Color Theory Update

I recently updated my Color Theory Index to include another artist focusing on color theory.

Via Dear Ada I found artist Sarah Charlesworth's Concrete Color series, a beautiful set of photographs with color theory as their subject matter. Googling the title of each piece could provide a seminar's worth of color theory. For example, Googling "Ostwald Triangle" led me to ColorSystem.com's amazing page about German chemist and color theorist Wilhelm Ostwald.

Egypt on Route 66

A nugget from KPCC's local news coverage that I thought might supplement our vast knowledge of ancient Egyptian art: Egyptian artifacts exhibit makes exclusive appearance in Southland by Steven Cuevas.

Just FYI, I believe the transcript of the interview between Cuevas and Eva Kirsch, the curator responsible for the exhibit at the Robert V. Fullerton Art Museum at Cal State San Bernardino, got confused with the material of which the beads in the world's oldest dress are made. It's our old friend faience, like the famous blue hippo, not "ionz."

Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party at The Brooklyn Museum

About thirteen years ago I was working on my senior thesis or something and spent a lot of time thinking about feminist visual art. Didn't really understand anything. Just spent a lot of time thinking about it. One piece that I read about but didn't really get was The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago. I finally had the chance to see The Dinner Party during my trip to The Brooklyn Museum to see Gilbert & George. In fact, on my way out of Gilbert & George I saw a sign that said something about Judy Chicago and The Dinner Party with an arrow pointing down a hallway and I thought, "Not THAT Judy Chicago. Not THAT Dinner Party." And I just had to follow the arrow.

The Brooklyn Museum's website has a VERY thorough section on The Dinner Party including a virtual tour of each place setting with quite possibly more information than you would EVER want to know about each and every one. Also, perhaps more directly relevant to our endeavor, it includes readable reproductions of the Heritage Panels segment of the The Dinner Party, some of which describe female artists from a number of historical periods.

I suspect we'll get to feminist art eventually in Stokstad's Art History. And maybe we can take some time then to try to wrap our collective brains around The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago.

TxtStyles/Fashioning Identity & Timbuktu to Tibet: Rugs and Textiles of the Hajji Babas

If you'd like to read my review of the TxtStyles/Fashioning Identity exhibit at the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian through December 28, 2008, and Timbuktu to Tibet: Rugs and Textiles of the Hajji Babas at the Textile Museum through March 8, 2009, please click here.

Gilbert & George at the Brooklyn Museum

One highlight of my east coast tour was a visit to the Brooklyn Museum expressly to see the Gilbert & George exhibit.

Jeffrey Yamaguchi of 52 Projects has some great pictures from Gilbert & George at the Brooklyn Museum. Additionally, on the Brooklyn Museum's website there is a video of Tim Marlow interviewing Gilbert & George at Target First Saturday on October 4, 2008. There is also a video of a conversation with the artists Gilbert & George and Brooklyn Museum Director Arnold L. Lehman at the Members Preview and Reception held on October 2, 2008.

To the extent I knew anything about Gilbert & George before walking into this exhibit, I thought of them as well-dressed performance artists. They call themselves living sculptures. In the center of the first room of the exhibition display cases house ephemera from their early, what I'll call performance pieces. At the beginning and in the middle of the exhibition there are videos of their singing sculptures and other performances. So to some extent, they are performance artists.

Gilbert & George designed the installation at the Brooklyn Museum, responding to the architectural layout of the galleries. The presentation in not chronological. Often their series are designed around the space that they will be first exhibited. Here the series are, for the most part, not shown together. So what is the governing principle behind the design of the installation? While I navigated the first room, before I had even read that the artists had designed the installation, I suspected that the design was intended to guide the viewer around in a very specific pattern. Around the outside walls was the series The Nature of Our Looking. Around the interior walls were a number of postcard collages. In the center was a circle of display cases. The labels on the ephemera in the display cases were not in standard museum order - left to right, all facing the same side of the case, as close to the object it described as possible, as close to the edge of the case as possible. Instead the arrangement of the labels and the narrative of the labels - there was always a clear starting point - forced the viewer to move around the cases is a specific direction which varied for each case. Once I recognized this, I started to wonder if the objects in the case were the art at all, or if the dance of viewer around the cases was the art. In their interview with Tim Marlow they confirmed my suspicions. In designing the installation they were concerned with how the viewer comes into the room and how they move through. They intended to guide the viewer through.

