Tools And Tactics Aren't Art's Alone

I can't quite figure out how it ties to the rest of the story, but I still think Sean O'Toole just shortlisted himself for arts lede of the year:

For every Joseph Beuys and Yves Klein there is a fascist doppelgänger who also believes in the transformative potential of paint on the human body.

Alright, I am listening:

In 1999, shortly after trespassing onto a white farmer's property southeast of Johannesburg, Moses Nkosi, 21, was stripped, his naked body painted silver by the landowner and his black assistant. An anomalous brand of vigilantism, this was repeated again a year later when a 14-year-old girl accused of shoplifting underwear was similarly stripped and painted by a white store manager and her black assistant.

Don't Show That! [frieze.com]

Sedia Veneziana, Chaise Bordelaise

via la_biennale

So Venice is not a total bust. Raumlaborberlin have installed their 2006 mobile inflatospace sculpture, „Das Küchenmonument," in the Giardini.

And next to it is The Generator, an on-site workshop for knocking together "sedia veneziana," which are not just autoprogettazione-style chairs...

via br1dotcom

they're "future particles of the generator-space-structure," modular building elements of both social space and structure. autoprogettazione stacking chairs. Awesome.

Which, of course, is related to their exhibition for Arc en Reve in Bordeaux last year, "Chaise Bordelaise."

"Chaise Bordelaise" consisted of a 3x3x1m pile of pre-cut, reclaimed lumber, instructions, and some tools. Visitors made some chaises, then took them home.

It's basically an Enzo Mari x Felix Gonzalez-Torres mashup. If greg.org had tags, this post would be giving me a tagasm right now.

Raumlaborberlin: what's up? exhibitions [raumlabor.net via archinect]
Chaise Bordelaise [raumlabor.net]
related: proposta per un' auraprogettazione

Venetian Mirror

via tsaaby

Yeah, so I'd been poking around flickr for a while, looking to see how MOS's project for the US Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale turned out. Because well, because.

via Erika-Milite

And hmm. What is it about it? The green straps? Should the weather balloons have been upside-down, so gnarly knots and straps take a backseat, and the smoother, more reflective surface is visible instead of pointing to the sky? Maybe instead of straps, string a net across the courtyard, and attach the balloons from above, or maybe let the balloons float up against it to find their own structure?

via
br1dotcom

Do the balloons just not have enough gas, or enough gores?

Because right now, I'm rethinking my entire satelloony look.

It's Reagan Men! Hallelujah!

This is where Nightcrawler 'ports in and shouts, "Ausgezeichnet!"

Here is Joseph Beuys, pop singer, performing his greatest anti-US, anti-nuclear hit from 1982, "Sonne statt Reagan, [Sun not Reagan]." Reagan, remember, is a German homonym for rain [Regen], so it makes perfect sense.

As Ubu explains it, "Beuys tried his luck as a pop singer as part of his political commitment." Sure.

To throw one more tidbit in there, here's one section of the lyrics that jumped out at me:

Er sagt als Präsident von USA
Atomkrieg ? - Ja bitte dort und da
ob Polen, Mittler Osten, Nicaragua
er will den Endsieg, das ist doch klar.

He says as President of USA
Nuclear war? - Yes please here and there
whether Poland, Middle East, Nicaragua
he wants the final victory, that much is clear.

Endsieg: perhaps Reagan used a loaded term in German, one that turns out to be associated with Jews in Mein Kampf and inevitable civilian casualties in the Third Reich. But translation can be a bitch that way. Just ask the guy who came up with "enhanced interrogation" ["Verschärfte Vernehmung"].

Thanks greg.org reader frank for the felt hat tip.

MoMA On Fire

The fire at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC this morning reminded me of the incredible story of another museum fire, at The Museum of Modern Art in 1958. Before my time, I know, but I'd only learned of it last year, when Ann Temkin staged a show of Monet's Water Lilies [Here's Roberta Smith's review, and a tangent I went on about Pollock] and mentioned the fire.

Mentioned the fire because it destroyed a giant, 18-foot-long Water Lilies painting the Museum had acquired just a couple of years before. [The current 3-panel Water Lilies was the replacement.]

UPDATE: LIFE published a 2-page color spread of the painting with the announcement of The Modern's acquisition in 1957:

So what happened? The New York TImes' report from the scene [purchase required] is riveting. [one image above] Director Rene d'Harnoncourt "trudging out" onto the street in tears. One worker dead, two visitors injured, and dozens of firefighters treated for smoke inhalation. Visitors and staff trapped on the penthouse terrace being evacuated by Alfred Barr, who throws a chair through a window and catches women and children on the roof of the neighboring townhouse. The fire chief marveling "at how women employees, soaked by dripping water, kept helping save the pictures."

Like the Phillips fire [apparently], the MoMA fire was triggered by construction. In the Modern's case, contractors installing air conditioning on the second floor were smoking near open paint cans, sawdust, and a canvas dropcloth. The work meant that except for the largest paintings, all the other art had been cleared from the second floor.

Art on the third and fourth floors was undamaged, and was evacuated to the garden, and to the Whitney Museum, which abutted MoMA on 54th St. Among those works? Hello, Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which was on its one and only loan from the Art Institute of Chicago. Close call.

