A nod to Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending A Staircase (No.2), 1912
Philadelphia Museum of Art

First exhibited in 1913 at the Armory Show in New York, Duchamp's Nude Descending A Staircase inspired public outrage. The painting challenged expectations: it was abstract, ambiguous, and reduced the female form to what one critic called "an explosion in a shingle factory." As far as audiences were concerned, Duchamp had thrown classical nudes like Venus of Urbino and La Grand Odalisque out the window.

Officially titled the International Exhibition of Modern Art, the Armory Show was America's first grand attempt to engage with modernism. Before 1913, most Americans were unaware of artists like Picasso, Matisse, and Manet; now they were hungry for them. The kinetic pulse of Europe, so unequivocally tied to modern art, was hard to ignore.1

That isn't to say that modern art didn't exist in America before 1913. Artists who had traveled to Europe, like Marsden Hartley and Robert Henri, returned to the States with a new sensibility that penetrated their art.

Based on the critical response to Duchamp, America's nod to modernism would nevertheless be a work in progress. Art collectors were integral to the assimilation process, with names like Abby Rockefeller and Mary Quinn Sullivan at the helm. In 1929 these women, along with other collectors and philanthropists, launched the first museum of modern art in the States, today known as MoMA.

1 I'll expound on this in a later post, and also talk about America's invaluable role in preserving European modernism after WWII.

Museum Hours: So much more than art

A panorama of Viennese working class culture and a hymn to the museum, the new film Museum Hours inspires its viewers to look, yes, but also to see.

Director Jem Cohen hovers his magnifying glass over the streets of Vienna and the city's beloved Kunsthistoriches Museum. It is a privileged view for the less itinerant of us. Built in 1891 to house the collection of the imperial family, the Museum has long been a haven of history and the senses. It is also one of friendship: Johann, a gentle, middle-aged museum guard has worked at the Kunsthistoriches for six years; he comes to know Anna, a frequent visitor as of late, who has flown in from Canada to visit her ailing cousin.

The exchanges between the new friends breathe fresh meaning into the museum as a metaphor for life. The more you look the more you discover; the more you discover the less alone you feel.

Cohen invites us to notice details in the seemingly ordinary. We need not ascribe beauty or power to them, but simply notice them. That is how Johann passes the time so pleasantly at work. One of his recent discoveries is a detail in a Breughel painting: a skillet protruding from a reveler’s hat. This leads him to consider eggs, which in turn leads him on a quest to find eggs in every painting he can. This is what it means to be human: to use our powers of observation, and often patience.

Cohen puts you in uncomfortable places that you can either flee or inhabit. When confronted with an unexciting field of wheat on a hill, adorned with but a few winter-bare trees, you realize you are looking at a living painting. Suddenly you understand.

And yet, the scene continues to surprise. Once Johann and Anne approach the hilltop, only Johann is visible for some seconds. He is at the edge of the camera’s lens and Anne is just beyond it. For all the cinematic rhetoric this defies, it feels paradoxically organic. It is akin to looking at an awkwardly cropped Degas painting: it is capturing an unstaged moment in time, and it makes no effort to accommodate our expectations.

The familiar or under-looked details in Museum Hours - textured layers of paint on a canvas; a child's face - crystallize at the end of the film, in Johann’s soliloquy. The manner in which light hits an object, or the way a person expresses pleasure or pain, is worth noticing. Such details enhance our experience of the world, just as making a discovery at the art museum leaves us with a flutter in our hearts.

Art along the staircases

 

The hidden treasures of a city aren't always remote or tucked

away. Sometimes they are hidden in plain sight, like the public stairwells of Los Angeles. A relic of our mass transit era, these stairs offered direct access to bus and rail lines for the residents of hilly neighborhoods. As you might guess, the auto industry ultimately negated the stairs' relevance; but they have since undergone a popular revival. Partly responsible is Charles Fleming, a staircase aficionado who published a guidebook to LA's historic stairwells in 2010. It has opened doors for exploration.

Scattered throughout the East and Westsides of the city, an   impressive network of stairs will lead you up and down hillsides and through eclectic neighborhoods. The stairwells and interspersing walkways are so rich with foliage you may forget you're in the middle of a metropolis. The stunning views are a happy reminder of this, while the burn in your calves will measure how far you've climbed.

