So, Who’s the Artist?

In the art-as-gimmick department, this item is perhaps more interesting for the questions it elicits than how the so-called artwork is actually generated.

Tarinan von Anhalt practices what is called “jet art,” flinging paint into the vortex of hurricane-force winds generated by the engines of airplanes, splattering onto blank canvasses that are eventually worth thousands a pop. An idea invented by her late husband, Jurgen, on a tarmac in Dallas in the 1980s, his wife later expanded the medium to include fashion accessories. Earlier this month, she showed off the technique as part of an event in Florida, above, marking the 50th anniversary of the Learjet. (Later this year, she’ll be interacting with the famous Boeing 707 that belongs to actor John Travolta.)

An article in the Palm Beach Post posed the conundrum of just who the creator really is here: “If art is the expression of the artist,” wrote Carlos Frias,” then whose emotion is landing in [the] purple and blue and yellow and red splashes and speckles?”

Good question. Who gets the credit for these colorful (and not especially terrible) examples of faux expressionism? Is it the facilitator (von Anhalt)? The machine (i.e., the jet)? Or even the pilot (who sets things into motion in the first place)?

All of the above, combined in the combustion of a moment. Art or not? That’s debatable.

(Photo: Thomas Cordy / The Palm Beach Post)

The Art in Aisle One

“Contemplating Prospect”

Finding art in the mundane is a theme I always return to, and a series of paintings with the evocative title, Cathedrals of Desire,” epitomizes how a unique sensibility can elevate the everyday to a transcendent level.

The “cathedrals” in question are those high altars of American consumerism, the Targets and Walmarts and the like that litter shopping malls across the retail terrain like giant repositories of instant gratification. Artist Michelle Muldrow was inspired by a treatise by the philosopher Edmund Burke that equated the sublime with aspects of terror: “My paintings of big box stores are intended to elicit fear and awe at the vast American consumer landscape,” she writes in a statement about the series. “These environments represent not only the actual structural space and overwhelming chaos of goods, but also the psychology and vernacular of American consumerism.”

I was taken with how Muldrow uses splashes of color and light to capture the underlying clamor inside these mammoth structures that “reveal the most naked of American consumer desires,” according to the artist. The unfocused images ironically convey an immediate familiarity, a testament to how deeply ingrained these contours are in the corners of our minds. If the paintings are intended to create uneasiness, they also result in a curious mix of both dread and recognition.

Something to think about the next time I step into that Home Depot…

Casting Shadows

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two pieces with surreal overtones from the exhibit Shadow and Light, a retrospective of the work of photographer Bill Brandt (1904-1983), at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Considered one of the great masters of black-and-white photography (the “pre-eminent British photographer of the 20th Century,” according to the New York Times), his dark and moody images of wartime England were recently (and astutely) described by the writer Ariella Budick as “lyrical grime.” In later years, Brandt liked to focus on the eyes of artistic notables, such as painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet, above left, in a photograph from 1960. (Seaford, East Sussex Coast, from 1957, is shown right). The exhibition traces the evolution of a multifaceted photographic legacy, and is on view through August 12.

Silver Linings

Andy Warhol’s pillow-like Silver Clouds (shown in motion here), float dreamily amidst the Clouds: Fleeting Worlds exhibit that opened last week at the Leopold Museum in Vienna. The whimsical helium-filled balloons, adapted from a Warhol installation first created in 1966, are accompanied by an array of cloud renditions throughout history, by artists ranging from William Turner to Rene Magritte, whose surrealistic Summer (1932) is seen below. The exhibition runs through July in the Austrian capital.

Out of the Box

Intelligent advertising may seem like an oxymoron these days, but a remarkable print campaign from a long time ago still impresses with its creative uniqueness as well as longevity.

With the unlikely sponsor of Container Corporation of America, which was clearly thinking outside the box (couldn’t resist), the series, called “Great Ideas of Western Man” ran over a period of almost three decades (1950-1975) and matched artwork from a number of illustrators and designers with thought-provoking quotes from an array of philosophers, writers, scientists, and other cultural icons. The goal, apart from the simply inspirational aspects, was to introduce the American public to the work of artists — such as Milton Glaser, top, and Saul Bass, below — with which it would otherwise have remained unfamiliar.

Ahead of their time in not underestimating the discernment of consumers, the ads are considered a watershed moment in marketing history, as they bore no corporate message beyond the inconspicuously placed CCA name in small type at the bottom.