Meanwhile, besides the Monets--the large Water Lilies was apparently hanging on the 53rd St wall and had been "hacked" fighting the fire--the Museum initially reported that four works had been damaged or lost. The other Monet, another, smaller, late work hanging in the Bauhaus Staircase, was supposedly restorable, despite, as the Times put it, having "its oil flowed and blistered," and "looking like a toasted marshmallow." I guess I'll have to check, but the Giverny painting known as The Japanese Footbridge [above] came into the collection in 1956, so unless MoMA had three late Monets at the time, that's the toasted one.

[UPDATE: They did. Temkin's essay about the Water Lilies makes it clear that the stairway painting was a smaller, but still big, Water Lilies. The Museum tried for three years to restore it, but in 1961, it was declared to be damaged beyond repair. Jackson Pollock's No 1A, 1948. was also in the staircase and also damaged, but it was conserved.

Of the fate of the largest Water Lilies, Temkin wrote, "After the fire, Museum officials returned to find the painting buried under a pile of debris on the ground; firefighters had unknowingly destroyed it breaking through the windows into the building." There's a photo of the aftermath in LIFE Magazine's April 28, 1958 issue. It is unreal.]

Boccioni's The City Rises is still around, as is Pawel Tchelitchew's Cache-cache [Hide and Seek], which was described as "probably the most popular [painting] in the museum." [More on that in a second. The controversial original 1953 version of Larry Rivers' Washington Crossing The Delaware [below] was damaged, though for some reason, it's not listed in MoMA's collection. Which means the only other total loss besides Water Lilies was a World's Fair mural by the Brazilian artist Candido Portinari.

In a Times sidebar on April 16 detailing the art losses, Sanka Knox was reassured by a Museum "spokesman" that "none of the damaged pictures, including the two Monets, are among the most valuable of the museum's paintings," and then an unnamed "staff member" said that, "apparently none of the museum's most valuable holdings" were damaged." Which begs the question, right? Right:

Among these "most valuable" works, according to a staff ember, are Rousseau's The Dream, Picasso's Three Musicians, Van Gogh's The Starry Night and Gaugin's Still Life with Three Puppies."

I'm sure it means nothing, but the only museum official quoted by name in Knox's piece was Barr himself. Now about that most-popular Tchelitchew.

In 2007 FIT art history professor Richard Turnbull gave a Brown Bag Lecture at the Museum about the divergence of curatorial and popular opinion titled, "From Pavel Tchelitchew's Hide-and-Seek to Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World" [mp3 available]. He said the museum education staff gets asked about Hide-and-Seek all the time by teachers; apparently it's been in the NYC public school curriculum for decades, and they always want to walk kids through the painting's cycle of life allegories. [Actually, I just finished listening to the whole lecture; it's more like Tchelitchew hid so many faces and figures in the painting, you can stare at it for hours. It's like a psychosurrealist Where's Waldo?] It hasn't been on view since around 1999 when the Museum closed for renovations.

Is it just me, or do all these paintings still look burnt? What a palette.

[images: top, nyt; the rest: moma.org]

Thomas Houseago Speaking At The New School

It's taking me a while to warm to Tom Houseago's sculptures, but that's fine. It took me a very long time to come around to Rachel Harrison's work, and boy, is it worth it, so I'm happy to give it time.

Meanwhile, this long, impassioned, fascinating, and quite awesome speech he gave at The New School in May as part of his Public Art Fund group exhibition, "Statuesque" [which is up right now, and which just got a too-condescending review in the Times, and which Andrew Russeth just posted a nice commentary about] is worth every one of its ninety-plus minutes.

Talking about him leaving his studio in Belgium? His heartfelt shoutout to the Rubells who, really, wow. Give them grief if you want, but they are some of the most dedicated, hardcore lookers and supporters of artists around, and they continue to be. Also, Leeds football hooligans and Star Wars and late Picasso and bongs for babies? Houseago makes a crazy/infectiously compelling case for his work, and for art itself.

Great stuff that should be seen by more than the 338 YouTube viewers and the 250 people in the New School auditorium who've seen it so far.

Don't Hang Up, Just Talk About It!

The Ed-werd Rew-Shay Memorial Art World Pronunciation Guide keeps on growing!

the latest additions include:
Richard Anuszkiewicz
Huma Bhabha
Thomas Houseago

And some great mispronunciations that needed addressing:
Chinati
Laocoon
Modigliani

Also, I just know the Aperture Foundation's video editors are totally taunting me by leaving the introduction off their 4-part interview between Okwui Enwezor and Zwelethu Mthethwa. [OAK-wee en-WAY-zore and Zweh-LAY-too m'TATE-wah, I know, but it's such a tantalizing two-fer.]

Have any suggestions, stumpers, or maybe some great mispronunciations you've heard? Send them in!

If you see something, say something!

With All Due Respect To Bruno Bischofberger

this is pretty awesome:

Do Daniel Libeskind's Awesome Machines Mean I Have To Stop Hating His Work?

In the 1980s Daniel Libeskind was an increasingly prominent architectural theorist who--I was about to say "who had nevertheless not actually ever built anything," but the whole thing that's turning my head upside down is that he did, in fact, build something in the 80s: these machines.

They were exhibited at the 1985 Venice Architecture Biennale as "Three Lessons of Architecture." There's The Reading Machine, The Memory Machine, and The Writing Machine, all intended as metaphors concerning the then-hotly debated post-structuralist theory of architecture-as-text.

