January 31, 2007 12:03
Department of Instant Gratification
My last post asked why more museums don't attempt the occasional illuminating mix of periods and media from their own collections. In no time my blogosphere colleague Tyler Green came up with a quick example of a museum that's been doing that, the De Young in San Francisco. (You need to look into the first item on his list of Five Things, then follow the link to his own earlier posting about the DeYoung.)
Sounds like exactly what I had in mind. My own visit to the De Young took place before the official opening, so the permanent collection wasn't entirely up on the walls. That may be why I don't recall seeing Jasper Johns' Bread displayed with the 19th century American trompe l'oeil paintings, one of the combinations Green mentions, but that would be just the kind of thing I was talking about yesterday. Not an ordinary thematic grouping. ("Fifteen paintings of Spring!" The Brooklyn Museum attempts that kind of mix, with mixed results. ) The juxtaposition at the De Young casts a more intricate light on how an artist rethinks old problems and reconfigures tradition.
So much the better if the new work breaks out of the tradition by a long way, as Johns does vis-a-vis trompe l'oeil and the Shonibare I talked about yesterday does in relation to Hogarth. Combinations like those can set off a whole complicated chain of reflections. With their ever high admission fees, most American museums are suspicious of anything free, but even they should be ok with free association.
January 30, 2007 3:17
Correspondence Course
Tell me again why most museums are so afraid to mix work from different styles and periods in their galleries? It's not that I can't appreciate the value of the standard chronological force march through art history, but I'm always struck by how rarely museums are willing to depart from that model, to put aside a gallery from time to time where, say, a Matisse odalisque....
Odalisque with Red Culottes/Henri Matisse -- National Museum of Modern Art, Paris
.... could lounge for a while alongside one by Ingres or Delacroix.
Odalisque Reclining on a Divan/Eugene Delacroix -- The Fitzwilliam Museum
Or better still, where a Severini (the painter) could share space with a Maserati (the race car), so you could see one of the those fast machines the Futurists were all obsessed with.
I thought of this a few weeks ago when I was touring the not quite complete new addition to the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) that opens in May. A good part of the museum's permanent collection had already been re-installed. As it happens, one of the galleries devoted to contemporary African art is adjacent to a gallery of 18th century European work. That gave Pamela McCluskey, SAM's curator of the art of Africa and Oceania, the idea to lure in two Hogarth prints, part of his great picture cycle Marriage a la Mode, from the European collection....
The Unhappy Pair at Home/William Hogarth -- Seattle Art Museum, Eugene Fuller Memorial Collection
...to display in the African gallery near Nuclear Family, an ensemble piece by Yinka Shonibare, an artist born in Britain and raised in Nigeria, in which a family dressed in what appears to be late Victorian fashion is actually wearing "African-style" batik fabrics manufactured in Indonesia for sale to Africans today.
Nuclear Family/Yinka Shonibare -- Seattle Art Museum
It was an interesting match. In Marriage a la Mode, which casts a very cold eye on the downfall of a fashionable young couple, Hogarth leads us through the same thickets of class, status and social performance that are always on Shonibare's mind. And not surprisingly, Shonibare has pointed to Hogarth as one of his continuing inspirations. Putting their work together drew Hogarth's very English comedy of bad manners into the wider world while it rooted the Shonibare piece in the long line of satire that it extends and complicates. And it reminded you of how the wheels of commerce roll through both works.
When MOMA reopened in New York three years ago the museum bragged about having new galleries where they could mount rotating shows devoted to individual artists, mini-exhibitions that would combine work from all periods of their careers. It was a good idea, but why not put aside some space occasionally for something a little more daring, like a show that plays with the idea of domestic space by matching one of Rachel Whiteread's plaster cast interiors....
Ghost/Rachel Whiteread -- Photo: Gagosian Gallery
....with, say, one of those stifling parlors by Vuillard?
Mother and Sister of the Artist/Edouard Vuillard/Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.
It might actually let a little air into the room.
January 26, 2007 4:31
Eraserheads
In 1953 Robert Rauschenberg erased a drawing that Willem DeKooning had given him. Then he called the new work Erased DeKooning Drawing. Now I discover that graffiti artists in Brazil and the U.K. have found some new ways to erase their way into art history. Meanwhile they've been creating some pretty funny headaches for city officials who have to decide if cleaning a public surface can still amount to vandalism. Read all about it.
January 26, 2007 1:12
The Naked and the Dead
I just caught up with What Remains, a documentary about the photographer Sally Mann that's been playing around the festival circuit and will cablecast on Cinemax this Wednesday, Jan. 31 at 7 pm. Full disclosure, Cinemax is part of HBO, which is a subsidiary of Time Warner, which also owns Time and so on. (Look closely at your own paystub and they probably have a half interest in you.) On the other hand, I've written about Mann several times over the years, always until now when she had no connection to whoever pays my salary, because her work fascinates me. So there it is.
Steven Cantor, who made the film, followed Mann for five years, starting around 1999. (They had already worked together on a documentary short about Mann in the early '90s that was nominated for an Academy Award.) It was a period when her work evolved away from the portraits of her husband and children that first made her famous. She began to make melancholy southern landscapes produced with 19th-century equipment and developing techniques. From those she turned to steadfast pictures of putrefying dead bodies, produced with the same techniques, that she made at a forensic research facility where bodies were deliberately left outside to decay. In a later part of the film we get to watch Mann on the phone as she learns that a New York gallery has cancelled a show of those pictures. (Death is always a hard sell, but it probably didn't help that the exhibition would have taken place just a couple of years after 9/11.) Then comes something like a happy ending. Mann gets a 2004 show of the same pictures at the Corcoran in Washington, D.C.
Here's one of the easier pictures from that series.
