James Turrell's Annus Mirabilis

This is James Turrell’s big year! Starting this spring, a trilogy of Turrell retrospectives will appear across the country-- at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, Los Angeles’s LACMA, and Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In addition, there have been recent gallery shows and visits planned to the Roden Crater project. And, as a lagniappe, there’s a pictorially splashy piece on the numerous “sky spaces” Turrell has constructed for private patrons in the May 12 issue of the New York Times Style magazine.   On the festive occasion of all the above, I will reprint in a subsequent post a long article I wrote after seeing James Turrell’s 1980-81 exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York-- his first and only New York museum exhibition before the forthcoming Guggenheim show (though there have been many elsewhere). My article appeared in the May 1981 issue of Art in America magazine. The initial sections were devoted to the art-political context-- both in California and the broader art world-- in which Turrell’s work first appeared. The last sections treated the installations exhibited at the Whitney.

MOMA the Destroyer?

The former American Folk Art Museum building. New York City 1997-2001, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Photo Giles Ashford.

We're not talking about the latest bizarre horror movie. The villain is New York's own Museum of Modern Art and its proposed plan to raze Tod Williams and Billie Tsien's 53rd Street building, a striking structure which formerly housed the American Folk Art Museum. The plan has provoked volleys of criticism from architects, preservationists, ordinary citizens, and serious architecture critics. (See Martin Filler's acerbic article in the May 23, 2013 issue of the New York Review of Books.) If MOMA goes ahead with the ill-advised destruction project, it would be committing cultural vandalism. And this horror would occur in real life-- not on the silver screen.

Perhaps responding to the protests, MOMA announced yesterday (May 9) that it would reconsider its plans. But as Robin Pogrebin reports in the New York Times, anonymous insiders say that the museum is still likely to go ahead with the destruction. We await MOMA's final decision and can only hope for the best.

Lisa Gherardini Visits the Moon

Left, Initial transfer. Right, Image with laser-communicated corrections.

On January 18, it was widely reported that NASA’s scientists had successfully beamed a picture of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a powerful spacecraft which has been orbiting the moon since 2009. NASA claimed that it was testing the technology of laser communications in deep space, and that its effective transfer of the image was a major advance for interplanetary spacecraft.

Thinking of the lone Mona Lisa, out there circling the moon, I imagine her reception in that alien region. Perhaps ET art historians are already on the case-- worrying over the image, analyzing the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic expression, debating the model’s true identity. Are they trying to decide whether it is in fact a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, rather than Isabella of Naples, or Caterina Sforza, or Cecilia Gallerani, or Isabella d’Este? Or are they wondering whether the image that dazzles and puzzles them is perhaps a self-portrait of the great Leonardo himself?

I’m curious about how these art-deprived ETs would react if, as a follow-up, instead of another single painting, we decided to send a truly comprehensive representation of our globe’s art works. If, for example, we were to send them, via digital images, the entire contents of the Louvre, or another major art museum. Would they be overwhelmed with admiration, stunned by our skill and aesthetic taste, and, longing to see the real thing, would they be inspired to immediately jump on the next space vehicle and become our first extra-mundane tourists?

But what if we were to send out art works that displayed the more dismal aspects of life on our planet. For many years, political artists here on earth have used projections as a type of powerful urban guerilla tactic. I’m thinking, for instance, of  Krzysztof Wodiczko, who since the 1980s has used ephemeral images, projected onto public buildings and monuments, as a means of highlighting social and political problems. Such projections could probably travel far into space via the new laser technology.

Krzysztof Wodiczko: Public Projection on Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., 1988

And perhaps it would even be useful to send S.O.S. messages about our political stalemates and social distresses to other worlds. How marvelous if someone out there, on the shoulder of Orion or in some black galaxy gazillions of miles away, looking down on our poor, tormented earth and perceiving our woes-- our perpetual wars, our unending international conflicts, our mindless culture of violence, our starving millions, our looming climate crises, our terrible inequalities of wealth, privilege and opportunity-- perhaps some stranger out there will know how to solve our seemingly insoluble problems, know better than we, caught up in our troubles, seem able to know for ourselves. 

