I believe when we engage intimately with works of art, who we are and how we view our world, changes. The creation of art and the viewing of it, allow for us to reconfigure our thoughts, and to make ideas and abstractions, concrete. All art germinates from a need to see, understand and communicate. Like alchemists, great artists distill and transform. For me then, art becomes an experience and a lens through which to view the world. The alchemy in art is that it allows us to see stars where once we saw only dust.
If one of the major pursuits of 20th- and 21st-century art has been to break down the barrier between artists and viewer, between viewer and created object, then Doug Wheeler's installation on view at David Zwirner until Feb. 25 is a gorgeous example of dissolving this borderline. Stepping across the threshold of Wheeler's Infinity Environment one is immediately swallowed up by luminous space. Inside the rounded room, the light changes slowly from brilliant white to a murky lavender darkness. And one wonders, where does the artist's space end and the viewer's begin?
Wheeler, along with James Turrell and Robert Irwin, was one of the founders of the West Coast Light and Space movement in the 1960s and '70s. I remember the '70s as being the era that completely broke down the physical boundary separating art from viewer. For a while, every gallery I visited had some large piece of art that invited tactile exploration. Art was theatrical, big, off the wall, out of the box, and leaping into the world. And the light and space artists pushed this fluidness between shape and container through their investigation of the act of perception. Often they depicted voids, open space, spaces that looked empty, but were in fact filled with atmospheric light. Art was no longer a thing, but an essence. And the west, with its vast vistas, its dramatic lighting, and its utopian ideas of a flexible society was the perfect environment for this type of art to flourish.
I happen to be a great proponent of art that encourages active participation. Where the permeable boundary is pierced and we are encouraged to climb inside the artwork. It's the same feeling I get from falling into a novel, the sense that I am walking around in someone else's imagination. In Wheeler's case it is purely the medium of light that we explore, touch, see, and sense. His simplified use of material heightens and distills the experience. Being inside his space is at once ethereal and dense. It's like being consumed by a bank of fog, or like confining infinity in a room.
When I was still a teenager I asked my father what the definition of intelligence was. My father is an art historian and an intellectual, a man who has spent his life in the rarefied realm of ideas and history. But he is also a man very much concerned with living the good life, with enjoying the material. It seemed to me, even back then, that if anyone could explain how a smart mind worked, it would be my father. And so he did. "It's the ability to connect abstract ideas and make them concrete," was his answer.
I've often thought that conceptual art was too concerned with abstract ideas. Concepts that take precedence, sometimes even replace, the aesthetic and material side of art. It's the rare artist whose work combines both the abstract and the concrete, the conceptual and the actual. Agnes Denes whose show,Sculptures of the Mind: 1968 to Now, is on view at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks & Projects until January 19, 2013, is the even more rare artist, one who maps the process from idea to concrete apparition and back again.
Denes is an internationally recognized artist and the first environmental artist to synthesize land and performance art. At various times, she has incorporated mathematics, linguistics, philosophy, technology, theology and ecology into her work. The form her art takes is as varied as the sources she draws upon:drawings, sculptures, earth/land projects, performance, writings and photographs, to name only a few. On view at the Tonkonow show is a photographic and textual documentation of one of her best-known projects, Wheatfield -- A Confrontation from 1982. In Wheatfied, Denes planted two-acres of wheat in downtown New York, a comment on human values and misplaced priorities even then, of a real estate mad city. But, Wheatfield was also a stunning visual statement, a rich golden field smack in the middle of the stark cityscape of Manhattan. After the wheat was harvested, the hay was fed to horses and some of the grain traveled globally in the International Art Show for the End of World Hunger organized by the Minnesota Museum of Art, 1987-90. The piece had an actual, living cycle. Concept became art, art became food, food cycled through the ecosystem and we were left with the documentation -- with art.