It was a rare and enlightening blend of commerce and art that would be refreshing to see more of now…

Fluid Blueprints

Gehry’s “Fish Lamps” at LA’s Gagosian Gallery

It’s fitting that a legend renowned for his brand of “liquid architecture” would turn out to have a not-so-secret passion for…fish. Fish Lamps, left, on view at the Gagosian Galleries in Los Angeles and Paris, are the latest aquatically inspired creations from famed architect Frank Gehry, who’s been called the “most important architect of our time,” as designer of such landmarks as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain and the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. The lamps, made out of plastic laminate, are ironic for the warmth they impart, not a quality usually associated with the subject matter.

Detail of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

What’s fascinating is how Gehry has fused this penchant for the creatures in one way or another in works throughout his career. From the fluid undulations of the Guggenheim Bilbao, to Standing Glass Fish, which graces the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, it’s a motif that has long permeated his projects.

“Standing Glass Fish” at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden

The affinity was born of a childhood time when his grandmother would leave the live carp she bought at market in a bathtub, where they would swim until ready for preparation as gefilte fish for the family meals. An indelible impression was born, interesting not only from a creative standpoint, but psychologically as well. Gehry says that fish became “like a symbol for a certain kind of perfection that I couldn’t achieve with my buildings.” It highlights how the artistic mind works in its own unfathomable ways, understandable only within the context of the sensibility and experiences of the creator.

Fish Lamps (created last year) are a return to what Gehry calls that “perfect form,” a continuation of an idea begun as a commission for the Formica Corp. in 1984. Their shimmering iridescence shines new light on an artist’s lifelong and lovely obsession with the shapes and patterns of the denizens of the deep.

Lightness of Being

Seemingly floating in mid-air, this giant sculpture, called Planet, by British artist Marc Quinn, debuted as a permanent installation at Gardens by the Bay in Singapore on January 18. The seven-ton, ten-meter-long painted bronze, which looks deceptively weightless (and depicts the artist’s infant son at the time) was created in 2008 and was previously exhibited at England’s Chatsworth House, followed by an appearance at Monaco’s Oceanographic Museum last year.

Quinn (whose controversial marble sculpture Alison Lapper Pregnant sat atop one of the plinths in London’s Trafalgar Square from 2005-2007), says of Planet: “ It’s a piece of art, it’s not a manifesto, and it shouldn’t have a particular answer, it should have a lot of different interpretations, because art that lasts is art that is ambiguous. It’s poetry not prose.”

But is it really nothing more than theme-park-like amusement? Or simply kitsch? (“Art that flaunts its content in an immediately readable way risks vacuity,” wrote Jonathan Jones of the piece in The Guardian.)  Let’s say the jury is out on this one…

(Photo: Stephen Morrison / EPA)

All You Need Is Luck

A story at the New York Times arts blog last week highlighted the eternal conundrum of just what it is that constitutes “art,” which finds a perfect example for discussion in a project called “Aqua Dice,” by an American artist who resides in France, Max Mulhern. As I write this, two huge “dice,” above, conceived by Mulhern and launched to sea on December 12, 2012 (date not coincidental), are headed to parts unknown, with bets being taken on where they will make their eventual landfall. On-board GPS systems send daily signals for those interested in tracking their progress.

One of several sketches for “Aqua Dice”

The seedlings were born of Mulhern’s love of all things sea-related, and a fascination for designing boats as sculptures. Two years ago, the idea was brought to life with start-up funding solicited on the Internet, and Mulhern’s concept – influenced by artistic works ranging from Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man to Milton’s Paradise Lost – was eventually constructed by a French shipbuilder, who specialized in fishing boats. The “dice” (both are about the size of standard shipping containers) took off from the Canary Islands, roughly on the same path as that of Christopher Columbus as he navigated his way towards the New World. Mulhern calls Columbus’ ships “big dice” – and the “Aqua Dice” themselves are seen by the artist as an “ode to chance and luck.”

“I’m placing them in nature’s hands…the waves and the winds and the currents are going to do the pushing, the rolling, the deciding,” says Mulhern. (For those who may see the creations as a maritime hazard, it should be noted that they are designed to collapse on impact, amongst other precautions — such as their color.)

So back to the “Is it really art?” discussion. “Ridiculous,” groused one commenter at the Times blog. “Irresponsible and ill-advised,” harrumphed a second. My own sentiments tend to echo yet another’s:

“Why not? Anything is possible.”

