snapshot • Rico becoming art

Rico clutches at paper dropped like rain from the ceiling of the Hirshhorn Museum in DC. The paper is dropped automatically - but carefully regulated - from the ceiling by machines, and glides down, gently accumulating on the floor. It's an interesting piece by the American multi-media artist Ann Hamilton. On one of my visits to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) in North Adams, the big room (the largest indoor art space in the country) was outfitted with a larger version of this piece (I'll post some photos of this piece later), which included sound, with speakers moving up and down within the space. It was a very powerful piece. It's also interesting to see how people interact with the paper on the floor, or as it descends, leaf-like from the high, beamed industrial ceiling. Kids love it. And as you can see in the above photo, so do some adults. 

quote unquote

"There is always a paradox inherent in vision, an impossible desire to see yourself seeing. A lot of my work probes this tension; to want to see, but not being able to." 

Spencer Finch

I was fortunate to see the remarkable exhibition Spencer Finch: What Time Is It on the Sun? at Mass MoCA in 2006. I am including a link to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art site if you would like to learn more about this artist, who combines conceptualism with aesthetic and tactile (visual) modalities. I took a lot of photos of the piece represented above (SUNLIGHT IN AN EMPTY ROOM (PASSING CLOUD FOR EMILY DICKINSON, AMHERST, MA, AUGUST 28 2004) 2004), and included just three here. 

http://www.massmoca.org/event_details.php?id=28

Richard Serra Sculpture, National Gallery East Wing, Washington, DC, 2008.

Richard Serra Sculpture (detail), National Gallery East Wing, Washington, DC, 2008.

Richard Serra Sculpture, National Gallery East Wing, Washington, DC, 2008.

National Gallery of Art East Wing, Central Court, 2004.

This building, by I. M. Pei, is based on a grid of triangles. You can just make out the triangular sections of marble that make up the floor; even the benches arise from the triangular floor grid in sharp-edged blocks. The sculpture in the upper left is by Martin Puryear; the glass wall behind it now showcases a huge piece by Andy Goldsworthy, igloo-like mounds of cut stone, some of which are bisected by the glass, so that part of the piece is inside, part outside. 

Anselm Kiefer's 'Zim-Zum' (detail), National Gallery East Wing, Washington, DC, 2004.

German artist Anselm Kiefer is one of the 20th century's great artists; painter, sculptor, printmaker. The scope of Kiefer's work is as vast as the troubling century that begat it. This huge piece, which occupies most of a wall at the National Gallery, is breathtaking, and remarkable in its complex imagery and materials: acrylic, emulsion, crayon, shellac, ashes, and canvas on lead. Getting a detail shot of the work is more meaningful to me than seeing a tiny image of the piece. When I taught Art History, I would make my students get out to museums so that they could interact with real art, and not just look at bad slides in a dark and airless room - although I made them look at a lot of bad slides in dark and airless rooms. One of the shocking and disturbing things about the art history department of the University of Massachusetts, where I studied, is that they were proud of having no relationship with artists. As an artist, I found that attitude deplorable. I always maintained that you can have art without art historians, but there would be no art historians without art.

I am including a link to the Kiefer piece, and encourage you to check out more of Kiefer's work.

http://www.nga.gov/fcgi-bin/timage_f?object=71599&image=18190&c=collcomm

I was fortunate to be able to travel to Connecticut to see an installation of a huge Kiefer work, housed in a specially-designed building on the grounds of the Aldrich Museum. "The piece, Velimir Chlebnikov, features a group of thirty paintings inspired by Velimir Chlebnikov, a Russian eccentric poet and thinker who has long fascinated Kiefer." (From the Aldrich's web site.) The 30 huge paintings are arranged in grids on facing walls of the building, and a quote is scrawled on the wall opposite the entry. 

If you visit the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) - more on that in another post - they have exhibited (it may still be up as of this writing) a huge concrete Kiefer piece that a Connecticut collector was court-ordered to remove from his lawn. Philistines! Anyway, I will more than likely post some of my photos of the work on this site. 

The Gates (Christo & Jeanne Claude), Central Park, New York, 2005.

I had read about Christo's work (eventually his partner, Jeanne Claude, was recognized as a co-creator), and perused images in art history books, but had never seen one of his huge-scaled works, so I went to some trouble to get to New York to see his (their) much-hyped "The Gates." The work was up for only 16 days, but was many years in the making. One fun fact: 116,389 miles of thread went into the fabric used for the piece. This is the same guy who wrapped the Reichstag, and surrounded several Florida islands in pink fabric. I still have a couple of the one million swatches of orange rip-stop fabric that were handed out in Central Park. If you are interested in the piece, here is the URL for The Gates: 

http://www.christojeanneclaude.net/tg.shtml

One of the great things about this site-specific piece is watching the way people interact with it. The winter day I was there was mostly sunny, and there were lots of people out in the park. Of all the art works I have seen in nearly 40 years, this one was the most integrated with its audience, and everyone seemed to be delighted by it, or studied it, or apparently ignored it. It was amazing to see how it interacted with the most famous park in the world. 

