Wac6arts

Worlds Overlapped

My arts blogging these days has been subsumed by my daily blog, Counselor @ Law, over at wac6.com.

Recent posts there that might have been here, or at least a couple in that category that come to mind, are:

• A write-up, with some decent pictures, of a hurried tour of Frank Gehry's Stata Center on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Mass. As you know, I love Disney Concert Hall, where the LA Philharmonic plays. So if you liked my pieces here about Disney Concert Hall, you may want to check out the wac6.com post about Stata Center.
• A reflection on a large public sculpture at the San Jose airport.

I'm still here! I'm just over there!

Seattle's Hammering Man is Back to Work!

In a great sign for the economy, Hammering Man's missing arm has been returned and he is back to work!

The video below taken last evening around 7 pm.

Alexander Calder Show @ the Seattle Art Museum

You learn how incorrigibly playful Alexander Calder must have been from the 1961 film by Carlos Vilardebó, Le Cirque de Calder, now playing in a video loop at the Seattle Art Musuem as part of its exhibit of the Jon and Mary Shirley collection of Calder's work. The film is of a puppet circus that Calder performed for friends throughout his life. Calder's skills with wire and handmade contraptions are on display, as Calder makes the puppet performers and animals move and perform circus tricks. "Madame, Monsier," he calls out, in the voice of the puppet ringleader, when a new act steps up. Some of the wire-frame-and-cloth circus animals even leave behind poops, which Calder covers with sawdust and sweeps away before bringing in the next act.

Calder was born at the end of the 19th Century and he died over 30 years ago. Some of the work on exhibit is over 70 years old. And yet, the only thing in the show that seems dated is the film (and that is because of the film quality and tell-tale tinniness of the soundtrack, not the play it captures).

The show of hanging mobiles, standing mobiles, wire sculpture and jewelry is also a playground. And more is in play than the mobiles in motion: they are lit to cast strong shadows, and placed to be physically accessible from every (terrestrial) angle. The jewelry is under glass, as it should be, but the rest of the work is not. You are asked to not touch, but the fact that you can -- or might step the wrong way and be swiped by a fin of sheet metal -- makes the show fun. Even black circles on the floor, meant to demark the radial sweep of the hanging moblies (and thus no-go zones for pedestrians), contribute to the fun: I saw a mother and child chasing each other along one of the circles. But the main reason you do not touch the objects is because they are at work; and that fact relieves you of the duty of having to regard them as sacrosanct. (Pictured in this paragraph: Bougainvillier, 1947. Photo copyright © 2010 Calder Foundation. Used in accordance with the fair use guidelines on the Calder Foundation site.)

One has to think that the Shirleys are responsible for how humanely the show is laid out. It's awfully generous of them, not only to lend their collection, but to permit it to be shown in such an accessible way.

Calder in his Roxbury studio, 1944. Photograph by Eric Schaal. Copyright © 2010 Calder Foundation. Used in accordance with the fair use guidelines on the Calder Foundation site.

Although the work is fresh, particularly in the ensemble of this show, sheet metal is no longer a particularly contemporary artistic material. The passage of time makes Calder's material seem like construction paper, albeit that of a giant craftsman. Matisse had his large colored paper to take scissors to, and he laid the pieces out in two dimensions; Calder cut from sheet metal and wired his pieces to hang and balance in space and define a different kind of volume, an accessible interior.

Hammering Man's Arm Has Come Off!

Just crossing University Street walking south on First Avenue, shocked to see that Hammering Man is not only not working, but has lost his working arm altogether! In the shop for repairs, a City of Seattle sign says.

Art for Architecture's Sake

One of the pleasures of driving west on Yessler in Seattle, down the hill to the Sound -- and it delights me every time -- is to pass a Carolina blue cacophony of steel beams and planes tossed up, like a giant, frozen-in-mid-explosion Calder, just under the overpass where Yessler crosses Fifth Avenue.

I took these pictures this morning. In the top photo, I tried to approximate the perspective one has from the road. The other photos show views from the sidewalk on Yessler.

Here is a good example of a sculpture that works because of where it sits. The piece is in a transitional space that would otherwise be lost to the arterial overpass. Unlike the Serra sculptures at LACMA, say, or the Miroslaw Balka at the Tate Modern, this piece would not be interesting in any museum space.

That's because the work is not conversing with itself or arguing with the logic of its own composition. Instead, the piece is a canny asterisk, referencing Fifth Avenue and pulling its buildings into a skyline.

I went down a flight of steps to Fifth Avenue, to try to find a plaque that might identify the names of the sculpture and its sculptor. Finding none, I tapped on the door at 300 Fifth, the property hosting the work, and asked the security guard what the piece is called. "We don't call it anything," he said.

That feels exactly right.

Belisha Beacons at Berkeley Square

I love Belisha beacons. Fanciful and functional, they delighted me everywhere I came across them in England.