Because I haven't sprung for any Libeskind monographs where he discusses the project, for my understanding I rely heavily on Lebbeus Wood's thoughtful blog post, which also happens to be full of beautiful photos of these incredible machines:

the vogue for a linguistic interpretation of architecture has passed, and the avant-garde has moved on, or at least elsewhere. Libeskind's machines, inspired by reading and writing and implicitly interpreting texts, as well as memory (treated as text), would be of little interest today if the machines were only didactic illustrations of theory. But they are much more. As objects of design, they have powerful presence, as well as conveying a refined and highly rigorous aesthetic sensibility. As acts of the disciplined imagination of tectonic possibilities--how many parts might be assembled into a compelling whole--they are highly original, exemplary, and instructive. For example, in the diverse, even contrasting ways the same material, such as wood, can be used expressively in the same construction. Or, in the complexity of joints, from fixed to flexible, enabling the total assemblage. Of course, as hand-crafted constructions (a bit too 'Renaissance' for comfort, as was Tatlin's Flying Machine), they are at once nostalgic and visionary, the latter if we believe that technology is not the main issue at stake in architecture

The 'Renaissance' feeling is not off the mark, and by design. To make his argument for the end of humanist architectural history and for a reincarnation of sorts for [his] universe of architectural reference points, Libeskind went way back, both in terms of design and technology, using period technique to build important unrealized machines from history.

The Reading Machine, for example, is a fabrication of the "Reading Wheel" published in 1588 by Agostino Ramelli in his enormously influential engineering and design folio, Le diverse et artificiose machine del capitano Agostino Ramelli. It was designed to let a scholar keep his place while moving from tome to tome, a giant, creaking set of browser tabs. In a paper on "Three Lessons" presented in 2007, Ersi Iannidou [pdf] describes the making of:

Libeskind, determined to retrieve the experience of constructing such a machine, chooses to recreate not only the object, but also the experience. He works as a craftsman, bearing total faith in the craft of making. He builds it with hand-tools, solely from wood, with glue-less joints, dawn to dusk, in complete silence. When finished, he makes eight books--he writes them, makes the paper, binds them; just one each--and places them on the wheel. Each book contains just one word or phrase repeated anagrammatically: idea, spirit, subject, power, will to power, energia, being, created being...[it represents] 'the triumph of the spirit over matter, of candlelight over darkness'. It teaches an 'almost forgotten process of building', namely, handicraft.

The Memory Machine is Libeskind's interpretation of Giulio Camillo's "Memory Theatre," a 16th-century structure where, upon entering, a person's mind would be filled and inscribed with a knowledge of the universe. Some historians have argued that Camillo's idea influenced the construction of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, which may or may not have been why Libeskind based his design on a period stage set apparatus.

He makes a leap to modernity with The Reading Machine, which is an interpretation of Raymond Roussel's "Reading Machine." 49 square columns were rotated in impossible-to-follow ways by a series of handles, signaling the removal of the human architect from the industrialized city. Libeskind has since waxed, as he does, spiritually about the piece,

...which was designed to generate a new understanding of the ever-living city. This construction, a veritable spiritual experiment, involved reincarnating an experience of a medieval ascetic world, by constructing a machine in a monastic way, using no modern equipment, no electricity, but the discipline of craft, candlelight and the power of faith in the future text of architecture. The machine dealt with the organized chaos in which permutations of names of saints, both true and apocryphal, emblems, reflections and cities were symbolically and physically made mobile by turning the 'circle into square'. It took twenty eight simultaneous rotations to turn the machine's faces toward the unexpected image of a reawakened site.

Mhmm. Ioannidou quotes Libeskind as calling The Writing Machine "a quadripartite computer operation," which begins to hint at at least one reference that I can't find anybody making: to the difference engines of Charles Babbage, which were the early 19th century, mechanical ancestors of computers. Keep that in mind while reading Libeskind-via-Ioannidou again on the making of:

The Writing Machine is an industrial apparatus; so the architect becomes an industrialist, architecture a nine-to-five job. For the construction of this last machine Libeskind sets up a business, buys a clock, and focuses on the bare minimum of technique. He works hard--nine to five at the start, later overtime--speaks 'small talk', smokes cigarettes, does not mingle work with other issues--especially having fun.

I think we are to understand here that Libeskind not only built these things, but that he built them in deeply meaningful, experiential ways. They're the not just by-products of his Method Architectural Theory, but its literalization. The Architectural Word Made Flesh. Or wood, as the case may be, but still.

As a guy contemplating the historically accurate bricolage-style refabrication of, among other things, a 1960 satelloon, I can appreciate all this seemingly conceptual performativity. Well, some of it. The part that isn't a Renn Faire version of the Woodwright's Shoppe. But the bigger problem for me is I'm not sure I like where this is heading.

Read Woods' description of the seemingly unintended architectural consequences of post-structuralism's decoupling of form and function and tell me that it doesn't ft Libeskind's disastrously clichéd building projects to a T:

What began as a radical concept affecting the very core of architecture, is compromised, we might say reduced, to commercially marketable and client-acceptable styles--a fate much the same as idealistic modernism suffered in its time.

So knowing what we know now, and faced with a worldwide blight of Crystalline Shard™ museum annexes and condos, can we see the warning signs of Libeskind's epic failure in these machines? Are there other lessons to be learned from "Three Lessons"? Should I not let myself like these fantastical contraptions quite so much?

