Dissolve - or Try to Stand Out
June 24, 2010

SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO - Their sentences were composed slowly, deeply considered before uttered. The two women spoke as if they had been struggling - and not always successfully -- to save lives in peril amid atrocious living conditions. We walked into the auditorium at Santa Fe Dance Barns midway through their presentation and needed a few minutes to figure out who these people were and what they were struggling with.  They were trying to make art.

The struggle was the dark side contrasting sharply with the bright and common theme of the exhibition -- animation. These artists, Kara Walker and Mary Reid Kelley were helping to open the show by discussing their work with the curators in front of the public. The 8th annual SITE Santa Fe Biennial, which opened June 20, is called Dissolve

Dissolve is Flickering Images in Dark Rooms.... yes, but more. Cartoons, colorful drawing, Pixar .... no. Citizen Cane, Gone with the Wind, Birth of a Nation ... colder, colder. Fantasia, spin art, Monty Python ... getting warmer. Video art is somewhere in the dark matter between Pixar and Pottery Barn, and Visual Genius is a struggle to see, for both for viewers and makers. It's easy to make (and get) something pleasant or cleaver. It's hard to go nebular.

On June 19, I listened to these artists talk about their struggle to make something meaningful, so on the first day of the public opening of Dissolve, I pledge to be open minded and see if I could get something (great, a gem, a tiny spark, a bubble) from this exhibition of non-stop video. In a museum where no silent still things compete with it. Great concept; what's there to see?

Airplanes fly across the screen that pretend to be drawn on a flipbook. Pretend. Not good enough. Hiraki Sawa. Thumbs down.

A toy car scene lays on a table. Video from four cameras is spliced together as if a automatic TV director is calling out 'close-up,' 'two-shot,' 'wide-shot,' ect. and this plays above the toy scene. The show is a traffic jam, we can tell by the sound of honking cars. A tiny, toy couple watch the jam up from park benches. The expression on their faces (close-up) is fascinatingly always the same.

Seeing film and the filmed at the same time is not often possible, but we know it exists. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy gives viewers the immediate experience of it.

A man dressed in tails drawing a picture on a large sketchpad. He draws a bottle of wine and a glass and then plucks the real think off the board. This film was made by the Edison Company to promote the idea of moving pictures sometime between 1894 and 1918. I can imagine the people who made this little old film, and I don't hear them talking like angst-driven artists. The image is fun to see. Its inclusion in this show is an attempt to put the struggle to make relevant video art in 2010 in historical perspective. 

Kara Walker manages to make films/videos that offer interesting visual images in four dimensions. Time, and the normal three. The racist - anti-white-redneck - storyline taken from the real history of criminals and assholes is not clearly spelled out in the film, but the imagery is beautiful.

Jacco Olivier makes a finger painting, and another one, and another and links them together as a moving film with a similar plot to Avitar. Lush in color, it is less than 2 minutes long. We might not have criticized the story line if Avitar had been so short. (Same can be said for a few of the more narrative (not really fully narrative) videos in the rest of this show.)

A gem, with a few issues. Berni Searle lays a cut-out silhouette of three clumps of people in a tray of water and the red dye from the paper dissolves into the water in front of our eyes on three different large screens. You know you've seen this paper before. The texture is something you understand but can't quite explain. The bottom edge of the paper is crinkled and  the figures seem to be standing in a natural landscape that's loosing all its color. One of the silhouette forms doesn't quite stand up. It flops onto the bulk of the paper. It confirms that the image was made with paper. The red dye leaves the paper and swirls around in the water until the whole scene starts over again. Better than a lava lamp.

I followed the show in the suggested viewing order and at this point, entering a circular room made of gauzy drapery, I started to feel overloaded. The room is busy, quiet except for layers of whispered content coming from speakers directly above the viewing area.

I got sucked into watching an older woman in costumes of obvious types: nun, sailor, cowboy. These change every few minutes. She appeared to be singing something in German, a traditional folk song, maybe. The costumes related to drawings layered behind her, but I can't understand the German. There are a lot of people in this gauzy-green room, and four other videos demanding attention. I placed myself under the speaker and got lured into the singsong of the German woman.  I try to make sense of the other works. Random images. Random narrative. Sure, there's some cool drawing, cool photo and digital images, but not much clarity.

Afraid I was going to miss some bits of genius due to overload-blackout, I decided to come back later. I wrote my prior post, which talks about the quick and easy pieces in this show, and 'later' turns out to be days later because SITE is only open Thursday through Sunday.

Three gems would have been missed if I hadn't come back ...  William Kentridge. Watch someone draw, erase and redraw an image as it tells a story. Nothing like watching paint dry; it's beautiful; vivid gray smudges remind you of what was drawn like your dreaming it.

Cindy Sherman's short piece where her image is a paper doll in a package and she gets put in different costumes. Ahhhh....a breath of clarity.

And more clarity with Black Stuntman, an ordinary guy, facing ordinary troubles with a costume -- pencil drawn, of course. 

Black Stuntman is one of several videos in a big square room. There is a big screen showing the work of one of the angst-filled women, the one who read a pun-filled poem called You Make Me Iliad, at the panel discussion, Mary Reid Kelley (see the first photo). The iambic pentameter poem is read for a camera by the serious voice of its creator. The look of this speaker and the other characters who represent German WWI soldiers reminded me of an old B&W cartoon of Mickey Mouse. And there were some films from that genre playing in the same room. About five on little airplane-like screens in front of the bench seating, so you could keep an eye on a little screen while watching the Iliad droning on. The make-up is interesting. The poem is nonsense. Cleaver figures of speech, alone, do not make exceptional poetry. Nor was this piece exceptional film making, acting, or .... unless I just missed it entirely ... visual art.  Because you can illustrate the words, or animate the images, doesn't mean you should.

Just like any big 'biennial' art experience, there are always gems and klunkers, and there were some of each in each of the pieces I really took the time to look at in this show. There is stuff worth seeing, and I'm going to try to go back in and see more.  

Terry Talty writes about the experience of being human and looking at contemporary art.

SITE Santa Fe Biennial 2010 is all video.
June 20, 2010... Santa Fe, NM

SITE Biennials make this warehouse space feel small. SITE, a big, contemporary art exhibition space at the corner of Guadeloupe and Paseo de Peralta in Santa Fe is now taking advantage of the fourth dimension in order to accommodate the 2010 biennial. And for every piece included, there seem to be infinite variations.

To see thirty images, walk through the show at a normal pace. Then, walk through again and see another 30. Entertaining yourself is easy. See the image on the right? It's rain falling.

Here's another simple pleasure, if you just have a few minutes. Watch the Oscar Munoz' piece, where a video camera runs while someone draws a face on concrete with a wet brush. The drawing evaporates before it can be completed and the image's expression on the screen changes as parts disappear and are redrawn. Sometimes we forget that it is in the processes of being drawn, but we can see the hand. And it's moving as fast as it can.
At right,Oscar Muñoz, Re/trato, 2003. 
 
The setting is mesmerizing, and was created by David Adjaye, the architect who designed the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Denver. Black and white images flicker in what feels like a red room. A circle of always-different images is draped in a green room. Sound is coming in from above, isolated for just the viewers/listeners standing below it.