Untitled #9, 2001/Sally Mann
That work got me thinking more broadly about how photographers deal with death. It's one of the most ancient preoccupations of art. But it was one thing for painters or sculptors to represent a corpse. That "body", after all, was actually just a piece of stone or a collection of brush strokes. Photographers however point their cameras at actual corpses. And even if we know that photographs are "just" images, we also know that the images are of real corpses. We digest those images differently and they bring with them a heavier burden of questions about how the dead should be treated and viewed.
So how should we look at the dead, that burgeoning group that every one of us will someday join? The conventions that determine what's acceptable have been anything but stable. Remember Wisconsin Death Trip? It was once a famous selection of photographs, published in 1973, and chosen by Michael Lesy from the work of Charles van Schaick, a studio photographer in a small Wisconsin town between 1890 and 1910. The images that have stayed with me longest are the ones of dead children who were posed for Van Schaick's camera at the request of their families. It would be unthinkable to do that now, but at the time -- an era of high child mortality rates -- they were simply regarded as keepsakes.
From Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy
But those children were intact and offered to the camera in ways that made them appear to be "at peace", more or less, which is our preferred illusion when it comes to death. With Mann's pictures we enter a realm without peace, without decorum, which is another way of saying the bodies she photographs are rotting on the ground -- swelling, splitting, discharging their innards. But Mann's techniques -- she shoots in black and white, on glass plate negatives that she develops in ways that leave deliberate scratches and halations on the prints -- produce instant aesthetic distance. So if these bodies are in state of decay, they are also absorbed by her into an art historical line of meditations on death that extends back at least as far as the Middle Ages. Which makes the pictures bearable.
In the last few years Mann has also been taking pictures of her husband Larry, who has been diagnosed with a form of muscular dystrophy that will progress with time. The man we see in the film appears for now to be in great shape, which of course just makes the prospect of his future difficulties harder to think about. But that is, after all, why his wife is making these pictures of him. Because for her, as for Richard Avedon, or for Rembrandt and Goya, the deep inspection of our universal and inevitable decrepitude is one of the most important jobs art agrees to take on. These are difficult pictures both for her and for him. But there are all kinds of bravery, and their's is one.
I have never seen a photograph, not even any of Mann's, as sobering as the images all through Stan Brakhage's silent 1971 film The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes, for which Brakhage cooly recorded in full three autopsies in a Pittsburgh morgue. Brakhage doesn't aestheticize the dissections. He simply points his camera in their direction and lets us watch as one body after another is sawed open and taken apart, transformed before our eyes into the merest tract of meat that can be endlessly violated.
All the same, some of the most powerful photos of the dead that I know of are from the series that Andres Serrano made in the early '90s in a morgue.
The Morgue (Homicide Stabbing)/Andres Serrano -- Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Serrano doesn't use Mann's distancing devices, her black and white soft focus. He uses his own. The focus in Serrano's pictures may be sharp and the lighting stark, but the poses and pallette answer to expectations that we bring to the pictures from art history. So the picture above takes the sharply perspectival view of Christ in Mantegna's "The Lamentation Over the Dead Christ" -- the painting that places your eye at the soles of Christ's feet -- and turns it upside down. But in their cool and brightly lit way, these are very moving pictures. They move you to pity. At first the pity is for the people in the pictures, who have died. But soon enough you realize it's for us, who will.
January 25, 2007 4:06
Pictures from an Institution
Maybe it's time to retire the idea of "outsider art". That's the catch all term for work produced by self-taught artists who may also be hermits, mental patients, religious obsessives and so on. As much as anything it's been a marketing device, a word that hints of rebellion and feverish disorder. Artists are supposed to have that mad gleam in their eye. So much the better if they're actually certified as crank cases.
I realized just how misleading the notion is today during a stop at the American Folk Art Museum here in New York, where I spent a good part of the afternooon at the completely fascinating show devoted to the work of Martin Ramirez. One of the better known outsiders, Ramirez was a Mexican who left behind his wife and children in 1921 and came to the U.S. to find work in mines and on railroads. Within ten years he had descended into some kind of serious mental confusion. He died in 1963, and the last 32 years of his life were spent in California mental hospitals, diagnosed as a catatonic schizophrenic and almost never speaking. But always drawing. And drawing. Though never trained as an artist, Ramirez produced scores of clenched, bristling pencil and crayon drawings. This was not run of the mill art therapy stuff. It was powerful and original, literally going to the origins of anxieties and desires. It had the intricacy and invention, if not the range, of Paul Klee or Saul Steinberg.
UNTITLED (Courtyard)/Anthony Petullo Collection of Self-Taught and Outsider Art, Milwaukee
It's not hard to believe he was mentally disturbed, and our knowledge of that gives the climate of paranoia and isolation in his drawings a feeling of authenticity you don't get from artists who were merely depressed or eccentric. (Compared to Ramirez, Edvard Munch looks as placid as Mr. Rogers.) The work is full of obsessive motifs, confining palisades, segmented tunnels that swell like weird birth canals, with trains that pop out of one only to be swallowed by another. And weirder still, despite all their forcefields of parallel line his drawings can also feel locked into stalemate and paralysis. You can easily picture the man who made them as a glassy-eyed catatonic.
UNTITLED (Madonna)/ Philadelphia Museum of Art, partial and promised gift of Josephine Albarelli
And yet still a man with some kind of mysterious and powerful internal life, and with a fully achieved mature style. So what was he outside of? Ramirez, who was not only institutionalized but further confined within himself, may have been outside most human companionship. He was certainly outside the networks of the artworld, which didn't begin to discover him until a few years after his death. And he's still outside the customary borders of art history. But he was as deeply in touch with certain profound currents within ourselves as any artist I can think of. Outsider art? Looks more like insider art to me.
