Uncanny Unease: The Digital Eye at the Henry Art Gallery

The digital eye is an uncanny one, at least as it stands in the Henry Art Gallery’s exhibition The Digital Eye: Photographic Art in the Electronic Age. Although this is not true of every work of art included in the show, a substantial number of the images create the distinct sense of unease that defines uncanniness through not only the subject matter depicted, but more often through the overtly disjointed way the photographic imagery appears within the frame.

Simen Johan. Untitled #83 (from the And Nothing was to be Trusted series). 1999. Toned gelatin silver print. Collection of Marita Holdaway. © Simen Johan. Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.

The doll-like baby captured in Simen Johan’s Untitled #83 (from the And Nothing was to be Trusted series), with a menacing expression and a devil-like crown of black hair, would be disturbing independently. However, the image takes on a hyperreal quality through its heightened contrast: the fire burns with a radiating intensity that makes its innocent role atop a birthday cake lost in exchange for the threat of imminent danger. Likewise, the toddler becomes a ravenous, cyborg-like figure that belongs squarely in the uncanny valley, its eyes more robotic than human, its face shrouded in shadows, staring into nothingness.

Sigmund Freud presented one of the earliest and most longstanding definitions of the uncanny: a frightening instance that bears a relationship to the familiar. Occurrences such as prosthetic and severed limbs, ghosts and the dead, cyborgs, robots, doppelgängers and automatons fall within this understanding of the uncanny valley.  The arm that is a part of the human form seems so normal when attached to a person, yet becomes something else entirely when detached. The Addams Family took advantage of the latter’s affect through the “Thing” character, a natural fit within the show’s comically repulsive tropes.  Likewise, a prosthetic arm on an otherwise natural body can also be an jarring visual experience when unexpectedly taking the place of the skin and appendages we expect.

Still from The Addams Family. Image from addamsfamily.com

Many of the standard items included on the uncanny list appear throughout The Digital Eye.  Wendy McMurdo’s Helen, Backstage, Merlin Theater depicts a child and her doppelgänger posing as though there were a mirror between them that disappeared.  Herbert Bayer’s Lonely Metropolitan incorporates disembodied eyes and arms. Takeshi Murata’s amorphous form from a photographed film still in 001 and Jason Salavon’s Every Playboy Centerfold, The 1970s both create ghostlike-forms from their otherwise (relatively) ordinary subject matter.  When viewed in its entirety, The Digital Eye encompasses a fairly complete index of the uncanny valley.

Image: Wendy McMurdo. Helen, Backstage, Merlin Theatre (The Glance). 1995. Pigmented inkjet print. Courtesy of the artist. Image from henryart.org.

However, the more interesting relationship between the uncanny and this exhibition manifests more subtly, through the techniques employed within some of The Digital Eye’s most captivating works. Like many manmade objects, a particular fascination comes along with a photographic spectacle that is not immediately decipherable; the same way one stares from atop the Hoover Dam and attempts to fathom how mid-century technology enabled this sublime structure’s production, a similar curiosity arises when staring into a photograph that appears too composed to be real. Although the increasing prevalence of Photoshop may have dulled this effect in recent years, a fascinatingly unknown quality remains beneath the surface of a digital photograph that seems too composed to be true.

Julie Blackmon. Powerade (from the series Domestic Vacations). 2005. Pigmented inkjet print. Courtesy of the artist and G. Gibson Gallery, Seattle. Image from henryart.org

In The Digital Eye, Julie Blackmon’s pigmented inkjet print Powerade (From the series Domestic Vacations) makes this effect its focal point, integrating otherwise mundane imagery into a disturbing image that commands not so much a look as a blatant stare.  A mere glance at the photograph would suggest a boy playing in a yard. However, with any closer inspection, the red ball, the boy’s back and the blue bottle of Powerade ensnare the on-looking eye, naturally pulling its attention towards these objects existing on an overtly distinct plane from their surroundings.  Looking more closely reveals the “yard” as an estranged garden of sorts, more likely to house gnomes or the Fountain of Youth than the swing set and bicycle that one would expect to find in an ordinary boy’s world.  A sense of uncertainty pervades the entire image; what initially seemed familiar appears strange and hyperreal.  Despite the absence of an object of decided uncanniness, Powerade belongs in the valley as much as any disembodied appendage.

Although psychoanalytic theory has become largely dismissed as irreverent in contemporary society, the prominence of the uncanny within this photography show is not without significance: feared uncertainty prevails in our present moment. The indecisive politics, government upheavals too complex to read from afar, and an unpredictable economy only offer stability in their constant presence; every week similar stories surface in the news, but with conflicting endings. In this sense, The digital eye is also a reflective one, offering a mirror into a state of being less defined by its subject matter and more acutely understood through an inexplicable composition of elements that creates unease without resolution.

Every Signifier on the Las Vegas Strip: Fifteen Days, Endless Simulacra

This week, I begin a fifteen day trip to Las Vegas, Nevada, to seek and document art experiences within the notorious mecca of American popular culture. While turning a critical eye to Sin City and its cacophony is far from novel (someone else also happens to be doing a similar project at this exact moment), the motivation behind this trip is to document the art, architecture and visual culture of the current Las Vegas Strip more comprehensively, and with greater reflection, than is possible in the standard three-day visit.

Over the past several months, I have selected and booked fourteen of the most culturally significant casinos on the Las Vegas Strip,* based on their relationships to American history and culture. As I work my way through this experience, Peripheral Vision be turned over to the documentation process, returning to its regularly scheduled programming after April May 29.

Image from wildnatureimages.com

*The “official Las Vegas Strip” refers to the 4.2 mile portion of Las Vegas Blvd. South between Sahara Ave. and Russell Rd.

