December 31, 2007 11:56
Blogroll Update
I've been meaning for a while to add two of my favorite art/architecture sites to my blogroll. Time.com's crack squad of techies will put the links up on my roll on Wednesday. Meanwhile, I'll post them here.
C-monster.net is a very comprehensive and frequently hilarious art news aggregator. It has led me to waste many precious hours of my life wandering among other art sites, hours that I could have spent learning to play the piano or speak Portuguese.
The New Modernist is a blog (mostly) about architecture by Edward Lifson, senior arts editor of Chicago Public Radio. A man with an eye for news from everywhere and interesting things to say about it.
December 27, 2007 4:56
The Biggest Art Stories of the Year
I started this blog on Jan. 5 of this year, so I'm closing in on the first anniversary. I won't bore you with a rundown of the various Lessons I've Learned. (For instance, did you know there's just one "l" in pavilion? I finally mastered that one at the Venice Biennale.) But in the end-of-the-year spirit, here's one last list. I've already put out there my favorite exhibitions and buildings of the past year. Here's a list from the newsier side of the blog. The ten most important stories — or so it appeared to me — that the artworld produced over the past twelve months.
1. The Endless Tug of War Over Antiquities. Museums and private collectors have them. "Source" nations want them back. And this year they got quite a few, or at least Italy did, thanks largely to its tireless minister of culture, Francesco Rutelli, who romped through the collections of some of the biggest American museums. This, of course, was already a story last year. And it's sure to be one next year, especially as the official opening approaches for the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, which would just love to retrieve the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum.
2. The Impermanent Collection. Tempted by the exploding art market (see below), museums started to see their own collections as so much movable merchandise. The Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo and the St. Louis Art Museum embarked on major deaccessions. After Jefferson University in Philadelphia put its big Eakins, The Gross Clinic, up for sale last year, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts stepped in to co-purchase it. To finance the co-purchase, this year PAFA had to sell...an Eakins. Meanwhile, Randolph College in Lynchburg, Va. and Fisk University in Nashville, two schools with sketchy balance sheets but some nice art in their campus museums, decided to liquidate some of their holdings. The good news is that by the end of the year neither had been able to conclude a sale. And the difficulties they've encountered on the way to market — lawsuits, bad publicity, objections from the state attorney general in Tennessee — should give pause to other schools thinking of treating their art collections as piggy banks.
3. The Continuing Saga of the Barnes Foundation. The Foundation picked architects — Tod Williams + Billie Tsien — to design a new home when (and if) the Barnes collection moves from Merion, Pa., where it belongs, to Philadelphia, where it doesn't. Meanwhile, opponents of the move, the Friends of the Barnes, petitioned Judge Stanley Ott to reconsider his earlier decision to permit the Barnes to relocate. Which he should. Earlier this month, however, the Friends also fired their lawyer.
4. Christoph Buchel and MASS MoCA. Buchel, a hyper-demanding Swiss artist, made one demand too many of MASS MoCA, which was trying to mount his first, massive American installation at their space in western Massachusetts. Then MASS MoCA unwisely attempted to show his unfinished work. An artist and an institution in a mutual meltdown. Nobody came out the winner.
5. Museum World Musical Chairs. Lots of major changes at the top. William Griswold, director of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, decided to head for New York to become chief of the Morgan Library and Museum. Kaywin Feldman of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Tennessee was picked to replace him. Across town, Kathy Halbreich stepped down at the Walker Art Center, eventually to take the newly created position of associate director at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She in turn was replaced by Olga Viso, director of the Hirschhorn in Washington, a city that had already lost National Gallery of Art curator Jeffrey Weiss, who's now director of the Dia Foundation, and would lose National Gallery curator Nicholas Penny, who is headed back to London to run the National Gallery there. Lisa Dennison abruptly jumped from director of the Guggenheim to a top job at Sotheby's. Timothy Potts left the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth for the Fitzwilliam at Cambridge University in England. San Francisco MoMA curator Madeleine Grynsztejn headed back to Chicago — she used to work at the Art Institute — to run the Museum of Contemporary Art. And at the end of the year MoMA in New York announced that next year, when John Elderfield reaches their mandatory retirement age of 65, he'll be stepping down as chief curator of painting and sculpture, one of the most important jobs in the American museum world.
I forget anybody?
6. The Matter "Pollocks". A few years ago Alex Matter, whose father Herbert was a friend of Jackson Pollock, found a number of small paintings in a locker once rented by his late father. On the brown paper they were wrapped in they were labelled as "experimental works" by Pollock. But by this year it was looking ever less likely that they could possibly be the real thing. In January the Harvard University Art Museums announced that tests on three of the paintings showed that they contained pigments that weren't available commercially until the 1960s and '70s, years after Pollock's death. Then last month, James Martin, a forensic scientist who had studied a different and larger sampling of the paintings, told a forum in New York sponsored by the International Foundation for Art Research that some of the pigments were not available until even later — the 1980s. Could Pollock have obtained the paints many years before they were available on the market? Sounds like a very long shot to me.