January 24, 2007 5:13
What's Not to Not Like?
Like a lot of people I was badly disappointed by David Childs' misbegotten design for the Freedom Tower, the battle clad banality that will stand where the World Trade Center used to be. And the massive flank of accompanying towers by major names -- Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki -- is not much better. Whatever their individual virtues, they're too tall. Human scale anybody? Now Rafael Vinoly, the architect who was part of one of the design teams that offered an alternative proposal for the site, has decided to let people know just what he thinks of how things are shaping up there. I'm with you Raffi.
January 24, 2007 12:14
Break Out the Cell Phones
A few days ago I posted an item about a sign in the new Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle that forbid visitors from taking pictures of one of the pieces there. Along the way I informed the world that photos were also banned in the New York City subway. Wrong!
In 2004, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which runs the system, made a highly publicized proposal to ban photography as a security measure. Protests were loud enough however to make the MTA rethink the idea, which never came to a vote and was dropped a year later. But to compound the confusion, police were apparently instructed for a while to enforce the not-quite-official ban anyway. There's a story about the collapse of the attempted ban here. And another one here about enforcement measures that went forward anyway while the ban was still just a talking point.
From Gothamist.com
Thanks to an alert reader for setting the record straight and for putting my mind at ease. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I helped some tourists take a subway cell phone pic last summer and I've been waiting ever since to be hauled away by Homeland Security and waterboarded.
January 23, 2007 4:41
Mr. Bush, Meet Mr. Cartier-Bresson
I plan to stay late at work tonight to watch the State of the Union address with my news-obsessed colleagues at Time. Meanwhile I've been planning a visit this week to the Cartier-Bresson show at the International Center of Photography a few blocks from my office. And in advance of that, I've been paging through a copy of Henri Cartier-Bresson: Scrapbook, which the ICP show is based on. It's Cartier-Bresson's own selection of his early work, pictures he glued into an album in the mid-1940s while he was being held in a German prisoner of war camp.
The connection? Revisiting these great, strange pictures -- their greatness inseparable from their strangeness -- reminded me of the tricky relationship between art and photojournalism, and then between news pictures and how we feel about the bloody obscenities that we see first thing every morning from Iraq. We connect Cartier-Bresson to photojournalism because he founded the news photo agency Magnum. But he was trained first as a painter. And when he started to take pictures in the early 1930s he wasn't interested in gathering news. He was a newly hatched surrealist on the hunt for miracles, moments when the real world somehow gave you a fleeting glimpse of the uncanny.
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SEVILLE, SPAIN, 1933/Cartier-Bresson H./Magnum Photos
It was his great intuition that the camera, because it was a nearly automatic instrument, was the perfect surrealist device. The surrealists loved anything that seemed to bypass rational thought processes. They loved found objects. They loved stream-of-consciousness "automatic writing". They thought things like that brought you closer to some hidden fund of life's wonders. By that definition drawing and painting was a little too painstaking, too thought out. The camera, a thing you just pointed and clicked, was the idiot savant of the art world. They also loved shock juxtapositions. Meret Oppenheim's fur lined teacup. Marcel Duchamp's bicycle wheel attached to a stool.
I went on about this once in a Time review of a MOMA show. The point worth making tonight is that we still sometimes see the work of photojournalists through the prism of art, and usually do it uncomfortably, as though we or they or both of us were aestheticizing pain. But maybe we're focusing too much on the wrong idea of art, the kind that emphasizes lighting and composition or whatever other formal qualities. Cartier-Bresson was on to something when he brought the surrealist intuition into his later work as a photojournalist -- namely, that even before it gives you information, a news photograph can inject into your reptile brain an intuition about a world turned upside down.
That's what happens when you see a picture of two disembodied feet dangling at the bottom of a body bag. Or an armchair in a tree after the flood waters receded in New Orleans. As I write this I'm also watching a segment on the ABC Evening News about a U.S. army unit on patrol in Baghdad. There's a boy walking past an armless body that's lying along the road. Before it tells you anything else, anything about security in Baghdad or Sunni-Shi'a tensions, an image like that signals to you that this a world that's radically out of order, like a bicycle wheel attached to a stool.
It would be an obscenity to call that image art, but it doesn't hurt to know that it reaches into our understandings along pathways that certain kinds of art also travels. So whether they know it or not -- and many of them do -- photojournalists and TV camera people working in Iraq today are descendants of both Cartier-Bresson the news photographer and Cartier-Bresson the surrealist. They show us pictures of a place so badly fractured, so unearthly, that we "sense", even before we "know", that it will take a super human effort to put it right.
Over to you Mr. President
January 22, 2007 12:17
Verboten! Verboten! Pics Nicht! Pics Nicht!
As a college student in the early '70s I made a visit to East Berlin, where I got an interesting lesson in how far a paranoid regime would go to control the circulation of images. It was forbidden to take pictures of all kinds of things there, including taxi cabs, supposedly because they could be used as military vehicles in the event of war, though the idea of a rickety Trabant, East Germany's flimsy mass market car, being pressed into service as a tank is pretty funny. Consumer goods were also more top secret than rocket launching pads. When I attempted a shot of a washing machine in a department store, a panicky sales clerk shooed me away.
In the U.S. we have our own photo taboos. Because of fears about terrorism you need a permit now to use a camera in the New York City subway, though I shot a cellphone pic for some tourists there over the summer and have yet to be hauled off to Guantanamo. But in our property-minded market economy the real sore spot concerns copyright. That came to mind this morning when I was reading some angry internet chatter about the new Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, a wonderful place that I wrote about in my last post. One of the works on display there is Typewriter Eraser, Scale X by Claes Oldenburg and his wife Coosje van Bruggen, another of their enlargements of everyday objects. (Or objects that used to be everyday. Remember typewriter erasers?) What had bloggers upset was the plaque accompanying the piece. In a perfect example of institutional tone deafness, it includes a statement by Oldenburg: "The idea of endless public dialogue...visual dialogue...is very important to us." Which is followed by the words: "Sorry, photography of this sculpture is prohibited." So much for visual dialogue.