Best of all, the routes are teeming with art and history. A  recent walk took me past Rudolph Valentino's home in Whitley Heights, a Mediterranean-style neighborhood built in the 1920s. (Bette Davis and Marlene Dietrich used to live here, too.) I ogled over the remnants of old Hollywood, not to mention the visual pleasures. On a walk near the Hollywood sign I passed a towering medieval archer, painted on the facade of a home. It was not out of context, either: the house was modeled after a castle. Some homes later, I discovered a lifesize statue of a Hindu god meditating. The smorgasbord of style and taste was enchanting.

The artistic charm of these tucked-away communities isn't always overt. There are quiet accessories like Victorian-style crown molding, colorful mosaic floor tiles and beautifully-carved support systems. The doorways are magnificent, too. Some look like the threshold to a medieval fortress, while others are daintily decorated with woodcarvings and inlaid materials like glass or tile. Looking every which way I felt like a shifty-eyed sleuth, sniffing out the subtle details that were so plentiful.

To put it simply, staircase walks provide a respite from the daily grind, not to mention the daily grime, of the city. If the scenery starts to bore you, add an element of suspense to your adventure. Try stealing an orange from someone's tree; you just might get accosted by their rabid dog. RUN, but make sure to catch the house with the year-round Christmas tree on your way out.

Plato's cave, look out

What do you get when you cross an artist with a library? ...A cave! Okay, let me explain. I was recently welcomed into the home of artist and actor Leigh McCloskey and his lovely wife, Carla, for a film screening. Leigh is a spiritual man, very gestural and easily possessed by his ideas. In a word, he is impassioned. His library-turned-cave is a perfect example.

Leigh, shortly after 9/11, decided a re-structuring of the world was in order. His solution? To turn his library into a celestial, cosmic space laden with paintings of sacred feminines and metaphysical imagery. But it's a little more complex than that. While I can't do justice to Leigh's process, in summary he sees great importance in the intersection of humanity and the universe at large. He believes that we have lost touch with our interconnectedness; that we have become critics and not creators, and the remedy for this is reconnecting with the extra-human realm.

His vision has manifested into something spectacular. The ceilings, walls and floors of his library are all painted in a royal blue. Fluorescent figures, symbols and shapes float through the space. Lilith and Eve make an appearance amidst radiant bursts of light and figures with glowing halos. No feature or accessory has been ignored either. Even the spines of books are painted. So is the couch, including the underside of the cushions. A freestanding column beside the couch has an image of Eve swirling around it. There is a bowl resting atop the column that Leigh says represents Eve's chalice. He doesn't miss a thing. I can't help but imagine him painting in some entranced reverie, initiating every object or fixture into his little blue world.

And while the images and motifs seem kind of chaotic, according to Leigh they actually reflect a method. Everything in the room plays off one another, sort of like a map of the universe.

If you are wondering why Leigh calls this space a cave, it has to do with the primordial nature of its namesake. Caves harken back to a time when humans were more connected with themselves and the universe. Whether you experience a 70s throwback or an otherworldly dimension on this visit, the sensory experience is palpable. It's too bad Plato's prisoners didn't have colorful digs like this.

[Photo courtesy of Leigh McCloskey's website: http://www.leighmccloskey.com/Artist/artist_main.htm]

Humans are the new medium

If you live in Los Angeles and write about art, it's likely that all-things-Pacific Standard Time are leaving your fingertips. And no, I don't mean the time zone, but the title of an initiative spanning Southern California that aims to explore the L.A. art scene from 1945-1980.

A recent PST foray brought me to the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, a sort of mini art colony that has workspaces, studios and an exhibition gallery. Their current show, "Collaboration Labs: Southern California Artists and the Artist Space Movement," is thought-provoking and immersive with its video installations and vintage photographs. The exhibit ventures to explore just what the title implies: artist-run spaces, specifically as an alternative to the gallery space, in the 1970s. In a decade rife with instability, such collaborations reflected not only political and social concerns, but also a desire to cooperate and collectivize.