7. Alice Walton. I have this picture in my mind of the Wal-Mart heiress in one of those starkly lit war rooms like the one in Dr. Strangelove, with a big map on one wall that shows every institution in the U.S. that might be in any way interested in selling off some of its art. This year Walton quietly offered Fisk University (see above) $30 million for a sharing arrangement for all 101 works in their Alfred Steiglitz Collection. (That deal is presently tied up in legal challenges.) She flew out to Randolph College to take a look at the art in its Maier Museum. (Backed away from that one.) Though she failed to get The Gross Clinic from Jefferson University, she picked up a lesser but still estimable Eakins from them, Portrait of Professor Banjamin H. Rand. Her Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is scheduled to open in Bentonville, Ark. in 2009. I will not be surprised if by that time she's bought the Statue of Liberty.
8. The Art Market. It's up. It's down, It's sideways. A correction is coming. No, no, more Russians are coming. Wake me up when it's over.
9. Gone But Not Forgotten. Sol LeWitt, John Szarkowski, Elizabeth Murray, Alexandra Boulat, R.B. Kitaj, Ileana Sonnabend
10. Damien Hirst's Diamond Encrusted Skull. Enough said. And I mean that.
December 27, 2007 11:54
Pyramid Scheme
Okay, I'm back from my holiday vacation break, and practically the first thing I learn is that Zahi Hawass, the irrepressible head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, has announced that Egypt's parliament will shortly consider a law that would put his nation's museum pieces and monuments, including the pyramids, under copyright protection. Presuming that Egypt can get other nations to recognize its claim, anyone seeking to make detailed replicas of the pyramids, of the Sphinx or of, say, statues and other objects in the Cairo Museum, would be obliged to pay a copyright fee to the Egyptian government.
My question: Can you copyright ancient monuments that have no known architect? The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works provides a mechanism to extend protection to the "authors" of works of architecture. Some sculptural monuments by identifiable artists have copyrights. The Statue of Liberty — by Frederic Auguste Bartholdi — has had one since 1876, ten years before it was dedicated in New York harbor. And though the Eiffel Tower has been in the public domain for years, its night time image is not. Its decorative electric light display is copyrighted, which effectively copyrights the tower at night, so commercial photographers have to pay a fee to take its picture once the lights are on.
But I'm not aware of any ancient monument subject to copyright protection, and I'm wondering if a copyright claim on the pyramids would be one that other nations would be obliged to recognize. If it is, it should be interesting to see what that means for this little pyramid here.
December 21, 2007 2:55
American Gladiators of the Mind
To keep you moderately entertained today, here's a link to a Time.com podcast of an oddball intellectual exercise carried out last week by Time's arts section staff — the critics who write about movies, television, books, pop music and, ahem, art and architecture, as well as our distinguished arts section editor — all of us disputing among ourselves about what was the most important single cultural "thing" of 2007. (The link takes you to a page with several Time.com podcasts. You need to download the one in Entertainment called "The Best Thing of 2007".) In the end we vote! Meaninglessly, I would say, but the conversation has its moments. I, naturally, defend something high minded. Very, very high minded. And heavy. Very, very heavy.
In other, non-thing related news, at Time we have what you might call a holiday escape clause for the entire staff. At the end of the year we shut down the magazine for a week and take off. (Except my hard working colleagues at Time.com, which never goes dark.) So I'm taking off and taking the blog with me. I'll be back up and running on Thursday, Dec. 26. Til then, seasons greetings everybody.
December 19, 2007 1:50
From Russia: No Love
Dance (II), Matisse, 1910 — Image: The Hermitage Museum
The Russians have abruptly cancelled "From Russia: French and Russian Art Masterpieces of 1870-1925", a lavish loan show that was supposed to move next month from Dusseldorf to the Royal Academy of Art in London. The reason they give is that the British have not guaranteed that works in the show, which include major canvases like Matisse's Dance (II) and a Cezanne view of Mont St. Victoire, would be returned to Russia in the event that descendants of the original owners of some works brought legal claims for their restitution.
In the past, descendants of Sergei Shchukin, the great Russian patron of Matisse and Picasso, have attempted without success to reclaim works from his collection that were confiscated by the Soviets and eventually passed on to Russian museums. The British Parliament has adopted legislation to protect art on loan from seizures of that kind, but it hasn't yet come into force.