In this biennial, the curators, Sarah Lewis and Daniel Belasco, incorporated a brief overview of the history of film and video from a 'aaahhh' kind of perspective. Every piece, new and old, they said, has 'that something special' and although they were as vague as the word 'aaaahh' about what that was, each piece made sure to show the human at work behind the technology. Aaaa-haaa..

SITE is a closed box, and can be intimidating to people uninitiated to it. In the past, I've passed through a gauntlet of weird sculptural debris, or had to walk in without any idea of how to find the door, but somehow for this show's opening, the grounds outside are decorated with groups of people talking about the work -- almost a film fest atmosphere without the celebrity hype. The darkness of the big space, at first, makes this show seem too difficult for an average Joe to understand. But when you ask anyone coming out of the space what they saw, what they thought ... you get a self surprised, 'it was cool.'
 
But to really look, is consuming. So, I'm going to go outside now and talk to some people about it. Back, soon.

Sculpture adds sense to the Natural World:

All God's Children Got Rhythm
Yoshitomo Saito
New Work
June 4- July 31, 2010

They are less than two inches high; just pieces of branch buds, assembled on the wall and poking out at you from your knees to over your head. And they cast beautifully intricate shadows. You can get lost in looking at them. They are "Rocky Mountain Winter" by Yoshitomo Saito, and are installed this month and next at Rule Gallery, 227 Broadway, Denver.

I stood at the opening with the titles list, reading to see if I could match each sculpture with its title. I had to look hard and think in order to make the matches but soon became obvious. I asked the guy next to me to do the same. He make the same matches. I guess Saito knows what he's talking about. His subject most often is nature.

Not in the sappy way that landscape paintings can be, these sculptures are pleasant to look at and inform us about how it is to see things in nature. Things we don't often think to see.

Adding or Subtracting from the Chaos

Solo Shows at Site Santa Fe

SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO - I'm standing in a gallery reading poetry. The lines are carefully placed on drawings, and are trying to give me a lesson on Antonin Artaud, a French Surrealist and dramatist. I read the poetry and wonder if I am part of such a shallow society that information must be accompanied by pictures in order to be enticing.

The drawings with attached poetry are the work of Terry Allen, and the piece is called Ghost Ship to Rodez. It is one quarter of the current show, One on One, at SITE Santa Fe, which runs from Feb. 6 to May 9.

The words making poetry could either be Allen's or Artaud's. (My guess is Artaud, but even Google won't confirm if I'm right or not.) I get a nice hit of thought provocation from the first image and words I see, and intently read. My friend doesn't like the imagery that goes with the poetry - rats and other nasty stuff - and she leaves after a quick stroll around the space. Here's an example of what is fitted under the rats and crows:  'do people in heaven dream about hell,' 'do they wish they'd had been a little more sinful in life and repented at the last minute.'

A score these framed drawing line the room and tell the story of Artaud's trip to Mexico in 1937 when he was trying to quit heroin and take up peyote. He was having a hard time. He imagined all kinds of things coming out of his body. He may or may not have been successful looking for trouble to fuel his art, but his troubles got worse. Soon after leaving Mexico he went to Ireland where he got arrested and deported. He was sent home in a straight jacket, chained to an iron bed in the hold of transport ship for the duration of the 17-day cruise.

Next door, the artist is trying to further describe this extremely frightening experience. The photo shown here represents the installation well and is part of a virtual gallery tour on SITE's website. I can imagine I'm supposed to feel Artaud's pain, but my experience is a little more like looking at the photograph. The shadows are beautiful. The form are interesting.

One of the parts is a woman with a Texas accent telling a disjointed account of Artaud's story from six different screens suspended from a contraption that's a cross between a spider and an anorexic android. Not easy to understand. In a corner, is the other form, generating a breathy, whoshing sound. Symbolically, it is a sailing ship about 10 feet long and almost as tall as the ceiling. There are sails that move in a created breeze, and a bed that represents the deck. Beneath is a sea of books. Earlier this month, Allen and his wife, Jo Harvey Allen staged a play he'd written, also called Ghost Ship to Rodez, and maybe these were used as the set. I'm intrigued by the forms but I want them to communicate more. And the quabbling sound sends me out for refreshments like a bad commercial.

I look for some human contact. I can't talk to everyone about art like this. My eyes randomly land on one of the drawings -- 'he was so selfish, he had no understanding of what selfish was.' Who would admit such a thing if it were true about themselves, I think, and start to feel guilty for my own ignored blind spots. Overbearing. I didn't know what that word meant until very recently. Or heartburn, until I was pregnant.

Luckily, I started talking to someone who spends a couple days a week watching this show as a museum employee. She asked if I had any questions. I think someone at SITE knows that if a viewer hasn't taken the time to read the pamphlet about the show, they won't get very far in understanding it. I ask what experience she had with the show.
   
She brings school kids in, and they are not given a lot of advance prep. From looking alone, second graders, she says, can tell that all of the framed pieces and the two installed images are about one person. They can tell that the person was having a hard time.

She, a grown up, calls the story an existential crisis.

We talk just outside the room with the whispering Texan woman and I realize I'm torturing myself, as if I needed a nagging heroin withdrawal, by not leaving the room.

Maybe it's not worth writing about art, I say looking for more punishment

A few months ago, well several times over the past three months, I've visited a piece by Samuel Becket at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Denver. The piece is one woman, speaking a monologue clearly for 14 minutes, with her face blackened so only her lips and teeth are visible in the dark room. Every phrase of the monologue starts my mind turning on the question of my identity, the idea of the self and how it is perceived differently from the outside and from inside, and changes with every moment. I know it is Beckett's words that do it. They are poetry. Spoken quickly, but clearly. For 14 minutes.

I'm longing for a little clarity in this piece of Terry Allen's.

The museum employee and I go to the next room, and look at the work by American artist Hasan Elahi. He was detained after 9/11 and falsely accused of being involved. So, through this work, Tracking Transience, he is in the process of thoroughly documenting his life -- taking photographs of everything he eats and many of the places he's shit. These are cycled through an array of screens the roughly represent the United States. On another was, his credit card bill for the past 10 years scrolls by like flights on an airport screen. A program designed by government researchers to predict a person's whereabouts runs on a semi dome like a very complicated constellation map. SITE built the globe; it's quite beautiful. As a life document, this room is more cold and inhuman than Facebook. Do we have a life if it isn't documented in some way? I wonder. If a life falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Does it have an existential crisis?

Looking for the Face I had before the world was made
by Terry Talty
January 30, 2010

DENVER, COLORADO - Representing the human face in art is a little like saying aloud who you're sleeping with. You're telling people what you find attractive. When you paint faces, you're showing what you think is human. Painters have more trouble with it today because representing a particular face accurately puts that painting into a sub-genre of art: photorealism, portraiture, realism. Many contemporary artists use a cartoon, a symbol, or some other kind of messy mark or gesture to depict the meta-face, or the every-face. Michaël Borremans blur some, and focuses well on the nondescript parts struggling to find another way to that universal face.

The show called Looking for the face I had before the world was made is six-different exhibitions by six artists (or artist teams) that opened Jan. 29 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Borremans' paintings, about 10, are in the main floor gallery.

The gallery is dimly lit and the faces in the paintings aren't engaging the viewer. They are the backs of heads, someone looking away, the profile of an artist intent on something oblique to us. The colors are somber and in one, the subject is a thorny stick leaning against the wall. In one, the figure is wearing a tightish cap that seems to have mouse ears sewn onto it. No one would be caught dead in such a hat unless it was a costume, said my friend nudging me.