I used to pretend that I didn't care about celebrities or famous people (that was just not cool), but I finally admitted that I get excited, like most people, when I spot one. And I love to name drop (OK, I'm not cool). Here's a partial list of Famous People I have seen or met:

Seen: Christo & Jeanne Claude (emerging from a limo in Central Park; Jeanne Claude is instantly recognizable for her bright orange hair); the tall blond female cop on Hill Street Blues (in an elevator at the Whitney Museum, Manhattan); A famous male actor whose name I can't recall, on the set of "Mommie Dearest," Manhattan, so I guess it doesn't count; Tea Leoni, on the beach at Nonquitt.

Spoke with briefly: Willem Defoe (very nice), Commes des Garcon store, Chelsea, Manhattan; David Duchovny (polite), on the beach at Nonquitt, South Dartmouth, Massachusetts (I said, "How's the water?" and he said, "Well, it's refreshing."); Betty Carter (at the bar at Lulu White's, Boston; she was lovely, I was tongue-tied). 

Hung out with at their apartment in New York: Hope Davis (who would be my daughter-in-law if I had married my ex-girlfriend) and her husband, the actor John Patrick Walker.

Hung out with in a public place: Clement Greenberg (art critic, party); Dizzy Gillespie (several times; he was a childhood friend of a good friend of mine). 

Interviewed: Dizzy Gillespie; Tal Farlow; Don Pullen; Sam Rivers (in a stair well, Symphony Hall, Springfield, Massachusetts); various famous classical musicians - I'm too lazy to remember all their names.

Rode in a cab with in Manhattan: Clement Greenberg and Sandy Sloane (at the same time!). 

Worked as Assistant Curator with in Boston: Kenworth Moffett.

Hung out with in Toronto: Karen Wilkin; David Mirvish (another story for another time).

Interviewed on an island in New Hampshire: Jules Olitski.

Interviewed and became friends with and received a painting from: Lawrence (formerly Larry) Poons (That's another story for another time).

Hung out with at his Manhattan loft/studio: Michael Steiner. 

Rode in an elevator with and embarrassed myself by saying something really stupid to: Kurt Vonnegut. (We lived in the same apartment building in Northampton, Massachusetts, and, if I'm not mistaken, I owned his futon and cocktail glasses. He was very gracious, if embarrassed.)

Married: Liz Taylor; Brigitte Bardot; Michelle Pfeiffer; Gina Lollobrigida. (Just kidding. About Gina.)

Of course, this list does not include all the famous musicians I've heard perform. And I know this doesn't count, but I almost went to Woodstock. Who knew?

There are so many celebrities, it's hard to remember them all. All those parties!

Andy Goldsworthy Sculpture (Storm King Wall), Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York, 2003. (Series of 11 Photos)

Much of Goldworthy's sculpture is ephemeral, but this stone wall (1997-1998), commissioned by the Storm King Art Center, recalls the stone walls of earlier times, and was built, in part, on the site of one such wall. It wasn't until I saw the film about his work (Rivers and Tides), that I really began to take his work seriously. Experiencing this wall amid the rolling hills, lawns and fields of Storm King is a transformative experience, and watching the wall disappear into a lake and "re-emerge" on the other side is a delight. 

This photo is a bit grainy (taken at the NGA in DC in a low-light environment with my iPhone), but I included it because it is an important image to me. The paintings are by one of my art gods, Mark Rothko (1903-1970). I am including a brief paragraph from the NGA website on a Rothko exhibition held in 1998:

Mark Rothko was born Marcus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Russia (today Daugavpils, Latvia), on September 25, 1903, the fourth child of Jacob Rothkowitz, a pharmacist (b. 1859), and Anna Goldin Rothkowitz (b. 1870), who had married in 1886. Rothko and his family immigrated to the United States when he was ten years old, and settled in Portland, Oregon.

Rothko's expansive spaces have been linked to Romantic artists of the 19th century, and are evocative of open spaces found in nature (the sky, the ocean) and in the spiritual realm. Along with Matisse, he is one of the great colorists in art; the color in his late paintings, before his suicide in 1970, are blacks and grays. 

This photograph captures a work by sculptor George Segal (1924-2000) and a nearby window, American Art Museum.

Two stills from the great Korean video artist Nam June Paik's 1995 installation, "Megatron Matrix," which fills an entire wall (a narrow room was created for the piece) at the American Art Museum. 215 video monitors flash ever-changing images; some of the monitors become groups of images within the whole. It is a remarkable piece, at once transfixing and overwhelming.