Turning the Page

“The page as an object, like all object-symbols, resonates with meanings that have no mass, no displacement of physical space, their dimensions measured by the degree of reflection they inspire. Our living of the last two millennia is a progression coerced by the turning of pages — they are finger ripples in our clay past. On the surfaces of pages, as on the walls of caves, humans have been fulfilling an imperative crafted by their long-journeyed evolution — they navigate the mind’s stubborn synaptic pathways, forge new passages, shape, sculpt, and conjure ephemeral wisps, map their invisible neuralscapes, and perform the alchemy of a weightless thought, an idea expressed.”  — Stephen Nowlin

[Stephen Nowlin is co-curator of the exhibit, Pages, an exploration of paper as a medium of creativity through the ages -- which runs until January 27 at the Williamson Gallery at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.]

(Photograph: Cara Barer)

Dreaming in Dalí

A step inside the surrealistic face-like installation designed by Salvador Dalí (known as the “Rita Mae West Room”), at a preview of the largest retrospective of the eccentric Spanish artist’s work in decades, at Paris’ Pompidou Centre. The creation, from 1934, showcases Dalí’s characteristically audacious imagination, with elements of Pop art that were way ahead of their time. The exhibition — which includes many of Dalí’s signature masterpieces, including The Persistence of Memory (melted clocks and all) — is on view in the French capital until March 25; it moves to Madrid’s Reina Sofia Museum from April through September of next year.

(Photo: Benoit Tessier / Reuters)

Illustration/left: © en-masse

The Emperor of Ice Cream

The title comes from a famous American poem, by a writer who epitomized paradox in avocation and appearance, as exemplified in the portrait shown left, from 1952. “Poet” would not be the first description that comes to mind in this photograph of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), who looks more like a buttoned-up CEO than any cliché image of a creative type. Indeed, Stevens’ day job was as an insurance executive, but he became one of the great voices of modernist poetry. (The image is among those featured in Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets, on view through April at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.)

As I read through that great compilation of his work, The Palm at the End of the Mind (including the aforementioned “Emperor,” with the indelible line: “bid him whip in kitchen cups concupiscent curds”), there were two poems that especially brought me back to the percipience of Stevens, both offering intriguing connections to the realm of art.

In an analysis of the astonishing “Sunday Morning” the writer Robert Buttel saw Stevens as establishing himself as a kindred spirit to Henri Matisse, in that both artists “transform a pagan joy of life into highly civilized terms.” Based on a languid woman’s spiritual reveries on a Christian sabbath, and replete with religious allusions, its opening lines are among the most descriptively scene-setting in modern American poetry:

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

And while the kindred-spirit aspects that Buttel alluded to in the connection to Matisse were no doubt philosophical, it’s not a stretch to see a visual bridge between the opening tableau of “Sunday Morning” and a piece like Interior with an Etruscan Vase (left) by the French painter, which followed many years later.

If the Matisse comparisons are subtle and under the surface, “The Man With the Blue Guitar” is an overt homage to another artistic soulmate, Pablo Picasso, whose The Old Guitarist was painted in 1903. Again, a poem that features a striking Stevens opening:

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’

The man replied, ‘Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.’

David Hockney played that guitar forward when he reexamined the Picasso work after being fascinated by the Stevens poem, in a series of drawings from 1977 (one of which is seen right), entitled The Blue Guitar: Etchings by David Hockney Who Was Inspired by Wallace Stevens Who Was Inspired by Pablo Picasso.

Talk about full circle. Which, incidentally, is so much of what art is all about.

Tangled Up In Blue

Step onto the campus at the University of Florida these days and it’s likely you’ll soon be singing the “blues” — but not of the musical kind. “Blue Trees,” a public-art project conceived by Konstantin Dimopoulos, has awareness of the critical importance of trees in the environmental landscape as its primary goal, bringing attention to the troubling issue of deforestation that is taking place on a global scale.

The Australia-based artist, who describes the undertaking as a “social art action,” has previously dressed up arboreal settings (the trees are colored with harmless pigments that degrade naturally) in such cities as Vancouver and Seattle. “In order for me to get people to see the forest, I had to get the trees visible,” he says. “Trees are largely invisible in our daily lives, and it’s not until it’s too late that we realize how important they are to us both aesthetically and environmentally.” As for the offbeat choice of color, Dimopoulos explains that, “The fact that blue is a color that is not naturally identified with trees suggests to the viewer that something unusual, something out of the ordinary has happened. It becomes a magical transformation.”

Depending on the weather, the “transformation” in Gainesville is expected to last through this May, while the woody perennials of Houston are scheduled for their own splash of color later in 2013.