The universal face is on the other side of that hat, looking into the picture frame with us. Inside another frame is a brown haired female looking down at her hands. No facial features stand out. In the dim gallery light in front of this canvas, two figures are standing looking at the canvas in profile. One brown-haired female looks like the painting; I take her picture on my crummy phone camera. The other human is a guy with too much apparent individuality to be the universal. One side of his head is shaved and the other -- well, I can only see a dark line of hair at the crown from my vantage point but it seems to be a normal head of hair.

Try to draw this threesome as the universal. The guy can pose showing his left or right side and play the part of twice as many characters. Eliminate all until you get the 'common human.' I let Photoshop help me. Put this face in a scene that we all do: look at our hands, scratch an itch or turn away from someone looking at us. 

The primordial human face -- one to whom we can all relate -- is cold and sad like the feeling in this gallery. We are not inside this human. We are looking at it. It's a completely different feeling than the Renaissance window to the world, different from looking into a picture and buying the illusion that it's a window onto a painted scene painted. And there is one painting in this show that has this traditional perspective just to remind us that looking at the face that is not engaging us, is different from looking through the window with the artist. It's subject is simply an open magazine. It's there, the traditional window to the world, where we are in the mind, behind the face, of the universal person looking at the open pages.

I don't know what you have when you finally create the meta-face, if Borremans has done it here. You don't have the feeling 'hey, we're all looking at the same stuff. I can really feel I'm seeing with that figure's eyes.'

It's more the question, 'hey, is that what I look like to the world?'

And if he's found the face that we had before the world was made ... 'have I always looked like that?'

Looking for the Face I had before the world was made
by Terry Talty
January 29, 2010

DENVER, COLORADO - Disembodied lips enunciated clearly the plight of the speaker feeling disconnected from the world and her physical body. The brain ... and the brain ... the lips say, and emphasize with the few poignant pauses. This 14-minutes monologue is so fast you originally believe it's in a foreign language.

The language is that of Samuel Beckett, the Irish playwright who gave us Waiting for Godot and many other surrealistic plays and stories. The lips are a 2 foot by 1 foot video projection made before the playwright died in 1989, and it is installed in a completely black room at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. The background of the face or anything else that would be on the screen is black. The projected lips are a deep value of black, the mouth less deep and the teeth white, and moving as fast as the lips.

Of course this image is intriguing. Is it the face I had before the world was made? as the title of this six-part exhibition at the MCA is called? 

Before The World Was Made

If I make the lashes dark
And the eyes more bright
And the lips more scarlet,
Or ask if all be right
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity's displayed:
I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.

What if I look upon a man
As though on my beloved,
And my blood be cold the while
And my heart unmoved?
Why should he think me cruel
Or that he is betrayed?
I'd have him love the thing that was
Before the world was made.

Beckett's film piece is called Not I. The speaker continually talks about the the person who is physically moving about: looking at something in a museum, grocery shopping, typing as the Not I, not the person that the speaker feels she is. She doesn't recognize her physical self. She sighs, she screams a little, she emotes and is rational. This may sound like too much to take for 14 minutes, but the speech is as open as an astrology column. The lips for words, words make thoughts, spoken thoughts lead to created thoughts, thoughts trigger emotions, emotions fire sensations, create more thoughts and on and on.

Out of the blue, a friend of mine said to me a while ago, "I don't want to die. I really like thinking."

Is this experience in a dark room with disembodied lips what I was before the world was made? And is that different from the one that will be mine after my world is gone?

Looking for the Face I had before the world was made
by Terry Talty
January 30, 2010

DENVER, COLORADO - Portraits of people by A.G. Rizzoli at the Museum of Contemporary Art are a cross between a building dedication plaque and Dadaist drawings of machines or geometry that were titled with someone's name. Each of Rizzoli's elaborate mechanical drawings of the classic sky scraper is named for someone - his mother, a Mr. Alfredo Capobianco (full title of the piece: Alfredo Capobianco and Family Symbolically Sketched/Palazzo del Capobianco).

These aren't tiny images but ever viewer steps within inches of the frame to get more intimate with the details of Mr. Capobiano's resurrection as a drawing of a building. There are slogans in banners and around the architecture that is the central element of each piece that give us some tiny hint at who these people are, but it's not obvious why one building is Mr. Capobiano and another is the artist's mother. And it becomes unimportant. I go back again and again to look up close at one of the drawings and pick out something interesting to take in. The next time I look I pick out something different. These drawing are like those Edible Bouquets. This time I took a honeydew melon slice. Last time I just had time to grab a grape. I'm not sure if I have time to tackle a whole slice of pineapple on a stick.

What kind of building would you be? A woman looking with me at this very detailed drawings of fantasy architecture described a house she'd imagined when she was a kid: nine stories below ground and nine stories above, made out of malleable foam.

Me? I had a dream when I was a kid that I live in a house made of a tight circle of pine trees with a floor about ten feet up. A treehouse, but no walls but pine trees, no windows but the small slits between them, and a clear view to the stars. With some invisible ceiling.

And you?

Land in Art at the New Mexico Museum of Art

October 27, 2009

SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO - On day three in New Mexico, I find it's time to differentiate myself as an art tourist, one who travels to see contemporary art, from tourist art. Art made for tourists including the art made to hang on walls is beginning to wear me down, although I consciously avoid looking at bad galleries. However, just walking around Santa Fe my companion has already managed to call some paitings we've walked by 'insipidly lifeless'. The gallery called it Nouveau Surrealism, but the images were like a Doonesbury comic strip, my companion continued until he realized he was insulting the a comic strip. Nauseating, was his conclusion, in the first ever use he has made of that word. Style without substance.

 

In a few days we'd already seen lots of attempts to recreate, to emote, to aesthetically communicate the beautiful land around us. It's a hard job in a visually clutter world. Georgia O'Keefe's sensuous works usually do it for me, but here in Santa Fe, they are flaunted everywhere amidst the nauseating stuff. And all the copiers of O'Keefe, of dead Impressionists, of dead Abstract Expressionists, of Western Artists like Remington and Russell and of all the copiers of Indian artists.

Realism is boring, O'Keefe said, what's interesting is what an artist emphasizes, points out to you.

 

New Mexico was the home of a land art collective show this summer, and we'd missed most of it by this fall trip, but went inside the Fine Art Museum of New Mexico to see a more traditionally placed exhibition on the land idea.

The show was based on an old photo show at the George Eastman House, called New Topographics, something about: in today's world what does man do to the land, how does man live in it that makes land relevant to us human folk today. The show is called: ManMade: Notions of Landscape.

Well, it sustains us, said my companion. We are of the earth, not really of the city structure although so many artists today feel city is their environment. Cityscapes are veiled, I think. And we Westerners are lucky to still see the unveiled thing, and feel something about it.

Last night we were in Ojo Caliente, soaking in hot water that people here have been soaking in for centuries (longer than people were saying USA) and when we get out, we and everyone around us, were wearing the same robes like in a sci fi movie set in the future.

 

About the show: ManMade: it is mostly photography. And a reenactment of a Robert Smithson, . Without that piece, called Atlantis, there was nothing physical about land included in this show. All were snaps of it. Artificial 2-Ds of landscapes, just as Smithson's is a make-believe landscape.