Wheatfield -- A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan -- Blue Sky, World Trade Center, 1982 Copyright Agnes Denes, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York
Much of Denes's work is concerned with cycles. Long ago she coined the term "eco-logic" to describe her art making process: thought and life, birth and death. An early example is Human Dust from 1969, a piece that documents a man's life through photographs, text, and actual cremated human bones. The bones are quite beautiful, calcified and organic shards displayed on a pedestal under a Plexiglas disc. The text is a poetic list of statistics. He was an artist. He died of a heart attack. He was born 50 years ago, which means he lived half a century or appr 2/3 of his expected lifespan. A demonstration of what we will all be reduced to, dust and facts, and yet the text all tells us that this everyman fathered 2 human beings, thus beginning a chain of 60 or more human beings added to the world population within 4 generations (counting up to 2000 A.D.). Like Wheatfield, the cycle of life and art continue.
Human Dust, 1969Copyright Agnes Denes, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York
Systems. Denes is fascinated by systems and patterns. She maps out her projects in detailed and delicate drawings, a form of visual mathematics. In Tree Mountain -- A Living Time Capsule, conceived in 1982 and planted in Finland in 1992-96, Denes created a manmade mountain and planted it with eleven thousand pine trees in an intricate mathematical pattern. It is eco-art in the truest sense of the word, a land reclamation project dedicated to humanity and to our natural environment. Tree Mountain has no lifespan; or rather its lifespan is unknown, projected into the future.
Tree Mountain -- A Living Time Capsule -- 11,000 Trees, 11,000 People, 400 YearsCopyright Agnes Denes, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York
Denes's art moves from one state to another, from the micro to the macro, from immediate to infinite, from part to whole, from the self to culture, from cold mathematics to gorgeous imagery. She doesn't allow boundaries to be finite, but is concerned with the process of change and the flow of information from one system to another. Her sculptures move beyond the concrete, to a place of open-ended, free reign, Her materials, whether wheat or trees or even a human life, stretch into the infinite.
And so I come back, full circle, to my father. Who I should fully disclose is the art historian Peter Selz and who first introduced me to the work Agnes Denes, and who himself, wrote in an essay on Agnes Denes for her show at the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in 1992, "Everything is connected in Dene's multifarious work. Her concepts deal with space, but ultimately her work is focused on the life of humankind and on the human predicament."
Agnes Denes Sculptures of the Mind is on view at until January 19, 2013 at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projets, 535 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011
Under the racket of taxis and buses barreling up 10th Avenue, people chattering, the endless throb of drills ripping city pavement, and the piercing warning of trucks backing up, comes a low sound, a reverberating boom, boom, boom as distant and intimate as the heartbeat of a baby in the womb. Then the sound stops momentarily as if to catch its breath before starting up again. Rounding the corner and heading west on 25th Street, the erratic beat grows louder until, ducking between two buildings underneath the train-tracks of The Highline, the source of the sound is finally revealed. It's the world, our bulging, straining Earth.
This is Tight Spot, an installation piece of a blue blown-up globe by musician and visual artist, David Bryne that measures 48 by 20 feet and is an inflatable globe reminiscent of those grammar school globes that used to spin in the front of classrooms. Only instead of a hard globe we can hold in our hands, Tight Spot is giant sized and as soft as a beach ball. Since September 15th Tight Spot has occupied the space adjacent to Pace Gallery, where, compressed between the buildings and squished below The Highline, it emits low frequency vibrations.
Like a lot of Byrne's previous installation pieces, Tight Spot is deceptive in its simplicity. A simple object remembered from childhood, but like a memory in its recreation, this globe has become exaggerated. Tight Spot has also been given Bryne's voice. The thumping sound comes from two speakers placed inside the interior of the world that plays recordings of Bryne's filtered and processed voice and are, he has said, an open invitation to passersby to come, investigate and discover the object.
This is art that actively engages with the viewer. A meet-up with an object that has been given a human sound and that is itself pressed into a tight spot, but so are we. As viewers we are held in the small space allotted us, between sidewalk and large object. It is an intimate encounter in our everyday world with an everyday object but one that points beyond itself to the social currents of society and the world at large. As if to suggest that, come hell or high water, we are all in this together.