I don't know yet. But it reminds me of the takeaway from 1939: The Lost World of the Fair, the book David Gelernter wrote while recovering from being attacked by the Unabomber, how we basically ended up with the future we were promised at the World Fair--including TV and car-based suburban sprawl--and it sucks.

On a more practical note, I've tried to find out more about the actual making of Libeskind's machines, and to figure out where they are now. But since Libeskind's studio only responds to "credentialed media," I'm left to assume that all three machines met the fate of The Writing Machine, which Libeskind says was destroyed in a fire at the Palais des Nations Palais Wilson in Geneva in 1987. Too bad, because at the rate he's going, they were the best things he ever built.

The Trendmaking Eye

One of the great stories surrounding MoMA's 1965 exhibition "The Responsive Eye" is how collector/garmento Larry Aldrich turned several Op paintings he owned into fabrics, and then into dresses, which fed into the Op Art Trend that was apparently swirling around New York. Of course, it's a great story if you're not named Bridget Riley.

It's a well-known story, partly because Aldrich had invited a Herald Tribune columnist and photographer to his showroom to meet Riley who, until that moment, had no idea about the project. And she. Was. Pissed. Riley reportedly tried to sue, and differing accounts say she was either successful or thwarted by US laws. The line was either a raging, lucrative success on the artist's back, or a failure, because a million other Op Art designs instantly saturated the market.

But that's jumping ahead. Let's let Aldrich set it up with his rambling, entertaining, and humiliating side of the story, as told to Paul Cummings in a 1972 Archives of American Art interview:

LA: I showed Bill all of those paintings that I thought were a new form of geometries, and I believe that he picked out two of them for the Observant [sic] Eye show that he did not know about. One was an Avedisian and the other one whose name we can't remember at the moment -- It was at the Martha Jackson Gallery. But when we were in our cutting room, he said, "You know, Larry, really I think it would be a terrific idea if you were to convert some of these to fabric." I had a less expensive firm as well as the Larry Aldrich clothes called Young Elegants, and I got Julian Tomchin who was a fabric designer. I had the Vasareley and the Bridget Riley and Anuszkiewicz and this other young man who I can't remember [Julian Stanczak] were fine with it. But then, and I said I would like to convert these into prints. I said I don't want them to be copies of these paintings, but I want the prints to be inspired by these paintings. Of course this is something that you're going to have to do exclusively for me. And so he presented quite a number of sketches for this line. And then he made up the fabric. I stress again that he was to make these exclusively for me, but he was a very clever little boy, for while he made those exclusively for me he made variations on those and put them on an inexpensive fabric that was shown and sold to inexpensive blouse people and what not.

PC: So they were everywhere?

LA: They were everywhere all of a sudden. Anyhow, the Bridget Riley one was not necessarily the most successful, but because it was interpreted in black and white and in grey and white, it was quite effective. And Bill said, "I think it would be wonderful if you gave Irma [his wife] a cut of the fabric, and she could have a dress made out it to wear to the opening of the Observant Eye show." And a turban. I sent her a big swatch of it. In the meantime, we had designed some dresses, and I showed them to Life magazine. And Life went for them and had a feature that came out shortly after the Museum of Modern Art show opening. Anyhow, Anuszkiewicz, whom I had gotten to know quite well by then, was just thrilled with the idea of what I had done. This other chap at Martha Jackson's Gallery [Stanczak] was very, very happy about it. The one that lived in Paris I didn't hear from.

PC: You mean Vasarely?

LA: Vasarely, yes. Bridget Riley was coming for the show, and I met her at the opening dinner. In fact, this was such a big event that NBC or CBS were filming, and they asked that I be filmed with her in front of the Bridget Riley, which I had loaned for the show and [they had me] tell how I happened to buy it, you know, the whole story of seeing it in the Tate and so forth. And she was very attractive, and so I said, "Would you come down to my showroom? I have something that I'd like to give you as a gift."

And that's where the Herald Tribune picks up the story. Sure, we can be shocked, shocked that Aldrich just went ahead and did all this without asking the artists first. But then shouldn't we also be amazed that Aldrich says the idea to turn the paintings into fabrics in the first place came from MoMA curator William Seitz?

That LIFE Magazine spread, by the way, is right here. Shot in the Modern's show. I have to agree with Aldrich, the Riley print on the upper right is not that great.

And while Aldrich is not doubt remembering Mike Wallace's "Eye on New York" show about "The Responsive Eye," that's not who interviewed him at the opening. It was a 25-year-old film student from Sarah Lawrence named Brian de Palma, and his be-boa'ed 26-year-old producer Midge Mackenzie, who made a 20-minute documentary short called The Responsive Eye.

The filmmakers interviewed Seitz during installation, and then they had free access to film in the show's black-tie opening. Since it's dePalma, I did a split screen combining the opening titles because, really, make me think their film was commissioned by the Modern itself. There's no mention of it in the Museum's press archive, but in 1963, de Palma was presented with an under-25 award at the Museum by the Society of Cinematologists for his undergrad short Woton's Wake. Somebody want to ask de Palma what the deal was?

In 1965 Riley complained that the "explosion of commercialism, band-wagoning and hysterical sensationalism" was obscuring the "serious qualities" of "The Responsive Eye." And her collectors, the curators, and the Museum were right in the middle of it. As Bill Seitz said to Mike Wallace, "it's really the absorption of modern art into modern life. And that's something we all wanted, but, uh, it may change the character of the art a bit, too."