One of the period's seminal artists, Barbara Smith, caught my eye. Born in Pasadena, CA and known for her performance art, Smith stole my heart with her 1972 work "Nude Frieze." Captured in a series of black and white photographs, the performance involved suspending naked people to a wall with nothing but duct-tape. (Since the photos are pretty explicit, click here to see an example; to whet your appetites, I included a PG-13 image above.) A highly orchestrated affair, Smith served as a sort of "conductor," directing people through a microphone to tape her nude subjects to a wall. After remaining suspended for a given period, the nudes broke free. The end result? A wall of flaccid tape revealing some suggestion of the bodies it once adhered--a sort of relic of the performance.

Smith's work is rife with allusions, from the Crucifixion to the sculptural friezes of Graeco-Roman antiquity. Here Smith is the sculptor, modeling her "material" for the purpose of enacting a vision. Her vision involves a form of sacrifice, albeit a cooperative one, where the subjects have consented to be painfully adhered to a wall. Unless you're into S&M, I have a hard time finding physical joy in this experience...

The impact of Smith's work can undoubtedly stand alone, but I can't help thinking about a

similar piece made a decade earlier. Yves Klein, a sort of conceptual artist from France, launched a series called "Anthropometries" in the 1960s. Under his supervision, a tuxedo-clad Klein directed nude women to cover themselves in paint and impress their bodies atop a large canvas. The entire performance was accompanied by a live classical orchestra and audience; one can only imagine the spectacle. Ultimately, the sole remnant of this event was the imprint of women's bodies on a canvas, similar to the wall of tape from Smith's "Nude Frieze."

It's hard to deny that Smith was engaging in a dialogue with Klein. There are, of course, differences, but the general theme of supervising a human "medium" is hard to ignore. Whether Klein's work is collaborative is questionable, but he did not forcefully compel his subjects to participate--they were consciously and willfully involved in the process, even if to ultimately follow the artist's directions. However, the gender element is ridden with controversy, a tone that isn't as potent in Barbara Smith's work. By re-enacting the tradition of the empowered male artist and quite female muse, Klein is clearly playing with gender roles. It's comically ambiguous, though, since we can't identify whether he is critiquing this dynamic or celebrating it.

If you want to fully experience the glory of Barbara Smith and some of her collaborators, the 18th Street Arts Center is worth paying a visit indeed.

An art-rospective journey

Some things beg to be interpreted as phallic. The Washington Monument, lipstick, water bottles...they all elicit a semblance of this shape. In fact, an industrial designer friend tells me it is more difficult to avoid than you'd think.

A sculpture that I recently saw at the University of Alabama solidified her comment. Assembled by artist Craig Wedderspoon in 2010, the work is a construction of aluminum squares mimicking a textile pattern. While the components align with its title, "Argyle," the shape they form is another story. Twisting and undulating from the bottom up, this dynamic sculpture, well...looks like a penis. (I don't think I need to enumerate on the details--see right.)

Then again, maybe I'm jumping to conclusions; there is more than one way to look at art. I sat and stared at the sculpture for a while, legitimately trying to get my head out of the gutter. The best interpretation I could muster up was a gourd. Pitiful. After muttering some self-deprecating thoughts, I conceded to my initial impression. I got tired of trying to see beyond the phallus.

Now having reconciled with this undeniably suggestive sculpture, I ventured to experience it from other angles. Located at the intersection of a thoroughfare, I found that people had to interact with it in some capacity. I noticed a couple folks graze against it out of sheer laziness; one passerby brushed his hand across the sculpture--a friendly gesture of acknowledgment. I took great pleasure in watching people engage with the artwork, and wondered if the feeling was mutual. I did have quite the begrudging expression for a while.

From a theoretical perspective, I considered Wedderspoon's work as an intersection of gendered associations: the penis (a pretty obvious one) and the craft of knitting. Indeed there is a Michigan-based artist, Mark Newport, who emulates this concept with his hand-knit, adult-sized super hero costumes. His works represent the convergence of a traditionally feminine craft and a largely masculine domain. Perhaps Wedderspoon had something similar in mind.