Standing there, one wonders if like a balloon, our world is expanding too fast? Or inversely, are we, like the compressed globe, being crushed by outside forces? Will the tissue of our world hold? And is this the sound the world makes when it is under too much stress and like an exhausted heart, an infant unable to be born or about to putter out?
All recognizably representational art is a distortion. And these distortions can be either formal or emotional. However, in Tight Spot, Byrne has done both. The compressed sphere of our earth protrudes in the center and flattens out at the side, like a fisheye lens it maps the curve of the earth though the image is almost entirely of blue sea -- blue being Bryne's favorite color -- calming to look at and yet, startling in the realization that there isn't enough space for the whole earth to fit. Not in this tight spot. This bulbous though representational exaggeration is both comical and sad as if in Tight Spot, Bryne has found a way to walk the line between truth and paranoia.
Tight Spot is on view at 508 West 25th Street in New York until October 1, 2011.
"I am always an outsider looking in," says Iranian-American artist Taravat Talepasand. "By portraying myself in different cultures I start to understand how another culture might see, and where they might place me." Indeed Talepasand's current body of work, now on view at Steven Zevitas Gallery in Boston until June 11th, examines how the Eastern and Western cultures conflate and clash. Even the title of the show, The Corrupt Minority refers to a recent combative statement made by Iranian clerics that lightly veiled women are a corrupt minority. The irony of course is that Islamic legislation has made women legitimate sex objects and this is at the heart and core of Talepasand's recent body of work: issues of global and personal identity, sex and gender, and most specifically, that of the process of subject (Talepasand) as she is transformed and overtaken by objectification.
Image-making is by definition always a process of objectification; Talepasand extends this process by incorporating the use of self-portraiture into her work.
In the exquisitely crafted "Self Portrait: Sanctioned," Talepasand merges the traditions of European and Persian painting into a self-examination. As dark and mysterious as the Jan Van Eyck it alludes to, Talepasand re-appropriates not just the colors of that rich, red turban, but the invention of oil painting, a technique originally credited to Van Eyck and the Renaissance that, in point of fact, originated in the Middle East. Taking it one step further, Talepasand has painted herself naked, as a sculptural relic reminiscent of a pre-Islamic time. Her face is covered in black oil, the source of much of the value and conflict between her Western and Eastern identities, and she has truncated her image at the arms, though she still manages to shield her breasts from the viewer as she boldly stares out of the canvas.
"Still Life: Halft Sin" is a depiction of the tradition during the Persian New Year, to set up a table of meaningful objects, often grains, candles and The Koran. Unable to visit Iran because of the recent unrest, Talepasand sought connection through blogs and the internet. Online, she discovered an illicit and subverted culture, hidden from traditional view, much like women are hidden behind their burkas. She has appropriated some of these images into her own tableaux of relics, painting scandalous images of Iranian women posing nude that she found on these sites. Although the painting is quite risqué, the hookah in the center is an instrument allowed to both men and women of the culture, and the use of a female palette of pinks and reds softens and personalizes the explicit subject matter.
Using the play between darkness and light and images of pop, humorous puppetry, "Presumption of Justice" is a mythical commentary on the sinister repression of women in Iran. The painting is a complicated narrative of fairytale melded with contemporary culture. The three radiant female images representing the mind, body and soul of women. In the center of the picture, Talepasand, disguised under a Pinocchio mask gazes at the soul, draped and glowing up on a pedestal. Like the fictional Pinocchio -- a wooden puppet that wanted to be a "real boy" -- Talepasand, too, wishes to rescue the sculpture and turn it into a real woman. But unable to do the forbidden, she is transformed into a donkey cleric who stands with back to the canvas and scolds the only real boy in the picture: the man with the truncated arm who is pointing at the female image descending. For like a goddess leaving Mount Olympus, "woman" has climbed off her pedestal and returned to earth to warn and rescue her tribeswoman. In so doing, her private parts, those identifying her as female, have been exposed to the X-ray vision of the clerics as well as the viewer.