Creative Time And The Afro-Icelandic Liberation Front

Danish artist Jacob Boeskov flew to Lagos, Nigeria to make and star in a short action film he wrote titled, Dr. Cruel and the Afro-Icelandic Liberation Front with the noted Nollywood director Teco Benson. The film was produced by Creative Time Global, a new series of international initiatives launched this year by the NY public art organization.

Nollywood is known for its vibrant, near-zero-budget film industry, which should probably be called a video feature industry, since HD, DV, and even phonecams are the norm, and everything goes straight to the street on DVD. Dr. Cruel premiered in May in New York, but Creative Time recently posted Boeskov's production diary online:

It has been a long day and Teco has surely delivered. He really is the finest action director in Nollywood. We have filmed chases and fights. I have destroyed a pair of my pants in one of my amazing stunt moves. He has been great to work with. He has an ability to make actors and crew feel good, even when he shouts at them. But it is late now and everybody is tired.

Just as we're wrapping up a scene, I hear the sound of a generator dying and the room goes black. The production manager runs down to the street to look for black market fuel. There is a fuel crisis in Nigeria because of the absence of the president and... well, it's a long story.

I go to the window and light a cigarette. The room is dark, lit only by the cell phones from the actors and the crew. The mood in the room is intense, but okay, I guess. People talk low, or are silent. The production manager is back, looking triumphant. He has managed to buy some fuel in the street, and the generator is running again. The lights are turned on. Back to work.

It all sounds a little crazy, but interesting. Here's the trailer:

Dr. Cruel and the Afro-Icelandic Liberation Front [creativetime.org via @annepasternak]

I Didn't Know 'What I Did On My Vacation'

Holy smokes, Gordon Hyatt, I didn't know what you did 44 summers ago.

Among the episodes of CBS's news program "Eye on New York" which were acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in 1967 for their Television Archive of the Arts is "What I Did On My Vacation," which, wow. It was a series of Happenings. In the Hamptons. Conceived and produced for television, by television.

According to Jeff Kelley's Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow, the producer of "Eye on New York," Gordon Hyatt, approached Kaprow in the summer of 1966 with the idea of staging a series of Happenings across the Hamptons over the course of an August weekend:

The general idea for Gas, which was largely conceived by Hyatt (and supported in part by Virginia Dwan of the Dwan Gallery), was to interject a series of Happenings into the leisure activities of summer vacationers and locals, who would presumably be caught unawares as they disembarked at the railroad station, took the ferry, swam at the beach, and so forth.

Kelley's exhaustive recounting of Kaprow's Happenings is invaluable for getting a sense of what actually happened, but it's also full of uncritical assertions, revisions and spin. It's almost as if Kaprow was trying to distance himself after-the-fact from a TV spectacle he readily agreed to, but which he later came to regret. Interesting.

Gas began on Friday August 5th. A parade of oil drums, weather balloons, and homemade hovercraft met the city crowd as the LIRR pulled into Southampton. [photos are documentation by burton berinsky, not stills from the show] On Saturday, Kaprow brought bands, smoke bombs, and skydivers to Coast Guard Beach [now Atlantic Avenue Beach] in Amagansett, where Frazier inflated a giant black phallus of a skyscraper-shaped balloon. Or as the flyer put it, "Procedure: Children and adults may help release helium balloons, frug on the beach, help to start plastic skyscraper, swim." [Note: If you think you might retell this story sometime, frug is pronounced froog. It is the ultimate White Guy Shuffle.]

From Amagansett, the Happening crew hustled out to Montauk Point, where the fire department was waiting to pump gallons of flame-retardant foam over the cliffs and onto the beachgoing audience.

On Sunday, after arranging for three bedsful of nurses to meet the Shelter Island ferry, Kaprow staged two decidedly North-of-the-Highway Happenings in Springs for the kids: a car painting picnic at the auto junkyard, and a foam-filled relay race at the town dump. Alastair Gordon, who was 13 at the time, wrote about participating in the dump event in his awesome book, Spaced Out: Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties, which was excerpted in the Easthampton Star in 2008:

Someone was barking through a megaphone: "Keep moving . . . not too fast . . . don't look at the cameras. . . ." We were told to move deeper into the sandy pit, slowly, toward a group of people wearing black plastic capes at the bottom of the slope. We wore pink buttons that read "GAS -- I'm a Happener" and blew whistles as we marched downward. Stacks of multicolored oil drums were pushed from a ledge, and we were told to roll them back up the slope through the sea of firefighting foam.

I guess I was too young to pick up on the sexual allusion at the time, but the foam felt weirdly comforting as it oozed around my ankles and bubbled up to my waist. Mud stuck to the drums and made them difficult to roll, but we kept pushing because there were men with cameras, and we were going to be on TV.

Though they should have been obvious going in, Kaprow's problems with Gas seem evident in Gordon's account: the Happening didn't just 'happen,' it was staged and performed for cameras:

Though nearly everyone, including Hyatt, deemed Gas a success, Kaprow saw it as a reversion to theater. It was a string of "spectacular" Happenings intended more to be seen than enacted, both during the events and on television.

The feedback loop Kaprow loved had been replaced, he found, with

the false feedback of narcissism on a mass-media scale, in which the culture, through the mirror of television, watches itself having a gas.