Here's the sculpture, in a top secret image that I've appropriated, like a good post-modernist, from the blogsite of thestranger.com, one of the places where I read about the ban.
Most sculpture parks have policies restricting commercial photography for the purpose, say, of producing calendars or postcards. But a ban on photographs of any kind seemed over the top, to say nothing of impossible to enforce. (Would there be guards preventing people from even turning their cameras in the eraser's direction? Would guerilla photographers attempt drive-by shootings from Elliott Avenue?) Two years ago there was a brief uproar when security guards at Millennium Park in Chicago attempted for a while to stop people from taking pictures of Anish Kapoor's very popular reflective steel sculptureCloud Gate -- a/k/a "the Bean". Park officials say it was all just a misunderstanding, that only commercial photographers are required to get permission to shoot the piece, and that park guards had overinterpreted the policy.
So I put in a call to the Seattle Art Museum, which built and supervises the Olympic Sculpture Park. They were already aware of the fracas. Their press office says the language on the plaque is mistaken and will be changed. As a condition for lending the piece, Paul Allen, the Microsoft billionaire who owns it, had asked the museum to disallow commercial photography. But due to miscommunications when the plaque was being prepared much broader language found its way on to the sign. The museum promises that a new one will be in place in a few weeks with the offending language removed. So everybody can relax. If you want to show your grandchildren what a typewriter eraser used to look like, you won't have to resort to a telephoto lens to shoot the thing.
Now what I'd still like to know is this: does Allen own a giant typewriter eraser because it gives him pleasure to think about equipment that Microsoft helped to make obsolete?
January 19, 2007 5:07
Hark, the Park
I had a chance last week to spend a couple of days going over the wonderfully intricate new Olympic Sculpture Park that Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi of Weiss/Manfredi designed for the Seattle Art Museum. The park, which slopes down to the waters of Elliott Bay, is actually located about seven blocks from the museum, which in May will also debut a sizeable new addition by the Portland-based architect Brad Cloepfil. This is a park that uses some fascinating stratagems to engage its site, its purpose and its moment in history. In this week's Time I try to put it into the context of some other parks in the U.S. and Germany that don't settle for ordinary notions of parkland. You can find a lot of good pictures at this Flickr.com page, but here's the panorama we run this week in the magazine:
Photo by Paul Warchol
Weiss/Manfredi were dealing with a difficult site, a sloping nine acres cut by a four-lane road and a railway line. But they turned whatever disadvantages into spectacular opportunities with a dynamic Z-shaped path that makes sure you understand that this is a work of human ingenuity, not a make-believe meadow. That path also recruits the road and the railway into it's design scheme, as additional dueling scars across a space that thrives on them. And in the age of Daniel Libeskind and Zaha Hadid, architects who understand that dynamic lines can be both true -- meaning that, in the 21st century, they get to the bottom of the things that surround them -- and a pleasure, the Seattle park demonstrates that landscape can be deconstructed just like architectural space. And just as pleasurably. Meaning that it's a lot of complicated fun.
But it wasn't until I saw the picture in my own magazine that I realized -- here comes another of those deja vu moments -- what the design reminded me of. It's like a horizontal rendition of The Monument to the March Dead, the 1922 monument to nine workers killed in a right wing attempt to overthrow Germany's Weimar Republic, an episode that was a prelude to the Nazi take over. It's by Walter Gropius -- the monument, not the coup attempt -- the one time director of the Bauhaus, the German art and design institute that was the forcing ground for much of what we think of as the modern world.
When I went searching for it on line I came across a wonderful correspondence with an image in Fritz Lang's silent film Metropolis -- I'll let you search for that -- but also, and much more unexpectedly, with this painting by the great master of 19th century German Romanticism Caspar David Friedrich:
The Sea of Ice, 1824
So nature, meaning the fractured ice field, gets filtered through art, meaning the Friedrich painting, which gets remembered by Gropius, who is trying to find a jagged form for painful memories, and through all those lenses gets remembered again, either explicitly or indirectly, by Weiss/Manfredi, who are trying to signify all the complexities of nature and civilization in the same place. Looks good to me.
January 18, 2007 5:22
Deja Vu All Over Again 2
There's just something about Angelina Jolie that makes people think "Madonna". The Madonna in the Bible, not the Madonna who adopts African babies, just like Angelina. (Though come to think of it, sometimes Angelina makes people think of that Madonna too.) In any event, the painter Kate Kretz generated some press and blog chatter recently with a work that literally elevated Angelina into the heavens.
Blessed Art Thou/KATE KRETZ
As it a happens, my own humble publication did something similar last May when we included Jolie, complete with halo, in our Time 100 list of the world's most influential people. Our illustration was by Anita Kunz. A thanks to my sharp eyed colleague Carolina Miranda for making the connection. Hail Angie, full of grace.
Angelina Jolie/ANITA KUNZ
January 17, 2007 5:45
Here Comes the Neighborhood
With the rise of "starchitects" it's become a well understood strategy for developers to seek out the starriest and attach their big names to any project that might be controversial because of its size or location. Actually, it's a practice that long predates starchitecture. As far back as the late 1950s the developers of what would become the detested Pan Am building, the behemoth that forever blocked the view corridor down Park Avenue and all but squashes Grand Central Station, chose Walter Gropius as their architect. That got them the credibility of the Bauhaus -- Gropius used to head it -- for a project the money guys feared might not attract financing. And hey, it worked.