Talepasand's palettes are often separated between blues and grays for male depicted subject matter, and pinks and reds for female, a comment on the division between men and women within Iranian culture. In the painting Andarooni, Biooni, Lies and Man (Insider, Outsider , Lies and Man), these colors come together. Blooming bursts of orange and red vines -- feminine flowers -- are in the process of breaking through a stone cleric bust of cold blue. In depicting Andarooni Biooni, Talepasand is embracing her outsider insider status in the culture, as a woman and an Iranian/American.
Insisting on her right, even her ownership of taboo imagery, Taravat Talepasand re-appropriates the female form from both Iranian and American culture. By portraying subjects in moments of objectification she connects the personal to collective experience, thus her art becomes a lesson in the futility of ever truly erasing identity from society.
In the world of computer software a Virtual Easter Egg is a hidden message within the text or program that once clicked on, opens up to reveal a joke or feature. It is the modern day version of the Russian cluster egg and takes its name from the first Faberge Egg that opened up to reveal a golden egg. Recently Lady Gaga used the idea when she gave birth to herself out of a transparent Egg at the Grammy Awards. For a long time, the artist Hope Sandrow has been fascinated by this conundrum and the multi-step process of discovery, of worlds and landscapes and ideas hidden inside containers that are both virtual and real.
And indeed, entering Sandrow's world is akin to stepping inside the diorama of a sugar-coated Easter Egg or slipping into the scene of a pastoral painting where art and vision merge. (Go on a Virtual Easter Egg hunt by clicking on the word And and searching the images.)
Hope Sandrow's Open Air Studio sits up a dirt road, tucked into the side of a hill in Shinnecock, Long Island. But wander through the turn-of-a century carriage house and suddenly, her sunny living space opens up into a continuous art installation, a panorama that is both an artscape, in which to view art, and a studio space in which her art is created.
Hope Sandrow, an artist who has worked with complex photographic images, conceptual and installation art, has long been preoccupied with evolution and ecosystems. In her Open Air Studio she now raises Panduan fowl, a rare breed of exotic roosters and hens. She began this project a number of years ago when Shinnecock -- a singular rooster with a Shakespearean personality -- followed her home while she was out taking photographs. The tale of Sandrow's interaction and involvement with the rooster she since named Shinnecock is now a well-documented story on her website, and he and his flock are viewable on live feed from her webcast. Needless to say, Shinnecock was the inspiration that first pursued Sandrow. In turn, she embraced and adopted Shinnecock as part of her life and work.
Out the living room window and even sometimes in the home, chickens, landscape and the art commingle. Roosters and hens wander freely through this paradise of form following after function. In an effort to protect her flock, Sandrow planted a wide variety of feather-like foliage, ostrich ferns, corkscrew grass, tall flowering balls of purple allium and bristling shrubs of juniper and cyprus that camouflage the birds' exotic plumage thereby protecting them from the hawks circling above. "No matter where I set the camera," Sandrow said. "I could create art that examines the concept of the growth of form through function."
A creek runs through the garden, and two odd structures sit on slight rises at various ends of the yard. These are the coops constructed from drawings of a Sol LeWitt parallelogram, which Sandrow transformed into a 3-dimensional habitat. Sol LeWitt had a long history of engagement and exchange with other artists, and Sandrow has honored the spirit of LeWitt in her use of materials, for they are full of light and she even calls them her Coop LeWitts. Sandrow says her flock lives in them happily. "My approach to conceptual art, and I believe this was Sol LeWitt's approach, is that this art is not removed from nature, but connected to it."