My brief research on "Argyle" led me to a recent article on the proliferation of phallic symbols on campus. It turns out everyone else's mind is in the gutter. Some of these like-minded folks, however, are calling for their removal. Says one professor of "Argyle": “I’m just tired of looking out my window every morning and seeing a giant penis. We need to ensure we are practicing safe architecture.” Is there something inherently dangerous about a penis? What is more, if you can't re-frame the connotation of a piece, you can at least try to re-frame your experience of it. Instead of being offended, why not see it as a source of light-hearted humor whenever you look out the window? I don't mean to sound high and mighty--you're entitled to take offense to whatever you'd like--but this artwork has alot to offer. Least of all, it presents an excellent reminder that life shouldn't be taken too seriously.

If you'd like to see more sculptures at the University of Alabama, see this map of the public art on campus, a project developed by the Department of Art and Art History.

The desert is not so lonely

After living in Death Valley I learned that the desert is more compelling and unpredictable than I gave it credit for. The night sky is so visible you can actually see the curvature of our planet; summer temperatures average at 120° and it's drier than the L.A. River yet there are waterfalls to speak of. The nearby ghost town of Rhyolite, Nevada offers another seemingly out-of-context wonder.

Located at the entrance to Rhyolite is the Goldwell Open Air Museum, an exhibit of seven large-scale sculptures by various Belgian artists. Intent on finding a place where they could work freely, the artists chose the Mojave Desert as their spatial muse. The on-site sculptures that resulted, from a mosaic sofa to a colossal blonde nude, have transformed this expanse of land.

In an otherwise vast and lonely setting, the artworks evoke a sort of animating quality. Their contrast with the natural environment heightens visual acuity, provoking awareness of the art and space around you. I may never have studied the intricacies of Sofie Siegmann's mosaic couch or noticed the mineral deposits of the nearby mountains if not for this incongruity. (For a similar contrast effect, read on an exhibit at Versailles that integrated the anime-style art of Takashi Murakami into the 17th-century Baroque palace.) Though initially disarming, the desert sculptures assume a rightful presence in this harsh but captivating landscape.

Just as the Goldwell artists celebrate a unique workspace, so too can we celebrate uniqueness of movement. There is something invigorating about viewing art outside the controlled space of a traditional museum. It is easier to engage with since you aren’t being over-stimulated by imagery. You don’t have to feel anxious about crossing the invisible line since there’s no guard to scrutinize you. You can frolic in the shrubs and no one would care. Every now and then it's nice to view art unrestricted.

Upon indulging in these freedoms I took a special liking to Venus of the Desert by Hugo Heyrman. She is a huge, cinder block sculpture with a presence that teeters on the spiritual. Simplified in form, her most distinctive features are her breasts and hair, including the dainty tuft of yellow on her pubic region. She kneels with her arms at ease in quite the ambiguous gesture.

A reference to the ancient Graeco-Roman goddess of sexuality and love, Venus has been appropriated by artists for millennia now. As the archetype for the classical female nude she has inspired works such as Titian’s 16^th century Venus of Urbino and Manet’s Olympia of 1863.

Heyrman’s work is a reinterpretation of the classical nude form, a popular undertaking by modern and contemporary artists. Among them is Pop artist Tom Wesselmann, who parodied female objectification in his Great American Nude series from the 1960s. Like Wesselmann's nudes, Venus of the Desert is not soft and languorous but anonymous and industrial, from her lego-like formation to the cinder blocks that shape her. She resembles not a traditional goddess but a blonde bombshell—a goddess of modernity, if you will.

Heyman's work is not completely distinct from ancient practice. The sculpture's monumental size echoes the large-scale statues Greeks and Romans erected to the gods, serving both as protectors and objects of worship. Additionally, the kneeling pose of Venus is suggestive of prayer and thus her mythological origins. Ultimately Heyrman's work captures an intersection of ancient and modern conceptions of sexuality and art.

Even if visitors like myself did not come to Rhyolite seeking a Mecca, Venus lends to it the air of a pilgrimage site. In fact most of the sculptures have a mystical presence, largely a byproduct of the unique space they inhabit. This collection is a reminder that we can interact with nature and art in a unique and non-disruptive way, and above all that you are never alone in the desert.