All the same, the British press suspects that the real reason for the cancellation is that it's another opportunity for the Russians to vent their annoyance that the British are continuing their investigation into the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian security agent who was poisoned in London last November. The Russians have refused to extradite the man whom the Brits want to charge with the crime. (Gee, all this on the day that my magazine makes Vladimir Putin Person of the Year.)
UPDATE: On Friday the Russians changed course and decided that the work could travel to London as soon as Parliament moves up the effective date for that indemnifying legislation, though no guarantees as to whether the show would open on time on Jan. 26 as scheduled.
If a diplomatic spat over the Litvinenko investigation was the real reason for the cancellation, then the show was a victim of the souring of Russian-British relations. A pity, but hardly the first time that works of art have been used as pawns in political games. I thought of that this morning after reading that yesterday Sotheby's in New York auctioned off a 1297 copy of the Magna Carta for $21.3 million. (There are actually 17 surviving copies of the Magna Carta from the 13th century. Between 300 and 400 were produced periodically for distribution to English shire courts and cathedrals.) The Magna Carta isn't a work of art, but it's certainly a precious object, and as I learned recently a different copy was also once used, or almost used, as a pawn in a (more benign) political game.
So, the book-length hardcover catalogue that Sotheby's prepared for their one-item Magna Carta sale yesterday contains this story:
In 1939 a copy of the Charter belonging to England's Lincoln Cathedral was on loan to the U.S. for display at the New York World's Fair. By the time the fair closed that fall Britain and Germany were at war, but the U.S. was still on the sidelines. Earlier in the year an American supporter of Britain named J.W. Hamilton had proposed to a prominent British politician named Leo Amery that the Lincoln Magna Carta might be given as a permanent gift to the U.S. That would not only demonstrate the sources of American democracy in an English document, it would encourage pro-British sentiment in the U.S. at a time when isolationists were fighting to keep America out of the war. Amery passed the idea along to the then-Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.
The British Foreign Office was at first cool to the idea. But by early 1941, with the war going badly for Britain and Winston Churchill installed as Prime Minister, Winston himself started to think well of it. But then came ministerial second thoughts. If Britain gave a copy to the U.S., then Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa would all want one, and the Brits only had so many copies to go around. Even worse, the British government didn't actually own the Lincoln Magna Carta. Officials of Lincoln Cathedral did, and they weren't inclined to let go of it.
The entire question remained stalemated until December, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entered the war anyway, though for the duration of the war the Lincoln Magna Carta did remain at Fort Knox for safekeeping.
Okay, class dismissed.
December 18, 2007 9:25
The Architecture Top Ten
As identified by me in this week's list-mad issue of Time. Actually it's just five — and one of them is a sculpture park — plus five hopefuls for next year.
Bloch Building, Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City — Photo: Nelson-Atkins Museum
Why only five? Even though Steven Holl's Bloch Building at the Nelson-Atkins Museum may be the best new American building I've seen since Frank Gehry's Disney Concert Hall, I can't honestly say I saw nine other new buildings this year that rose to the bar. (There are American projects only on this list by the way. For some reason even Time's travel budget doesn't allow me to circle the globe at will.)
New York Times Headquarters, Renzo Piano — Photo: Davers Steel
Biggest disappointment? Renzo Piano's New York Times headquarters in Manhattan. We were promised a diaphanous, semi-transparent tower. What we got was more like a battleship grey metal slab. Of course with Piano these days you only to have to wait a few months and another completed American project comes rolling out of his shop. Next up, the California Academy of Science in San Francisco. And the new campus for the Los Angeles County Museum. And the addition to the Art Institute of Chicago. And the Whitney's satellite museum in lower Manhattan. And.....
Akron Art Museum addition, Coop Himmelb(l)au — Photo: Akron Art Museum/Roland Halbe Photografie
Building I wish I had gotten out to see? The addition to the Akron Art Museum by the Vienna firm Coop Himmelb(l)au. It looks great in pictures. I'll get there.
Glass House, Philip Johnson — Photo: Eirik Johnson
Best old new building? Philip Johnson's Glass House and the whole mixed bag of structures he built over the years across his compound in New Canaan, Conn., which opened to the public for the first time this year.
Proposal for Transbay Transit Center, San Francisco, Cesar Pelli — Image: Transbay Transit Center
Most promising development? I was glad when Cesar Pelli's proposal won the competition for the new Transbay Transit Center in San Francisco. What's most interesting about Pelli's scheme is not so much the tower — which is a variation on a fairly elegant template he's already provided for towers in Hong Kong and Jersey City — but the 5.4 acre park that the design provides on the six block-long roof of the transit center, which is a hub for bus and rail lines. If all goes as planned it'll be a green roof that's also a true public amenity.
Proposed towers for World Trade Center site — Image: Port Authority of N. Y. and N. J.