Media Control 2010: Up and Out, Chelsea Girls, and The Social Network

Christian Marclay’s Up and Out is a complex media product of its time.  The artist merges two separate, preexisting films into one to create the 1998 video: a soundless version of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (1966) plays in its entirety against the audio track of Brian De Palma’s 1981 Blow Out (a film partially inspired by Blowup). Each film’s narrative focuses on a crime scene; Blowup‘s incident involving a photographer is seen and not heard, while Blow Out‘s conflict centered around a sound effects technician is heard but not seen. Seeing the two together as Up and Out produces fleeting moments of synergy: chase scenes come together and then dissipate, investigations nearly overlap before going their separate ways, clues inexplicably translate across both storylines.  The mixing of the two scenarios controls the way the viewer perceives each, the product of this experience being the new film, Up and Out.

Excerpt from Up and Out, Christian Marclay (1998).

In order to maintain conscious awareness of both films, rather than  following one narrative of the preexisting films and ignoring the other, the viewer becomes keenly aware of his or her own media consumption process and how the two films control the experience of one another. Screened in Seattle in 2010 as part of the Henry Art Gallery’s exhibition Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture, Marclay’s video resonated particularly well in light of another local screening this year: Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, shown at the Seattle Art Museum this past summer. Warhol’s 1966 epic film presents two 16 mm reels projected side by side.  Largely without a coherent narrative, the films focus on short sequences of the artist’s cast of superstars engaged in extended dialogues and ordinary activities. In contrast to the experience of Up and Out, during which there is an opportunity for the viewer to focus selectively, Warhol exerts a particular control over the audience by only providing a soundtrack for only one reel at any given time and changing the reel that has sound intermittently throughout the screening.  When Warhol removes the sound from one film and turns it on for the other, the viewer’s attention naturally follows.

Excerpt from Chelsea Girls, Andy Warhol (1966).

Chelsea Girls and Up and Out appear in comparable formats but were created over thirty years apart; likewise, each is definitive of its respective time. Warhol’s control parallels media culture of the 1960s in the sense that mainstream content at that time was under the control of small number of large corporate entities (CBS, NBC ABC in television) and limited philosophies (Hollywood productions in film); the content creator was in control while the audience consumed the content as it was presented. In contrast, Marclay’s film represents a time of controlled media options; the audience can choose to listen to Blow Out instead of watching Blowup in the same way an individual can choose to read the scrolling news across the bottom of a CNN screen over listening to the newscaster.

In contrast, 2010 is a year well into the media culture of customized and user-generated content. Hulu and iTunes offer extensive selections of media options; through YouTube, the viewer can be the content creator and consumer.  In this regard, The Social Network offers a relevant, albeit obvious, glimpse into the present moment of media culture. The Mark Zuckerberg character performs the most overt control exerted in the film: the network of his creation facilitates his control over both physical and virtual relationships, as well as over the identity he constructs and projects as his Facebook persona. The Social Network is relevant to its audience as a story they helped to create through participation on Facebook, likewise demonstrating the audience’s own control over the film’s outcome.

Trailer for The Social Network (2010).

Although The Social Network is most representational of contemporary popular media culture, the media consumption process exposed by Marclay’s film better maintains its original relevance.  Film and television may have changed hands in terms of content creation and composition but ultimately, Marclay’s media-on-media control still rings true; seeing Up and Out still can influence how we watch the dueling reels of Chelsea Girls while also bringing out the various relationships between individuals and social media depicted in The Social Network. Up and Out demonstrates to its audience members how they experience the entertainment and culture at their disposal. In short, similar to the outcome of Blowup, Up and Out determines it not what we see but how we see what we see.

Obscuring the Wunderkammern: Figurehead in the Peabody Essex Museum

Installation artist Charles Sandison has coated the Peabody Essex Museum‘s East India Marine Hall in a dark, drifting sheath of digitized ship logs and journals .  Titled Figurehead, the enlarged strings of writings travel across the historical space’s walls, objects and visitors in disjointed paths that correspond with the weather of Salem, MA, via algorithms and data pulled from the internet. After adjusting to the visual overload of the installation in the same way one’s eyes adapt to a darkened room, the finer details began to emerge; the museum’s founding collection is also in this room, the paintings, figureheads and other artifacts absorbing the projected strands of text.  Physically overwritten by the ship captains’ perfected script and darkened to the point that many objects were unrecognizable, the East India Marine Society collection was transformed by Sandison’s installation into something distant and phantasmal that hovered above the otherwise conventional museum.

FreePort [no. 001]: Figurehead, Charles Sandison, East India Marine Hall, Peabody Essex Museum. Image from metrowestdailynews.com.

The Peabody Essex is the oldest museum in the United States currently in operation.  As its complicated name might suggest, the institution has gone through various mergings and additions since it opened to the public in 1825 as the East India Marine Society Hall. The namesake East India Marine Society of Salem, Massachusetts was a group of individuals who “…navigated the seas beyond the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn, as masters or supercargoes of vessels belong[ing] to to Salem,” as was outlined by the Society’s 1870 bylaws.  This group of sea travelers convened in order to share information about exploration of what they referred to as the East Indies; part of this mission included sharing the objects accumulated during their travels as the public collection that ultimately became the museum. It was though this effort that Society members created a particular asset: an authentic, American wunderkammern.

“East India Marine Hall and General View,” H.P. Ives, 1859-1885, stereoscope, image from New York Public Library.

