Drive-By Sightings: Fine Art Ads on NYC Taxis

New York taxis are known for lots of things, most of them bad. Thanks to a new advertising campaign, 500 Big Apple taxis will be known for something great—great art. Works by artists Chuck Close and Kehinde Wiley will grace the tops of 500 cabs for the rest of the month of January as part of an advertising campaign hoping to bring art to people in the streets. Their works will take up more than $100,000 worth of advertising space as part of a gift to the city. The next question will be whether pedestrians and fellow motorists will take note of these drive-by sightings or if the ads will blend into the great blur of life in the big city. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Drive-By Sightings."

Seeds of Destruction: Dustup at the Tate Modern

Art is good for the soul, but sometimes it can be bad for your health. Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds installation at the Tate Modern in London aroused curiosity before it began affecting visitors’ respiratory systems with the porcelain dust it threw off. Sadly, this is just the latest hazardous episode in the nine-year history of the Tate Modern’s “The Unilever Series” program of featuring installation art by the hottest contemporary artists. But are these blockbuster shows pushing the envelope beyond the limits of public safety? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Seeds of Destruction."

In the Wilderness: The Unknown Art of James Magee

“What happens if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it?” Willard Spiegelman asks intriguingly in a recent article in The Wall Street Journal. “What happens if a man spends 30 years building an architectural-spiritual monument in the west Texas desert, which few people have seen and probably very few will ever see?” Who Spiegelman is talking about is James Magee, a reclusive sculptor whom another critic believes may be "America's greatest living unknown artist," a dubious and unwelcome title for most. What Spiegelman is talking about is The Hill (shown above), a massive work of art set in the arid desert 90 minutes outside of El Paso, Texas, that Magee has been working on for 30 years. Magee’s reclusive days may be over with a new exhibition of his work and resulting media attention. Will success spoil the rock sculptor? It seems unlikely for this artist who at the age of 64 now wanders into the mainstream from the wilderness—a prophet of individual art professing a new gospel to the commercialized art industry that has no idea who he is or what to make of him. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "In the Wilderness."

Close Examination: A Chuck Close Portrait on Film

“Chucky Fat Face,” artist Chuck Close admits to being called by fellow artist Richard Serra during their graduate school days together at Yale early on in the film Chuck Close, Marion Cajori’s lauded documentary now available on DVD for the first time from New Video. In Cajori’s film, we see Close full face—both while painting one of his signature self-portraits and through the eyes of his fellow artists and his family. It is this combination of intimate close examination and wide-angle perspective that makes Chuck Close not only an unforgettable study of an individual artist, but also a thought-provoking examination of twentieth-century art and how modern artists mentally approach their art. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Close Examination."

[Many thanks to New Video for providing me with a review copy of Chuck Close.]

Fallen Hopes

I remember standing under Alexander Calder’s gigantic stabile Eagle (above, from 1971) when the PMA installed it at the top of the “Rocky Steps” as part of the city’s push to get a Calder museum for Philadelphia as part of the “Museum Mile” dream to include the PMA, the PAFA, the Rodin Museum, and the eventually to be moved Barnes Foundation Museum. I remember looking down and seeing the optic orange paint chips scattered everywhere as evidence of just how much difficulty the installers had moving the gentle giant. Born July 22, 1898, Calder’s known better for his lighthearted mobile structures that dance in mid-air on wind currents. I never forget to look up at Calder’s Ghost high above the great staircase of the PMA. Although Calder’s stabiles seem whimsical, they’re just as monumentally crushing as the sculptures of Richard Serra, although I don’t know of anyone being hurt or killed by a Calder. Just because Calder’s works don’t seem to threaten you like Serra’s do, doesn’t make them less dangerous. For Philadelphia’s dream of a “Museum Mile,” the dream of a Calder Museum has been crushed time and again over the last 9 years.

Today, where the Calder Museum might have been on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, a small park full of smaller Calder stabiles rests like a kind of graveyard. Many of these smaller stabiles wear the funereal black of Calder’s Man (above, from 1967) rather than the happy optic orange of so many other stabiles. Calder’s family’s association with the City of Brotherly Love goes back generations—from his grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, who came to Philadelphia from Scotland in 1868, to his father, Alexander Stirling Calder. Sculptures by the Calders appear all over Philadelphia. Between the Peales, the Wyeths, and the Calders, Philadelphia-area art has always been a family affair. Unfortunately, local government just couldn’t put together the proper package to sway the current generation of Calders to take that final step that would have made the museum a reality.