The studio can stretch away from the flock and their habitat. Sandrow has done a number of performance pieces that take the Open Air Studio on the road. In 2008 she created a tableau on the side of Montauk Highway, which borders her property. In En Plein Air, Sandrow, clad in a nude body stocking, sat with Tom Edmonds, her husband Ulf Skogsbergh, and Margaret Kelly, in a live re-enactment of Edouard Manet's famous painting of a blissful pastoral picnic, Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe. Manet's image depicting the scene of a nude woman sitting and enjoying a lunch beside two fully dressed men had caused controversy back in 1863 when it was first exhibited. Sandrow's piece was a provocative homage to pastoral art as well as to contemporary installation art and to the artist's ability to inhabit both the inside and outside of the canvas. The work fully engaged its audience. "Commuters loved it," she said. "They waved, honked their horns and even stopped to talk. We were the highlight of their morning commute."
More recently Ms. Sandrow has been producing elegant, poetic multimedia pieces that incorporate shells, feathers, even, on one occasion, a gallon container of eggshell white enamel paint. In 2010 she created Two Eggs Observational Findings from the series titled The Sky is Falling. In the description of material used to produce the work, Sandrow gives credit to the two eggs created by the Shinnecock Family Hens, which she has placed under a glass bell jar.
Hope Sandrow can be seen as the glass bell jar, a protective yet transparent womb. An egg, of course, is also a womb, an incubator that holds a secret, a message, a life that will hatch and transform. Hope Sandrow, in serving as a window on her own work, allows visibility into this magical world, which is constantly revealing itself both to her and to us. In examining and participating in this fragile ecosystem, Sandrow's art acts as a permeable membrane through which we witness and access her creative process, which is not separate, but in tandem with nature.
Hope Sandrow has two upcoming events: a live, streamed performance from the Open Air Studio conceived by Elke Luyten and a work titled Happening Live that will begin in summer of 2011.
One of the gifts of art is that it allows us to image ourselves into another’s experience. Last week, as I sat on the floor of the Whiney Museum of Art, pondering an installation by artist Gary Simmons titled, Step in the Arena (The Essentialist Trap) 1994, I was profoundly moved by the power of Simmons’ piece to evoke the African American man’s experience. A multilayered installation of a whitewashed boxing ring, Step in the Arena stands alone in a bare room, on view in the show Singular Visions. Save for seven pairs of black wingtip tap dancing shoes, which hang from the ropes, this ring is empty. The floor, made of stretched canvas, is covered with a chalked-in diagram of footsteps, an intricate schema of the cakewalk, the dance preformed at minstrel shows during the days of slavery. A sense of absence pervades the piece: the fighters have gone, the white footsteps on the black floor are smudged and partially erased, the tap shoes have been left behind. We, the viewers—the spectators--are left on the outside, literally gazing through the ropes, with a sense of waiting. The stage is set, but empty. We are filled with both anticipation, and the haunting remembrance of past events, as if we have stumbled upon a ruined coliseum where gladiators of the past had no choice but to do battle.
However, the roped boxing ring suggests that for the African American man of today situations have not changed so much. Often compelled by disadvantage and limited choice to enter the ring, this metaphorical boxer is seduced by the promise of riches, but that promise is just another form of enslavement.
The title, Step in the Arena, referencing a song by the rap singer Gang Starr, is at once a call to arms and a warning to step into the arena—where a black man’s gift is merely flesh – and where he is owned once he steps in. Simmons’ work suggests that the arena is also about art and the marketing of the black artist’s experience once he has been “essentialized.” In this case, being essentialized means to be stripped down like a fighter, to a mere physical essence, or race-related experience, which is again an unchangeable trap, a static existance from which one can only emerge leaving ghostlike footprints behind.
In a global world that is often polarized by fixed ideologies, the risk of essentialism is the risk of reducing ourselves to just our inherent qualities. Essentialism relies on definitions by race, sex or other biological characteristics, and while these classifications are empowering, they can also be dangerous. Simmons’ point is that whether gender or ethnic-based, specifications are traps because they limit us to gross generalizations.
