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…

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.

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)

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…

Eyes of a Master

I was riveted by this rarely seen Rembrandt painting, Portrait of the Artist (c.1663-1665), which was on special loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art from the Kenwood House in London through the end of last week. It harbors an expression as enigmatic and difficult to characterize as that of the Mona Lisa smile: weary yet intense, elusive and omniscient. And what of the circles that seem to frame the image in a cryptic geometric pattern? More mystery from the grand master of the Dutch Golden Age…or as The New Yorker put it: “We see what he sees and, by the sorcery of paint, as he sees — with a consciousness both outward and inward, alive in a moment forever.”

Puzzle Me This

A man strides atop a giant jigsaw of a self-portrait of artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), spread out in an area measuring over 3,000 square feet, in Nuremberg, Germany, 5/3/12. (For the record, the full title of the original painting is Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight Years Old Wearing a Coat with Fur Collar…whew!) The huge creation, composed of 1,023 (oversized) pieces, will be reassembled in Moscow’s Red Square next month, in recognition of the historic relationship between Russia and Germany. It’s not the first undertaking of its kind in the painter’s birthplace of Nuremberg: a similarly massive project that recreated Dürer’s Portrait of a Young Venetian Woman
was constructed in 2005.

(Photo: Timm Schamberger / AP)

An Artsy Fourth

Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) titled this painting July 4th (1957), marking the date of
its completion.

Sacred Geometry

An item I saw the other day about an anniversary related to one of my favorite artists, the Abstract Expressionist painter  Mark Rothko, is a reminder of how art and spirituality intersect in transcendent ways.

Forty years ago, two visionary art collectors foresaw a sanctuary of contemplation and thought, where several canvases commissioned from Rothko would grace – no better word for it – a very special place of nonsectarian meditation in Houston, Texas. Thus was born the Rothko Chapel.

I remember learning about it in college, and if it intrigued me then, I find the idea even more fascinating now. The search for spiritual growth is par for the course these days, but for this unusual and beautiful concept to have been conceived in such a distant past? (Or in the words of chapel director Emilee Whitehurst, “One of the interesting things about being at the chapel now is that it’s almost as if the rest of the world has caught up to where they were 40 years ago.”)