Hope lives for the Calder Museum. The very nature of Calder’s work always gives new collections a chance. Calder’s Mountains and Clouds (above, from 1976), located in the Hart Senate Office Building, actually found its home after Calder’s death. Calder suffered a fatal heart attack right after finalizing plans for the sculpture in 1976. Six years later, the sculpture, a unique blend of mobile and stabile, appeared during the building’s own unveiling. Because Calder’s art is more about ideas than execution, versions of his work can be created just as well posthumously as during his lifetime. The idea of a museum of Calder’s greatest ideas in the city his family called home for over a century may see the light of day yet.

There’s Nothing Like a Dame

Although she’s compared most often to her friend, contemporary, and fellow British sculptor Henry Moore, Dame Barbara Hepworth carved out her own niche in the world of modernist sculpture, rising to an elite, international stature few other women sculptors reached in the twentieth century. Born January 10, 1903, Hepworth easily drew comparisons with Moore in works such as Mother and Child (above, from 1934), which reduces the human form to its essential elements and allows the eye and mind to penetrate the work through the openings so closely identified with Moore’s sculptures. Along with Louise Nevelson and Louise Bourgeois, Dame Barbara helped forge a new acceptance of women sculptors in modern art.

When Dag Hammarskjold, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, died tragically in a plane crash in 1961, the U.N. commissioned Hepworth to create a memorial. Single Form (above, from 1962-1963) still stands outside the United Nations Building in New York City as an simple, austere tribute to Hammarskjold’s spirit. The openness of the man himself appears in the opening of the cape-like structure, which seems almost inviting in its desire to envelop you. Much public abstract sculpture seems more off-putting than inviting (think Richard Serra), but Hepworth paradoxically brings a softness to these hard structures. Usually, “softness” serves as code for “female” and, hence, “not as good as a man could do,” but in Hepworth’s case, her deft touch often conveys something very apt and beautiful in that appropriateness. Hepworth married the sculptor John Skeaping and later the painter Ben Nicholson, showing that she could more than hold her own in the world of male artists.

I find Hepworth’s Construction (Crucifixion)—Homage to Mondrian (above, from 1966) to be her most unique work. The colors pay homage to the works of Piet Mondrian, but Hepworth does more than honor that artist’s works. The red symbolizes the sun, while the white stands for the moon. The yellow circle stands for the head of Christ and, perhaps, a halo. As the description near the sculpture says, “The red, white and yellow colorings form a pattern evocative of pain, purity and deity.” Hepworth’s open framework not only suggests the crosses of Christ and the two thieves, but also creates a network through which time and space can flow. The two dimensionality of painted crucifixions gives way to the veracity of three-dimensional pain. Through her unique style, Hepworth brings a freshness to old forms and revitalizes the religious content. Sadly, Hepworth died horribly in a fire in 1975 as she was battling cancer. The Barbara Hepworth Museum carries on her memory today, which serves as an inspiration not only to women artists but also to those who struggle to maintain their faith in this modern world.

Painting Impossibilities

“Mr. Marden may have been able to evade Modernism’s breakthrough requirement because he made his entrance at a time when painting as a whole had supposedly ground to a halt,” wrote Roberta Smith of Brice Marden in her New York Times review of Marden’s 2006 MOMA retrospective. “This was the late 1960’s, when painting was being forced through the eye of the Minimal-Conceptual needle and proving a trifle bulky and balky. It was having a near-death experience.” Marden, born October 15, 1938, survived that near-death experience by painting works such as The Dylan Painting (above, from 1966), an homage to the protean musician Bob Dylan as well as a Jasper Johns-influenced attempt to paint the textures and nuances of life after painting had seemingly ceased to exist. Like Dylan, Marden saw the world around him and re-envisioned his art form, stripping away everything until he found a core upon which to build.

Marden’s philosophical approach owes much to his 1963 MFA from Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture. Like his classmates Richard Serra and Chuck Close, Marden struck out a new path in art, seeking out different cultural viewpoints, falling eventually under the influence of Chinese art and calligraphy. As Francoise Jullien argues in his The Impossible Nude: Chinese Art and Western Aesthetics (reviewed by me here), Chinese art concentrates on process, such as the endless workings of nature and the spirit of dao within nature, rather than on the individual figure and any idea of individual essence. Similarly, in works such as Post Calligraphic Drawing (above, from 1998), Marden removes the figure and revels in pure process, in this case pure line flowing and sometimes sputtering across a page in pure, egoless dao. To answer all questions of painting’s demise, Marden changes the topic of discussion from the individual to painting itself, bringing Eastern philosophy into play over the domineering Western aesthetic.