Most unpromising development? The row of office towers planned for the eastern edge of the World Trade Center site in New York. Whatever their merits as individual buildings — and this time developer Larry Silverstein called in names like Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki — taken as a whole they represent a complete failure to think urbanistically, to conceive the site as an ensemble of large and smaller buildings and open space. When people describe the Trade Center site as a tragically missed opportunity, this is what they mean. The place has become a graveyard of ideas.
American Folk Art Museum, Tod Williams + Billie Tsien — Photo: AFAM/Michael Moran
Most exquisite predicament? The selection of Tod Williams + Billie Tsien to design the new home for the Barnes Foundation collection, assuming it does move to Philadelphia from its proper home in Merion, Pa. Tod and Billie are superb architects. Their American Folk Art Museum in New York is a small gem. So we may end up confronted with a brilliant solution for moving a collection that still should not be moved in the first place.
Riverview High School, Paul Rudolph — Photo — Sarasota Herald-Tribune/Dan Wagner
Worst trend? Tear down threats against buildings designed by the late American Modernist Paul Rudolph. One Rudolph house went down this year, and there are threats against an office building in Boston and Riverview High School in Sarasota, Florida. The good news? Yale University has brought in Charles Gwathmey to oversee a renewal and restoration of Rudolph's Art and Architecture Building.
Art and Architecture Building, Paul Rudolph — Photo: Yale
December 17, 2007 2:08
"Faux" Pas
Replicas of the terra cotta warriors at the Hamburg Museum of Anthropology — Photo: Kay Nietfeld/EPA
I've been mulling over the power of "authenticity" again lately, this time in connection with two developments last week. One was the decision by the Hamburg Museum of Anthropology to shut down an exhibition of what were supposed to be some of the famous Chinese terra cotta warriors from the third century B.C. The museum recently discovered that the figures were actually modern copies.
The other was the discovery by the Art Institute of Chicago that a ceramic sculpture of a faun purchased ten years ago in the belief that it was by Gauguin was actually a very skillful forgery.
Faun, formerly attributed to Gauguin — The Art Institute of Chicago
Forgery utterly destabilizes most kinds of art, because it goes to the heart of the experience. (I say most kinds because it wouldn't have the same impact on Duchamp's readymades or Warhol's Brillo Boxes, works that simply bypass the whole idea of authenticity.) When aesthetic pleasure is triggered by phony merchandise it calls into question all of our beliefs about the power of art and how it operates. We don't just respond to the formal qualities of a work of art — line, volume, color, whatever. If we did a good forgery would be just as satisfying as an original. We also invest the work with sentiments based on what we know or think we know about who made it. It's those sentiments that amplify mere formal pleasures into the higher realms of bliss and awe, or at least into more ample kinds of satisfaction. A good forgery is a like a deceptive lover. You've been lured into giving away your heart, and it doesn't help to know that the deception rests partly on your eagerness to believe.
Armoured General, c. 210 B.C. — Photo: The British Museum
In London recently I was able to see real examples of the terra cotta warriors at the British Museum's show "The First Emperor". Life size figures, each of them individualized to some degree, they make a tremendous impact precisely because we believe them to be the output of workshops from more than 2200 years ago. You pore over them for signals from another time and place about how it conceived humanity. (And for the pleasure of seeing so many ancient faces clearly individuated — it's like having 20 or so visitors show up on your doorstep.) Would it matter to be looking at replicas? Of course, and for those reasons. As well as for the reason that any modern replica is still bound to be a mediocre and misleading approximation. (But to add an extra layer of paradox, even the authentic figures are misleading, since like Greek marbles they were originally painted in bright colors that have long since worn away.)
With the Gauguin, there's the additional expectation that the work is invested with the intentions of an individual artist whose name we know. The "aura" around that work is partly a matter of the way we transfer to it our romantic conception of Gauguin. It's not simply a work of art. It's in some ways a sentimental keepsake.
But if we no longer have his Faun, at least we still have his teeth. Assuming they're really his.
December 13, 2007 8:47
Seurat at MoMA: Play Misty for Me
The Echo (study for Baignade), Seurat, 1883 — Yale University Art Gallery
Having posted yesterday about the pending retirement of John Elderfield at the Museum of Modern Art, I'll stay on a MoMA topic today, which is the really superb show, "Georges Seurat: The Drawings", organized by MoMA associate curator of drawings Jodi Hauptman. I can't think of another 19th century French painter, not even Ingres, whose drawings were a more important part of his overall practice as an artist. Even if Seurat had never developed pointillism as a means to restabilize painting after the Impressionists, his drawings would have made him a major figure for the way they provided an early glimpse of a drawing as an all-over field of marks, a fine mesh of particulates where image and ground interpenetrate.