 

A museum guards told us they brought in 4 tons of glass and broke it in the gallery - wearing safety glasses and respirators. He also observed a couple, in their twenties, who had no idea what Atlantis was.  They, he said, were going to go to Africa and visit it someday.

 

Sarah Pickering - landscapes of England - pastoral countryside. Photographs of explosions of a land mine, a fuel explosion and artillery. Looking at her pieces you could actually focus on the landscape, see the trees with the various explosions.

 

An-My Le was included with a good B&W photo of rockets; some accidental images are better than others and just because Famous-Artist makes them doesn't make them beautiful or even interesting. A little curatorial integrity would have been appreciated. I'm feeling skeptically sarcastic as I ask: Is violence necessary to be relevant today? And is it okay to intersperse images of landscape?

Smithson's piece was particularly violent. I imagined impaling myself on it, throwing myself on it, and it was frightening, a better rush of chill than any viewing of horror film or homicidal newscast.

Roni Horn is included with a series of photos of the Thames River. Pretty images. Horn concentrated interest because there were 20 or 39 footnotes on each one, but in this relevant age, we ignore footnotes. How many of us want to know what's in the footnote? And I am bothered by the paper curling and the quality of the print being so poor. If it's about water close ups being pretty, then make them pretty, bad craftsmanship should have a point.

The Zapatista. That's the name of the most famous picture in this show - I wouldn't have known its name from looking at it.  Apparently, Picasso was annoyed about it being called the Zapatista by its painter Diego Rivera. Rivera was said to have originally called it something else, something more pastoral, and Picasso probably got annoyed about it becoming a symbol of the Mexican revolutionaries fighting against the status quo.  I think Picasso avoided being political, but probably felt guilty about it. There was a lot of text on the wall of the SMU Meadows Museum of Art that explained Riveria's activities during this time, and to this I added what I know from popular cultural. Rivera would often annoy people with politicalness, I thought  -- remember the Rockefeller plaza mural as we saw it in the Frida movie? He wouldn't take out the portrait of Lenin.
The show at SMU this summer (running from June 21-September 20, 2009) was of paintings by Rivera from 1913 to 1917 made in Europe. His cubist period.
The first thing I noticed is that Diego is a great draftsman. He can make a simple line tell a lot about form. Cubism has a nice way of allowing a free way to pile up images to describe three-dimentional space, without rigid rules like perspective and things that concerned Renaissance artists. Cubism's free pile up of images worked to Rivera's advantage when he started making murals.
 I find cubism boringly filled with Spanish painters who all look the same: Juan Gris, Georges Braque ( who is French, sorry) and Picasso. But Diego Rivera had a fresh approach, did a lot of portraits, maybe because that was a way to make a living. They were almost academic in the front, side, top bottom view that seemed almost to come from a Cubist Instruction manual and yet were interesting because the guy could really draw a shape and have it mean something.
There was a room of Spanish painting by other artists showing how Rivera was situated in his time period, and a wall with paintings by his teachers in art college. The teacher that Rivera felt most close to was a Fauvist Post Impressionist and between Rivera, this teacher and the other students and teachers of the period is a diversity of work that looks post-modern. A precursor of bit change.
The Zapatista invites a return look. Centered, Mexican, Cubisit and clear, it was hung in the middle of one gallery with another painting on the other side. The other was a painting of a woman at a well. She was recognizable. The Zapatista was not, just his gun. 

DENVER - Kevin O’Connell and Arlene Shechet opened shows on the same day at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and I rode my bike over to see the work in the quiet of the day before the buzz of the opening hit it. The museum’s glass wall have been covered since Day One with a fabric that lets in light - glows white with it - but filters out the glare. The second floor glows with this absorbed sunlight, but Shechet’s work was placed in a gallery that’s cool like a shady spot.

Heavy felt blankets scrolled from the walls. Text was cut out of these swaths and it wasn’t immediately apparent where the words came from — reference to seeing the mountains - and there was some real poetic beauty to the snippets of words so I thought they were actually lifted from a poet. Poetry is harder to write than you think. Real poetry is in limited supply and I wouldn’t expect it to roll off an artist’s tongue. Or haphazardly land in the negative spaces cut out of this heavy material that sank and piled on the floor.

Coincidentally, the scroll of paper on which Jack Kerouak wrote On the Road was shown in a glass case at the library last year, the 50th year after it was published. And well, the poet was Kerouak, I found out later that evening.

The paper that hung on the rest of the wall space was made by the artist by casting it into molds she made of the surface of water. The cottony paper was made of flecks of blue and white and recycled bits of Asian drawings or patterns of some kind. What these drawings were didn’t matter much more than the words on the scrolls. I’d been guessing that the artist lives here, in Colorado, doesn’t get much recognition world-wide for her work and is trying a bunch of different stuff, not taken any one thing very far. The third kind of stuff were cut-out wood sculptures.

I’m sappily nostalgic about exotic or just nicely finished wood because I grew up in the suburbs where there was none. And these wood pieces are laminated, mixed wood that is very pretty like a nicely made box at a craft fair, which doesn’t make it art. These cut-out sculptures are tracing of topographic maps. Mountains, sitting about knee height, on pedestals.

I’ve always wanted to see a mountain like that - something I could balance on one hand. Mountains are never, for me, three-dimensional objects. For me, they are the best example of the possible 10-dimensional universe of new physics. A possible visual example of something theoretical and hard to understand. I used to live across the valley from a near-Fourteener called Red Mountain and I’m always amazed by how it looks from the other side, from it’s foot, and from it’s top, like a differently measured thing - sometimes as big as my thumb and sometimes filling the sky. And these little laser 3-D cutouts of Lookout Mountain or the mountains around Independence Pass are like the GUT theory - neatly unified.

Nice to have a Colorado artist in a museum as nice as the Contemporary in downtown Denver, I’m thinking, until later when I find out she’s from New York City, and all of a sudden I feel like I’m eating canned salsa. The director of the museum says how nice it is of the artist to create this show that is so site specific to Colorado. Ironically, I’ve given her a little bit of artistic leeway because I think she’s struggling in the boondocks like the rest of us and feel like she understands Colorado. You can see the irony of my compliment.

Meanwhile down in the photo gallery on the first floor are the photographs of wind generator installations on what the artist himself calls “Disposable Landscapes.” Flat, beige, rural land that, well, might be improved in looks by the addition of some nice looking windmills.

Close ups make these generators look a little like sterile spaceships, with doors onto their skinny long shafts that would start a shiver in any claustrophobic soul. But there is a beauty in the arrangement of parts on the photo paper and the space in between them. A beautiful sense of planning. There is a cool precision to the printing and mounting of these photographs that makes me think Universal citizen, but I’m wrong again. This guy, Kevin O’Connell, is a Coloradoan.

One would be silly not to think about landscape in Colorado because it has so much to do with what goes on here: industry, recreation and economy. And the Eastern plains have always been our disposable landscapes. I’ve heard lawmakers talk about development out there, wanting it so badly they can’t even say the word conservation, and it’s so ugly none of us environmentally-minded people give a damn about it. Dry and as beige as the suburbs. I’m guilty. I’ve thought of it as disposable.

Filling the room with cool blue sky against ochre, browns, tans and grass I’m feeling I ought to be a little more available to this landscape if it’s sitting there so available to me. But, I’m not convinced that a big white kinetic version of the Lincoln Memorial is so bad.