No Place Like Home

As if dropped from the sky in the most casual fashion, this installation that recently appeared at the UC/San Diego School of Engineering, by South Korean artist Do Ho Suh, is more than just a conversation piece. Like most of his projects, Fallen Star, as it’s called, addresses notions of physical space and impermanence, eliciting questions regarding boundaries, identity, and displacement. (Modeled after a cottage in Providence, Rhode Island near where Suh once lived, the one-bedroom house is pitched at a 17-degree angle, complete with a front yard and well-furnished interior. Visitors get a real taste of what it’s like to live on the edge after a walk-through.) What I find most interesting is its contrast between bucolic and disturbing, and larger still, how it makes you wonder about so many symbols of comfort that are based on fleeting foundations, along with their fragile underpinnings. (And on a more pop-culturish level, it brings to mind a certain topsy-turvy house from The Wizard of Oz…)

(Photo: Philipp Scholz Rittermann)

The Kubrick Eye

An exhibition setting from “The Shining” (1980)

It’s a testament to the breadth of the genius of film director Stanley Kubrick that even the most comprehensive exhibition ever devoted to his work barely touches on one of his most extraordinary ancillary talents: the uncannily perfect choices in music he so exquisitely utilized for his classics, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to his final opus, Eyes Wide Shut. Just this aspect alone would probably require an exhibit in itself.

Diane Arbus, “Identical Twins” (1967)

So we’ll leave his brilliant musician’s ear for another occasion and take in some of the visual-arts influences that permeated his films and are among the themes explored in Stanley Kubrick, which has opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for a six-month residency, after appearing at a number of European cities before landing in the U.S. this month.

An installation comprised of over 600 objects and materials including props, cameras, scripts, and sketches, it’s the largest compilation to date of the director’s contributions to modern cinema. (Kubrick died at the age of 70, in 1999.)

It’s no surprise that the relationship between the filmmaker and art would permeate any examination of the Kubrick legacy. A striking example is revealed in the ghostlike twins who made a memorable appearance in The Shining; it’s safe to surmise that the seminal photograph, Identical Twins by Diane Arbus, made an impression on the director, who was a photojournalist early in his career.

Likewise, another scene from the same film, which has Jack Nicholson slumped over next to his typewriter before he begins a nightmarish descent into psychosis, harbors elements of the creepy 1799 etching by Francisco Goya, with the unforgettable title, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. (Also featured in the collection are the geometric planks by artist John McCracken that are believed to have influenced Kubrick in the creation of the mysterious black monoliths that figured so prominently in 2001.)

Film as canvas: “Barry Lyndon” (1975)

But the artistic apotheosis is probably the long-neglected masterpiece Barry Lyndon, now considered one of Kubrick’s greatest achievements, where the 18th Century was brought gorgeously to life in settings — inspired by such painters as Gainsborough and Watteau — that are stunning in their period beauty. Kubrick scoured numerous art books devoted to the epoch in order to accomplish the effect.

I can’t think of another director with quite as many levels of sensibility as Kubrick. I ran across a quote from fellow director Martin Scorsese where he said, “Watching a Kubrick film is like gazing up at a mountaintop. You look up and wonder, how could anyone have climbed that high?” And how lucky for film lovers, who’ve been privileged enough to share the incomparable views.

A young Kubrick with camera, in the ’40s

More Than Words

Paul Klee, “Alphabet II” (1938)

As both medium and subject matter, the newspaper has had a long history of serving as inspiration for some of our greatest artists, and with print journalism seemingly going the way of the dinosaur as we continue our inexorable transition to digitally-based means of communication (bye-bye Newsweek, as seen last week), an exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. is an intriguing retrospective look at a richly creative relationship that has spanned more than 100 years.

Shock of the News (the name is a bow to the late and famed art critic Robert Hughes, whose TV series and book Shock of the New educated millions as to modern art), brings together pieces ranging from Picasso to Rauschenberg (Warhol had his own similarly themed show, Headlines, at NGA last year) as examples of the influence that the newspaper has exerted on some of the most imaginative minds of their time.

It’s not a “shock” that Picasso would be among the first to connect the cross-disciplinary dots, with a snippet from France’s Le Journal appearing at the corner of his 1912 Guitar, Sheet Music, Glass (above left), followed by such noteworthies as Max Weber (The Sunday Tribune from 1913, left), and Paul Klee, whose 1938 Alphabet II is seen at top. Ellsworth Kelly contributed his own playful self-portrait in cut-out newsprint. One of my favorites is the piece shown at bottom, Untitled (Diver) by Paul Thek, a 1970 watercolor-like acrylic drawn on newspaper, where the waves in the water were created by creases borne down by the weight of the paint.