Seurat literally created a new kind of draughtsmanship, one that de-emphasized line and cross hatching in favor of a broad massing of light and shadow produced by unusual means. Seurat's method was to drag conte crayon across the tufted surface of the thick textured paper called Michallet. (Do me a favor and just picture an accent over the "e" in conte so I don't have to go through the struggle to place one that my software puts me through. And let's not even talk about umlauts.) When he used light pressure on the crayon he left deposits of graphite on the upper surface of the tufts, but not in the channels below, so that solid forms still carried a slight luminousity of unmarked paper radiating in faint lines from beneath the darkened surface. With heavier pressure he could produce an impenetrable sooty black.
Seen up close, a Seurat drawing resembles a stormfield of bristling dots, like a TV screen, a darkened field permeated by pinpoints of light, out of which the ectoplasmic image dimly yet distinctly emerges. The line between figure and ground is uncertain, like in a Whistler nocturne. Contours oscillate at high frequencies. The border of a face or even a building can dissolve into a gaseous glow.
At the Concert Europeen, Seurat, c. 1886-1888 — MoMA
What that means of course is that by the 1880s Seurat was pointing towards that fetish of 20th century modernism, the shallow-depth picture plane, one in which the image fluctuates between illusionist volume and flatness. The extraordinary pictures of his mother from 1882-1883, bidding to us through fogs of graphite, are fully modeled illusions of three-dimensional form, but on close inspection everything solid melts into the air.
Today a contemporary artist like Vija Celmins is still mining the implications of Seurat's granular fields.
Untitled (Big Sea #1), Vija Celmins, 1969 — Courtesy McKee Gallery, N.Y.
And though Richard Serra may not have been thinking about them — he was probably filtering the monumentality of the ancient world through Malevich — his thickly applied paintstik drawings have their beginnings in the darkest passages of Seurat.
Dead Weight (Edfu), Richard Serra, 1991 — MoMA
And we haven't even talked about Seurat's drawings of the butt-end outskirts of Paris, the bain lieu, the Zone, at least one of them as lonesome and as radically composed — or is it decomposed? — as anything by Robert Frank or Garry Winogrand.
Railway Tracks, Seurat, c.1881-1882 — Collection Andre Bromberg
In all, a Seurat exhibition to stand with the great show three years ago at the Art Institute of Chicago about La Grande Jatte and the studies that led to it.
December 12, 2007 3:26
Breaking News: John Elderfield To Retire
Elderfield — Photo: University of Leeds
The Museum of Modern Art just informed its staff that John Elderfield, MoMA's chief curator of painting and sculpture, will be stepping down in July of next year. (MoMA curators face a mandatory retirement age of 65.) Kim Mitchell in the museum's press office tells me that no successor for Elderfield has been chosen yet and that the search process is yet to get underway.
Elderfield has been in MoMA's top curatorial job since he succeeded Kirk Varnedoe in 2003, but he's been a curator there since 1975. Over the years he's been the driving force behind some of the most gratifying shows the Modern ever presented, including the magnificent Matisse retrospective in 1992, the Bonnard retrospective six years later — a show that made Bonnard an infinitely more credible painter in my eyes; I don't care what Picasso thought — and the great Martin Puryear show that's up right now.
Elderfield, who was chosen by Time a few years ago as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, also co-curated the indispensable Matisse-Picasso show of 2003, as well as the great mini-show last year that brought together all four of the paintings Manet produced of The Execution of Maximilian. He got a more mixed reception for co-producing the three shows from 1999-2000 that were called Modern Starts, a thematic cross-mixture of works from MoMA's permanent collection. Those shows traumatized some people by departing from the museum's usual organization of shows by artist or medium or "ism" and instead mixing together art from several departments. They struck me as a useful ice breaker.
When the newly expanded MoMA re-opened three years ago it was also Elderfield who supervised the re-hanging of it's permanent collection, a rehanging that has never satisfied everybody — either it departed too much from the art historical flow chart devised by Alfred Barr and codified by Bill Rubin or it didn't depart enough. But the rehanging has also proven to be flexible — Rubin's beloved Cezanne Bather is even back for now in its central position, but probably not forever. It brought more artists from Latin America into the mix. And it inaugurated the idea of changing galleries dedicated to individual artists.
MoMA is constantly criticized for not being quick enough off the mark when it comes to contemporary art. Point taken, and one that the museum implicitly acknowledged this summer when it hired Kathy Halbreich, former director of the Walker Art Center, as an associate director at MoMA with a focus on that area. But MoMA is something that no other museum anywhere in the U.S. — or the world for that matter — is or can be, a truly encyclopedic museum of Modernism. It's mission as curator of the (still recent) past is crucial to its institutional purpose, and in that capacity Elderfield performed adroitly and sometimes brilliantly. In an era of dreadful, jargon-clogged art writing, he also produced catalog essays that are models of lucidity. And he brought some major works into the museum's permanent collection, including Rauschenberg's Rebus and Jasper Johns' Diver, one of Elderfield's favorite paintings.