There is a nasty construction sound nearby that’s been bugging me while I’ve been thinking here in the photo gallery, and someone says it’s coming from the next room. This room is called the New Media gallery and it often has a boring experimental film. Today, it very precisely and cleanly, shows three different loop videos of wind generators going around. The recurring shadows that the blades produce are beautiful, and the sound, I think, is definitely turned up to annoy me, because I’ve never experienced it that loud when I stand around watching wind catching blades. And I do this every chance I get.

My photograph included here was taken when the wind was blowing so loudly across a 100 degree Kansas landscape that I couldn’t hear the slightest whisper from the generators.

DENVER - I'm laughing, walking through Psychedelic Experience that opened March 21 and runs through July 21, 2009 at the Denver Art Museum. Here were posters, essentially ads, for all the sneaky, rebellious stuff we used to do hanging in the Denver Art Museum. And me too. Hanging out in the Art Museum. The current show in the big temporary, contemporary gallery of the DAM is the work of guys making posters for Bill Graham, concert promoter for the Grateful Dead, Santana and others.

I'd just bought a ticket from a young woman who wouldn't credit her parents for being full hippies. I wondered what gave a person real cred in that realm. Dropping acid, making art, doing the light show at concerts, making music, stealing cool images and making posters, bra burning, protesting, just having long hair?

The last time I was in this big gallery in the new Hamilton Addition to the museum - where you feel like you're inside an origami crane - the show was German painter Daniel Richter. His big paintings of organically amorphous figures and dangerous, graffiti-covered unreal places trying to be edgy pushed me away from the walls. Standing back I like the feeling I had that someone was standing in each one of them, and yelling at me, slurring.

My criticism of the Richter paintings -- busy and bright and reminding me of the shameless advertising of the psychedelic posters that I spent so much of my youth staring at while listening to the Grateful Dead, et al.

So today, I'm being drawn to those same folded-walls looking at posters from 1965 to 1971 from San Francisco. I laugh and think about someone writing a saying on the wall that says - there was a secret, cryptic language on the posters that told you there was going to be acid in the Kool-Aid.

Did old acid trips flash back to me at that moment? No, but my companion did remind me how light shows were made, and later we were able to go into an adjacent gallery and make a light show with a clear dish, colored water and oil and an opaque projector. I guess I can always still hear the music that went with those trips. But what I started seeing in my mind's eye was the equipment I used to use at art school - the Rapidograph for drawing and making new typography. Or rubbing Lettraset on a layout board. Taking that scrubbed white board with the little blue layout lines to the camera to make the negative for the printing press and then later the smell of real ink.

Then my companion and I really got to the issue of the day. The price of concerts was $2 to $4. The price of a car has ten times since 1971 --- how about the price of a concert?  I wouldn't pay to see Sting because it was more than $100. Twenty-five to 50 times the price of a concert Bill Graham was advertising. The price of graphic design? Has it doubled since 1971. These artists were paid $100 per poster. Would you pay $1000 today, or would you ask a high school kid, or a friend of a friend to design it, or hold a competition and give the winner 50 bucks? And where are the really cool posters today?  We compared a ticket from a concert in this exhibition with the one that had been printed for us to enter this show. Boring. No wonder kids are slopping spray paint everywhere. There's no place for real graphic design. The DAM tickets are the same as the ones that were printed when the new wing of the museum opened. Whatever happened to the Handmade Revolution we started back in the day? I think it went away like Women's Liberation, and Free Love.

Terry Talty is the Art Tourist who lives the Psychedelic Experience .

Jan. 29, 2009

LONDON  - In the early 1950s, Mark Rothko started making paintings that nearly everyone today could identify as a "Rothko." There were large paintings, usually two (sometimes more) rectangles of color on a colored background. Sensuous, almost cloud-like color shapes floating ethereally on equally sensual backgrounds. Because they have no recognizable images, when you look at them you feel only pure emotion. That was the radical idea that came in with the whole movement called Abstract Expressionism.

By 1956 or so, Rothko and other Abstract Expressionists had been on the cover of Life Magazine, were selling well in New York galleries and making money. At this time, Rothko was asked to paint a dozen canvases to decorate the soon-to-opened Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building, in New York City.

For this commission, instead of the multi-toned palette of his previous works, Rothko limited himself to a very small number of colors: red violet, orange and a dark red. The works were never installed in the restaurant. Rothko is quoted as having said he wanted to make the rich bastards who ate there nauseous, then of saying he designed these to be placed very close to the diners, then finally, refusing to sell the paintings to the restaurant at all because the place was just too inappropriate for his work.  At the Tate exhibition, these dozen paintings fill an enormous, dimly-lit room with their emotional presence. The low lighting is to protect the paint that turns out to be a commercial house paint rather than artists' oil, and the space is to accommodate stepping far back from these painting to see them glow back at you. You can't actually pretend to sit at a table next to them because there are little ropes keeping you two feet back, but when you do put a shoulder at least that close to them, they become the works of a man, not a shining star. They have splattered pain and brushy swirls of paint, which is something just about everyone has seen emphasized in a contemporary painting. 

Not a bad or nauseating view. We, almost 50 years later, live with faux painted walls, very busy décor and multiple TVs nearly everywhere we eat.

They do glow, though, viewed from afar, in this lighting, even with a hoard of people filling the gallery room. Rothko was incredibly perceptive to know that his work would look infinitely better in the Tate Modern than in a commercial restaurant. After this commission, he did a series of paintings that was even darker: blacks and dark blue and red violets. Several of this series were made to fill the walls of the octagonal, non-denominational chapel being built in Houston by architect Phillip Johnson. This dark palette was what Rothko used until his death in 1969.

They have such overwhelming somberness, viewers have always felt they described increasing depression over his deteriorating health and foretold his suicide. A couple quotable people on the audio guide said they thought Rothko's choice of color was intellectual. He had excluded images and had great success. Was he trying to exclude color to find another level of success?

One room contained paintings on paper done around 1964. These were mostly framed with a narrow, white border created by taping the paper on a surface, then the top half was painted completely black, and the bottom half varieties of gray. The gray, lower halves, became the dancing parts in this chorus line of similarly sized works. But again, the somberness is so pervasive, that I starting thinking of life and death. And actually found myself thinking that the top half - the black - was now the monotony of life, and the bottom half were guesses of what death might be like.

I'm not alone, other people walked into the room and looked like they were at a funeral. And obviously, the curators had found his daughter and an art historian to quote about how intellectual these were. Someone said he'd started a new series that was brighter.

We didn't see any evidence of this new series in this show that was organized to specifically featuring his later work. The last room of paintings was even darker. All were made in 1969.

I do think all Rothko's painting was intellectually driven because I've read what he's written about his work, and interviews. He read Neitzche and liked to listen to Mozart's Dissance Concerto or Don Gionanni while he worked. I think you can intellectually organize your work, try to make something that people will be drawn to, and try to evoke a specific response, but what happens when all those elements get put together sometimes turns out to be more (and often, unfortunately less) than what you intend. Intense emotion is what comes from these canvas.


Website Info from the Tate Modern:  Rothko
26 September 2008 - 1 February 2009

Mark Rothko Mural for End Wall (Untitled) [Seagram Mural] 1959 National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of the Mark Rothko Foundation Inc.