The hip-hop artist, businessman and author, Jay-Z when discussing his book Decoded said that the hidden mission of rap “is to find fresh angles into emotions we all share.” Thus art can serve as a revelatory doorway through which we think ourselves into another’s world. It’s an audacious ambition and one that plays out powerfully in Step in the Arena. There is great beauty in the elegance of black and white and smeared dance steps on a canvas floor, but the true force, potency and gift of this work of art lie in its transformative capacity to enable us to identify with an experience we might not have had otherwise. In the end, that’s what allows Step in The Arena to deliver its a knockout punch.
Conceptual, earth, performance, body artist and lately, large-scale public sculptor, Dennis Oppenheim died Friday night January 21st, 2011 at the age of 72 from complications from cancer. He’d been diagnosed only six weeks earlier, was in the process of undergoing chemotherapy, but then slipped away so stealthily that the Las Vegas Metro reported his death as a possible hoax. Would that it were a joke. Dennis loved a good joke. He was a supreme satirist, a punster extraordinaire, an artist who constantly reinvented his medium, endeavoring to find ways to synthesize multiple ideas. In the beginning, Dennis used his body, the earth and sky as art and as a means to explore creating sculpture; then performance became his sculpture, and recently, his public artworks investigated structures that incorporate architecture into sculptures that are both visually stunning and thought provoking.
Starting in the 60s Dennis became well-known as one of the original earth artists. The first piece I ever saw by Dennis Oppenheim was a photograph of a work titled Annual Rings, an action and earth/art piece done in 1968 in which he transposed the annual rings that mark a tree's growth onto the snow-banks along the U.S. and Canadian border line. Cutting with a shovel back and forth across political as well as time zones, Dennis’s piece dramatized the arbitrary boundaries in our cultural landscape. Politics is largely about taking sides, and Dennis’s shovel literally cut through sides and stances, while his image of concentric circles united them.
In the late 70s Dennis began to use puppets as a way to segue from performance art to motorized sculptures. He called his puppets his “surrogates.” They bore his facial features and danced and sang songs Dennis wrote, “It ain’t what you make, it’s what makes you do it,” and even lectured on art history. In the infamous Lecture from 1976, a puppet with Dennis’s face discussed the death of body and earth art to a room of empty chairs. Dennis’s puppets were an extension of himself. They were often marionettes of Dennis being manipulated by strings, and they spoke of the artist as a puppet being at the mercy of art commerce.
Another favorite and darkly humorous piece was a large-scale public work, Devise to Root Out Evil first shown at the Venice Biennale in 1997 and later installed and then uninstalled after an uproar at the Vancouver Biennale in 2005. Dennis’s Devise was a galvanized steel structure of a church turned upside down so that the steeple pointed into the ground like a divining rod to expose the wicked.
My father, the art historian Peter Selz, wrote that artists play an important role in changing social and political issues and that to transform situations, “We must change not only our industrial practices, but the way we view the world.” In tackling the physical environment, the body, and the corporate infrastructures of public institutions, Dennis continued to practice in his inimitable way, the art of social and political dissent.
Dennis was a shaman, part magic man, part irritant. And though his cleverness could frustrate his audience, even in that regard, by working so closely within the public realm, he endeavored to “critique” his ability to annoy, amuse and engage us. He referred to himself as, “a little devil.” And in truth, like the art he created, Dennis could be wickedly demonic, widely clever, beautiful all at once.
The British sculptor, Anish Kapoor once said that meaning arises from the banging together of object and viewer. I thought of this comment the other day when I walked into the Modern wing of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and smack in front of me was one of Kapoor’s hexagonal mirrored sculptures, As Yet Untitled, a glittering, reflective surface that sucked me across the room.
As Yet Untitled is a large concave disc about 12 feet in diameter made up of thousands of tiny hexagonal mirrors each less than an inch across. Its shiny fractured surface reflects light from all directions. As you approach it, your image dances around and is fragmented until, moving closer the flickering images of self finally coalesce into your own not quite focused, picture. Kapoor is playing with vanity, illusion, infinity, reflection and the continuous echo of the role of the artist and the viewer in the work. Not only a visually fascinating sculpture, sound also reverberates within the artwork. When standing dead center of the mirror and speaking, I could hear my own voice echoing back out and enveloping me within this bowl-shaped work of art.