As a way of holding on to him while letting him go, the museum has created the title of Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture, and in that consulting role Elderfield will be on board for a couple of major upcoming shows devoted to Matisse and DeKooning.
World's easiest New Year's prediction — the search for his successor is going to be the obsession of 2008.
December 11, 2007 5:42
Dangerous Liaisons
Shibboleth, Doris Salcedo, 2007 — Photo: Tate
I can't believe that people are still managing to trip over that long crack that is Doris Salcedo's temporary art installation in the floor of the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in London. But the completely ridiculous idea that Salcedo's piece might actually be dangerous got me thinking about art works that really do have a little danger in them.
Chris Burden, of course, was famous for that kind of thing, with performance works like "Kick the Bucket" where he lay on the ground surrounded by live electrical wires and buckets of water that visitors were invited to kick over. (I guess none did.) And then there was that time he had himself shot in the arm for "Shot in the Arm". Good name.
The Big Wheel, Chris Burden, 1979 — Photo: Ronald Feldman Gallery
But Burden also produced at least one piece where the threat was to the viewer. Back in 1980 I tip-toed up to The Big Wheel, which consists of a motorcycle with its rear wheel pressed every two hours against a three-ton flywheel and revved. That's enough to keep the wheel spinning at speeds up to 200 rpms. Touch that thing and you could lose a finger. So of course you need to. This is a work where the role of danger in its relation to desire requires no explanation.
North, East, South, West, Michael Heizer, 1967-2002 — © Michael Heizer. Photo: Tom Vinetz.
At Dia:Beacon in Beacon, N.Y. you can contemplate the perils of Michael Heizer's North. East, South, West — though from a safe distance. There's a guided tour, over age eighteen only please, and they don't let you drop over the edge of the four steel-sided holes that the piece consists of, the ones that sink to a depth of 20 feet. (As one of Heizer's "negative sculptures" — a hole or channel in the ground — it's plainly a precursor to Salcedo's crack in the floor.) The element of danger here, and its real enough if you peer over the edge, seems related to Heizer's ambition to tap into the sense of awe produced by ancient sculpture and monuments.
Lincoln Kirstein Tower — Photo: Paul Warchol
I came across another dangerous work earlier this year at the compound that surrounds Philip Johnson's Glass House in Connecticut — the Lincoln Kirstein Tower, an irregular concrete stairstep sculpture, 36 ft. tall, that was dedicated to Johnson's old friend Kirstein, the all purpose aesthete who founded the New York City Ballet with George Balanchine. When Johnson still occupied the grounds visitors were encouraged to climb the tower, but most of them halted halfway. The blocks are barely big enough for your feet and don't offer much in the way of handholds, and there's no railings. You get up around 20 feet or so — about where I gave up — and find yourself standing in midair on some precipitous little ledge. (I was on a personal preview of the Glass House site; I suspect that now visitors may not be permitted to make that climb.) Here the danger might have to do with Kirstein's lifelong personal daring — actually, he had manic episodes — and maybe also with the "stepping" of ballet.
But the Tower is also an outgrowth of Johnson's concept of "safe danger" in architecture, mildly perilous passages like the stepping stones you navigate across the reflecting pool that separates the two halves of the interior courtyard in the Manhattan guesthouse he designed for Blanchette Rockefeller. But there the worst you might do is miss a stone and wet your Manolo Blahniks. Fall off the Kirstein Tower and you can break your neck. Think of it as a garden folly with edge.
December 11, 2007 10:03
The Top 10 Museum Shows
It's end of the year list making time, and here at Time.com we've been making our's. Top ten movies, top ten books and so on. Here's a link to my completely subjective inventory of the top ten shows in U.S. museums this year. The only rule — an exhibition had to have its first American venue in 2007. Oh, and one other. I had to have seen it.
December 9, 2007 1:49
Lascaux Caves: More Fungus Among Us
Double Bison, Lascaux Caves, c. 17,000 B.C. -- Photos: French Ministry of Culture
Last year the European edition of Time ran an important cover story by my colleague James Graff alerting the world to the seriousness of the persistent fungus threatening the prehistoric cave paintings in Lascaux, France. Over the weekend the New York Times produced this update about a recurrence of the fungus.
Cow, Lascaux Caves, c. 17,000 B.C.
The Lascaux caves were discovered by four teenage boys in 1940. The caves and their 17,000 year old paintings were opened to tourists after World War II but closed again in 1963 to everyone but a trickle of visitors, mostly researchers, after lichen and small crystals started to appear on the walls. Then in 2001 the caves were hit by a severe invasion of fungus and bacteria that may have been due to an ill-conceived climate control system installed in 2001. The French have claimed to have gotten the problem under control, but the Times article is evidence that they still haven't.