But today the New York Times reports that The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission has rejected a plan by the Manhattan developer Aby Rosen to erect a 30-story tower atop the five-story former Parke-Bernet Galleries building on Manhattan's heavily-monied Upper East Side. This despite the fact that the architect of the proposed glass tower was Lord Norman Foster, an architect so globe trotting he has a helicopter pad at home, and despite the fact that Foster's new Hearst Tower, just across town, has gotten overwhelmingly positive reactions. (You can read my own overwhelmingly positive reaction in Time here.
But that's across town. For the most part, the Commission members were respectful towards Foster's design, but the verdict was clear -- the thing was just too big for the mostly lower rise (and mostly wealthy) neighborhood. (Which, by the way, it is.) So is starchitecture losing its clout? Or is it just that the collective power of the East Siders is even cloutier? The writer, dandy and architectural traditionalist Tom Wolfe --"in a navy-and-white flannel houndstooth suit", the Times tells us -- was one of the locals who showed up at the Commission's hearing to denounce the Rosen-Foster scheme. This was the Tom Wolfe, author not only of Bonfire of the Vanities but also of the anti-modernist manifesto From Bauhaus to Our House, a guy who designed the big ceiling moldings for his own apartment -- moldings, a modernist taboo -- a man who thought Walter Gropius was a villain and a knave even before he designed the Pan Am building. For the record, the artist Jeff Koons turned up to speak for Rosen, who's also an art collector, but to no avail. Worse, Koons' outfit didn't even rate a mention in the Times.
The ever vigilant East Siders have also done in the Renzo Piano-designed addition that was planned for the Whitney Museum, very near the Parke-Bernet building, going at it so consistently that the Whitney finally threw up its hands and decided instead to build a Piano-designed satellite museum downtown, far from the truculent Upper Easties. But can neighborhoods with fewer hedge fund managers swing the same weight? Keep an eye on the ongoing struggles to scale back the Frank Gehry-designed Brooklyn Yards project, one that's full of Gehry's magnificent flourishes but way too big, and the Polshek Partnership-designed tower that the New York Historical Society wants to build behind its museum and library on Manhattan's West Side. The neighbors are fighting both of those, but is there even one among them who has a navy-and-white flannel houndstooth suit?
January 16, 2007 6:06
I Saw a Film Today, Oh Boy
Sleepwalkers, Doug Aitken's large scale video projection onto the outside walls of the Museum of Modern Art in New York premiered Tuesday night. It was a disappointment. Aitken's piece consists of five separate silent narratives, all of them projected simultaneously, each following the same general arc over the course of its 13 minutes. A nocturnal city dweller wakes as the sun goes down, procedes into the outside world to begin his or her worknight, but at some point lifts into a kind of ecstatic state. A grey haired businessman played by Donald Sutherland ends up dancing on the roof of a taxi. An office worker played by Tilda Swinton drifts into her dream of playing a violin in an orchestra. (Like the British artist Sam Taylor-Wood, who has pressed Robert Downey, Jr. into service for her video work, the L.A.-based Aitken has moved into the territory of video art as star vehicle.) A postal worker played by Chan Marshall -- a/k/a Cat Power -- starts spinning. An electrician (Seu George) eventualy does lariat curls with his cables. A bicycle messenger (Ryan Donowho) ends up drumming on a bucket as he lifts into space.
At any moment, some of the narratives will be projected across the front of MOMA, two on its westernmost walls that face onto a parking lot, and five on the three walls that enclose the sculpture garden. The garden is the best place to view it. In passages, the ones of abstract beats of cityscape and sky, the five nearly adjacent images set up a syncopated rhythm that turns the white surfaces of Yoshio Taniguchi's MOMA architecture into drumskins.
All of the stories in Sleepwalkers could be riffs on the Paul McCartney interlude in A Day in the Life. "Woke up, fell out of bed, ran a comb across my head". You know what happens next. "Somebody spoke and I went into a dream." But Aitken's trope of private fantasy claiming its space in the Cartesian city is too predictable. In our workdays (and nights) we all yearn for other realities. Can't argue with that. But his fantasies are as sanitary as Taniguchi's walls. They don't bombard your nerve endings. They mostly just flickr.com.
For what it's worth, what I'd still like to know is how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.
January 16, 2007 11:49
More Da Vinci Decode
I wanted to briefly revisit the subject of my last posting, about the announcement that the Italian art researcher Maurizio Seracini will resume his attempt to determine if completed portions of The Battle of Anghiari, Leonardo's never finished and long lost masterpiece, might be hidden behind a wall of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The news is still exciting. We know from copies made before the painting was lost in the 1560s that Leonardo's scene of four horsemen battling in a ferocious tangle predict the whirlpool energies of the Baroque. (No wonder Rubens loved it.) So to disinter the original would be a major event.
Or a major disappointment. Even if the mural is waiting for us where Seracini suspects — in a cavity behind Vasari's later wall painting — what hope is there that much will be left of it after being stashed away for almost five centuries in something less than ideal conditions? ("Cavity" is not a word you associate with "climate controlled".) To complicate the problem, we know that Leonardo, he of the questing, scientific mind, treated painting as a technology-in-progress, meaning he routinely experimented with technique. To achieve a greater depth of tone in The Last Supper, before applying the color he laid down an unusual layer of white lead on top of his final layer of fine plaster. That brought him the effects he was looking for, but also contributed to the fast deterioration that produced the work as we know it today, a flaking remnant.