In the end, the experiment failed because Gas participated in the popular cliches of what Happenings were.

And the avant-garde was inextricably linked with the leisure entertainments of affluent youth. All of which, well, guess what? Whatever Kaprow's later regrets about it, Gas seems like a peculiar, even unique experiment in corporate-avant-garde collaboration. And the involvement of Hyatt, a member of MoMA's Junior Council and Dwan in the transform "What I Did On My Vacation' from arts journalism into public art.

At the very least, it's a vast improvement over the cliche-ridden, made-for-TV art happenings they're throwing up these days. [OR. Does good Art-for-TV really just equal failed Art-for-TV + time?]

"What I Did On My Vacation" was shown at Hauser & Wirth's Kaprow restaging last year, but I can't find it online. No problem, though, because the National Film Network has a DVD for just $22.

"What I Did On My Vacation" aired on WCBS on Sunday, September 11, 1966.

Vintage coverage from TIME: Gas: Happenings in the Hamptons [time.com]

MoMA, CBS And The Responsive Eye

After watching the first segment at maryandmatt's blog, I was hooked. Mike Wallace, shooting a 1965 episode of WCBS news show Eye on New York in and about The Museum of Modern Art's blockbuster exhibition of Op Art, "The Responsive Eye." [Part 2 and Part 3]

The music, by Specs Powell, a jazz pianist and percussionist who was on staff at CBS, is as stunning as it is jarring. I kept waiting for irony, or Mondo Cane-style sensationalism, or--worse and more likely--the snide philistinism of Wallace's future 60 Minutes colleague Morley Safer, who infamously sandbagged contemporary art in 1993, resulting in, among other things, Glenn Lowry's awesome shutout of Safer from covering the Museum's 1998 Jackson Pollock retrospective. But there was absolutely none. The entire show was serious and straight-up. Part 3, particularly, focuses on arts coverage in the media, and media's culpability in hyping, distorting, or even fabricating trends for their own purposes. I can almost imagine the pitch meeting for "Eye on New York" as a rebuttal of Time magazine's dismissive coverage of "Op Art." "Responsive Eye" curator William Seitz nails it when he kind of laments to Wallace about the impact of superficial arts coverage:

And this, in a sense, does worry me, because it is really, an impact of a--

Well, it's really the absorption of modern art into modern life. And that's something we all wanted, but, uh, it may change the character of the art a bit, too.

But should this be at all surprising? CBS's founder Bill Paley was the Modern's president at the time. Already a long-time trustee, Paley was tapped by David Rockefeller for the position in 1962, and to succeed him as the first non-family chairman in 1968.

A couple of folks on Twitter have suggested, rightly, that MoMA should screen this awesome program. As it turns out, they already have been, since 1967. That's when the Museum's Junior Council announced the creation of a Television Archive of the Arts, a three year effort which had actually begun identifying, reviewing, and acquiring film and television media about art and artists in 1964. The Archive began when museum officials learned that some of the films and tapes--they don't say which--were in danger of being destroyed or lost.

The Archive was to be housed and made available in the new International Study Center, which was under construction. [It's now demolished, but it stood on the west side of the sculpture garden, about where Taniguchi extended the glass corner of Cesar Pelli's tower. It's funny to remember a building and space so clearly, only to realize that not only is it gone, it's just as likely no one knows what you're even talking about.]

The PDF archive of MoMA's press releases is absolutely incredible, by the way. Here are the announcement of the Archive, and the initial checklist. The first 64 programs from ABC, CBS, NBC, National Educational Television, and NYC's Channel 13 included dozens of artist interviews and documentaries.

One thing that stands out, though, is that only CBS, and only programs like "Eye on New York," donated their own archive of complete interviews and extra footage. Maybe this was because Gordon Hyatt, the producer, was also on the Junior Council's committee which put the archive together.

I'm probably long overdue to point this out, but this is really why I'm writing this post: for almost ten years, I was the co-chairman of MoMA's Junior Associates, which is the successor group to the Junior Council, and I joined the Film Department's committee after stepping down. And yet so much of this history is completely new to me. So much of the Museum's activities and programs are professionalized now, but I can still recognize the deeply ingrained culture of, for lack of a better word, "amateur" involvement. It's really rather remarkable, and it has been for a very long time.

[maryandmatt.net, thanks andy]

CityLAB's Duck & Cover

And in other Venice Biennale of Architecture exhibition news: cityLAB, Dana Cuff and Roger Sherman's architecture think tank at UCLA, is also in the US Pavilion show, Workshopping. One of the projects they're apparently showing is called Duck & Cover, which appears to be a community garden in the form of a giant Google logo visible from Google Earth.

Looks awesome, but wait, are those mirrors up there? Magnifying glasses? Spiral escalators to nowhere? Also, isn't the G a little self-referential for Google? I'd think they could get 'er done quicker if they sell the structure's shape to the highest bidder. Or make it a Q for Quimby.

cityLAB [workshopping.us]
previously: heads up: roof as nth facade

How To Make A Biennale Pavilion Architectural Intervention

MOS, of the PS1's woolly mammoth carcass MOSes, is one of seven architecture firms and collaboratives included in "Workshopping: an American Model for Architectural Practice," at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The exhibit is curated by Michael Rooks of the High Museum and Jonathan Solomon of 306090.

