Last night, Josiah McElheny gave a talk at UCLA. Among other things, Josiah talked much about the implications of Modernism and what it has meant that a group of men were allowed to decide how our world looks. Josiah presented multiple beginnings to multiple universes, and also dropped some names of significant women who were largely written out of the Modernist history. The ones I caught follow:

• Hilma af Klint
• Lilly Reich
• Charlotte Perriand
• Aino Aalto

The talk was, in many ways, ideal. Josiah cares deeply about the history which he is interrogating, and still maintains a level of modesty about the power of ones work to change its subject. It prompted me to think about areas of research that I deeply care about, and what it would mean for me to engage them rigorously.

My brother was in town a few weeks ago and we stopped by the Hammer to check out the work by Chen Qiulin. Chen’s work is obliquely documentary; recording some of the now-submerged cities and valleys of Sichuan, China through video of narratives enacted on the condemned landscapes.

Of primary interest to me in Chen’s work is how she presents the landscape as defining the events within it. Collapsing industrial buildings tower over people, shaping the actions they may take. It seems as if all they can do is wander through the landscape, searching for each other, searching for meaning in their actions. Indeed, they can do nothing to shape the land around them, or to prevent its disappearance. And we can only watch as they progress down a linear path.

I wonder how software and installation can be used to represent landscapes as charged as these, how they can engage viewers in ritual similar to those enacted by the actors/demonstrators in Qiulin’s work. Can we guide people through the environment as effectively as the bride and groom in Qiulin’s videos? Perhaps we need some sense of inevitability in our work; to see an the next step coming, even as we aren’t sure of what it is.

In Qiulin’s video, we follow the actors as they walk the path of their fate. In games, we may need a guide to help us, perhaps we are one of the many men carrying peonies to the lake, and so instinctively stay with the group. In an environment, we can limit pathways, like presenting viewers with a staircase leading up to an unknown plane. At what point do these constraints become meaningful, and how do they shape the narrative for the viewer?

This issue of imbuing work with substantive meaning or context is one I will be tackling in future writings. Simply using a dataset to create an image does not make the image about that data. A higher level of transformation is occurring in successful work, a level which I am trying to reach in my own practice.

Salt

The first thing that struck me in the desert was the salt-tree in front of our campsite. The tree—a tamarisk—had large crystals of salt coating its leaves.

Salt manifests wherever there is water in the desert, and plants growing in oases need to be halophilic to survive. I am interested in systems where halophiles could be operating benevolently on behalf of less salt-tolerant species, and in the exoskeleton that the halophiles produce as they grow under mineral-rich conditions.

Journey

Scrambling from rock to rock in Joshua Tree National Monument cemented the desire Pete Hawkes and I had to make the journey integral to some of our work. Michael Kimmelman’s essay on The Art of the Pilgrimage brings up how travel to see a work shapes your perception of the work; I think the travel itself could become the work. What better way to share a steep mountain climb than to lead someone on it? Naturally, we would like to have some additional payoff, some tangible work that people who engage in the travel ultimately contribute to. We’re working out the details.

Zombichrucians

Let’s not forget the crazies who live out in the desert, or the artists who impersonate crazies in the desert. Christmas-tree-like light-up crosses, keep-out signs, and ringing church bells that don’t belong to you. The bells peal loudly in the desert, trailing off into the open space, never bouncing back. Someone else hears and we all scramble for the car. It doesn’t start for a minute that feels much longer, when we finally drive off into the space, becoming a glowing light on the horizon.

More images from the weekend are available on flickr.

There are lots of things worth noting in the William Kentridge exhibition: Five Themes. For now, I will simply note the superb blending of mechanical actors with hand-drawn animation in ‘Black Box’ (pictured above, not playing). The piece also incorporated found video footage of a rhinoceros “hunt”—the rhinoceros being a prominent figure throughout the piece, and much of Kentridge’s other work.

You can find out more at the Exhibition Website. The show runs until May 31, 2009.

The pieces that worked best for me were simple concepts with simple executions. Hans Haacke’s “News” prints out an rss feed of news stories as it is published. The beauty is in the overwhelming amount of content generated; many rolls of printer paper flow out onto the floor, curling up on themselves and forming an elegant pile. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s “Microphones” was similarly austere. A series of microphones were arranged in a circle in the center of a darkened room. Whenever someone spoke loudly enough into a microphone, it would play back their voice, then add some previously recorded sounds in response. The piece demanded a certain level of confidence from audience members to get it towork,but also stood on its own as a collection of beautiful objects.

A number of classic performance/interactive pieces were also on display. Many of these pieces were shown alongside an updated version. Video of Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece” performances from 1965 and 2003 were on simultaneous display. Tom Marioni’s work from the 1970s, “The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest form of Art” was recreated every Thursday for the duration of the exhibition. In other cases, visitors to the museum were encouraged to create their own work using the props and ideas of artists on display. Notably, there was a platform with props for making one-minute sculptures. The inclusion of updated participatory work with classic pieces is a great curatorial move, and really helps to keep the ideas of the older pieces relevant to todays audience.

View more images from the museum in my SFMoMA flickr set.

Lin’s recent work represents landscape data rather than the landscape itself. It is a transformation of scientific viewing into artistic viewing. The direct observation of the world is done through mechanical, sonic, or digital means by non-human systems. Lin translates this information–the landscape as it is perceived by machines–into a new set of drawings or scaled-down landscape structures, allowing us to move around and inhabit the data. The work still looks very digital, but the transcription has an obvious human hand, and the bumps in the data are smoothed to the point where the analog feel of a landscape is restored.