Having been exposed to Andy Warhol's work in film school, I questioned whether their manifesto-like declarations about art, that art should be democratic, have subject matter, meaning, have a moral character and the idea of "Art for All," are sincere. To illustrate their idea of Art for All, they described coming into a gallery the day after their exhibition opened only to find the gallery owner looking quite unwell. When asked why the long face he replied that the woman who comes to clean the gallery loved their exhibition.

Can two people who describe themselves not as a collaboration, but as one artist be serious? Can an artist who describes everything they do as sculpture when nothing they do fits within the traditional definition of sculpture be anything but ironic? When asked at the Members Preview and Reception held on October 2, 2008, whether they were influenced by Andy Warhol they responded,

Andy Warhol and Pop Art in general was a celebration of consumerism. We want to be a celebration of humanism.

They're images appear in almost every piece of photographic work. But they insist that the works are not self-portraits. Rather, to paraphrase their interview with Tim Marlow, they are visual letters to the viewer - Gilbert & George speaking to the viewer. They are the subject of all of their thoughts. They take what is in their brains and show it on the wall.

We have no plan when we go to the studio in the morning. However we are that day, that is how the pictures will be. Ours are all coming from the inside. We're always looking for the moral dimension of the subject matter. It has to have a human moral issue.

They strive for human, moral subject matter in response to the abstraction that was prevalent in the art world when they began in 1968 and is still going strong today. Like my friend Mary, they're not into Rothko, what Mary calls my stripes.

But Gilbert & George are not without formal structures. Their largest, both figuratively and literally, contribution to the art world is multiple series of large scale photographic works. The vast majority of their works consist of photographs in thin black frames tiled next to other photographs in thin black frames. This results in the appearance of a black grid. Gilbert & George explain this structure as purely the result of their means of production. They started in a small studio with no money. The only way they could make larger works was to make a big picture out of small fragments. Also that was the only way they could transport such large works. But once the grid came into being it came to control the composition slightly.

That slight discipline gives us a good way to make a controlled design.

Their works are almost uniformly based on symmetry and reflections. When they say the grid came to control the composition slightly, I feel they must be making a radical understatement. Between the ability to print multiple images inherent in the photographic or computer graphic media and the repetitive structure of the grid, their pictures have very quilt-like qualities.

I saw Gilbert & George after I saw the Panza Collection at the Hirshhorn Museum. Both address the idea of collecting the uncollectable. In the first room of the Gilbert & George exhibit the display cases full of ephemera from their early performance work reminded me of Hamish Fulton's works in the Panza Collection. Hamish Fulton makes treks through rural spaces. These walks are the art. The photographs with printed texts are artifacts of the walks. Similarly, the invitation to Gilbert & George's dinner is not the art. The dinner is the art. But what we have left after the dinner is this collection of invitations and menus. How is that any less abstract than Frank Stella's stripes? How is that any more accessible to all?

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Supplemental Reading

My friend Jennifer, who's a professor of comparative literature and specializes in ancient Greek stuff, recommended the following books to supplement our studies of art stuff:

• The Tomb of Agamemnon (Wonders of the World) by Cathy Gere
  
• Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration by Georges Didi-Huberman and Jane Marie Todd

The Panza Collection at the Hirshhorn Museum

On a last minute whim I stopped by my favorite museum on The Mall in Washington, D.C., The Hirshhorn Museum. Lucky I did because the current exhibit, The Panza Collection, is stunning. As usual, the exhibit is free, and it runs through January 11, 2009.

In The Panza Collection exhibit the Hirshhorn displays thrity-nine examples of Conceptual, Minimal, Light and Space, and Environmental art which the museum recently acquired from Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. The Hirshhorn has put together a PDF checklist of all the works. The pieces that most moved me were the Conceptual works which favored ideas over the creation of unique objects. In other words, pieces that really push the viewer to question the very idea of art.