Though the curator of the current exhibition maintains that 21st-Century artists have been incorporating newspapers in their work as much as their predecessors did, it’s safe to assume that this venerable interplay has pretty much seen its zenith. Which makes Shocking News (running through January 27) an even timelier tribute to all the news that was fit…to paint.

Filling the Void

Beyond an emotional or visceral reaction, and the question of what it is or isn’t, art for me tends to inevitably carry the qualifier of whether it makes one think. That being the case, several of the seriously meta aspects of the work of Richard Haley, featured in the exhibit, Holes, Voids, and Other Descriptive Terms for Blankness, currently at LA’s Pacific Design Center, caught my eye (or mind, I should say), with one piece in particular, “Hole Relocation,” the cornerstone of the exhibition, as an example.

It began with Haley fashioning a plaster mold of a hole in the ground in his hometown of metro Detroit. He then had it transported to Los Angeles, where he used it to create an identical hole, which was then packed with dirt from the other side of the country. The portable hole, positioned on a handcart, is displayed with adjunct pieces, left. In the artist’s own words, from an interview at the podcast, Bad at Sports:

“Essentially, I’m shipping nothing from one contested place to some other strange place — two strange cities… I don’t exactly know what a hole is, and I’m trying to figure that out. It’s a puncture in the land, but it’s not the land itself — it’s not the site. It’s surrounded by the site, but it can’t exist without the site. A hole is almost more like a photograph in that a photograph is not the thing, but it cannot exist without the thing the photograph is of. The hole is the space, it’s not the earth.”

Like I said, seriously meta, and, yes, it made me think. How do you replicate nothingness? What is a hole, if nothing? Who defines the subjective aspects of a void? (I’ll stop there for now.)

Haley is interesting because he touches on elements of minimalism, conceptualism, and land and performance art in one way or another. (Another project had him in a race against the sun as he attempted to sink a rowboat in synchronization with a sunset, right. Yet another was called an “Attempt to Disappear Where the Blue of the Sky Touches the Blue of the Sea.”)

In his review of the current exhibition, LA Times critic Christopher Knight wrote that “getting an object to signify nothingness isn’t easy.” Nor is getting someone to think…

Let It Rain

Not that England needs much more of it, but the “Rain Room” (above), a digitally engineered installation that just debuted at London’s Barbican Centre, is well worth the drench. Even though visitors don’t get in the least bit wet.

An opportunity to get to feel much like a certain biblical character did when he parted the waters, “Rain Room” is a 100-square-meter space of cascading showers (falling at 1,000 liters per minute), where sensors identify visitors as they navigate inside the room, setting off magnetic signals that allow them to remain high and dry as they wander through the deluge. Stepping into the darkened corridor that anchors the installation, “the rain closes around you, enveloping each silhouetted figure in a perfect cylindrical void,” wrote the The Guardian earlier this week. “It is a startlingly surreal experience.”

Interest in the exhibition, which runs through March 3, has been noteworthy, with extended “queue” times being reported after its launch on October 4.

“Audience” (2008)

Conceived by a group called Random International, founded in 2005 by a trio of Royal College of Design graduates, it’s the latest venture by a collaborative that unites groundbreaking interactive technologies with artistic purpose in creative settings, while employing cognitive research that analyzes why people behave as they do under unexpected circumstances. They came to attention with a 2008 project called “Audience,” which consisted of a series of digitized mirrors that tracked individual visitors after detecting their presence, subsequently following their every move like a bunch of curious eyes — blurring the lines between viewer and participant.

With “Rain Room,” one of the artist/founders of Random, Hannes Koch, said he hoped the experience would give people a sense of “playful empowerment.” To be a master of the natural universe, if even for a few minutes.

(Photo / top: Christopher Pledger)

Into the Sky

I came across this photograph, taken of the Eibsee Lake in Bavaria, Germany on September 24, 2012, and found it so richly dimensional in its composition and evocative on several levels that I felt compelled to post it. What look like clouds (and they are, in a reverse trompe l’oeil kind of fashion) are actually reflections of clouds in the water, where a platform looks ready for someone to dive (or descend) into the “sky.” The image seems to create some subliminal sort of expectation without meaning to; it’s a juxtaposition that’s moodily dreamlike and lingers in the memory. An incidental piece of art that just happened to cross the wires on a run-of-the-mill news day…

(Photo: Karl-Josef Hildenbrand / AFP / Getty Images)