Sponsored by
Fujitsu
With additional support from
Access Industries

Exhibition organised by Tate Modern in association with the Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, Japan, supported by Japan Airlines

With a donation from The Dedalus Foundation, New York
Media partner
The Times

Tate Modern presents an exhibition by one of the world's most famous and best-loved artists, Mark Rothko. This is the first significant exhibition of his work to be held in the UK for over 20 years.

Tate Modern's iconic 'Rothko Room' works are reunited for the first time with works from Japan. The Seagram Murals were originally commissioned for The Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building New York.

Rothko's iconic paintings, composed of luminous, soft-edged rectangles saturated with colour, are among the most enduring and mysterious created by an artist in modern times. In the exhibition his paintings glow meditatively from the walls in deep dark reds, oranges, maroons, browns, blacks, and greys.

The exhibition will also focus on other work in series, such as the Black-Form paintings, his large-scale Brown and Grey works on paper, and his last series of Black on Grey paintings, created in the final decade of his life from 1958-1970.

Rothko is the must-see exhibition of the year - book your tickets now to avoid missing out.

January 26, 2009

NOGENT-SUR-MARNE - Just outside the highway ring that delineates Paris is more of what also looks like Paris - the suburbs. Nogent-sur-Marne is a town of about 75,000 inhabitants lying off the southeast corner of Paris proper. We went to the town to see a retirement home for old artists. We think this a unique idea, certainly not something the government of the U.S. is thinking of doing. It may be a unique place in France, too -- the only one of its kind.

The residence is owned by the national foundation for the visual arts, and consists of two large homes adjacent to one another that once belongs to two sisters. The home(s) are located in a large wooded park in a pretty crowded bedroom community. There are also two exhibition spaces for contemporary art in this facility. We luckily stumbled into one very well organized, well lit and modern one with a show of photographs by French artist Julie Ganzin.

The show, called Paysages Elementaires, was 60 or so photographs of natural places. Many of these were set up in pairs - diptychs. The artist's statement is below in French, and she's basically saying that the work is about the four basic elements of Greek physics: air, water, fire and land, but with her particular focus.

To discover her focus is a job that requires discovering subtle differences between the two parts of the pairs of images. There is a lot of disturbed ground, a lot of gray winter scenes of Italy, that puts many elements at the same level of natural attention grabbing. Often the newly finished house is more beautiful than a field of winter weeds. We learn that some of the photos are of land reclaimed by humans from the Po River others of southern Italy or rural France. Sometimes you can see a sea in the distance, sometimes remnants of a brush fire, sometimes a field of wind generators.

My companion thought the photographs were unnecessarily gray like the weather we have been getting used to in Paris in January. I think the lack of color saturation enhancement that she could have done with Photoshop made the works, each photo, more even, and demanding of intense effort to look at what was different in each one. The photos are not about the beauty of nature but the sameness of human interaction. Whether you cut a road to set a windmill or a new house the road becomes brown dirt. And without a lot of human care, grass and greenery can look like trash. And with very little effort trash can fill up a place and really make it look like a garbage dump. We have a saying in Colorado "Tread Lightly" and it always sounds prissy, but correct -- an easy solution where nature is already beautiful - already Photoshopped by a lot of sunshine and clear skies. But human society may need to actually encourage more treading - careful treading and with a concern for aesthetics as well as efficiency. Putting art-minded people to work, thinking creatively to make looking a more pleasant or interesting job.



link to website:
http://www.ma-bernardanthonioz.com/fr/index.php


PAYSAGES ELEMENTAIRES
Julie Ganzin

Les Paysages élémentaires ne sont pas « miniaturisés », ni « stylisés », mais focalisés sur la représentation d'un des quatre éléments (la terre, l'eau, l'air et le feu). Ces paysages peuvent décrire un élément, tout autant que l'élément désigné sera le vecteur de notre perception du paysage, en ce lieu donné. Pour nourrir le jeu avec les mots, on peut dire que ce sont des paysages « réduits » à une perception élémentaire.

L'élément mis en exergue est lié à une activité humaine, nous y renvoie ou permet d'en détecter la trace (l'eau et les pompes à eau de la plaine du Pô, le feu et les départs de feu en bord de route en Campanie ou en Sicile, la terre travaillée des cultures intensives et des pépinières industrielles, les champs d'éoliennes, etc.). Les règles du jeu sont communes aux différentes zones géographiques parcourues. Et si ces règles de conduite permettent d'offrir une « lecture » du paysage dans l'entrelacement de ses différentes composantes, c'est aussi en se jouant de la dimension purement illustrative, voire académique, attachée à cette thématique.

Les associations en diptyque mettent en tension les images dans une feinte confrontation entre les éléments. Le projet découvre le paysage que nous sommes en mesure d'appréhender au quotidien dans l'intrication entre activités humaines et réalités naturelles. Les Paysages élémentaires donnent à voir localement ce que les acteurs du territoire « fabriquent ». Il se peut aussi qu'ils laissent parfois entrevoir le visage d'un paysage « politique » produit par des décisions et des mécanismes qui nous échappent.

La Maison d'art Bernard Anthonioz créée à Nogent-sur-Marne, par la Fondation nationale des arts graphiques et plastiques (FNAGP) présente des manifestations consacrées à la jeune photographie, à la vidéo, au graphisme,  et à l'art contemporain. Elle accueillera à terme une artothèque destinée à faire partager les œuvres appartenant au patrimoine de la Fondation.


1976-2006 : une fondation trentenaire

La Fondation nationale des arts graphiques et plastiques a été créée en 1976, à l'initiative de Bernard Anthonioz, par la réunion de deux legs faits à l'Etat : celui de la baronne Salomon de Rothschild et celui de Jeanne et Madeleine Smith.
La Fondation, reconnue d'utilité publique, a pour missions de soutenir les artistes graphistes et plasticiens, et d'encourager la création et la recherche dans ce secteur.
Depuis son origine, elle a plus particulièrement développé des actions à caractère social en faveur du logement ou de l'hébergement d'artistes en activité ou retraités.

Elle gère à ce titre, à Nogent-sur-Marne, une maison de retraite destinée en priorité à des artistes âgés ou dépendants, la Maison nationale des artistes. Par ailleurs, elle possède à Paris et à Nogent-sur-Marne trois ensembles d'ateliers où travaillent près d'une centaine d'artistes de toutes disciplines et de toutes nationalités.

Tout en poursuivant son travail dans le domaine social, l'ambition de la Fondation est de favoriser la visibilité de la création plastique contemporaine et d'apporter, sous diverses formes, son soutien à des actions susceptibles d'œuvrer dans ce sens : diffusion d'expositions en France et à l'étranger, aide à la participation d'artistes ou de galeries françaises à des manifestations à l'étranger, bourses, aides à l'édition d'ouvrages ou d'outils d'accompagnement.
L'ouverture de la Maison d'art Bernard Anthonioz constitue le premier jalon de cette nouvelle politique.