For example, Hamish Fulton makes treks through rural spaces. These walks are the art. The photographs with printed texts are artifacts of the walks. I got into a conversation with a super-awesome interpretive guide about this. If I went on a walk with Hamish Fulton, would I be observing art? Arguably the art is his subjective perception of the walk, so I could observe him subjectively perceiving, but is that any closer than viewing a picture he takes on the same walk and labels? Another Fulton piece in the collection is Moonrise Kent England 30 September 1985. Basically, he drew a little circle on a piece of paper and the "art" is Fulton's permission to reproduce that however the owner chooses. The Hirshhorn decided to use paint and vinyl lettering on an entire wall.

Fulton's Moonrise Kent England 30 September 1985 is in the same conceptual vein as Lawrence Weiner's works. According to the brochure,

Lawrence Weiner's artwork has consisted solely of what he calls "statements": words, clauses, and phrases that may be realized in any format (written or spoken), in any context, by anyone--or not at all.

When it acquired A rubber ball thrown on the sea, Cat. No. 146, 1969, from Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo The Hirshhorn received a card on which Lawrence Weiner granted the bearer permission to reproduce the words, "A rubber ball thrown on the sea" however they chose. Again, my super-awesome Interpretive Guide and I discussed the intellectual property rights issues surrounding works like this.

A rubber ball thrown on the sea

Did I just steal a piece of art from The Hirshhorn? You can ask Lawrence Weiner December 11th at 7 p.m. in the Hirshhorn's Ring Auditorium.

Douglas Huebler typed letters explaining the process and that the letter was part of "the form of the art." In the letter accompanying Duration Piece #12 Venice, California--Plum Island (Newbury Port), Massachusetts, 1969, Huebler claimed to have transferred sand from a beach in Venice, California, to a beach in Plum Island, Massachusetts, and vice versa. Moreover, he would do so every ten years, though the purchaser of the artwork is financially responsible for all future sand transfers. The letter goes with a picture of darker sand on lighter sand and a picture of lighter sand on darker sand. This in and of itself is amusing. And when I read the letter, I fully believed that Huebler had been to both of those places and transferred the sand just as his letter explained. Then I read the brochure,

Already well-regarded as a sculptor by 1968, Douglas Huebler rejected three-dimensional object-making and began to create pieces comprising snapshots that "picture" the commonplace, often absurd, actions described in the accompanying captions. His work suggests how language can override photography's supposed ability to capture reality and thus ultimately determine our understanding of both events and the images that represent them.

So is transferring sand from a beach in California to a beach in Massachusetts "absurd"? Was I totally gullible to believe the letter? Was the sand in the picture even at a beach? Were Dario Robleto's collections of macabre ephemera, such as charred tape recordings of rare birds, in Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego which I talked about previously, real? Is anything depicted in art "real"? Does it matter? Does realness make art any more or less genuine?

I plan to recreate Jan Dibbets' Flood Tide, 1969, a series of photographs of the tide washing away a mark in sand, at Hilton Head on Thanksgiving.

Continuing my obsession with museum signage, the signage in The Panza Collection was rather large, yellow vinyl letters on the wall. The first few pieces in the exhibit consist of vinyl letters on the wall. This confuses the art and the signage. This was at the request of Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. In fact, he actually requested that the letters be even bigger. Curator Evelyn Hankins wanted to use traditional signage: black lettering on white cards attached to the wall and eventually compromised by reducing the size of the vinyl lettering.

If someone could do me a huge favor and go to the Gallery Talk on Friday, January 9th at 12:30 p.m. when Curator Evelyn Hankins will discuss the idea of collecting the uncollectible with Curatorial Research Associate Ryan Hill, I would greatly appreciate a full transcription. Just head to the Hirshhorn Museum Information Desk at 12:30 p.m., January 9th. Thank you!

P.S. The picture at the top of this post is one I took of the brochure cover which depicts Robert Barry's Steel Disc Suspended 1/8 in. Above Floor, 1967.

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