The idea is to creat a canopy of spherical Mylar weather balloons in the courtyard of the US Pavilion. From MOS's project text:

if you've seen the structure, i'm sure you're wondering, 'why is it made out of helium balloons, why does it make a canopy, why is there seating, etc... is it referencing other projects? is it analogical? is it utopian? is it micro-? is it urban? is it domestic, what is it? is this even architecture?' (unfortunately, we can't answer that last question. this type of project is like diet-architecture, a copy without the calories. it's got a sort of bitter aftertaste that you might grow accustomed to, or you might not. that's ok. we like fake architecture.)

we've been wondering, what kind of architecture would haruki murakami make? well, when we finally write our text we would definitely tell you that it does, indeed, mean something and it does reference things, but why would you really want to know all of that anyway? do you really think it would make it better? I mean, what about just enjoying this weird artifice, this fake social space? hey, it wiggles. look at this strange alternate environment made of reflections and repetitions. enjoy the visual noise. have you ever seen N.A.S.A.'s echo project? google it. what can we say, we just love the aesthetics of radar reflectors and inflated satellites. they are of another reality. seriously, even if we wanted to fully explain it to you at this very moment, we couldn't. even though we're trying not to be, we're only human. also, they need this text before we've finished the design. did we mention that we are working with the son of andy warhol's 'silver clouds' fabricator? we're very excited about this. he lives in duluth. [emphasis added because, well]

So just Google, aesthetics, and a flip three degrees of Andy Warhol reference and voila, instant pavilion! I can't wait to see what their actual text is. The exhibition opens Thursday.

MOS, Instant Untitled [designboom, thanks john]
Workshopping.us [workshopping.us]

The Dictates Of Our Own Conscience

"11. We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may."

- Joseph Smith, The Articles of Faith, "Thirteen statements describing the fundamental beliefs of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."

If You Can't Say Anything Nice, Come Sit For Me

I watched the documentary Alice Neel last night, made in 2007 by the late artist's grandson Andrew Neel. It's pretty good, definitely worth a watch. Documentaries by family members come with a whole set of conflicts and challenges baked in, but Neel succeeds, I think, at identifying the craters and unexploded mines as he maps out the family's emotional landscape.

Neel's story is intense--John Perreault, variously a critic, colleague, friend, and sprawling nude subject of the artist, thinks it's long overdue for a Hollywood adaptation--and it's hard to imagine that the definitive significance of the paintings left behind is somehow "worth" the suffering and abuse and privations endured by Neel's kids (and grandkids). But then, that's not a fair tradeoff. Neel's rightwing son Richard is right to recognize that if it weren't this set of problems, it would've been something else. Neel had to make her art; it was an obsession, really. And being able to make it, Perreault argues, made Neel a "better mother (and person) than if she had lived a horrid life of creative frustration. And took it out on her sons."

But that's not the point. I mean, it is, but what I was wanting to post was the hilarious interview with Alex Katz, who Andrew effectively cast as "Figurative Painter #4," When Katz finally manages to stop talking about his own work and how actually, he was doing whatever it was Neel was doing, only earlier, all he can say about Neel is that she was "an angry housewife." You stay classy, Alex.

While Googling the quote, I found thanks to Time Out London, that Neel and Katz are having a portrait facedown at the moment. Though it's hardly a fair fight. The Whitechapel Gallery's having an Alice Neel retrospective, while Katz is showing new work at the National Portrait Gallery, including this lovely work, his portrait of Anna Wintour.

Paint Stick? Painting Crop?

Dear painting experts,

Please tell me that the brush-steadying stick with the sock on the end which is so vital to the painting process that it must be included in Serious & Important Photographic Portraits of such artists as Arnold Friberg and Winston Churchill has a venerable and esoteric name. And then please tell me what that name is. Thank you.

And awesome. Mahl stick. Here's a lyrical history. Thanks, Jason!

images: Deseret News via NYT; life mag via acontinuouslean]
Related: Norman Rockwell, Triple Self-Portrait

On The Set With Grenada Invasion Re-Enactors

Awesome. The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library contains several elaborate sets where visiting elementary school students re-enact the invasion of Grenada. "[I]n keeping with Mr. Reagan's first career as an actor," the Wall Street Journal writes, presumably without irony, "the Reagan Library appears to have the most elaborate stage sets [of any presidential library.]" The sets include an Oval Office, the White House press room, and Air Force One:

The replicas are built to three-quarters the size of the originals, and decorated as they were in 1983. The mock Oval Office has pictures of Mr. Reagan and Nancy Reagan on their wedding day, replicas of Mr. Reagan's favorite horse sculptures and jars of jelly beans.

Also:

Making a 27-year-old invasion relevant for today's children isn't always easy. Kids have to be told what communists are, and why Grenada becoming a communist country would have been a big deal.

The reenactments are part history lesson, part interactive game. The kids decide whether or not to invade, how to carry out an invasion, even how to deal with media leaks.

Apparently, the re-enactment only works with elementary and middle school students. Too many high school students reject the invade-or-negotiate-with-communist-dictators script, which was written by a 25-year-old screenwriter.

At Reagan's Presidential Library, the Kids Are in Control [wsj via @demilit]

In The Medium Of Google

I know that what's really needed around here is a redesign, and probably the addition of a few thousand tags. But right now that's an 8th burner project, and I've only got a 4-burner stove.