From Dr. Johnson to Un Ballo in Maschera

I’ve always liked works that dare to blend disparate elements and/or styles. It’s remotely possible that my interest in “discordia concors” grows out of some irregular childhood experience, but I rather think it dates back to my years in grad school when I fell in love with Metaphysical poetry. Samuel Johnson’s famous description of those works (“the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”) was not meant kindly, but did capture a quality of the poetry. What Johnson failed to recognize was that, in the best of them, in the works, for example, of Donne, Marvell or Herbert, that violent yoking produced thrilling effects.

The danger, of course, is that a reckless heterogeneity, whether in poetry or prose, will result in an incoherent mess. But when the mix succeeds, it’s exciting. Take David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, a brilliant instance of “discordia concors.” Mitchell’s novel boldly combines six disparate narratives set in different historical periods, ranging from the nineteenth century to the post-apocalyptic future. The genre of each story is different, each has a unique voice, and each breaks off at a cliff-hanging point, only to be completed in reverse order in the novel’s second half. There are subtle links between tales-- a repeated name, a reference to a previous character. The novel’s ascending-descending structure is its major oddity, but that complicated structure is precisely what functions to unify the dissimilar elements.

 Recently, I saw David Alden’s surreal production of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera at the Metropolitan Opera. It was an eye-opening, if not entirely satisfactory, instance of operatic “discordia concors.” Alden describes the opera as a “bizarre combination of serious political material, high Italian melodrama based around the hackneyed stuff of marital infidelity, and an almost operetta-like lightness of being.” He thinks of it as “experimental and dislocated” and unlike Verdi’s other masterpieces.

The dislocations are built into the libretto. On the one hand, there's lyric romance involving a feckless, love-obsessed monarch, a guilty wife, a brazen fortune-teller and an irate cuckold. This story is awkwardly joined to an unrelated, long-simmering royal assassination plot. The tale’s sinister finale occurs not in deep darkness, but at a frivolous masked ball. And not only the story line is disjunctive. Verdi’s heterogeneous score is unsettled and unsettling. It combines haunting, grand-opera love-arias, duets and a superb quintet with stinging passages of coloratura mockery and frisky scenes of operetta-like farce.

In Alden’s production, Verdi’s musical discordances are underlined rather than glided over. They are made more salient by the production’s taut film noir ambience, its ambiguous and incongruous costumes, and a curious minimalist set-- the latter dominated by a huge reproduction of the Louvre's ceiling painting of Merry-Joseph Blondel’s The Fall of Icarus. All this “discordia” takes its toll. The night I saw the performance, much of the singing was good, some even splendid. Yet the emotional impact of Verdi’s magnificent music felt somewhat vitiated, as was the power of the opera’s tragic ending. At the end, I came away less than moved, though I was nevertheless delighted, amused, and pleased by Alden’s fresh approach.

Electioneering French Style: the Red, the Rose and the Black

I periodically like to take a ramble through the French on-line press. Lately the coverage seems to be all presidential election news all the time, which, since DSK was eliminated, can be almost as boring as the American Republican Primary campaign. Sometimes, though, an interesting item or two will pop up. Today I came across a story about candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, operating in full-throated electoral mode.

It seems that last Thursday, about 200 metal workers from a company called ArcelorMittal came to Paris to meet with the President. But instead of a welcome mat, they were greeted in front of his campaign headquarters by "an accueil musclé"-- i.e., they were blasted with tear gas. Outraged, the metal workers marched on to the Eiffel Tower, intending to post a banner identifying the tower's steel as from their own region. You'd imagine that a sensitive candidate might want to apologize for such an ugly incident. But when questioned about it by a TV journalist, Sarkozy was his typically irascible and vulgar self. He responded (this is a loose translation): "What do you want me to say-- you think I give a damn?" He followed this remark by turning on the journalist, calling him a "couillon," and then attempting to make a lame joke about it. In the French Le Huffington Post article at this link, you can see a video of the exchange. Note the astonished looks of those around the reporter.