The image of the original Peabody Essex, alongside that of Charles Wilson Peale’s collection, comprises what popular culture has taught us us envision when we hear the phrase, “curiosity cabinet:” a wide assortment of aged cases and shelves filled with items that now would fall into specific museum genres, including natural history objects, historical artifacts and fine art. Most curiosity cabinets resulted from a particular aristocrat’s personal holdings of taxidermy, decorative objects and man-made wonders. Yet with roots in a collaborative founding rather than an individual’s point of view, the brand of wonder found in the East India Marine Society cabinet was also collective; as objects gathered by a group of entrepreneurs traveling trade routes in the 18th century there was a uniquely American aspect to this artifact compilation.

Charles Sandison’s Figurehead interacts with this original wunderkammern by projecting directly on top of its objects; figureheads from the Society’s ships absorb the glowing text most prominently but it also infiltrates the case containing a deteriorating, taxidermied penguin and floats across the paintings and busts of nineteenth century gentlemen.  Figurehead obscures all objects in the East India Marine Hall to the point that it is hard to even know for certain what one has seen while visiting this room; the pervading sense uncertainty characteristic of foreign environments has been created within one of the country’s most American spaces.

FreePort [no. 001]: Figurehead, Charles Sandison, East India Marine Hall, Peabody Essex Museum. Image from the Peabody Essex Museum.

While visiting the installation, other visitors I encountered in the space found the experience entirely frustrating; labels for the objects were impossible to find in the darkened room, as was often the case for the objects themselves.  The only readily available context was the reference to life at sea provided through the projected nautical jargon of the ship logs; the East India Marine Hall had been transformed into a place that could only be understood by viewing the objects extremely closely and deciphering the collection through the perceptions allowed by the conditions of the room. In this regard, Figurehead is  itself a total representation of the wonder to be found on an exploration.  While this affect is created by a media-based experience, it is also one that cannot be communicated through digital media alone; physically being in the East India Marine Hall is required.

Immediately outside the East India Marine Hall, the streets of Salem are flooded with commercial mini-museums, capitalizing primarily on the Salem Witch Trials and other clichéd urban legends connected to the region. These places are intended to appear wunderkammern-like without owning any objects that would be found in a true curiosity cabinet. One such place is the 40 Whacks Museum, which focuses on murderer Lizzie Borden and houses collections of skulls and hatchets, among other things.  The space is branded to look more or less like a wunderkammern, with aged props, elements of the grotesque among the collection and traditional cases much like those in the East India Marine Hall. Yet essentially all objects in the museum are reproductions, replicas and creative interpretations of historical objects, conceived of and arranged for the purpose of selling Lizzie Borden merchandise to tourists.

The 40 Whacks Museum, Salem, MA

Commercial museums like the 40 Whacks attempt to conform to the image pop culture has created for curiosity cabinets in order to capitalize on the public’s affinity for wonder. In contrast, Charles Sandison’s Figurehead is a contemporary version of a wunderkammern. Unlike commercial imitations, the artist has rethought the wunderkammern in terms of both the history of this concept and the Peabody Essex museum’s own history.  In this regard, Sandison distilled the essence a curiosity cabinet: the uniqueness of the individual museum in which it resides. Figurehead’s true medium was the historical context of the Peabody Essex Museum reconfigured into a representation that bridges the digital and physical roles museums now play. Poignantly, the relationship between physical and digital information is one museums still struggle to negotiate and fully understand; Figurehead‘s successful merging of the dichotomy suggests there is still something to be learned from the wunderkammern, even for the institutions built upon its foundation.

Pop Culture on the Rocks: Lost Guggenheims, Fallen Showgirls and the Liberace Museum

The last time I visited the Liberace Museum, an older woman invited me to try on a giant, patchwork coat. Providing the requisite opportunity for participation the way almost all American museums now do, this coat allowed visitors to feel the added weight Liberace experienced while parading across the stage in one of his elaborate garments.  The woman overseeing the coat was a museum volunteer and clearly a lifelong Liberace fan.  As I tried on the 40 lb garment and posed for the camera, she let us know the coat’s cacophony of shimmering  fabrics were handmade by another volunteer and consisted of fragments from the ensembles of former showgirls.

The room in which I tried on the coat was the highlight of the museum: the costume gallery. Spread across two buildings in a strip mall on east Tropicana Avenue, the Liberace Museum showcased five primary collections; biographical photographs, a handful of vehicles, and a melange of pianos were displayed in the building nearest Tropicana Avenue, while the space on the other side of the parking lot housed the costume collection and selections of Liberace’s Baroque home furniture.

Costume gallery, Liberace Museum, 2008

This week, the Liberace Museum closed indefinitely. While many news sources have reported on this closure since its announcement in early September, I suspect few people under the age of fifty actually visited the physical space.  Dave Hickey’s seminal essay “A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz” in 1997 book Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy provided incentive to visit and reconsider the value of Liberace to American society’s acceptance of the gay community. Likewise, Lady Gaga’s popularity and overt derivations from the piano star’s approach to celebrity suggest Liberace remains relevant to contemporary audiences (see Eric Felten’s “Lady Gaga and Liberace: Separated at Birth?”). Yet, the two instances I visited suggested there was not an enormous body of Las Vegas visitors clamoring to get into the modest space so far east on Tropicana Avenue that the museum ran free, hourly shuttles to and from the hotels on the Strip.  The one occasion I took the shuttle back to the Strip (as opposed to taking a $30 cab ride or renting a car; public transportation is reportedly not for tourists) the only other party enjoying the footage of Liberace performances shown on the shuttle’s TV was a group of three from Australia visiting Las Vegas for a week.

Liberace Museum, 2008

In general, Americans do not visit Las Vegas for the form of culture found in museums. Some have suggested that the closing of the Liberace Museum might be attributed to its isolated location, away from the tourist areas of the city. While the free shuttle was one solution to this concern, the closure of museums throughout Sin City over the past decade demonstrates that its site was not the only reason for the Liberace Museum’s demise.