But in the mean time, I've noticed--and perhaps you have too?--that many projects and ideas around here relate in some way to Google, and to the way Google shapes our perceptions and interactions with the art, architecture, information, people, and the world.

So I rolled it all up into one, big Google category. Besides my own projects, it ranges from this morning's post on Michael Wolf's photos; to the whole sculpture and roof facades on Google Maps thing; to my 2005 attempt to re-create Ed Ruscha's Every Building on The Sunset Strip using the failed Street View predecessor, Amazon's A9; and all the way back to my early 2002 experiments with Google AdWords poetry, and to my Jan.. 2002 request for permission to use the word "Google" as a verb in my first short film. Weird, interesting stuff.

greg.org/google/

Michael Wolf, Street View Photographer

I'm glad and not surprised to see I'm the only person using Google Street View as an artistic source. Since at least last year, photographer Michael Wolf has been making a series of Street View-based works that explore urban life as it's experienced, seen, and transmitted.

Wolf roams Google Street View in classic street photographer tradition, searching for the hidden, the unexpected, the sublime, the beautiful, the overlooked, images which reveal something about the character of a city and its residents. So far, he's done Street View Manhattan and Street View Paris.

According to his Amsterdam dealer, Galerie Wouter van Leeuwen, where he showed this Spring, Wolf has spent over 400 hours searching Street View, which sounds like a direct translation of street technique to the virtual world. His careful cropping and composition, too, resonate with street photography's quest for stolen, fleeting, magic images.

Some of his images carry Street View's trademark aesthetics: blurred out faces [but not as many as I'd expect], navigation overlays and cursors, and occasionally the fractures and distortions of the pano image knitting algorithms. From the prominence of the screen pixels, it looks like he actually reshoots images on his screen, or as one press release put it, "pictures of pictures."

His series Street View A Series of Unfortunate Events looks like archetypal on-the-scene photojournalism, only stripped by any news or context other than place. Though Wolf himself eliminates any place specifics or links, leaving each image to stand on its own.

In March, the photography museum FOAM and the Virtueel Museum Zuidas staged an exhibition of Wolf's Paris Street View photos on the street. Giant prints were placed around Gustav Mahlerplein, a plaza in a modern culture and office complex on the ring road south of Amsterdam. Unfortunately, no images of the exhibition have made their way back into Google Maps.

While Wolf's quote of Robert Doisneau's Hotel de Ville kiss is the most obvious, my favorite throwback images are like the ones here, where he finds in Google layers of reflections and perspectives that'd do Lee Friedlander and Harry Callahan proud. Really beautiful stuff.

Michael Wolf photography [photographymichaelwolf via things magazine]

Casting Long Shadows

This has been sitting on my desktop since last month, when Google Maps announced the addition of 45-degree Aerial View imagery for new locations, including Dortmund, Germany.

So I clicked over to Dortmund, and zoomed in there to the central platz [Friedensplatz, actually], just getting more and more psyched to see that sweet-looking geodesic soccer ball pavilion up close, and then poof, at the last minute, the final zoom, the Aerial View showed up, and it was from much later. The soccer ball was gone.

But then I forgot all about Google's 45-degree View when I saw the sun doing it for me. These attenuated morning shadows are just awesome. Like 19th century silhouette portraits as reimagined by Giacometti--and shot from outer space.

Which reminds me of the statue of a horse and rider in front of the Noordeinde Paleis in The Hague, the first building I saw on Google Maps which had been obscured by the Netherlands' unique polygonal camo pattern:

[An update on those Dutch Camo Landscape paintings I was talking about making: I'm still going to do it. One thing I'm very glad for is taking all the screenshots I need for the images I want. I first noticed the changes last winter, but now every the camo on site I've mentioned on greg.org has been replaced with typical square-pixel obscuring. Functionally, the camo still works, but aesthetically, it's a real loss.]

Now about that ball: It is probably better known to the millions of soccer fans in Germany as the WM-Globus. It was conceived in 2003 by artist/musician/actor André Heller, who ran the cultural and arts program for the Deutscher Fußball Cultural Foundation. Described by Heller as a "consulate of anticipation," the Globus was sent on a 1000-day, 12-city tour in advance of Germany's hosting of the 2006 World Cup. It's 18 meters high, weighs 50 tons. Two interior floors contained football memorabilia and multimedia installations, while the pressurized scrim exterior contained an LED map and nightly light shows. Lighting effects designer Anthony Quodt has several articles on the making of the WM Globus and its specs on his site, lightlife.de. Too bad it predates the YouTube era, because the stills look like a hot, glowing mess.

After the World Cup, a Hamburg entrepreneur named Dr. Alexander Extra purchased the Globe from the DFB for EUR300,000, with plans to transform it into a permanent museum of sports culture, the Sporteum. Alas, no money was forthcoming, and the Sporteum failed to materialize. So Dr. Extra put the Globus on eBay last summer. Which turns out to have been a bad time for the geodesic soccer ball-shaped pavilion market, because bidding stopped reached just EUR50,000. The unidentified buyer was reportedly also from Hamburg, so I expect it's still sitting in the warehouse, but I'll look into it.

Wary Mari

And thus we see the painful difference between meaning to buy Wary Meyers' awesome-looking design project book Tossed and Found and actually buying it. I would have been inspired by their Enzo Mari autoprogettazione-esque mantle many months ago. What progettazione have I not thought of in that time? I'll never know.

Progettazione 1x2 [warymeyers]