all satellite imagery, including Google’s–is color-enhanced. “It is the case that colors in satellite imagery are always false, albeit made to look realistic (just as with those pretty pictures of galaxies and planets).” [ogle earth via @felixsalmon]

Oh, Red, Green & Purple Where Art Thou?

On his blog Into The Abyss, editor/filmmaker Todd Miro has an awesome, screencap-filled rant about the orange-and-tealification of Hollywood. In color theory, teal is the high-contrast opposite of flesh tone [as the palette Miro generated at kuler demonstrates] and so directors looking for an image to “pop” are jacking up the color contrast and narrowing their films’ palettes. In post.
While color adjusting has always been with us, Miro traces the problem to the Digital Intermediary, which has become the visual equivalent of AutoTune:

The Cohen brothers ushered in the new era of digital color grading with their excellent 2000 film, “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou.” This was the first feature film to be entirely scanned into a computer, a process known as “Digital Intermediary”, or DI. Once inside the computer, the colorist now had unheard of control over every element of the image. Imagine tweaking an entire movie with the tools and precision that one has with their still images using Photoshop, and you get some idea of what power was unleashed.
But was that power used for good… Nooooooooooooooo, or course it wasn’t!

As in so many other ways, so it goes with orange & teal overkill: Transformers 2 turns out to be the worst of the worst.

Teal and Orange – Hollywood, Please Stop The Madness [theabyssgazes via afc]