In some ways, museums seem a natural fit for Las Vegas between of the constant flow of people in and out of the city and the high concentration of resident performers, architects, designers and other creative individuals required to support the entertainment excess for which Vegas it is known. Considering how the shopping, dining, sexual opportunities, spectacle and general branding as a place where one can do anything without regret play a significant role in Las Vegas “culture,” it is easy to forget that gaming is the single reason for the city’s position as a destination in America.  Gambling makes all other things Las Vegas is known for possible, and ultimately, all roads in the city’s tourist districts lead to (and are paid for by) gaming.  This situation creates an interesting relationship with culture, particularly because Las Vegas has spent so many decades creating a culture around gambling that makes it appealing to a mass audience, as opposed to only those who consider themselves “gamblers.” Contemporary popular culture is essential in Las Vegas’s ability to sell itself, and hence the city is designed to reflect the most present of moments in American consciousness.

In the 1990s Sin City capitalized on the public desires for “edutainment” and family friendly activities through the addition of cultural amenities to casinos.  A few remnants of this era still exist, including the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art and the Mandalay Bay’s American Zoo and Aquariums Association accredited Shark Reef. The Venetian Casino opened two museums affiliated with the Guggenheim and designed by Rem Koolhaas in 2001: the Guggenheim Las Vegas and the Guggenheim Hermitage.  The Guggenheim Las Vegas exhibited only The Art of the Motorcycle before its closure in  2002. The Guggenheim Hermitage lasted until 2008, showing works from the collection of its namesake Russian institution and the New York affiliate by big-name modern painters, such as Picasso, Lichtenstein, Mondrian and Kandinsky, among others.

Guggenheim Hermitage, Venetian Resort Casino, 2001, image from rex-ny.com

When the Guggenheims opened in the Venetian, they made sense in terms of the casino’s theme through their adherence to the American perception of Italy as a place for high culture and artistic mastery. Yet the permanence and preservation that  define museums are antitheses to the way visitors approach Las Vegas, as a place without a past, consequences or a future that is definitive; anything can happen with a roll of the dice. Likewise, museums defined by history struggle to find a place in the community (both tourist community and residential community) of such a place; here, “Las Vegas history” is merely a theme equated to the “French Riviera,” “Old West” and “Tropical Islands” represented within the casinos .

The role of Las Vegas’s history is made clear on the Zeigfield Stage in the Bally’s Casino, where Jubilee! continues as last remaining showgirl production on The Strip.  Similar to the fate of its museums, Las Vegas has seen a dramatic loss in the showgirl productions that once dominated the city, beginning most prominently with the closing of the Stardust’s famed productions in 1999 and the end of the Tropicana’s Folies Bergère in 2009. 

Jubilee! perseveres in an almost parodic production that includes an original “Titanic” number that borders on the absurd; when I attended a performance earlier this year I found myself surrounded almost entirely by tourists from Asia.  The vintage styling of the rhinestone costumes, pronounced smiles and homemade backdrops now appear more like the “living history” component of a historical museum than a contemporary performance. If the inclusion of former showgirl outfits in the participatory coat at the Liberace Museum isn’t evidence enough, the showgirl production’s relationship to museums is made even more pronounced by the opportunity to take a formal tour of the Jubilee!’s wardrobe and sets on select days of the week.

Jubilee!, Bally's Casino, image from nytimes.com

As a physical manifestation of popular culture and mainstream American interests, Las Vegas is known to exist in a state of constant flux. Even the community-based Las Vegas Art Museum shut its doors in 2009; hence while Liberace’s legacy may have suggested the museum he built would have an endless audience in Las Vegas, the city in which his career was cemented, a part of me was not surprised when the announcement came that it too would disappear. Las Vegas is not nostalgic, only temporal.  Popular culture does not remember; if it did, at least a portion of the hoards of Lady Gaga fans that visit Las Vegas annually could be expected to flock to Liberace’s pianos and costumes as a means for better appreciating their favorite star.  Instead, I suspect a very small minority of the Little Monsters even know who Mr. Showman was.

Ultimately, the outcry of the press regarding the Liberace Museum’s closure has been surprisingly pronounced for an institution that received relatively little notice when it was doing anything but closing. While there is a natural inclination blame the Las Vegas environment for its lack of recognition of the past, that would be the easy way out. Las Vegas, as a money-driven city, feeds from mainstream trends and culture.  In the case of the Liberace Museum’s closure, the question to ask is the following: what it is that prevented us, the Americans who created what Las Vegas has become, from remembering to visit, or simply remembering at all.

The Revolution Begins with a Trash Can

Exhibiting art created for city streets in a museum setting is a difficult undertaking. The interior of an institution can often be one of the farthest environments from an “urban landscape.” As gated experiences with limited hours, museums are tightly controlled in regards to everything from lighting and security to object placement and user experience. In contrast, art designed for the streets, following completion by its creator, is typically left at the mercy of its surroundings, at which point it may be added to, mangled or simply disappear.  The city street also adds a level of cultural context that a white-walled gallery is hard pressed to replicate, particularly when an opening or other event involving a chaotic mass of people is not taking place in the building.  Absence of control adds an element of risk to art, and without the risk, urban art can instantaneously be sucked lifeless.