To see what was known about Leonardo's working methods on The Battle of Anghiari, I checked in with the updated edition of Martin Kemp's Leonardo da Vinci, one of the standard references. Bad news. Comparing Anghiari with The Last Supper, Kemp writes:
For the Battle he seems to have adopted an even more unconventional method, close to a technique later described but not recommended by Vasari. The materials suggest that a layer of granular plaster would have been laid down, and primed to a hard, flat finish with a layer of resinous pitch applied with sponges.
There's more:
Early sources indicate that he lit a fire beneath his painting to dry the pigments on the wall, a procedure that was probably necessitated by his use of faulty linseed oil. Antonio Billi, writing about 1518, recorded that Leonardo had been cheated by his supplier of oil — perhaps he had been supplied with oil which had not been fully concentrated by heating until it reached the proper consistency.
From the several surviving copies we know that the picture fared well enough for the 60 or so years that it remained visible on the wall where Leonardo left it uncompleted in 1506. All the same, experimental technique plus questionable materials doesn't sound like a promising formula for long term survival, especially survival in a cavity. In his book Kemp is skeptical that anything much could be back there. If the Italians do eventually decide to go in after it, the "rediscovery" of Anghiari could be the biggest disappointment since Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone's all but empty vault.
January 15, 2007 4:12
Da Vinci Decode?
In Florence last October I had a chance to catch a fascinating show about Leonardo da Vinci at the Uffizi Gallery. It focused in one part on The Battle of Anghiari, the never completed mural by Leonardo that has been one of art history's most bitterly regretted lost works since it disappeared in the mid-16th century. In anticipation of the show I even made a trek to the little hilltop town that is Anghiari today, not far from Arezzo.
(Is it a bad sign that not even two weeks into my blogging career I'm already running my vacation pictures? This is the last one, I swear.)
Then came the news this weekend that Italy's Minister of Culture Francesco Rutelli, best known in the U.S. for spearheading his nation's campaign to retrieve pilfered antiquities from American museums, announced that he had decided to allow the art researcher Maurizio Seracini to resume his attempts to determine if the remnant of Leonardo's work might be hidden within a wall of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.
Leonardo had begun the work there in 1505, just across the Sala del Consiglio where Michelangelo was to produce his own mural, The Battle of Cascina, another scene from a Florentine military victory. Neither work was finished. Michelangelo produced a completed cartoon, now lost, which has come down to us in detailed copies by other hands. Leonardo got as far as applying color to the dry plaster wall, but only finished a few horsemen before decamping for Milan in 1506. His completed fragment remained visible until the hall was remodelled by Giorgio Vasari in the 1560s and was copied repeatedly by artists of the time. We also have four related drawings by Leonardo himself. So we have some impression of the wild vortex of four battling horseman, a scene that has come to be called "The Fight for the Standard", one that made the work legendary, especially after it was swallowed up.
Here it is in a copy made by Rubens, who was himself working from a copy made by an anonymous Italian artist.
Three decades ago Seracini noticed a tantalizing message on a small green flag carried by one of the soldiers in The Battle of Marciano in the Chianna Valley, a 16th century fresco in the "Hall of the 500" by Vasari. Written on the flag were the words "Cerca Trova" — "Seek and You Shall Find". Seracini decided to try that out. Working with a team of researchers, in 2003 and 2004 he used x-ray and infrared scans of Vasari's fresco to determine that behind the wall it's painted on there's a cavity large enough to contain the completed fragment of Leonardo's lost work. Then Florentine officials refused to renew Seracini's permit to work on the wall. (Maybe they heard that his name pops up in The Da Vinci Code and decided to penalize him for Dan Brown's knuckleheaded speculations.) That decision was reversed last week. There's a good Associated Press account of all this here.
"Lost" works reemerge all the time. Just last fall two lost altarpiece panels by Fra Angelico turned up in Britain in the home of librarian who had died a few months earlier. And a Norman Rockwell turned up in an attic. But the reappearance of that Leonardo would be a class by itself, like rediscovering that monumental statue of Jupiter by Phidias. (Not an easy thing to lose, one would think.) Could it be that those horses have been rumbling behind that wall for five centuries but no one heard them til now? Seracini says that even after his work resumes, it will take a year and a half to develop an answer.
January 12, 2007 5:40
I Saw the Light
Alice Walton's failed attempt last year to buy The Gross Clinic, Thomas Eakins' 1875 canvas of an operation being performed by a Philadelphia surgeon, Dr. Samuel Gross, led me recently to pick up Portrait, the brisk new biography of Eakins by William S. McFeeley, and to take a new look at Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, Eakins' hard lined, sunstruck scene of himself (in the background) and his friend Schmitt, boating on the Schuykill River that runs through Philly, a picture owned by the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
You sometimes hear The Gross Clinic described as the greatest 19th century American painting, though I've never been sure what that meant, and for all its pictorial thunder I prefer the sculling picture. I know why, too. It's that hard light that searches out all the particulates of the scene and specifies everything it falls across. That light always seemed to me to be the visual correlative of the pragmatic, dry eyed materialist side of the American disposition, all of which can be virtues at times, and all of which are indisputably qualities of Eakins, who was fascinated by science, mechanism and rigorous processes. He painted the picture more than 50 years before William Carlos Williams offered his famous description of his own processes as a poet — "No ideas but in things" — but that's a line Eakins would have understood right away.
I found myself thinking about this at a press luncheon yesterday that the Boston Museum of Fine Arts gave to kick off the big Edward Hopper retrospective that opens there in May. As I watched the Hoppers slide by on a big screen at the front of the room I was reminded again how much Hopper's stark, unpitying light, all those sunstruck walls, owes to Eakins.
No one is better than Hopper at finding the melancholy note in sunlight. He understood how light can isolate figures even more mercilessly than darkness, a lesson I suspect he learned partly from Eakins. (Naturally they both suffered from serious bouts of depression.) And like Eakins he found in light its capability to imply deep, enclosing silence.