Last year's Time story suggests that the continuing problem with Lascaux is not just fungus, it's fog — the absence of a truly independent body to examine the problem and evaluate potential solutions. The team of microbiologists sent in recently to evaluate the caves is not the same thing. Let me steer you to this quote from the Time cover:
It's hard to sort out the competing claims [as to what caused the fungus] because there still has been no independent judgment of what went wrong and whether it is being put right. The committee the Ministry of Culture created to perform that task is made up of most of the bureaucrats responsible for the damage, including the architect who installed the climate system, the curator who oversaw the installation project and the lab director. How such a committee can arrive at unbiased answers is "a good question," admits Marc Gauthier, an expert on the Gallo-Roman era and the committee's chairman. But he says the process is working.
Is it? You can learn more at the website of The International Committee for Preservation of Lascaux.
Postscript: By coincidence lately I've been reading the new paperback edition of The Cave Painters by Gregory Curtis. Recommended reading for anybody who'd like to know more about the kind of art that makes mere "antiquities" look like artworld newcomers.
December 7, 2007 6:10
More Mayne Man
A few weeks ago I posted about the beautifully conceived and executed federal office building that Thom Mayne's firm Morphosis has produced in San Francisco. Today a new podcast was put on the web in connection with e2, a series set to air on various public TV stations about green design. The second episode, called "Greening the Federal Government", will focus on that building. Meanwhile, if you want to amuse yourself for a few minutes the podcast gives you a few glimpses of it and a brief interview with Mayne.
December 6, 2007 10:38
Undocumented Immigrants?
Greek pottery from the Walsh Collection — Photo: Chris Taggart/Fordham University
Fordham University opened a new museum of Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities today on its Bronx, N.Y. campus. All of the work comes from the collection of William D. Walsh, a wealthy alum and longtime Fordham benefactor. But as the New York Times notes, this a tricky time to be opening a museum of ancient artifacts,. All this year and last, Francesco Rutelli, the tireless Italian culture minister, has romped through American museums reclaiming works that he said were exported from Italy in violation of its cultural property laws.
As a former assistant U.S. attorney, Walsh may have been more aware than some other collectors of the law as it relates to the trade in antiquities. But when he tells the Times that he hopes his collection is sufficiently documented because it was all acquired through auction, not private dealers, he may be putting too much faith in how energetically the auction houses vetted their consignments in the days not so long ago when buyers and sellers were less sensitive to the issue of illegal exports.
In the Times, Richard Hodges, the director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, says bluntly that "a lot of [the Walsh collection] is not provenanced". Meaning there's no clear history of how it same into the market. Meaning it might have been looted from an excavation site. Jennifer Udell, Fordham's curator of art, says the university will be "happy to work with anyone who has a legitimate claim" to any of the work. We know that Rutelli has already reclaimed items from the Princeton Museum, so university collections are not below his radar. If he hasn't already, I suspect he'll be looking over the Fordham collection's inventory list before too long.
You can find the Times story here.
December 5, 2007 5:43
The Lion Sweeps Tonight
Lioness Demon, c. 2900 BC — Photo: Sotheby's
I don't generally dwell on the ups and downs of the art market, but the Wednesday night antiquities auction at Sotheby's in New York has produced one pretty stunning result. A carved limestone lioness figure dating from between 3000 and 2800 BC was sold to a so far unnamed British bidder for $51 million — $57.16 million when the buyer's premium is thrown in. via. That makes it not only the most costly antiquity ever sold at auction, but also the most expensive work of sculpture. It's just three and a half inches tall, so that comes to about $18 million an inch.
Though it's generally referered to as a demon figure, the carving may also represent Inanna, the Mesopotamian goddess of sexual love and war. And it may actually have been worn as an amulet, so it's probably a stretch to call it sculpture. The piece has been on loan since 1948 to the Brooklyn Museum. The seller was a charitable trust established by the family of Alastair Bradley Martin, a former Brooklyn Museum chairman who bought the little lioness 59 years ago.
December 5, 2007 4:35
Pitt's Burg
"Lagniappe House", Concordia — Image: Concordia
You may have seen news stories earlier this week about "Make It Right", the project that Brad Pitt is leading to promote the reconstruction of the Lower Ninth Ward, the New Orleans neighborhood that was demolished two years ago by Katrina. In the aftermath of the storm I went down to New Orleans for Time, and I learned something about how big the hurdles are to rebuilding in some parts of that city and how many schemes have been put forward not just for rebuilding the city but for reimagining it.