Kapoor was born in Bombay, India but since the 1970s he has lived and worked in London where he first became widely known in the 80s for sculpting sensuous biomorphic shapes of granite, plaster and bright pigment that took the reduction of minimalism into a symbolic, sensual and poetic realm. He moved on quickly to the exploration of the illusion and inversion of space, sculpting out voids in walls and in the floor that drew viewers inside dense fields of color.
Space, Kapoor contends is fiction--not just one thing--and like fiction, space keeps turning into other things. In Kapoors work, what space turns into is often a version of the self, which for Kapoor is an infinite, explorative tunnel. Even the sculpture’s as yet untitled title, points to the possibility of endless variations inherent within the work.
In numerous interviews, Kapoor references the fifteen years he spent in analysis. Since he is no stranger to psychoanalytic terminology, and to the method of examining the self in order to understand and square ones place in the world, I couldn’t help wondering, when looking at Kapoor’s sculpture, how much he knew of the Greek myth that gave rise to the term Narcissist. As I watched people being seduced by their own glittering reflection in the museum, I recalled the story of the youth, Narcissus who fell in love with his own reflection and the voice of Echo, the nymph who, punished by the Goddess Hera, was cursed with only being able to repeat the last thing she heard.
In the myth, Echo, unable to speak her own thoughts, is forever doomed to mirror others. Narcissus, like an infant not yet able to understand what reflections are, thinks his own image in a pool of water was speaking to him. It is Echo, echoing back his fascination with himself. Poor Narcissus becomes so transfixed he dies pining for himself and Echo’s repeated chanting of his own words of adoration.
For me, art is a way of understanding and examining, of seeing my place in the world. A reflecting surface for both artists and viewers and what is so compelling in Kapoor’s sculpture is that it smacks us together, unites us in the experience of looking and listening, of discovering our own Ego. Finding himself in the mirror, Narcissus is a mythological representation of the infant stage in human development, a being as yet unable to distinguish himself from ‘the other.’ As humans, when we first recognize ourselves in mirrors (usually at around 18 months of age) we have entered the beginning of Ego development. We have, for the first time, identified with our imaginary selves, the construct we will take through our lives. The Ego-- is the result of connecting with our own specular image.
Walking across that room in the Metropolitan Museum, into the infinite space of Kapoor’s As Yet Untitled mirror, I saw from out of the glass void, my self, coalesce. I was caught in the reflecting pool of my own Ego and in Kapoor’s tool of self-creation. And he was in it with me. Art, like Ego begins with invention, with the moment the self is born and recognized. Without an imaginary, autobiographical self, without Ego, there is no art.
A Connecting Network or Why I Love Being Enlightened
When identical twin brothers, Doug and Mike Starn, burst onto the art scene fresh out of school in the 1980s as a single artwork entity known as the Starn Twins, it was not a case of love at first sight for me. I wasn’t impressed with their deliberately aged photographs, torn up and then scotched taped back together or later with their huge images of oak trees, shot from underneath as if a child was gazing up mesmerized by the tree’s limbs branching out like a web of neurons. They were powerful and yet, where was all this disjointed, multiply imagery going? What was the point? I couldn’t see it, though in fact I couldn’t forget it either, and so it lodged like an incomplete thought in the back of my brain. But it all came together for me two weeks ago when I climbed up the stairs, rounded the corner and found myself gazing up through a sea of bamboo reeds, into the under-story of a sculpted world sprouting from the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art--Big Bambú.