La Maison d'art Bernard Anthonioz : une nouvelle maison
pour la jeune création

La vocation de ce nouvel espace financé par la Fondation nationale des arts graphiques et plastiques, est de mettre en valeur la création contemporaine dans le domaine de la photographie, et du graphisme, disciplines moins exposées. La MABA souhaite donner la parole à de jeunes créateurs dans le cadre de collaborations avec d'autres institutions culturelles comme le Jeu de paume, le MAC/VAL, ou le Festival international de l'Affiche et des Arts Graphiques de Chaumont

 
L'artothèque

La Maison d'Art Bernard Anthonioz accueillera à terme une artothèque constituée des œuvres de la collection de la Fondation nationale des arts graphiques et plastiques. L'ensemble couvre une période allant de la fin du 18ème siècle à nos jours. Cette collection rassemble des peintures mais aussi des pastels, des gravures, des dessins, des lithographies, des photos, des sculptures et même une collection d'œuvres d'art premier et plus particulièrement africain.

 
Particuliers, entreprises, collectivités et institutions auront la possibilité d'emprunter régulièrement des œuvres d'art moyennant un abonnement. Le catalogue des œuvres sera bientôt disponible sur le site internet de la Maison d'Art Bernard Anthonioz.


Si vous souhaitez être informé par e-mail dès l'ouverture de cette artothèque, nous vous invitons à vous inscrire à la lettre d'information de ce site qui vous est proposée en page d'accueil.
 

Musee de Montparnasse
January 23, 2009

PARIS - We have seen goofy photographs of artists that hung out in Montparnasse in the early part of the 20th Century. Pictures of Picasso in a toga, surrounded by others going to a costume ball. One very famous photo places the group on a little cobblestone street that is obviously a dead end (because there is a building at the end of it: an impasse, as the French say). Very little commercial traffic goes on this street and it is covered by an arch of ivy. Ivy covers the buildings on both sides of the little street. And all the artists in the picture are clowning and laughing. This is today where the Musee de Montparnasse is located today. It was formerly the studio of Russian artist Marie Vassiliev.

The building at the end of the impasse is called the Espace Krajcberg. Inside this little place is the work of Franz Krajcberg, which relates nature to art. The museum likes to use this space to relate the two areas because that was the purpose of Krajcberg life's work. We got to see about 10 sculptures of this artist that were made in Brazil from found wood - remnants of a forest fire and other natural events - that he has then refined into sculptural forms that he could sell in a gallery.  These were done in the '70s so they were very progressive. Today, my friends and I are always wandering the woods and pointing out or picking up cool things like this. We tend to arrange and leave them there, and call it "Land Art," but none-the-less we are following in this tradition. Up close, the work was nice - better than the photos.

In the main museum space, were photographs by several International artists about living in a foreign country. They were nicely done, and interspersed with a native inhabitant that will not leave its home - the ivy. Many of these images were very thought provoking - the graves of Chinese in different countries. The tight quarters of students (Yes, even smaller than our tiny rented apartment in Montparnasse.) Below you can read more documentation about the exhibition, called Déplacement, which has the very nice ambition to be about calling attention to foreignness in a time when there is global mobility. And note that it is partially sponsored by the post office.  



Exhibition Info:

Déplacement

10 décembre 2008 - 25 janvier 2009

Les photographes
Yannick Aleksandrowicz, Neckel Scholtus, Hortense Soichet, Julien Spiewak, Jasmina Tomic, Lorraine Turci,
Julien Vasquez, GAO Xin Wei, GUO Yi, JIN Xiang Yi, LI Chun Guang, LI Su, LIU Yong, SONG Yang, XU Ke, ZHU Jiong

Direction artistique
Hortense Soichet et Zhu Jiong

Direction du projet
Christian Mayaud et SU Zhi Gang \ CHENG Qiang
La mission photographique Le Voyage, initiative de l'Université Paris 8 et de l'Académie du Film de Pékin (Chine), est invitée à présenter le deuxième et dernier volet de ce projet dans le cadre de la programmation "Déplacer/Recréer".  L'exposition Déplacement propose un état des lieux de la société à l'ère de la mobilité généralisée.
La mission photographique Le Voyage est réalisée en partenariat avec La Poste.

Horaires d'ouverture :
Tous les jours sauf lundi, de 12h30 à 19h

Tarifs d'entrée :
Plein : 5 euros / Réduit : 4 euros

-------------------------
 
Le Musée du Montparnasse et
l'Espace Krajcberg sont heureux
de vous présenter le programme
des rencontres
 
DÉPLACER / RECRÉER 
  De l'art et de l'écologie

MERCREDI 10 DECEMBRE 2008
Rencontre à l'Espace Krajcberg de 19h30 à 20h30
 
De l'importance du Manifeste du Naturalisme Intégral aujourd'hui
- En présence de Claude Mollard, expert culturel et co-auteur de La traversée du feu avec Pascale Lismonde, biographie de Frans Krajcberg.
- Baptiste Lanaspeze, philosophe et éditeur, mène un projet éditorial en ligne Wildproject.

VENDREDI 16 JANVIER 2009
Rencontre au Musée du Montparnasse 15h à 18h

Regards sur la Chine : déambulation sur les territoires en mutation
- Hortense Soichet est co-directrice artistique de la mission Le Voyage. Elle est photographe et doctorante en esthétique.
- Zhu Jiong est co-directrice artistique de la mission Le Voyage. Elle est photographe et enseignante
- Zeng Nian, photographe, il fait des reportages entre la France et la Chine.

JEUDI 22 JANVIER 2009
Rencontre à l'Espace Krajcberg de 19h à 20h30

Une charte pour une production culturelle responsable
- Sylvie Bétard, Co-fondatrice et directrice de développement de La Réserve des arts
- Jeanne Granger, Co-fondatrice et directrice de projets de La Réserve des arts

Réservation souhaitée : contactez Sonia Legros au 01 42 22 90 16

 

PARIS  -  The lights came on in Paris as the sun set, some on one wall of the Hotel de Ville were arranged like a constellation and blinked. It was lightly raining, now dark, and we sank into the courtyard to enter the museum of modern art in the Pompidou Center. In small dark square rooms off the giant entry hall of the center, the Beaubourg as the building is called, we left coats, went to the toilet, and bought tickets. Back in the center of the grand hall, we were directed to ride an escalator, walk through a glass-walled room, and back outside into what seemed like the cold, black night. Instead it is the glassed-in colonnade of escalators that take us to the 6th floor to see a show about Futurism.
   
I know that Futurism was declared in a manifesto around 1910 by Filippo Marinetti, a French Italian poet. He tried to include the Cubists like Picasso, Braque and Gris but they had their own manifesto and outlines for working. Intellectually, the curators of this show are telling us that these guys really were thinking along the same lines.

Marinetti wrote poems, got press in Figaro for the Futurists and drew cartoons. Umberto Boccioni stands out as the master artist - sculptor and painter - and the rooms with his work are extraordinary, beauty of the machine age, bright colors and dark shadows expressing hope for man-made inventions that will make the world a more wondrous place.

In these early years of the teens, Marcel Duchamp was painting. He mades "Nude Descending a Staircase." Cubists are trying to show all faces of something at one time, and Duchamp paints cubism and time. His Spanish-French friend Francis Picabia is painting on plywood - illustrating -- mechanical drawings.

The English speakers are making paintings of the Brooklyn Bridge (Joseph Stella) and wild, abstract still lifes from the English anti-Academy group of Vorticists, lead by Wyndham Lewis. David Bomberg occasionally removes even abstract reference to real things. Then the French-Russian couple, Sonia and Robert Delauney, remove all realistic subject matter to the point of making fabic desgn-like paintings of circles (Robert) and shape (Sonia). Of course, fabric did not look like this in the teens. This has come later, after it was done in art.

