I wish that I could put it on my upcoming list, but I will just have to enjoy it from afar: The Floating Piers, by Christo, is installed on Italy’s Lake Iseo through 3 July.
Category: Art and Architecture
Nature, unnerving
Andy Goldsworthy talks to Terry Gross.
Upcoming: 43
A reason to get back on the Orange Line: Artomatic is coming to New Carrollton at the end of the month, as Bob Niedt reports.
Paris, 1922-1939
I am one of the newest members of Conrad Bakker’s Untitled Project: Robert Smithson Library and Book Club. My copy of the Wake is the 14th printing (June 1973) of the Viking Compass edition of 1959. As you can see, the cover details are a little different from the one that Smithson owned.
What Bakker’s carved and painted replica lacks in readability, it beats my book for durability. The binding is badly cracked, and I’m not sure that it would hold up to a second reading (I made it all the way through in the summer of 1986).
Bibbity Dum-dum
A lovely simile linking the cinematic, literary, and pictorial worlds, from Anthony Lane’s review of P. T. Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice:
As a lyricist of California light, Pynchon is rivalled only by Richard Diebenkorn, who spent some twenty years painting his Ocean Park series in Santa Monica, and I doubt whether any director—dead or alive, Altman or Anderson—could really conjure a style to match the long surge of a Pynchon sentence as it rolls inexhaustibly onward.
Soaring
In honor of the opening of Washington Dulles International Airport 52 years ago: a stunning gallery of images of the Eero Saarinen-designed airport under construction, photographed by Balthazar Korab, and donated to the Library of Congress.
Upcoming: 38
Book me a motel in the Berkshires: Mass MoCA is set to announce a long-term partnership with James Turrell, setting aside 35,000 square feet of new exhibition space for several of his works.
Reversible
Carol Vogel reports on the restoration of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Adam, a 15th-century marble by Tullio Lombardo, which is again on display. The sculpture was smashed into dozens of pieces when its supporting pedestal gave way, in 2002. Vogel notes “a new attitude adopted by museums around the world to share such innovative work not just professionally but with the public,” although concerns had been expressed (as reported by Randy Kennedy in 2010) about the slowness of the reconstruction as well as lack of media access. In any event, now that the sculpture is back, the museum has produced an impressive suite of videos summarizing the story.
Related: Restoration of a Mark Rothko.
Soulful
Kriston Capps mounts a thoughtful defense of the unloved, unlovely FBI HQ.
So much of the criticism of Brutalism treats it like a failed quiz—a problem to be solved, a problem for which there are correct answers, not a piece of history that could be preserved and improved upon.
What do you see?
Very nice 20-minute video detailing the restoration of a vandalized Mark Rothko, one of the Seagrams murals, now in the collection of the Tate Modern. Of interest to fans of John Logan’s Red—a study canvas prepared by the artist is found in storage, conservationists prepare a test canvas with those big sweepy brushes, some quick views of the murals as a series—tech gearheads (500-power 3-D microscopy), and devotees of the painter’s work.
Whiter shade of pale
Happy birthday to today’s Google Doodle honoree, Agnes Martin.
Emptying the shoebox
A holiday weekend affords some time to scan some old photos.
Erstwhile cars and girlfriends, much loved. Did I really have that much stuff growing in my front yard? I think that’s my neighbor’s Mitsubishi 3000GT behind Algernon.
A Yellow-crowned Night-Heron (Nyctanassa violacea) foraging at Huntley Meadows Park. This might have been my lifer.
Is this the original boardwalk at Huntley Meadows? I don’t think so, but it’s what we had in 1991.
Obsessions with the built environment on a trip to the Pacific Northwest in 1993. Bonneville Dam and its generator room.
The bascule Johnson Street Bridge in Victoria. Today, it’s in the process of being replaced.
Where else in the world but Portland would you find an official city park the size of a manhole? Welcome to Mill Ends Park.
I like the bubbly Canvasback, too
Rick Wright offers some of his unconventional picks for this season’s art competition for the Federal Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamp.
This is not a decoy, not a duck, but the self-conscious simulacrum of a duck/decoy, and in its grotesque combination of the organic and the artificial, the living and the not, this figure brings together eloquently the concerns, shared and conflicting, of hunters and birders, reminding us all of where the duck stamp comes from and all the fine things it has led to over the years.
It might win, but it won’t. I predict that next year’s stamp will be pedestrian and placative, like all its predecessors. I’m still buying it, though.
Upcoming: 35
Artomatic, the building-recycling, artist-driven free-for-all, is coming to Jefferson County, W. Va. The exhibition opens 4 October in the “Rock & Tile Building” in Charles Town.
Decline of the West: 1
First it was the lights coming on at Wrigley Field, then the closing of Tower Records and Ollsson’s Books, and then the end of the zone system for D.C. taxicabs. We endured. But this blow is too much to take: the Metropolitan Museum of Art has discontinued its colorful admission buttons, replacing them with paper tickets, stickers—and advertising. A spokesman for the museum says that the the new paraphernalia will save the organization two cents apiece. Bah!
And Godzilla here was working on collecting a full set, hoping to score a free admission when his color came up again.