Julia Freeman wrapped Gallery 4Culture in hand-painted and collaged floral wallpaper; life-sized cutout photographs of shrubs and dark, amorphous masses float aimlessly within its center, intended to be pulled and arranged within the space by viewers. My write up of the experiential result is here.
© 2011, Julia Freeman, VERY LITTLE ROOM FOR MISHAPS, mixed-media installation, Photos by Julia Freeman.
In Chicago there are two exhibitions of late 1960s architectural photography approximately two miles apart: Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown is on view at the Graham Foundation while Lewis Baltz: Prototypes/Ronde de Nuit is presented at the Art Institute. Comparing Las Vegas Studio’s documentary photographs to Baltz’s “Prototypes” seems like it should be a straightforward endeavor. The two sets of images focus on commercial architecture of the west, including signs, parking lots, roadways and building facades. Elements of the New Topographics movement strongly affiliated with Baltz’s practice can also be found among Venturi and Scott Brown’s photographs of the automobile-focused architecture of the Las Vegas Strip. Yet, instead of highlighting these similarities, viewing both exhibitions in rapid succession more clearly highlights the visual distinctions between a group of artistic images posing as documentary photographs and a body of archival photographs presented as conceptual works of art.
Lewis Baltz’s forty Prototypes hang single-file, in numbered order, around the perimeter of a single gallery in the Art Institute’s Modern Wing. Rigid uniformity dominates the space: each silver gelatin print is identical in size and frame, all titled according to the city in which they were taken. The persistent sunlight, stark commercial buildings and absence of people in the images definitively allude to the weather, sensibility and sprawl characteristic of the west coast. Other than this the Prototypes provide minimal details that distinguish the individual California cities from one another.
Lewis Baltz. "Laguna Niguel." 1970. Gelatin silver print. Laguna Art Museum Collection, Anonymous gift, in memory of Beula Prince © Lewis Baltz. Image from artblart.wordpress.com
The notation of arbitrary specifics as the works’ titles causes the images to be positioned as documentary in nature, but this stylization is then contradicted by the way Baltz presents his subjects within the photographs. Each image appears carefully constructed with precise attention paid to the basic photographic elements of composition, contrast and clarity. In Laguna Niguel, a forgettable building shares the stage with an equally banal parking lot, causing neither to be shown it its entirety. Instead, the forms of the building and parking lot together create the work of art; the photographed objects dissipate into a two-dimensional construction as abstracted from reality as the man-made landscape that serves as this artwork’s medium. Through its deep contrasts, isolated lines and highly conscious framing, in Laguna Niguel, the real elements of a city turn into elements of art abstracted from reality.
In contrast to the minimalist installation of the Prototypes, Las Vegas Studio appears ornate in its hanging throughout the rooms and stairwells of the Madler House residential building housing the Graham Foundation. Although Venturi and Scott Brown primarily intended for the images in this exhibition to be used as documentation for their 1968 study of Las Vegas, seeing the photographs independent from the final study raises the question of how they function as works of art in their own right.
It is known that the group visited Ed Ruscha’s studio immediately prior to their arrival in Las Vegas; they also directly reference the artist’s empirical approach in the panoramic, street level series of images titled “Ed Ruscha” elevation of the Strip, an imitation of Every Building on the Sunset Strip. Despite the influence of Ruscha and the use subject matter similar to the pursuits of New Topographics artists, most of the photographs in Las Vegas Studio are overtly aesthetic and composed; highly saturated colors, strategically illuminated neon lights and unexpected juxtapositions between commercial elements suggest the architects aimed to accomplish more than merely document the landscape before them.
"Riviera Casino, Las Vegas, 1968." Students and Professors of the Las Vegas Studio. 1968. Image from johndan.com
Particularly in the context of being framed, matted and hung salon style for exhibition, the Las Vegas photographs appear as though they aspire become works of fine art, rather than documentary footage. Their titles are straightforward and factual like those of the Prototypes, but unlike Baltz’s approach, the meaning of the Las Vegas Studio pieces still gravitates back to the physical subjects; a photograph of the Riviera’s parking lot and sign is entirely about the Riviera’s parking lot and sign. Although this gleaming image is easily among the more beautiful photographs of a parking lot ever created, the work of art is signifier of the casino, more similar to the physical Rivera sign than to the the parking lot of Baltz’s Laguna Niguel. Hardly a failure, the fact that the Las Vegas Studio images aptly represent the landscape of Las Vegas at the time of Venturi and Scott Brown’s seminal study demonstrates the inherent success of the project; when viewed in tandem with Baltz’s Prototypes, the questions raised by each exhibition diverge but ultimately offer a more complete view of their place and time.
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.
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.
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.
Julien’s Auctions hosted their “Music Icons” and “Hollywood Legends” summer sales at the Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino, Las Vegas from June 24-27.
“A bloody piece of wood, a stuffed beaver, an elephant’s tusk, a siren’s hand, and a painting by Dürer–not an untypical trove. Nor is it untypical for the provenance of many of what we today consider Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces to wend their way back through hodgepodge collections such as these.”(119)
Excerpt from Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler, New York, NY: Vintage Books/Random House, Inc., 1995.
Michael Jackson Commissioned Sofa, for his home in Kent, England.
Cereal with Jackson 5 prize; Michael Jackson hot cocoa, other items.
Gene Roddenberry's dining room
Johnny Cash's signed guitar; Michael Jackson Commissioned Floating Console Table
Anna Nicole Smith's belongings
Prop from Jurassic Park
Marilyn Monroe's therapy couch
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.
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.
“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
“Empty space becomes both fertile and intimidating in modernist special effects, like an extension of Wagner’s blackened gulf between audience and the lit stage at Bayreuth. The blank and unobstructed suggest absence as presence. This exposure was an invitation to add more special effects. After World War II, these modernist spaces were filled very quickly. They were scripted to meet the consumer side of entertainment that continued to grow. Finally they became very busy scripts indeed, particularly after 1955.”
Excerpt from From the Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects by Norman Klein, New York: The New Press, 2004. Print.
Video: Back to the Future Part II (Robert Zemeckis, 1989).