When the World War starts in 1914, it gets nasty. The most promising new British sculptor Brzeska dies in combat. The English get commissioned by their government to paint war and portraits. The Russian who have been doing Futurism and calling it Constructivism over throw the Czar in 1917 and democratize. They try to keep the hope of man-made machines and thinking alive. It is eventually autocratized into the Social Propaganda art we now think of as 20 Century Russian art. Then, a small group of artists and poets declare DADA. (Andre Breton, Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck, Emmy Hennings, Hugo Ball -- and they invite Marinetti in).

Dada was an anti-art movement. The war was an anti-art movement, too. And after these two things, all the bright and shiny things from Futurism turned into surrealism. Intellectualism was dead, and dreamy emotive stuff was in. A short life for Futurism.

The show here at the Pompidou Center took you through all these countries and what they attempted in do. I was surprised at how little I'd learned about the Futurists in art school. Like it was an under appreciated movement between Matisse and the Fauvists and the equally emotional Surrealists.

Were does it fit in today. A Detroit artist Jeff Mills added his answer with a video installation that was in Room 3. It included a montage of stuff from the teens: ballet was big, film was just getting started. It was in a nice dark room where you could sit on the floor and relax. Be entertained. There was a lot of moving images to help us see into this futuristic thing. The futurists were brighter than the cubist, that's true. Looked like they were happier, and each artist is more discernible from others, even in his own country.

Just a few floors below it is the city's collection - displayed on two huge floors - of artwork since Matisse (1900). The Futurist show was intimate and huge at the same time, and they had open spaces where you could sit on chairs and relax or read the catalog.

January 20, 2009
Almost 100 years after Dada, we visited the cafe in Zurich where Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Richard Huelsenbeck and Tristan Tzara started doing crazy things in protest to established art and the society that approved it and the First World War that was going on all around neutral Switzerland.

The Cabaret Voltaire has been restored in a very funky way. Upstairs is a nice expansive coffee shop with a back room set up for conversations on a same-level stage. Posters and Dada memorability are all over the walls.

Downstairs is the series display of contemporary art -- a series of Fluxus films at this time -- and little projects in a front room that has the distinct look of a museum gift shop cross with trendy new-age shops that surround this historic space in the old town, the pedestrian shopping area -- of Left Bank Zurich.

It's eerily hard to get. Just like Dada. Just like much of contemporary art.

Sunday, January 18, 2009,

We go out while pink light was still on the Galibier to take pictures. The weather and clarity of the day would not get better. It started to snow.


We went in for coffee and baguettes with good French butter, and back out to hear the results of the jury. When the Popular Choice award was announced it was: the bear on a sheep, followed by the cardboard boxes, and topped by a dragon. Steuart had gotten Second Place - People's Choice. He was thrilled that people liked his sculpture. Then they announced the Artists Choice and Steuart again won. He was shocked, and incredibly honored. Artist's Choice is always the most coveted award. He and most of the artists don't really like the idea that these events are competition and shrug off awards, but being appreciated by  other artists is really meaningful. He probably only had one more vote than the next artist, he said.There were so many that were pushing the idea of ice sculpture.

He thought he was finished with getting awards, and then the decision of the jury was announced, and he given the top prize. He was speechless in both French and English.  The snow was blowing in hard from the Galibier by this point, and everyone cheerily posed for a group photo.

We took more shots of the sculpture and then were treated to a great last lunch at the Crete Rond, another restaurant in Les Verney. Seafood in pastry, followed by a chicken breast, the cheese course and a great raspberry cake, A new wine was on the table, and then photos were passed out by Bernard Grange, the master of photo in the town -- just an hour or so, after the last image was taken. What a guy. Thank you Bernard.
 

January 17, Saturday
By the morning of the third and final day, Steuart still had three boxes sitting on the base. Nothing melted, nothing more. Several of the tabs on each side of each box were frozen in place. They would be supports to attach the flaps that would suggest this was a stack of opened boxes -- something that was destined for the recycling bin. He called the sculpture "Promises" when he sent the drawing and artist statement with his application to the competition.

While I helped by holding the power supply for the iron, a spectator asked what Promises meant, and I said, "what was in the boxes." The material was transparent, and implied emptiness. Drips from attaching boxes on top of boxes ran down the faces of the lower ones; drips from smoothing the top edge and deliberate melting of the surface had left the ice with a texture nicely reminiscent of cardboard. The whole piece has a nice quality of not being very tangible. Yet very ordinary.

Les Cartons people said when they figured out what Steaurt was making. He likes the idea of rising refuse to a pedestal. 
 
By the time the sun rose over the Galibier, and space blankets were brought out to protect the ice from the sun, most everyone's sculpture was at a place where its form could be recognized. A French guy, Pascal from Provence, had gotten his bear recognizable and the sheep underneath it, too. It made me smile. It was funny. There was a pile of chain links, a frog, a bonsai tree, a very modern elevator, a pyramid mix of snow and ice, a water bottle and graceful flame-shaped abstractions. One piece was carved on the ground by a French woman from Paris who hollowed out two halves of a bottle leaving a level of fluid appearing in the bottom of it, with a depression that looked a little like a pear was also in the bottle. On this morning there were four guys from the French army helping her lift the human sized bottle to the vertical, and then raise it into the air to set it on the meter high base. They were quite amused by their work.

The army trains in Valloire so they are ready for mountain operations. Each young Frenchman must still do obligatory national service, and for these men it involved helping artists. So French.

Lunch back at the Relais de Galibier was a great couscous salad followed by a Savoy-style Beef Burgundy. The wine was always the same, a red wine from Languedoc - across to the southwest of France. And it appeared on the table lunch and dinner, and was gone before coffee.

Lunch lasted until 3 or so, and Steuart slowly made his way back out to the pile of boxes. The freezing together of the parts was going very slowly, and he'd started to carve a checkered pattern into the snow base but was fearful that the snow that have been exposed to a lot of heat in the days before we arrived was going to collapse and send the entire stack to the ground.

When I arrived just before sunset, box four and five were sitting on his work table, and the flaps were having a hard time sticking. He added a solid block - an ice cube (four or six times the size of a drinks cube as the very topmost box. t would have to wait for a long while to see its place on top. For the next two hours Steuart put flaps on the bottom three boxes.

At seven thirty the pile was complete. Thirty minutes before the end of the competition. Steaurt are you finished? the chief of entertainment for the town of Valloire asked from the microphone. The jury would take its first look at the piece at 8 pm., followed by the spectacle of lights would begin, and the promenade of spectators would come by.  The army guys were carrying away all the unused ice, the removed snow, the tools, the tables, and making the ground nice around each sculpture. I want to keep the little blocks around the bases, Steuart tried to explain to them. It worked. He was done with 15 minutes to spare. Took a couple pictures under the spotlights. He had achieved a very voluminous piece from just one meter by one meter by ½ meter of ice. The finished piece stood two meters high on a meter high base. 12 feet.

The jury took in all 15 of the sculptures together, talking making notes, and then returning to the Relais for dinner and discussion, and the artists to their final dinner of the competition.

More Languedoc wine accompanied a duck breast in a lovely light sauce and baked potatoes slices. Here I am in France, walking everywhere, eating and drinking really well, and my pants are feeling loose. This is a great life.