Even given all that, the Pitt project actually looks promising to me. (And if it takes a movie star to get things moving there, why not? Pitt has a home in the French Quarter, so he's not a stranger to the place.) The goal for now is to raise money to build 150 houses in the Lower Ninth Ward "with an emphasis on developing an affordable system that could be replicated." Pitt has partnered with William McDonough, the "Cradle to Cradle" environmental thinker and designer. To design model houses for the project he's also brought in 14 well chosen architectural firms, including the Nigerian-born British architect David Adjaye, Thom Mayne's endlessly inventive Morphosis and Shigeru Ban, who's been involved throughout his career with humanitarian housing projects and questions of sustainability.
And unlike the New Urbanists, who have also been contributing ideas to the reconstruction of New Orleans, and who can be valuable as city planners but tend to be nostalgia-prone as architects, the firms working in the Make It Right Project are commited to contemporary design, not Disney-fication, They've already come up with models that look interesting, at least at this phase. The model above is by the New Orleans firm Concordia. You can learn more about Make It Right here.
December 4, 2007 12:13
The Turner Prize
State Britain, Mark Wallinger, 2006 — Photo © Tate 2006
The people at Tate Britain who bestow the Turner Prize, the U.K.'s annual art award, have given it this week to the artist who produced one of the most highly publicized installation works of the year. From January through August Mark Wallinger filled the Tate's Duveen Gallery with State Britain, a recreation of the anti-war protest encampment of Brian Haw, who for five years filled Parliament Square in London with banners, placards and messages opposing Britain's involvement in the Iraq War.
Wallinger's replica of Haw's protest uses an old installation art strategy, the re-contextualization of some meticulously recreated reality. (I first saw it done 20 years ago in the form of a perfectly reproduced futon shop in a Soho gallery.) This passage from the Tate wesbite explains the importance of recreating the protest this year.
On 23 May 2006, following the passing by Parliament of the ‘Serious Organised Crime and Police Act’ prohibiting unauthorised demonstrations within a one kilometre radius of Parliament Square, the majority of Haw’s protest was removed. Taken literally, the edge of this exclusion zone bisects Tate Britain. Wallinger has marked a line on the floor of the galleries throughout the building, positioning State Britain half inside and half outside the border.
You might say that Wallinger "aestheticized" one half of Haw's protest by locating it within the gallery but outside the exclusion zone for protests. But the portion that sat within the zone in which protests are now banned remained, in effect, an active protest. On one side, the simulacrum, on the other side, the ongoing reality itself, all thanks to one imaginary line drawn by the law.
I can't remember the Turner Prize ever going to such entirely political work. (Though the pottery of Grayson Perry, who won in 2003, usually has a social message tucked away somewhere.) What Wallinger does could not be more unlike the work produced by last year's Turner winner, Tomma Abts, who makes small, painstakingly conceived and executed abstractions with not a trace of reference to the world outside the picture.
This is probably a good time to point out that no less an institution than the New York Public Library has been doing its part to keep alive the tradition of protest art in the U.S. I think I'll head over and take a look at this show this week.
December 3, 2007 4:15
More on Maier
Preserve Educational Choice, the group fighting to prevent Randolph College in Lynchburg, Va. from auctioning off paintings from its Maier Museum announced today that it has posted the first half of a one million dollar bond. That was the amount required of them by the Lynchburg Circuit Court while they press their lawsuit to block the sale. Last week the Court agreed that the group could put up the money in two portions, with the second half due on Feburary 15.
Anne Yastremski, who heads the group, says the money came from more than 650 donors, in sums ranging from "spare change to $100,000 checks." According to an alumni group Yahoo posting "...one student donated $2,500 she saved from work during the past two summers. A group of students went door-to-door in the dormitories and raised more than $2,200 from 213 of their fellow students (approximately one third of the student body)."
The paintings were originally scheduled to be sold at two November auctions at Christies in New York. A temporary injunction blocked the sale, so the auctions went on without them, but this prolonged drama has many more chapters to come.
December 3, 2007 2:09
Beatlemania
If I'm a little late posting today it's because I got lost surfing around art related sites this morning. I started out looking at this piece on the New York Times website about high resolution digital photos of paintings that are available on line. That article led me to museumlink.com, an aggregator that links you to any museum website, including a long list of virtual museums. Playing around on museumlink eventually led me to the Beatles Worldsite Museum and it's indispensable inventory of Beatles-themed lunchboxes.
And it was there that I discovered the ultimate Conceptual artwork — a lunchbox inspired by the White Album, meaning that it's, well, all white. Since the White Album was designed by Richard Hamilton, the father of British Pop Art, the lunchbox is simultaneously an art history appropriation, a (probably unintended) spoof of Minimalist boxes and the subtlest pop culture-themed lunchbox of all time.
Now what I want to know is — did any real kids ever actually have such a lunchbox? Did they all grow up to be curators?
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
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