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego took on the challenge of exhibiting urban art through Viva La Revolución: A Dialogue with the Urban Landscape, a group show of work by 20 international street artists.  Predictably, the MCASD attempted to mediate the dissonance between the urban environment and the museum enclosure by commissioning a number of works to exist outside of the exhibition in the gallery spaces, on the streets of San Diego. During the three days I visited the city, the only mural of the nine installed I had the opportunity to experience was a colossal, red societal critique pasted across the side of an Urban Outfitters by Shepard Fairey. The wheatpaste mural was comprised of layers of the iconic images (Angela Davis portraits, images of singular eyes) and social commentary (“OBEY CONSUME REPEAT”) typical of the artist’s work.

“Hillcrest Mural” by Shepard Fairey, 2010, image from sdurbain.com

In many ways Fairey’s Hillcrest mural is most interesting because of its siting on the exterior wall of an Urban Outfitters: “renegade” art on the side of the commercially mainstream clothing store. It is unlikely that a chain retail store would allow spontaneous street art to remain on the side of its building, were it not sanctioned by a museum exhibition. It is also widely known that this particular store sells mass-produced garments and home wares made to appear as though they are second-hand items and elements of genuine nostalgia, bringing out the somewhat deceptive quality of street art created for a museum exhibition. The commissions may be of the utmost quality but the conditions under which they were created are distinct from actual urban works: budgeted, somewhat protected (Fairey’s Hillcrest mural has been tagged and restored on multiple occasions since the exhibition’s opening) and with sites legally procured.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the MCASD’s inclusion of a city-wide element in this exhibition. It is more expected than innovative in the sense that museums have been noticeably more active about creating installations beyond their buildings as a regular practice, particularly in southern California this year; for instance, this past spring, UCLA’s Fowler museum sent Nick Cave’s sound suits out into the world through semi-unexpected “invasions” on campus and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture disseminated 21 artist-created billboards throughout greater L.A. Should the MCASD have not commissioned the street art projects for Viva La Revolución, there would have almost certainly been a noticeable absence in the exhibition and a missed opportunity to bring art into a community that had so much impact on the development of the medium as “higher” art.

But, the success of Viva La Revolución I found most noteworthy was the effectiveness of the street art exhibition in the gallery spaces. The MCASD downtown location housing the exhibition was previously luggage storage for the adjacent Santa Fe train depot. The building’s details already somewhat urban in their styling due to this prior use, upon entering the space there was a sense that this is the place for a street art show.  Yet the indoor version of Viva La Revolución was something of a quiet revolution, its fate determined by an unassuming trash can in a corner. Titled Busted Plume, artist David Ellis’s piece initially seemed  to be a mere container for brightly colored pieces of garbage that appeared too clean and without weathering, much like Fairey’s pristine mural outside Urban Outfitters. But momentarily, one, then multiple items in the can created a structured rhythm amongst themselves.

The clanking was as clean as the garbage itself. Ultimately a composition by Roberto Carlos Lange, the sharpest sounds had the assuredness of a symphonic staccato; as the garbage can crescendoed into its strongest controlled cacophony, the small work’s presence suddenly was in control of the entire gallery space. This was a significant feat, considering how most other works in the room were gargantuan. Swoon’s tower of abandoned furniture and ethereal figures towered over the gallery, nearly reaching the beams of the space’s lofted ceiling while Akay’s mass of graffiti tools occupied the length of the wall adjacent to Ellis’s trash can. But through its aural domination, Busted Plume maintained the largest presence, even as the sound faded into the periphery around corners or behind glass doors.

"Viva La Revolucion" installation view, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego downtown

The decision to tuck Busted Plume into the most prominent gallery of Viva La Revolución was a bold choice.  Many museum visitors resist what they fear to be disruptions of the traditionally tranquil museum experience. While those attending an exhibition of street art may be expected to have a higher level of tolerance, a curatorial trust in Ellis’s piece as a centralizing force was clearly necessary; in the end this was absolutely the right decision.  The wastebasket brings the absence of control over visual experiences from the urban environment to the otherwise highly controlled museum experience, thus introducing a definitive element of street art into the gallery. Although Shepard Fairey’s mural had the name recognition and star power as a spotlight piece physically on the street, the essence of street art was to be found most successfully in the galleries of Viva La Revolución, where a wastebasket subtly demonstrates how the world works.

Rooftop Spectacle and a Soft Breeze: Big Bambú at the Met

Big Bambú: You Can’t, You Don’t, and You Won’t Stop is a colossal bamboo sculpture by Doug and Mike Starn installed on top of the Metropolitan Museum of Art through October 31 that visitors can ascend while on a tour.  I initially thought it was surprising for a giant sculpture by two contemporary artists primarily known for their photography to take center stage at the Met, a museum not often associated with risky contemporary art. But I found it even more unexpected that an institution as grand and mainstream as this was offering an opportunity for the public to climb on a sculpture held together exclusively by climbing rope, hovering over the Manhattan skyline.  Museums are usually hypersensitive to the safety of their visitors (and the affiliated liabilities); a tour that requires signing a waiver struck me as a highly atypical museum experience and one I was determined to encounter first-hand.

From the beginning it was clear that climbing Big Bambú would be a serious undertaking.  Fourty tickets to the guided tours are released two times per day from the Met’s education center, once at 9:30 am for morning tours and again at 12:00 pm for afternoon tours. When I arrived at the museum around 12:20 pm on a Friday afternoon, a line of 40 people had already formed.  After waiting at the end for about ten minutes, I was informed that I was the last person to be going on a tour that day and that I needed to arrive back in this space at 3:15 pm, sharp.

At 3:15 pm, the pre-tour process indeed began. Members of the group of twenty waiting to ascend Big Bambú were approached individually, asked to sign the waiver, which, among other considerations, reminded us that temperatures could be very high and that we “will not have immediate access to water or shade on the tour.” As I read through the paperwork, I was reminded of the warnings and disclosures often presented before embarking on a “thrill” activity of some kind; flying on a zip line through the canopy in Mexico, riding a mechanical bull on the University of Colorado campus, attempting the flying trapeze in the Sonoma Valley were several experiences that came to mind.

