Interface
I’m still working through thoughts about the relationship between visual art and narrative, but I want to record some observations about the present and future of interfaces, music, and paintings occasioned by Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings (now in its second edition) and an Edward Hopper retrospective at the National Gallery of Art. Oddly enough, both involve music—and unusual interfaces. But the central concerns of these two exhibitions are different, as is the web presence used to market them. I’ve written briefly about Eno before, but the Hopper thing is relatively new to me.
To begin, Brian Eno is alive. He can speak for himself, and does so on YouTube, in galleries, and even in Second Life. Hopper’s dead. He won’t be getting any more paychecks from his work. Eno’s monetization scheme is pretty traditional, i.e. limited editions:
My copy came from the first edition (just barely, from the numbers on the case). The normal concept of a “limited” edition is that the price is driven by scarcity—but Eno does not use any sort of DRM to keep you from installing the software on multiple computers. The success of the concept (into a second edition) allows him to improve or alter the software for newer machines, to expand the book (I can’t tell for sure, but the Amazon page suggests that the second edition is better than the first) and generally to surpass the original. Not to mention the fact that the software is meant to generate a nearly unlimited number of original works of art (hence the title, of course). Why the heck is the software’s package attached to the ploy of a “limited” edition? Seems absolutely the conceptual opposite of the package’s contents.
Bone Lens
Georgia O'Keefe, Pelvis I (Pelvis with Blue), 1944, oil on canvas, 36" x 30"I see so many things, a primitive ring,
a nest with a fallen-out bottom,
a white rubber band snapped into blue.
But mostly it's real memory
and the doctor holding up my x-ray
to the screen of light, a mini drive-in.
. . .
Denise Duhamel, Reminded of my Biological Clock -- While Looking at Georgia O'Keefe's Pelvis One
Last week we went to go see Georgia O’Keefe: Circling around Abstraction at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts. It was disappointing, given that there were only 42 or so works displayed and they charged a premium for entry. Looking at the video online from the same show at the Norton Museum, it seems as if there were a lot of works missing. I didn’t buy the monograph, but I had wondered why there even was a monograph given the less than earth-shattering premiseof the unremarkable collection. The really interesting thing to me isn't simply that O'Keefe "circled" abstraction, but that she steadfastly refused to land. The primary reason usually given is that she was horrified by the interpretations attached to her abstract works by critics.
But the show made me think just the same. One of the placards referred to the pelvis series as an exploration of the “bone lens.” This phrase has stuck in my head for several days now. A quote purported to be from a 1944 exhibition catalog tends to support this quirky interpretation of the pelvic bone paintings:
Spam Gate
One thing that always bothers me about the weekend is being forced to watch Fox to get local coverage. However, yesterday evening there was an interesting story about a local “meat sculptor” who entertains herself during the cold weather by making spam candles, hot-dog necklaces and such. I looked at the Fox web site to see if there was any mention of the story or web links and found that they do not update the site on weekends. So I googled around, and found the wonderful sculpture displayed above (completely unrelated to the story).
The spam sculpture of Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate warmed my heart. It’s from 2005, the same year I presented a paper on the legal and social controversies surrounding public photography of this sculpture at the Sweetland writing conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The paper is supposed to be included in a forthcoming anthology. I wish I had known of this fabulous sculpture then; I might have included it in my presentation.
Haas (plural)
Absolute New York, mural by Richard HaasI became strangely obsessed with Chocolate Haas by Sander Plug. It seemed that for a day at least, everywhere I turned there was a Haas of some variant or another. On the CBS evening news, Richard Haass suggested that GW has to tone down his rhetoric about Iran now that there is no evidence of a nuclear conspiracy. Trying to figure out who he was, I stumbled on Richard Haas, a wonderful painter of trompe-l'œil works on the sides of buildings. An odd confluence, triggered by a melting chocolate bunny. Each in its own way involves a magic trick.
I suppose what really drew me into the film was the emotional nature of what is essentially a good science project for a ten-year-old boy. The beauty of the collapse leaves you feeling oddly guilty that you find it aesthetically pleasing. Ruins have that sort of pleasure: the scars of misfortune find a sort of resonance to people constantly under assault from the new. There’s a question of course, “what would happen if,” that seems to underwrite such experiments with ruin. In that sense, the piece seems to be as much an experiment as a beautiful object. The remix with a death metal soundtrack recasts it in a different adolescent milieu.
The beauty is strictly in the facade; underneath the bunny is hollow. It’s a moving trompe-l'œil, disappearing in moments before our eyes. But perhaps it owes its impact to a visual variant of the Haas effect—the first sense impression persists, even as the contradictory impressions flood across the visual field.
Dirty Pictures
We went to go see the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Walker last Tuesday; seeing things in person often gives you a different slant or provokes questions that you hadn’t expected. Exposure to Kahlo’s paintings has been pretty universal for many years now, to the point where my Spanish instructor in Little Rock absolutely forbade her students from presenting on that topic. I’ve spent more time researching and looking at Diego Rivera myself, largely due to my fascination with monumental works. Rivera’s choice of fresco as his primary medium was certainly a political one; I’d never really thought about Kahlo’s materials before.
While there was one fascinating fresco fragment chipped from a wall, most of her paintings were on masonite, with a few on tin or sheet metal. The surface was absolutely flat, with little in the way of texture or brushwork. The pigments were largely earthtone, and there was a certain flavor of dirt in the work, perhaps amplified by the natural browns of the masonite. I love dirt. But why masonite? I kept finding myself thinking about that—and I began to wonder just how long masonite had been available as a material. I found the answer in a corporate history. It was invented in 1924, and attained broad distribution in the 1930s. For Kahlo, it would have been a brand new material. But perhaps the most compelling factor, then as now, would be simply that it was cheap.
