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Category Archives: Art and Architecture
On the Green Line
Artomatic 2009 once again takes place in an unbuilt-out office building, this time a new structure atop the enlarged Navy Yard Metro station. There’s a certain regularity to the eight-floor exhibition space, and we miss the rough-and-tumble of some of the funkier spaces in years gone by.
But the art keeps getting better, year over year. Representation by artists outside the immediate metro area continues to grow, especially artists from Sunderland in the U.K. There are many good photographers working with D.C. as their subject, coming from just as many perspectives. A standout is Angela Kleis, who showed “…There’s been a terrible accident,” high-angle images of a dead body lying artfully posed in the setting of various local landmarks.
Yes, there are a number of immature pieces in the show, some of them rather naively priced. But then there is a set of three accomplished abstractions on canvas by Jacqui Crocetta; or consider the lightly textured sculptures of heads by Anthony J. Ouellette. I generally don’t pause for video work, but Tracey Salaway’s “Seed Heads” caught me up short. It’s a long tracking shot through a patch of weeds, a beetle’s-eye-view of a dandelion in which its globe of seeds fills the screen.
Context and perspective
From Rebecca Mead’s profile of Christian Scheidemann, conservator of contemporary art and specialist in non-traditional materials, in the 11 May 2009 New Yorker. Scheidemann is in the process of replacing one of the tree stumps that are part of the late Ree Morton’s Sister Perpetua’s Lie (one had succumbed to rot) in preparation for a gallery showing. Unfortunately the replacement stump of White Oak (Quercus alba) turned out to be infested with beetles, so the conservator called on an exterminator, Jimmy Tallman.
The remaining question was whether the stump needed to be shipped to the shop, which would take up precious time, or whether Tallman could transport it himself, in his van. “What’s the value?” Tallman asked, with a note of uncertainty in his voice.
“Ten dollars,” Scheidemann said.
Tallman looked relieved. “That’s good,” he said. “Because I had one lady, a customer, and I took her antique table out with me, and it turned out to be worth twenty thousand dollars.”
“This will eventually be part of an invaluble installation,” Scheidemann said. “But I think we gave ten dollars for the cutting. So right now it’s worth ten dollars.”
Round Arch Style
Earlier this week a train malfunction led to my early exit from Metro at McPherson Square, and a fortunate exit it was, for my path took me within a block of a downtown building I’d never noticed before, at 13th and K: the Franklin School, a red brick rundbogenstil confection from 1869 designed by Adolf Cluss.
Upcoming: 15
Via Missy Frederick of the Washington Business Journal and Amy Cavanaugh of DCist, dates and a venue for Artomatic 2009 have been selected: 29 May through 5 July at 55 M Street, S.E. The host building, still under construction, is just a block from Nationals Park; nearest Metro is Navy Yard.
Form vs. content
You can always analyze visual art in terms of content or appearance, its formal qualities. I would argue that it’s a game to separate them: they’re indissoluably linked. Everything in the material world around us has a narrative.
So to… classify visual art alone as the one medium that shouldn’t require any effort on behalf of anybody to ever understand it—you should just be able to look at it and walk away—as a pure sensation: that relegates it the level of… a roller coaster ride….Just shut your eyes and enjoy the ride.
I’m more in mind of saying, Open your eyes and enjoy the ride. Because it’s much more exciting if you are thinking and questioning, and you don’t know what it is, and it is full of questions and statements that you can’t possibly [grasp]. Because that is a truer reflection of just how extraordinary reality is than something that’s… neatly tied up in a bow… There, Look at that, Be at peace, Go home.
I’m more interested in something that leaves you asking all those questions like What is that? I don’t know what that is.
—Matthew Ritchie, Art:21 Structures
Big pixels
Christoph Niemann tiles the bathrooms of his renovated home with renderings of 20th-century icons of art and graphic design.
“I wanted a Titian and all I got was a lump of lard,” Lisa gasped.
DIY
Via things magazine: the preparation of 100 Sol LeWitt wall drawings for his upcoming retrospective at MASS MoCA.
You too can present a retrospective of the great Wall Drawings of Sol LeWitt!
You’ll need a crew. Art students will do. Also recent art graduates, and artists- if they can follow instructions.
Art:21
The last time I was in a museum bookstore, I noticed a DVD series called Art:21. This turned out to be a suite of documentaries on practitioners active in the first decade of this century, some of them mature artists like Richard Serra and James Turrell, others in mid-career like Sally Mann, still others that are rising talents and less well-known. It’s been running on PBS stations for a while, but I flat missed it, since I rarely watch broadcast. So I took a break from the line of Perry Mason episodes I’ve been going through and added the discs to my Netflix queue.