After everything was signed, the tour group was brought to a small locker room. Mimicking rollercoaster procedures, we were asked to leave all loose belongings: cameras, purses, hats. We were even told to find  a secure place to fasten our tiny, aluminum admission buttons.  As I waited for the other tour attendees to relinquish their things, I had time to wonder about the adrenaline aspects of the forthcoming experience: Was I naively calm? Would this be the equivalent of a museum thrill ride?

Big Bambú installation view, May 2010 Photo by Doug and Mike Starn © 2010 Mike and Doug Starn / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, image from Metropolitan Museum of Art/flickr

At last brought up a flight of stairs to the top of the Metropolitan, we were met with Big Bambú. Constructed from a mass of bamboo stalks and branches sculpted by the artists and a team of rock climbers, the work is splayed across the entirety of the museum’s roof garden. Mangled knots of red and blue climbing rope binds the sculpture’s joints (the artists have used the terms “organism” and “arteries” to describe the work), contorting the bamboo pieces into the shape of a cresting wave. At the time of my visit, the structure peaked at 30 feet above the surface of the roof, but the artists and climbers will continue building and altering Big Bambú for the duration of the exhibition, ultimately bringing it to a peak of 50 feet. Despite being at the lowest scale of its form, there was a looming quality to Big Bambú, its scale daunting and unbalanced shape precarious.

Doug + Mike Starn, "Big Bambu: You Can't, You Don't and You Won't Stop," 2010, Metropolitan Museum of Art

The roof was an easy location for this sculpture.  A chaotic structure had been placed on top of an orderly institution. The obvious juxtapositions of the organic materials of the work set against the trees below the museum in Central Park also introduced opportunities to consider the dynamics of human creation and natural existence. But beyond these concerns, Big Bambú also bears a relationship to the human fascination with the rooftop as a site for spectacle. Although ascending a tall structure is itself an affair among TV towers and the remaining world’s fair projects, the thrill can be amplified by erecting another experience on top of the tall building.   The Stratosphere in Las Vegas is topped by several rides that simulate falling and hanging, thus inducing the highest level of thrill possible; Chicago’s Willis (formerly Sears) Tower recently added “The Ledge,”  a glass cube offering visitors a more death-defying view of the city through the structure’s floor.  The elaborate waiver and waiting process of touring Big Bambú made experience of this artwork seem comparable to other thrill experiences seem inevitable, but everything changed when the tour entered the sculpture.

The Stratosphere Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada

Once inside the structure, New York’s 90+ degree weather dissipated;  in its place we were offered shade and a light breeze. The path began with a steep incline and series of handmade steps, abruptly elevating the tour to Big Bambú’s 30 foot peak. Yet this ascension was entirely without spectacle; within the golden stalks and dried leaves, we were fully encased by the art, the group appearing comfortably secure and without concern for the height at which we were taking in a panoramic view of Manhattan.  In contrast to the “3 second rule” theory that museum visitors spend less than three seconds with each work of art they encounter , the tour attendees engaged with this work of art effortlessly. They touched (this was allowed) the branches, noted the aural aspects, asked questions about the Starns and their past work,  and lingered naturally on a small bench embedded in a pocket of the structure with a particularly luscious view. The effect was simple enjoyment; in the Starns’ space, no one feared the contemporary art.

In direct antithesis to the waivers, warnings and procedures, Big Bambú’s success was its lightness of being. Thrill experiences are often most enjoyed when they have finished; in contrast, the Starns’ piece is best experienced in all of its immediate presence, taking in the experience as-is.  Although those with specific interests in contemporary art consistently appreciate opportunities to become immersed in it, the general public are typically difficult to convince. In the instance of Big Bambú, spectacle may draw people in, but once inside, you can’t, you don’t and you won’t stop, because you don’t want to.

Visual Extras: Rachel Whiteread and SOIL in Residence

In “The 2010 Film Issue” of The Believer, Alex Rose writes on the bonus disc phenomenon and the impact of its philosophy on contemporary culture. The bonus disc is the information excess and readily available obscurity necessary to sell films to the mainstream in a digital age: the behind-the-scenes explanations, outtakes, extended interviews and director’s commentary. Rose argues that many of the pleasures of experiencing these once unattainable features are lost in the present level of media saturation:

“Call it the paradox of accessibility: as more and more shadowy items are brought to light, the allure of their obscurity and uniqueness is compromised.” (Alex Rose, “Bonus Disc Fever,” The Believer March/April 2010)

The bonus feature seems as though it should elicit a sense wonder because it represents something we have never seen; it has the potential to be the filmic equivalent of the stuffed dodo, the hidden crawl space, the original, handwritten manuscript.  Yet, as Rose concludes, typically DVD extras do not equal any of these; rather, most are ancillary distractions from the original film.

There are both successful and unsuccessful “extras” in the visual arts as well. In light of Rose’s essay, Rachel Whiteread Drawings at the Hammer Museum struck me as the behind-the-scenes category of bonus materials, largely due to the exhibition text’s likening of the drawings to the artist’s diary. The galleries were neatly separated by fixture or furniture element: one room for floors, one room for light switches and door knobs, one room for the mattress. Within each space the featured element was represented by one sculpture, the remainder of the room filled with drawings of the same form that utilized graph paper, correction fluid and other materials referencing the drafting process. Yet, the drawings appeared almost flawless, the perfection of the handwriting and preciseness of the painted whiteout avoiding any question of whether they represented discarded versions of Whiteread’s sculptural works; the drawings appeared to be independent works on paper, not the sketches or drafts one would expect to find in a diary.