In recent years, Marden had brought a greater sense of color to his work, as in The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, Second Version (above, from 2000-2006). Marden continues his exploration of the calligraphic line as an egoless solution to painting’s ego-driven excesses while adding bold color to please the eye. Whereas Jackson Pollock’s personality flowed all over his Abstract Expressionist canvases, there is no Brice Marden shouting from these images. Marden comfortably stands behind his works rather than in front of them, achieving a connection with the viewer some thought impossible after the meteoric rise and flameout of painting in the late twentieth century.

A Crushing Bleakness

Peter Schjeldahl’s review in the June 11/18 issue of The New Yorker of the Richard Serra retrospective at the MOMA leaves me befuddled. Despite finding that “a bracing bleakness descends,” when he thinks of Serra’s art, Schjeldahl can’t help but feel that “he is not only our greatest sculptor but an artist whose subject is greatness befitting our time.” I have grave doubts and reservations about Serra’s greatness and how “befitting” he is to our time. Serra’s One Ton Prop (House of Cards), one of his many menacing, “could fall at any minute” sculptures, appears above.

I don’t think I can ever think of Serra and not think of the workers who have been killed or maimed by his works. I understand that the apparent danger of his works is the source of their bite, but that danger has been more real than apparent more than once. In 1971, a worker was crushed beneath a two-ton metal plate at the Walker Art Center and died. When a 16-ton piece fell on a worker in 1988 as he was helping dismantle it, that worker lost his leg. The inconvenience and, possibly, danger of Serra’s Tilted Arc (below), which had been installed in New York’s Federal Plaza, led to its removal in 1985. Defending Tilted Arc, Serra said at the time, “I do not think it is the function of art to be pleasing. Art is not democratic. It is not for the people.” Such anti-democratic, anti-populist remarks sound strange in the mouth of a man who welds together gigantic public sculpture. If public sculpture isn’t for the public, who IS it for?

Nonetheless, Schjeldahl responds that “[t]aking a childlike view may be the best way to relax with and, to the extent possible, enjoy Serra’s art. Don’t try to understand. Play.” I ask you, would you let your children “play” in these sculptures? (The MOMA actually tries to portray these works as jungle gyms on steroids in some of their advertising for the Serra show, placing wide-eyed toddlers in the belly of the metallic beast.) I appreciate Schjeldahl’s attempt to get the viewer to loosen up and enjoy the ride, but I wouldn’t let a child ride a rusty rollercoaster either. Issues of safety aside (and I’m overstressing those issues, I realize), I can’t understand how Schjeldahl sees intimacy and joy inside these sculptures. I’ve only been inside a Serra sculpture once and recall any lasting memories other than claustrophobia and forbidding coldness. Of course, those may be my own projections, but how inviting can rusting metal possibly be, regardless of how beautiful that patina becomes?

Schjeldahl sees Serra “conserv[ing] a battered modernist confidence in the collective genius of experts, a priestly class that confers meaning and direction on society,” believing that “[h]ardheaded secular culture can make no greater claim to spiritual efficacy than it does in this show, appropriately housed in the high church of the twentieth century that is MOMA.” Perhaps putting a positive spin on Serra’s anti-populist strain, Schjeldahl returns to his child metaphor and finds comfort in the idea that Serra’s sculpture represents the work of “sensationally competent adults” in the world. I just can’t buy into that brand of elitism distancing the daddy artist and infantilized viewer. If, as mentioned elsewhere, art is the new religion, I don’t see Serra’s denomination offering comfort or inspiration, but rather a distant and unresponsive god.

Perhaps it’s Serra’s strutting machismo that turns me off, although perhaps even Serra himself now finds the “cowboy” mentality distasteful, as evidenced by his drawing of an Abu Ghraib prisoner with the caption “STOP BUSH” at the 2006 Whitney Biennial. If Serra himself has changed or mellowed, his sculptures, despite the wear and rust of the years, continue to threaten and bully those who approach them, if not physically then most definitely spiritually.