The films are selective and to the point. Each hour-long episode deals with four artists, about ten to fifteen minutes apiece. With a few exceptions, there are no voiceovers or interviewer questions: the films (carefully edited) allow the artists to tell their stories in their own words. Title cards superimposed on images of the work provide dates and a bit of context. Each episode carries a thematic title (“place,” “spirituality,” “identity, “consumption” from the first season), but the connection of each artist’s work to the theme is sometimes tenuous. Each episode is introduced by a framing segment, of highly variable quality; Laurie Anderson does a fine job introducing the series premiere, but a collaboration between Steve Martin and William Wegman is fluff.
What I find especially encouraging about the project is its selectivity—the refusal by the producers (Executive Director Susan Sollins and her staff) to pump out material just for the sake of making product. Each season consists of only four hours of programming, and the seasons are produced every other year. So, after eight years, we have sixteen hours of film covering 60-odd artists. I’m looking forward to watching it all.
More to see
Artomatic 2008 is more spacious and generally comfortable than its predecessor events, spanning nine floors of Capital Plaza I, none of them built out. It was quite pleasant to use the office tower to get a 360° look at the burgeoning neighborhood around the New York Avenue Metro station. The entire block between the station and the tower is a hole in the ground right now.
Added corporate sponsorship provided for waystations on most of the floors—a needed rest for most of us, because there is a lot to see. A surprising amount of photography (well, maybe not, digital imaging is inexpensive), almost all of it worth a look.
There were several opportunities to step into a booth for a special experience: a camera obscura, a panorama of a Norway mountaintop, a documentary video installation from Galicia in western Ukraine, a nature-themed corner from Joanna Cornell promoting the Neighborhood Ecological Stewardship Training program.
I stopped the longest for a suite of introspective, biomorphic abstractions by Gail Vollrath. I also enjoyed a flock of crows well-observed and sculpted by Janet Gohres.
Reunited with John
Assemblage artist Robert Rauschenberg has left us at the age of 82.
“I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly,” he once said, “because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.”
(Link via Boing Boing.)
Upcoming: 8
DCist reports that Artomatic 2008 will open May 9 in the Capitol Plaza 1 building, one block from the New York Avenue-Florida Avenue station on the Red Line.
Fear Not
Jeff Bagato visits the room-sized construction by local folk artist James Hampton, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly, with Metro Connection.
A shining
Via ArtsJournal: Philip Kennicott produces an excellent piece about the art, science, theater, and politics of illuminating the monuments and other public buildings of the National Mall at night.
A recent revamp of the lighting of the Washington Monument, employing focusing technology used to light sports events, reduced the amount of wattage thrown on the structure as well as light pollution (what a lighting designer would call “spill”). Nevertheless, 24 kW goes into keeping the obelisk bright at night.
The structures on the Mall have a hierarchy that is replicated in the lighting scheme:
… as lighting designers who have worked on the Mall discover, that hierarchy is an informally acknowledged rule, not a written one.
Claude Engle, a lighting designer who has lit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial and the [East Building] of the National Gallery, remembers a significant change over the years that he has been working in Washington. In the 1970s, when he lit the new [East Building] of the gallery, he just did it by feel, by instinct.
“We decided—and that was just us—that it should be less bright, maybe 80 percent as bright, as the Capitol dome,” he says.
And silly restrictions on information “for security reasons” extend to lighting the Capitol dome:
Eva Malecki, a spokeswoman for the architect of the Capitol, says that since 9/11, officials can’t even reveal what kind of light bulbs are used to light the structure.
“Any information regarding the current process for lighting the Dome,” she says by e-mail, “is security sensitive.”
Shoot
Peter Schjeldahl recaps performance artist Chris Burden’s career for The New Yorker. I don’t know how long the link will stay alive, but check out this pithy definition:
In pragmatic terms, art is a privileged zone of gratuitous activity, with boundaries maintained by the agreement of the vested authorities. Artists of the Duchampian sort delighted in effacing the boundaries, which, with increasingly avid complicity on the authorities’ part, kept being redrawn to corral the effacements. It was a silly game, in the end. Ultimate limits were discovered, most pointedly by Burden, whose influence on conceptual and installational artists, to this day, is immeasurable.
Just the work
Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt has left us. From Michael Kimmelman’s obit:
To the sculptor Eva Hesse, he once wrote a letter while she was living in Germany and at a point when her work was at an impasse. “Stop it and just DO,” he advised her. “Try and tickle something inside you, your ‘weird humor.’ You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool.” He added: “You are not responsible for the world—you are only responsible for your work, so do it. And don’t think that your work has to conform to any idea or flavor. It can be anything you want it to be.”