Here's a link to a video of an initial encounter at Clapham Common. Above is a video of a grander performance, 1 minute 42 seconds long, taken Dec. 22, 2009 at the corner of Berkeley and Bruton Streets in London. (I tried uploading this newer video at the same Internet cafe in Balham from which I uploaded the earlier video, but it took too long.)

Miroslaw Balka’s "Box of Darkness"

These two images of Miroslaw Balka’s "box of darkness," How It Is, now at the Tate Modern, look like photos of colored pencil drawings. But they're not. The images are photos of the walk-in and -under sculpture itself, taken December 20th with the iPhone I am now using to post this. Credit the quality of diffusion of the natural light in the Tate Modern's great hall and the optics of the iPhone's camera, with an assist to the steadiness of my hand.

Which Came First? The iPhone by Apple, or the pPod by SuttonBeresCuller?

Wikipedia reminds me that the iPhone was announced by Steve Jobs in January 2007, and was first sold in June of that year. Best I can tell, this may have been the same stretch of time SuttonBeresCuller were building the pPod. The name, "pPod," references the iPod, of course, and the iPod has of course been around forever. But make no mistake: the pPod prefigures nothing less than the runaway iPhone, and is its dimensional antithesis.

Here's a picture of the iPhone displaying the Earth inside. The metaphor is obvious: a world may be explored within; the world may be accessed through it. The iPhone is the ultimate networked appliance, a portal to everything, and it fits in your hand.

The pPod by contrast promises to put you in the middle of the machine. Literally, physically. You can sit inside, play movies, listen to music, and watch the world outside via cameras positioned on the pPod's four vertical surfaces. And let me emphasize that the world, from a pPod perspective, is outside. The device sits on four casters, so I guess if you want to see new places, you can move it (though it doesn't look like you would be able to navigate it from within). (The images below are from the SuttonBeresCuller site).

When MI6 and I visited Lawrimore Project Thursday night last, the pPod was resident in the gallery's video space and was playing 60s lounge music as the three video screens featured animation of a dancing pPod. Scott Lawrimore showed us where the pPod's cameras are mounted; the feed to the video screens can be switched to show what the cameras can pick up. Although the window is transparent from the outside looking in, apparently, from what Scott told us, from the inside, it acts as a mirror. (The gallery is otherwise filled with newer work by SuttonBeresCuller; a great review by Jen Graves will make you want to go see the show for the new work, as much as to experience the pPod.)

Come to think of it, the iPhone's single camera is also quietly embedded, almost flush with the smooth surface of the device. Here is a shot of the back sides of an iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS. Notice not only the cameras, but how the laminate surface of these later-model iPhones mimic the smooth surface of the pPod. (This image is by gillyberlin and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.)

Good Luck, Assholes (at the Frye)

Twirl, don't promenade, to the Frye to see "The Old, Weird America: Folk Themes in Contemporary Art," a traveling exhibit organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

The show is a hodgepodge, which means you can slip right past the works that don't pull you in, and focus on the gravity wells of genius that do.

Not to be missed, for my money:

• The show's signature piece, a kinetic sculpture by Cynthia Norton entitled "Dancing Squared." Here's how the catalogue describes the facts about it: "Aluminum, hardware, electric motors, dresses, wire. 90 x 180 x 180 inches." But you have to see this in motion. It is as good as you can imagine it from a still or video.

• Greta Pratt's "Nineteen Lincolns," an affecting series of portraits of contemporary Lincoln impersonators. Pratt photographs each to reveal his individuality, even as the similarity of costumes, postures and beards throughout the series asserts a common allegiance to an American ideal of the genuine. Lincoln Number Three has the uncannily sorrowful aspect one imagines the actual President might not wish to have revealed in his own portraits, but did. You can see images of all of the Lincoln work at Gretta Pratt's site, linked to above, but the prints are worth seeing at scale and arranged in a grid on a large wall at the Frye.

• Eric Beltz's graphite drawing, "Good Luck, Assholes: Thomas Jefferson's Vision of Death," at once hilarious and sublime. All elements of Beltz's vocabulary are fully realized in this piece: detailed rendering of period architecture; expert, currency-worthy founding father portraiture; subversion of the cursive font of authority; selective use and repetition of iconic motifs; and more I can put my finger on (the elements work together and yet are discrete) but can't quite explain.

Light Show at Site for Future Capitol Hill Sound Transit Light Rail Station

MI6 and I walked north on Broadway last night and came across an art installation behind the chain link fence at the corner of East Denny. This is part of the construction site for the future Sound Transit light rail station for Capitol Hill.

Thanks to a post on the Capitol Hill Seattle blog, I learned that the field is the work of Don Corson, and that the installation has been sponsored by Sound Transit.

Apparently, the rods are made of fiberglass. In an interview within a brief, smartly edited video by David Albright, Corson explains that the manufacturer of the rods mistakenly shipped 4-foot-long rods, whereas the piece, called "Oscillating Fields," was designed to have 8-foot-long rods. But the show is going on with the rods in place, in time for Halloween.