And where, I asked myself, did this light go later in American art? The light that identifies things that are mute, specific, isolated, enclosed within themselves? Then it hit me.
Donald Judd. No?
January 11, 2007 3:46
And Even More Fear of Flying
Remember when I promised a few days ago to get off this topic? ("This topic" being how rare it is for artists to do anything with the universal ordeal of flying.) I lied. I'm back to it, but just briefly. Thanks to Jason Kaufman of the Art Newspaper for reminding me that the Swiss artist-pranksters Peter Fischli and David Weiss have a photo series called Airports that wallows in the banality of those places we all drift through with our eyes closed. Here are two examples.
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Banality is a favorite Fischli & Weiss motif, so it's no surprise that they would find airports irresistable.
January 8, 2007 10:15
More Fear of Flying
Or is it fear of more flying? I promise to get off this topic after today, but in anticipation of a return flight tomorrow that will take off in bad weather, I found myself thinking more about something I blogged about yesterday, how rarely you find contemporary art that's concerned with the mundane experience of flying and airports. What occurred to me today is that because we don't get much from artists about the banality of flying, we're also spared the spectacle of disaster that lurks in the back of everybody's mind. Meaning the plane crash.
This is not as morbid as it sounds. (Actually, it is, but it's morbidity with a high minded educational purpose, so keep going.) Artists didn't used to be so squeamish. By the 18th century shipwreck scenes were an established subgenre of maritime painting. In an age of expanding colonialism, which meant expanded sea travel, they gave even stay-at-homes a picture of an ever more common fate. Claude Joseph Vernet, one of the most successful seascape painters of his day, returned to the subject again and again.
By the 19th century, after the Romantic taste for emotional extremity had taken hold, and when the ocean voyage had become an increasingly common but no less hazardous experience, Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa could become a sensation when it was first exhibited in 1819, just three years after the shipwreck it described. (Meaning when it was, by 19th century terms, practically a news event. Keep that in mind the next time you hear that the movie United 93, which came out five years after 9/11, was -- gasp -- "too soon".)
Movies have never shied away from imagining plane crashes, partly of course for the same reason that painters once loved shipwrecks -- they're the last word in action sequences. In the last ten years film makers have gotten all too good at picturing how a crash would look from inside, in Scorsese's The Aviator, in the Jeff Bridges movie Fearless and in Alive the adaptation of Piers Paul Read's book about a real world plane crash in the Andes, one that fascinated people because, just like the Medusa incident, it ended in episodes of cannibalism. (Will Ethan Hawke end up as a carnivore or a canape?) With it's loving attention to the cabin experience of a semi-controlled crash, that movie in particular fulfills your worst imaginings. How the wings would go flying off, the fusilage would fracture and the seats right behind you -- or worse, your seat -- shear away.
Yet where movies go, art doesn't, even when artists have no problems appreciating car crashes. Was Warhol the first to turn crack-ups into a legitimate subject for art? What I've always liked about his disaster series from the early 1960s was that the car wrecks that this most celebrity-obsessed artist decided to silk screen weren't the well known celebrity crashes. No James Dean or Jayne Mansfield. (And for that matter no Jackson Pollock, whose impassioned Action Painting Warhol's deadpan Pop was laying to rest.) The crash victims in Warhol were nobodies -- meaning you and me -- from the tabloids.
And one of my favorite works from the '90s is Unpainted Sculpture, Charles Ray's meticulous fiberglass recreation of a totalled sedan.
It's a screw you to whatever was left of Minimalism, an R.I.P. to California car culture and a low minded renunciation of John Chamberlain's candy colored (and hey, also wonderful) crushed car-parts sculptures.
And while we're at it, Ray's tangled remnant of a car is a momento mori -- that means "reminder of death", class-- one that's more riveting than Nicole Ritchie at her skinniest. It's a Raft of the Medusa with nobody on it.
It's true that automobile fatalities are much more common than deaths in plane crashes. All the same, who gets into a car and thinks every time about death? And who gets into a plane and doesn't? Meanwhile, the plane crash remains a rare subject in art, though in some corner of our unconscious every 747 looks like Melville's White Whale. And you know what that stood for.
January 7, 2007 10:25
Fear of Flying
A cross country trip this weekend made me wonder why artists have done so little with the common experience of flying. I don't just mean pictures with planes in them. Gerhard Richter, James Rosenquist and Roy Lichtenstein have all done those, though all of them used warplanes. I mean the banal stuff of civilian aviation, the airports, the check in, the view of the back of the guy's head who's sitting in front of you -- which may be one of the great but rarely acknowledged motifs of the century, as common as a sunset. (More common -- when was the last time you actually looked at a sunset?)
Nineteenth century artists were fascinated by railways. Manet made one of his most enigmatic scenes, a woman and a young girl waiting -- for what? -- in Gare St. Lazare. To perfect his rendition of steam effects, Monet returned repeatedly to the same Paris train station.
After 9/11 a few artists began playing with images of the security check in. Thomas Demand, the German who builds paper reconstructions of photographs, then photographs the reconstructions, made one of those three years ago called Gate.
But outside of WPA airport murals, and the occasional photorealist canvas from the 70s, artists haven't devoted much effort to this defining 21st century experience that we all endure. Is that because it's too difficult to reconcile the contradictions of flying? The combination of exhaltation -- I'm flying! -- banality -- I'm flying in a dreary cramped cylinder -- and persistent low grade anxiety about terrorism and turbulence?
