Category: Art and Architecture

Upcoming: 27

Via ArtsJournal, Irene Lacher chats with Laurie Anderson about Delusion (the piece she’s bringing to the Smith Center at the end of this week), an exhibition in Brazil, and an imagined project:

…I was in a green room with Yo-Yo Ma, about to give a commencement speech. And it was very hot and very boring, and we were sitting around and talking about different fantasies. And I said, “My fantasy is playing a concert and I look out and it’s all dogs.” And so, he said, “That’s my fantasy too.” And I said, “Whoa, that’s amazing.” We said, “OK, the first one that gets to do it has to invite the other one.”

[Untitled]

Vesela Sretenović: Is your lack of interest in making representational or narrative paintings the reason you avoid giving titles to your works?

Robert Ryman: Actually, titles came simply for identification purposes, and nothing was titled until it went out someplace. That’s why most of the small works from the early 1960s that have rarely been shown are still untitled.

VS: In the mid 1960s you started to use titles that were playful and associative, like Lugano, Archive, General, Pace, Courier, Spectrum, etc. You would think they had meaning, until you realized they were brands of paint, office supplies, shipping companies, or industrial materials. Was this an intentional tease?

RR: No, it was just a matter of finding a title that wasn’t so easy to associate with something specific. There was one title, Signet 20, that was from the brush I used, and someone called me and wanted to know if there was another Signet. But it was because it was a number 20 brush—there were not 19 previous Signets. The title Standard was from the company where I got the steel. Standard was just a word that couldn’t make one think of a landscape or a sunset or something.

Robert Ryman: Variations and Improvisations, 2010 (Phillips Collection exhibition catalog)

Decimate clutter

Steve Offutt dares to challenge the security bollards that have popped up in the last decade all over the city like so many fruiting bodies of concrete fungus. They won’t work, and they’re anti-people.

By now, the totality of those barriers must cover scores of acres of valuable sidewalk real estate. They create an unwelcome atmosphere to pedestrians, forcing them to weave and sometimes wait for others to make room just to walk to and from their destinations. Most of them are unsightly at best and downright ugly at worst. They have degraded the open space and welcoming feel of virtually every outdoor space in the core of DC.

Welcome to this situation

Arthur Lubow profiles Tino Sehgal, zero-impact conceptual artist/sculptor/choreographer.

Unlike so much of contemporary art, Sehgal’s art evokes passionate reactions among the unschooled as well as the cognoscenti. Anyone who has seen the onlookers trudging passively through an art museum (all too often the Guggenheim ramp resembles the humane cattle slaughterhouses designed by Temple Grandin) can appreciate the achievement. What fascinates me about Sehgal is that working only with human clay, he can call forth thoughtful and visceral responses from people who remain unmoved by more conventional paintings and sculptures. When I expressed this to him, he laughed at me. “I’m more ambitious than that,” he said. “That’s too little of a game.”

Nature is never finished

Randy Kennedy visits Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty with conservators from the Dia Art Foundation, who have devised a low-tech way to document the structure’s changing condition year to year.

…the institute, which often works in countries where conservation projects are carried out on shoestring budgets, came up with a remarkably simple solution: a $50 disposable latex weather balloon, easily bought online.

Along with a little helium, some fishing line, a slightly hacked Canon PowerShot G9 point-and-shoot digital camera, an improvised plywood and metal cradle for the camera and some plastic zip ties (to keep the cradle attached and the neck of the balloon cinched), a floating land-art documentation machine was improvised, MacGyver-like.

Submerged by the rising waters of Great Salt Lake in the 1970s, the piece is now exposed to the air, covered with a layer of salt, and subject to alteration by human visitors.

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.”

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