Rachel Whiteread. Correction fluid, ink and watercolor on graph paper. 17 7/8 x 12 in. (45.6 x 30.4 cm). Private Collection. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Image from hammer.ucla.edu

As the exhibition text noted, the drawings were, in fact, produced independently of the sculptures. There is nothing wrong or unusual about an artist creating two related bodies of work simultaneously.  However, the almost-perfect drawings on view at the Hammer offered limited insight into Whiteread’s creative practice and conceptual frameworks, and I had hoped to find a revealing of process through the prominent artist’s lesser known works.  The drawings had their own beautiful qualities, but when displayed beside the artist’s sculptures, they appeared insubstantial rather than supportive or in rich dialogue with the better, three-dimensional works. Much like the lackluster DVD extra, the drawings also did not provide the uniqueness or obscurity I was seeking.

It was easy enough to meander through room after room, admiring the drawings as beautiful objects,  but suddenly, at the end of the exhibition resided several vitrines of collaged postcards and curious objects for which the preceding galleries provided little expectation. After the relative monotony of drawings and sculptures formatted almost identically within the previous rooms, the messy magazine cutouts and obscure remnants of ordinary life (shoe horns, dollhouse furniture, glass orbs and so much more) were unexpected, feeling like extras among this exhibition of extras, except the vitrine contents were what I had searched for the entire time. Here, among the manipulated photographs of houses and various collections of glass bottles and plaster jaw molds, one could start to reconsider the concepts, ideas and forms that came together to create the sculptures for which the artist is best known. The obscure contents of the collages and vitrine objects do not add up cleanly to create the sampling of works highlighted in the remainder of the galleries; this is precisely why these objects were fascinating.

Rachel Whiteread. Vitrine Objects. Dimensions and Media variable. Private Collection. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Mike Bruce. Image from hammer.ucla.edu

Weeks after seeing Rachel Whiteread Drawings, my encounter with SOIL in Residence brought Rose’s article to mind again, except this exhibition struck me more as the “extended scenes” bonus feature. Expanding beyond the confines of the main SOIL space, SOIL in Residence is located in the large, luxurious Suite 288 of the Seattle Design Center. The SOIL gallery in Pioneer Square is fairly standard for the neighborhood: a narrow, white cube with a small backspace, only slightly larger than the size of a single apartment in Seattle. It typically features one or two individual artists or small group shows. In contrast, SOIL in Residence includes the works of all twenty-four artists from the collective.   The exhibition occupies 11,000 square feet of a showcase space in the Design Center, the “gallery” complete with commercial fixtures such as mirrors mounted to the walls, design sample drawers, and assorted windows details scattered throughout the massive room.

SOIL in Residence installation view, Pacific Design Center; photo by Joey Veltkamp

There is something to be said for the limitations imposed by a small space, particularly in terms of focus, presentation and selectivity; SOIL’s main space is effective in all of these regards. Yet, the “extended version” on view at the Design Center provides a different understanding of SOIL itself.  DVD extras often have an arbitrary quality when viewed in light of the final film, hence their omittance in the first place. However, knowing that a scene was ultimately cut from a feature does not discourage our interest; the prospect of the unseen provokes curiosity and intrigue. The DVD extra fails when it does not fulfill the promise of adding something new to our perspective of the film without distracting from the completeness of the original cut.

SOIL in Residence does not merely succeed as an extra because it is a solid exhibition of its members’ works that compliments the original SOIL. The way these works of art are installed in the strange showcase creates a synergy that could not be found in a gallery or any other conventional art setting. Nicholas Nyland’s Mother admires its own vibrancy through a mirrored wall as its details and complexities are highlighted through the inversion of its shape. The bed portion of Jennifer Zwick’s Bed Dress speaks directly with the fixtures of its surroundings, the luminous fabric accented by the home-friendly lighting levels designed to push furniture sales through this space.

The Design Center as a contemporary art space is obscure and unique, but the installation of SOIL in Residence would make one think otherwise; it is tempting to believe the exhibition was someone’s genius idea years in the making, rather than the product of available space during a moment of economic free fall.  It is, in this sense, the elusive ideal extra: an offshoot of an original, yet perfectly satisfying as an independent experience.

Continuing Education: Las Vegas Studio at MOCA-PDC

The 1960 version of Ocean’s Eleven captures the original form of the Las Vegas Strip on film: the elaborate neon, the intimate lounges, the Rat Pack performances and black tie clientele. The special features of the film’s DVD include interviews with cocktail waitresses who worked at the Sands, Flamingo, Sahara, Desert Inn and Dunes casinos during the period of the movie, nostalgically reflecting on this lost era in light of what Las Vegas has come to mean today.  Inevitably, these women express their reservations about the larger scale, the commercial attitudes and the touristic focus now characteristic of the Strip; all were in agreement that the past Las Vegas was preferable to the present.

Trailer for Ocean’s Eleven (1960)

Now on view at MOCA- Pacific Design Center is Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, which includes photographs, diagrams and films from the architects’ 1968 project that ultimately resulted in the book Learning from Las Vegas (1972).  The Las Vegas of these images is essentially the Las Vegas preferred by the casino cocktail waitresses; as Christopher Hawthorne describes in his review of Las Vegas Studio,

“What comes across in these photographs is an almost overpowering sense not only of freedom and discovery but also of innocence — although the innocence may well have been at least partly strategic, an element of the architects’ self-mythologizing impulse. Still, Las Vegas in these pictures seems remarkably light on its feet, unburdened by the elaborate, elephantine casino-hotel complexes that now line the Strip.” (Culture Monster 3.30.2010)

Experiencing the exhibition, or even just the catalog, Hawthorne’s point is clearly taken; the photographs are stunning.  Intended as a formal study, Learning from Las Vegas presented the illustrative photographs in an empirical manner. Ed Ruscha’s books, including Every Building on the Sunset Strip and Twentysix Gasoline Stations, were explicitly referenced as sources of inspiration for the project in terms of providing objective views of commercial buildings. The second, most common edition of the book was created with the intention of being affordable to students.  Consequently, the photographs and diagrams were primarily small black and white images with limited contrast; a small number were printed in muted colors in order to minimize printing costs.

Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown installation view, MOCA, Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles

Walking into the MOCA space, the vibrancy and clarity of the archive is shocking to any eye accustomed to the way these images were presented in the book.  The majority of the exhibition is hung salon style, across a single wall, adding to the overwhelming impact.  Within individual images, the hues are noticeably warm, even among the few photographs that had the benefit of being printed as full pages or in color. The rosy tint of Caesars Palace Signs and Statuary could not had been inferred from the image’s stark counterpart seen in Learning from Las Vegas; the book’s text never suggested the sky might be shockingly orange behind an image of the Stardust Casino as it was being defined as a “decorated shed.”  Learning from Las Vegas communicated its intricate arguments through relatively banal, objective images, but from the original photographs we see exactly how romanced the architects were by the Strip; indeed,  Las Vegas was beautiful.

"Stardust Hotel and Casino, neon sign, Las Vegas," 1968, photo by students/instructors of the "Learning from Las Vegas Research Studio", © Venturi Scott Brown and Associates Philadelphia , image from moca.org.

The idea that the Las Vegas Strip had an aesthetic quality in the 1960s is now acceptable, thanks to a combination of Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour’s book and general nostalgia, as communicated by both Hawthorne and the Las Vegas cocktail waitresses. Since the Learning from Las Vegas project, the Strip has evolved substantially. Venturi and Scott Brown returned to Vegas in 1994 at the invitation of the BBC and determined that many of the elements from their initial study had changed:

“The Strip has seen a considerable reduction in the number and size of its signs and a parallel evolution from signography to scenography, or from the decorated shed to the duck. Vivid examples of the trend toward scenography include the MGM architectural lion’s head, the Luxor Hotel pyramid, the Excalibur castle, and, most vividly, the Mirage lake cum volcano and Treasure Island Caribbean town.” (“Las Vegas After its Classic Age”; published in Neon, Artcetera, Winter 1995-96; Republished in Iconography and Electronics Upon a Generic Architecture by Robert Venturi. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996)

The change in architecture from the decorated shed so instrumental to Learning from Las Vegas, to its “duck” antithesis relates to Hawthorne’s assertion that the Strip has lost its lightness over the past 40 years.  While attending panel presentation “Ugly and Ordinary? Las Vegas Studio” at the Pacific Design Center a few weeks ago, I noticed a sense of disdain for the current state of the Strip; the only references to the contemporary Las Vegas during the discussion included a mention of “cultural slumming” by one of the panelists. Yet, to conclude “Las Vegas After its Classic Age,” Venturi and Scott Brown leave readers with only a question: “Would an analysis of our recent journey, from Las Vegas Strip to Las Vegas Boulevard, prove as instructive as the first for architecture?”

Although many dismiss the current Las Vegas Strip to be a large-scale, corporately owned shopping mall, reconsidering commercial, populist architecture is the mode of thought that characterized the original Learning from Las Vegas. The newer things to be learned may extend beyond architecture, but the prevalence of contemporary artists working with Las Vegas as a subject suggests the application of a critical eye to the Strip is still worthwhile. Dave Hickey writes in his essay “Deciding About Las Vegas,”

“…Vegas can’t be framed, only cropped. The worst snapshot can be the best photograph of Vegas because there is everything to see and, dauntingly, nothing much to look at there, except for people looking and people being looked at–and the setting for a thousand dramas. There is no ‘outside’ position. When you are in Vegas, you are onstage, in a theater in the round, a city-sized rococo stage setting, with a professional chorus. You and your fellow revelers are the actors, and as Warhol said, either everyone is a star or no one is.” (The Book on Vegas 27)

"Las Vegas," Lee Friedlander, 2002, gelatin-silver print, 16 x 20 in., image from artnet.com

The drama Hickey references in this essay from the early 2000s is similar to Venturi and Scott Brown’s reassessment of the Strip in 1994. Since that time, Las Vegas has continued to change, now progressing from the dramatic theming of the 90s era towards a de-theming brought on by the Wynn resort and CityCenter projects of recent years.  Since the 90s, contemporary artists ranging from Doug Aitken, Lee Friedlander and Thomas Struth to Olivo Barbieri, Liz Hickok, and Marc Dombrosky have worked with contemporary Las Vegas as a subject for consideration. Knowing this in tandem with the body of photographs and films in Las Vegas Studio demonstrates that the constant change of this city is what may offer the most to explore. Despite the accompanying appreciation for its beauty, nostalgia for “classic Vegas” is limiting when it prevents critical reflection on the present. Perhaps one of the most important modes of thought to learn from Las Vegas is the acceptance of changes that reflect the aspects of culture we otherwise refuse to see.

Bifocal 8: Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball and Casino Architecture

“The intricate maze under the low ceiling never connects with outside light or outside space. This disorients the occupant in space and time. One loses track of where one is and when it is. Time is limitless, because the light of noon and midnight are exactly the same. Space is limitless because the artificial light obscures rather than defines its boundaries.”

Excerpt from Learning from Las Vegas (Revised Edition) by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1977. Print.

Image: Poster for Lady Gaga’s “The Monster Ball” tour; image from popdirt.com