greg.org – Page 183 – the making of, by greg allen

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]

Wanted: Smithson’s Movie Treatment For Spiral Jetty Poster

I’ve been working on a shot-for-shot remake of the Spiral Jetty film for a while, and so I’m quite familiar with the storyboard-like drawings Smithson did for it. Familiar with them as drawings, that is. He called them Movie Treatments.
It’s a little embarrassing to admit I didn’t realize Smithson had used a treatment/storyboard for the flyer/poster of the 1970 Dwan Gallery exhibition of Spiral Jetty until I read it in Kathleen Merrill Campagnolo’s essay on the Jetty and its camera imagery in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art Journal. But there it is:

DWAN 29 WEST 57 STREET NEW YORK OPENING OCTOBER 31 TO NOVEMBER 25
A 16 MM, 35 MINUTE COLOR AND SOUND FILM ON THE SPIRAL JETTY WILL
BE SHOWN DAILY AT 2:00 IN THE GALLERY FOR THE DURATION OF EXHIBITION.

The Dwan exhibition consisted primarily of Gianfranco Gorgoni’s large-format photos of the Jetty, eight of which were included in Kynaston McShine’s historic “Information” show at the Museum of Modern Art that summer.
Given the iconic aspects of the photos and the powerful influence of the film–not to mention the experience of visiting the Jetty itself–it’s somehow odd to think of encountering the Jetty first in terms of Smithson’s site/non-site paradigm, as a situation represented in a gallery.
It’s also interesting to note that the film only played once a day, not on a continuous loop as is often the case now. It was an event more than an installation.
Anyway, I would like you to send me one of these posters, please. If you have one you don’t need, or perhaps some extras. It need not be signed. Thank you.

On The Soviets On The Moon

It doesn’t feel like a tangent to go from satelloons and museums on the moon to other aesthetic aspects of space and the space race. Plus there’s the fascination at discovering, as a grown man, how much I hadn’t been taught as a kid. As an American kid.
No one tried to ignore Sputnik or Yuri Gagarin, of couse, but it never registered with me that the Soviet Union reached the moon first. And landed the first spacecraft on it. And took the first pictures of the dark side of the moon. And from the surface.
The Soviets’ Luna Program began way back in 1959, when Luna 2 hit the moon [after shedding a bunch of small Soviet emblems, apparently.] This, beefore America even got a balloon into orbit around the earth.
Also in 1959: Luna 3 returned photos of the far side of the moon.
And in 1966, Luna 9 made the first soft-landing on the moon and transmitted back the first five photos from the surface.
To avoid embarrassment in the case of failure, Russian missions were typically only announced after they succeeded. This meant that each achievement was met worldwide with a sense of surprise and skepticism/resentment.
The first image sent back from Luna 9, however, was intercepted by the University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, which scooped the Russians’ own announcement.
As an image, there’s something familiar about it, at least in retrospect; it looks like what we [now] know the surface of the moon to look like. But in 1966, it had to have packed a punch. Add to that the level of political intrigue, the rivalry of the Space Race, and the ever-present military/nuclear threat of the Cold War, and this image becomes an incredibly powerful, important artifact.
One which I’d never heard of, or seen before last week. It’s as if Apollo and 1969 wiped away the contentious, anxious experience and history of the earlier years. And along with it, the memory, recognition, and appreciation of the achievements that came first.

Ken Price & Josef Albers At Brooke Alexander

Roberta Smith loves loves loves the Ken Price/Josef Albers show at Brooke Alexander. I all but stumbled across it a couple of weeks ago after finding Brooke’s interview with Price (PDF), and I have to agree. It is incredibly fresh.

Its overarching theme is that abstraction is reality-based, distilled from lived experience, and actualized through highly personal approaches to process and materials. It’s a lesson in life as much as art.

Albers’ paintings and especially the prints, are additive, while Price’s method is subtractive: he builds up layers of paint, then sands it down.

‘Marina Abramovic Is A Total Stone Cold Diva.’

Ivan Lozano’s post about Marina Abramovic, Joan Jonas, Tino Seghal, and the conservation of performance art is absolutely fantastic. [It’s built off the Performance Workshop Klaus Biesenbach held a couple of weeks ago, which was written up by Carol Kino in the NY Times.]
The idea of a single orthodox means of retroactively preserving or documenting or re-performing or whatever early performance art strikes me as unreasonable; I like the idea that artists can decide if and how they want their work to live on, whether if it’s as a score, video documentation, ephemera, or in Seghal’s case, unwritten verbal transmission.
Lozano hits the nail on the head with his awesome characterization of Abramovic [above]. And kudos to her for making a strong play for preserving her own work and for influencing the present and future of the medium. But one thing about her stone cold divadom that he doesn’t mention that came immediately to mind was her establishment of the Marina Abramovic Institute, which is charged with the preservation of performance art.
It reminds me of the Eric Carle Musem of Children’s Book Illustration, another ostensibly comprehensive history-writing institution which was founded by a practitioner–who wasn’t waiting for history to decide his place in the history books.