Rising above the dense green treetops, above the hard-edged New York City skyline, I found myself climbing into their rickety, organic, growing microcosm. A woven net structure made of varying sized bamboo poles lashed together with colored nylon rope. This fabricated world, balanced on the Metropolitan’s roof—for in no place is Big Bambú actually secured, it is miraculously, free standing—towers 50 feet into the air. A series of narrow pathways, along which guides lead groups up into a metric-like scaffolding, is under constant construction. Big Bambú will not stop growing, it does not stop growing, until October 31th , when the Starn twins and their crew will begin its deconstruction. Until then, eight to fifteen rock-climbers continuously lash poles together, assembling this growing labyrinth. Although the Starns consulted a structural engineer and an architect to transcribe their drawings, Big Bambú is not following a set plan. A truly evolving architecture, it is controlled chaos at play, which the Starns supervise, but do not dictate. It includes a sitting area initially started when one of the workers, wanting a place to rest, fashioned a seat for himself from the bamboo at hand. The Starns then decided to incorporate his ad-hock chair adding their own bench and boom box to create a symphonic living room in the sky.
Like the Roman twins, Romulus and Remus, (who in the mythical story of founding the city of Rome, first survived being set adrift as babies along the Tiber River in—ironically enough to recall here--a woven basket of weeds) our Starn twins have given birth to a new world.
And Big Bambú has the feeling of a creation myth in the making. Like strands of DNA, the identical Starn twins (who consider themselves one artists) structure alludes to the ability of cells to reproduce themselves and to the intricate web of neural paths inside the brain. So yes, it does come back to those early photographs scotched taped together, and the images of branching tree boughs, whose central theme was the idea that our modern world is an expanding web held together by connective tissue. It wasn’t about photographs, I finally realized. No one remembers what those images were. It was about the scotch tape.
In the case of Big Bambú, this web of connective tissue is not just created by the bamboo poles and rope, but by the shared experience of the viewers. Strangers when we started out, by the time I climbed down from Big Bambú twenty minutes later, I was on a first name bases with all the ten members of my expedition group. After all, we’d ascended up into the Starn’s basket-like world and shared a moment suspended in the sky. Which is the point of this work, and maybe of all great works of art, a shared moment of connection, through art, with a larger picture. The art itself is a lens that moves between artist, object and viewer and out into the world. “Only connect!” E.M. Foster beseeched in the final chapters of Howards End, “For without it we are meaningless fragments . . . unconnected arches that have never joined into a man.”
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. William Faulkner
Saw the play Red last
night on Broadway and was struck by the paintings Mark Rothko was working on at the time the play takes place, and their relationship to
the temples in Pompeii.
Rothko used to
spend time sitting in front of the Roman wall paintings from Pompeii at the Metropolitan
Museum. These large
frescos' overall effect is to flatten space. Deep colors, layered upon
each
other create walls that do not invite the viewer to step inside them.
You can’t
really enter the paintings. The colors float on dark gray banners, which also
frame them. There is no illusion of infinite space. No window onto
another
world. Because the space and color are contained, they create the sense
of being
their own thing.
Here’s
a view of a wall in Pompeii,juxtaposed
with some Rothkos.
Villa of Mysteries
Rothko's originally painted for The Four Seasons and now hanging in The Tate Modern
Rothko
visited Sicily and Pompeii and felt a deep
affinity between his paintings and the walls of the temples. These frescos
influenced the murals Rothko did for The Four Seasons. It was not just their technique and style that moved him, but the idea that art could be experienced as
symbolic
space.
Why should it matter that Rothko
sat in the Metropolitan Museum or an ancient temple in Italy and contemplated a
wall? Because he succeeded in reconciling the images and ideas in his head,
with the world around him and gave life not just to his ideas, but to the
physical reality of objects, which we still respond to as if they have a
human presence, a life after death.
Wheatfield -- A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan -- Blue Sky, World Trade Center, 1982 Copyright Agnes Denes, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York
Human Dust, 1969Copyright Agnes Denes, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York
Tree Mountain -- A Living Time Capsule -- 11,000 Trees, 11,000 People, 400 YearsCopyright Agnes Denes, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York
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