January 6, 2007 3:00
Deja Vu All Over Again
I enjoyed Lee Rosenbaum's recent piece in the Wall Street Journal about Boston's new Institute for Contemporary Art, the one designed by Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio. Rosenbaum draws a connection between the ICA's cantilevered upper story, which has a room descending at an angle from its underside, and the not so different silhouette of Rafael Vinoly's Boston Convention Center a few blocks away, which can be accessed on her website here. (My own take on the ICA from a December issue of Time can be found here.
The room sloping downward from the ICA is a very different thing from the one descending from Vinoly's Convention Center -- Diller + Scofidio designed it in such a way that it opens a view directly onto the surface of the waters of Boston Bay, creating the impression for anyone inside that they are looking at a glistening and slightly unreal wall of water. All the same, now that it's been pointed out, the family resemblance between the ICA and Vinoly's building, at least in that one area, is unmistakable. It got me to thinking about the many times I've experienced a kind of architectural deja vu. Whether it's a matter of coincidence, homage, unconscious influence, free quotation, outright steal or simply two architects who have each offered their own take on a historic form, it happens quite a bit. It happened again last fall when I visited Cesar Pelli's new Minneapolis Central Library.
It's a superb building, but it's also one with a roof that brought to mind Vinoly's famous Tokyo International Forum, which I visited two years ago.
Great minds thinking alike? From time to time I'll post other examples.
January 5, 2007 5:44
You Ought to be in Pictures
Lately I've been reading Pictures of Nothing, a collection of the six A.W. Mellon Lectures delivered in 2003 by the late Kirk Varnedoe, who spent 12 years as chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. Varnedoe's topic is abstraction, and he can be wonderfully acute and lucid. He's fascinating on the subject of Jasper Johns' crosshatch paintings, work I've always found tight lipped even for Johns, but where Varnedoe draws out no end of plausible meanings.
I mention him now because along the way he points out that the black slab in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey probably had as its inspiration the minimalist sculpture that had begun appearing in the mid-60s. His particular candidate for "proximate source" is Blue Column a 1967 slab sculpture by the Los Angeles artist John McCracken. Whether Kubrick, who lived in England by that time, was aware of it, it looks to me like a plausible possibility.
Though by actual count I've seen 2001 about that many times, the obvious connection between The Slab and, say, those big mute cartons by Robert Morris was one of those hide-in-plain-sight links that had never occurred to me. I've spent a lifetme looking at art and at movies, but like most people who think about this at all I'm more aware of the ways that movies influence art than vice versa. Are the shock edits in Eisenstein's Potemkin in any way influenced by the fractured space of Cubism? Could be, but beyond that I'm hard pressed to think of many examples of art being subtly -- repeat subtly -- pressed into service for a film, so I don't mean films made by animation artists like Yellow Submarine, a movie that ate whatever came it's way. But as Varnedoe recognizes, Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke needed a form "that was at once absolute and ambiguous, a form that had a tremendous amount of authority and an unruly indecipherability." So they borrowed one from the most resolute art of their time.
Maybe I was still under the influence of that passage a few nights later, when I happened to be watching John Boorman's 1972 film Deliverance on tv. Otherwise I might not have noticed, in the final twenty minutes, a brief shot, about five seconds in all, of a dumptruck at the edge of a high ravine spilling a flow of dark gravel down the slope.
The truck itself is no mystery. We know that a dam is being built across the river, one that will turn the whole valley into a lake, and we've already seen a montage of earth moving equipment under the opening credits. The shot makes sense psychologically, too, as a metaphor for the guilty conscience of the character played by Jon Voigt, who's on the last stretch of a journey in which he and his friends have killed two men. Voigt is hoping now that all evidence of the crime will be buried when the waters rise. Burial and cover up are on his mind.
What was riveting about the shot is how closely it matched photographs of Asphalt Rundown, a Robert Smithson piece from 1969 in which Smithson had a dumptruck spill dark asphalt down a slope to make the earthworks equivalent of one of Pollock's pours. (And, says Varnedoe, whose book includes a picture of that work, also a critique of what Smithson, in the era of the Vietnam war, saw as the lethal grandiosity of the Abstract Expressionists.)
Again, just as Kubrick was borrowing the power and strangeness of what was then new art for his own purposes, Boorman (or whichever part of his film making team proposed that shot) was apparently turning Smithson to his own purposes. (And yes, it's always possible that the resemblance is a coincidence. If it is, gee, that's quite a coincidence.) Are there more of these subtle borrowings in movies? I don't mean lighting effects. Cinematographers are always borrowing from Caravaggio, La Tour, Vermeer and Hopper. And I don't mean outright collaborations. Hitchcock famously (and hilariously) had Dali design the would-be Freudian dream sequence in Spellbound, an important moment in the history of kitsch. But were there any other directors who tried, say, to subtly adapt one of those Louise Bourgeois spiders? (Maybe Spielberg in War of the Worlds, but those spider-shaped Martian attack vehicles have multiple sources, including of course real spiders.) Or Jeff Koons potted-plant puppy dog? Fellini loved to tell people he was influenced by Stan Lee, who created Spider Man, but just how is not always easy to say.
And yes, we know anime. Animation, which is graphic art to begin with, has been full of references to other graphic art since animation began. Or at least since the best example I know, Disney's adaptation of that shot from Murnau's silent Faust
into Disney's Fantasia.
I saw the Murnau film for the first time a few years ago, when I already knew the Disney, and went - ah. But animators are born to the breed. Are there still any other film makers who borrow this shrewdly, the ones who don't draw to begin with?
About Looking Around
Richard Lacayo writes about books, art and architecture at TIME Magazine, where he arrived in 1984. He is the co-author, with George Russell, of Eyewitness: 100 Years of Photojournalism and has won various lesser known journalism prizes, which he keeps in his desk drawer. Read more