Meanwhile today, elsewhere in Paris, there was a large, cheery march from the Place de la Nation to the Bastille in support of the Front de Gauche party and their candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Melenchon and backers of the Front de Gauche on their way to the Bastille/photo Bastien Hugues sur Twitter

The crowd-- estimated at about 100,000-- carried various quotable banners. The one I liked best: "Mettez à la mode la couleur rouge!" I suppose Mélenchon has as much chance of becoming President of France as Ron Paul has of winning the Republican nod. But Mélenchon's campaign has lately been gaining a surprising amount of enthusiasm. If he gets the approximately 10 per cent of the vote that pollsters consider likely, he could make a serious dent in the turnout for the Socialist party candidate, François Hollande. Consequently, there's been a bit of snarky chatter in the media about the purposes of the Front de Gauche campaign. Cynics ask: Is Mélenchon, a radical leftist, actually a "coqueluche" of the arch-conservative Sarkozy?

Hubert and Jan van Eyck: Extremely Close and Incredibly Beautiful

Thanks to a grant from the Getty Foundation, anyone can now examine in stunning detail-- up close and at astonishing magnification-- the splendid Ghent Altarpiece. The high-definition digital images of Hubert and Jan van Eyck's masterpiece, The Mystic Lamb (1432), have been made freely available at a newly established interactive website.

As reported by Melissa Abraham (February 24, 2012, getty.edu), the Ghent Altarpiece recently underwent emergency conservation at the Villa Chapel in St. Bavo's Cathedral, Ghent, Belgium. At that time, the polyptych was removed from its glass-enclosed setting and dismantled, an unusual event which provided an extraordinary opportunity for scholars to study and document the altarpiece and for professional photographers to produce high-resolution images of the work's individual panels. Subsequently, the photographs were stitched together to create the digital images now available on the interactive website. That site is said to contain 100 billion pixels.

Further details about the images, the team who developed the website, and the decision to use an open-source approach are available in Abraham's report as well as at the site itself.

Super-Vapid Tuesday

The New York Times today (the morning after so-called "Super Tuesday") had an excellent editorial on the depressing Republican primary and the obnoxious positions taken by the candidates. Here are a few excerpts:

"Long before Super Tuesday, the Republican Party had cemented itself on the distant right of American politics, with a primary campaign that has been relentlessly nasty, divisive and vapid.... This country has serious economic problems and profound national security challenges. But the Republican candidates are so deep in the trenches of cultural and religious warfare that they aren’t offering any solutions....There are differences [between Romney and Santorum]. Mr. Santorum is usually more extreme in his statements than Mr. Romney, especially in his intolerance of gay and lesbian Americans and his belief that religion — his religion — should define policy and politics. Mr. Santorum’s remark about wanting to vomit when he reread John F. Kennedy’s remarkable speech in 1960 about the separation of church and state is one of the lowest points of modern-day electoral politics....
Mr. Romney has been slightly more temperate. But, in his desperation to prove himself to the ultraright, he has joined in the attacks on same-sex marriage, abortion and even birth control. He has never called Mr. Santorum on his more bigoted rants. Neither politician is offering hard-hit American workers anything beyond long discredited trickle-down economics, more tax cuts for the rich, a weakening of the social safety net and more of the deregulation that nearly crashed the system in 2008."

The editorial goes on to berate the candidates for their mindless and vicious attacks on Obama and for their potentially explosive position on Israel and Iran:

"There is also no space between Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum in the way they distort reality to attack Mr. Obama for everything he says, no matter how sensible, and oppose everything he wants, no matter how necessary.... They also have peddled the canard that the president is weak on foreign policy. Mr. Romney on Tuesday called President Obama 'America’s most feckless president since Carter.' Never mind that Mr. Obama ordered the successful raid to kill Osama bin Laden and has pummeled Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders, all without the Republicans’ noxious dead-or-alive swagger. Now, for the sake of scoring political points, Mr. Romney, Mr. Santorum and Newt Gingrich, who is hanging on only thanks to one backer’s millions, seem determined to push Israel toward a reckless attack on Iran."

The entire editorial should be widely read. One wonders how relatively sane Republicans (are there any left?) have been responding to this despicable primary campaign. If such temperate right-wingers do still exist, perhaps they will demonstrate their sanity at the ballot box in November.