After meandering through Lin’s constructions, I made my way through many of the other galleries at the museum. I was really happy to run into a lot of work by Al Farrow, whose reliquary series I first encountered at 21C in Louisville a week prior. Farrow constructs iconic religious structures from ammunition and weaponry. The structures themselves are beautiful, and the obvious subtext of religiously-sanctioned violence makes the work challenging without being didactic.

Systematic Landscapes was on view at the de Young museum October 25, 2008 – January 18, 2009. It traveled to be there, so there is a chance it will travel to a city near you in the future.

View more photos taken at The de Young Museum on Flickr.

I traveled to Boston this weekend for the Barbarian company meeting and holiday festivities. On Saturday, I went to the ICA to check out the Tara Donovan exhibition. The exhibition was fantastic, displaying a number of large installations by the artist. Each piece is constructed from multiples of a simple base object, with the overall forms being determined by the connection between pieces. Donovan’s work is instructive on many levels, some of which I’ll explore below.

When observed over time, in motion, or from different perspectives, each of Donovan’s work shifts and presents new sides of itself. Parallax and moiré effects are common in many of her pieces. Haze, a wall composed of drinking straws, has a few particularly interesting qualities. The regularly varying material opacity and hollow transparency combined with our limited field of view generates zones of darkness and light on Haze’s surface. The subtle compression of the straws as they push against one another causes subtle, crazed polygonal shapes to emerge within the darker areas.

The lack of obvious connectors between each object is curious. Many digital works share this absence of connection between components. What’s interesting about Donovan’s work is that it holds together despite the lack of connectors. In some cases, cups are stacked inside of other cups, or slabs of cracked glass are laid on atop the next. In others, the base material is the connector – many of the pieces are constructed from mylar tape. A lot of work is held in place by compression acting on the items from the walls of the room in which it is installed.

Each installation works on multiple levels of scale. Indeed, each installation exists on a large scale while being composed of relatively small items. Hundreds, if not thousands, of each building block are composed into the final piece. While some might claim that architecture inherently works in the same way, standard building materials lack the independent character of the things Donovan works with. This suggests the use of recognizable base forms in generative work, where the parts can be as meaningful as, and convey a separate meaning from, the whole.

The combined effect of these various attributes is that they often presented something of a puzzle for the viewers as they engage with Donovan’s work. People in the museum were delighted, and occasionally incredulous (especially with the paper plates), as they discovered what objects each installation was composed of, and to figured out how they were assembled. Perhaps part of the mystery of the pieces is how they can be so immediately powerful while being composed of such seemingly modest objects.

I can imagine a number of potential generative software pieces that would mimic Donovan’s assemblies. Existing purely in the software space, however, multiples of objects lack the impressive scale present in Donovan’s pieces. It would be possible to generatively develop systems of interlocking pieces and use rapid-prototyping or cnc milling technologies to produce thousands of the unique components. There would be an element of luxury involved. Despite that, proper material selection could render the objects more environmentally friendly than the commonly mass-produced items Donovan utilizes. Perhaps she would be interested in creating the objects from which her final pieces are constructed.

A number of other interesting pieces are on show, although they are eclipsed by Donovan’s work. One notable room is an ‘exploration of possibilities and problems’ concerning the Loch Ness monster. I hope to see similar presentations of less known, perhaps fictional, landscapes and phenomena in the future. As it stands, Loch Ness is a little too well known, and the presentation a little too sparse for my tastes.

Last night, we had an informal get together in the San Francisco Barbarian office. Pizza was eaten, beverages were enjoyed, and a lot of ridiculously cool work was shared.

Videos, photos and links to some of the work shown are being aggregated on the oooshiny log.

My favorite work was in the Summer Reading exhibition by the Hosfelt Gallery, a collection of artworks inspired by literature. The collection included a series of dioramas by Su Blackwell. Each was constructed from the pages of a book to recreate the world of the words inside a beautiful wooden box. Pictured here is ‘The Secret Garden,’ which has a door opening into the box and is the most immediately striking. Others in the series contain lights, a moving carousel, and other small mechanical inclusions. The words on the pages, naturally, tend to relate to the forms they construct, like a suitcase with the word ‘trunks’ legible on its side.

Another successful exhibition was of contemporary chinese art at the Elins Eagles-Smith Gallery.

The gallery is in an office building along with a number of others. They showed the work of many, including Chen Wenling and the Luo Brothers.

Warehouse-style galleries and bars cum art-spaces are common in the short alleys south of Market. The more buttoned-up sellers stick to smaller spaces north of Market, notably on the first block of Geary. They range from sellers like Warnock Fine Art Prints, who simply have a large collection of images for sale without much of an exhibition space, to Haines Gallery, who showed sculptures by many artists, including Andy Goldsworthy, in their comparatively large galleries. I certainly miss Chelsea at this point, but the work on offer here more than takes away the edge.

I drove down Highway 1 and the 101 to LA last weekend to check out the Glow Festival on and about the Santa Monica pier. Many thanks to Tom and Jess for letting us crash at their place again. The all-night art festival turned out to be mostly a big, messy beach-party. No worries, as we got to the Usman Haque piece before it broke and were able to squeeze in a few seconds of interaction with Moon Theater. We also had some solid tapas and sangria fueling us as we pushed through the crowds.

Moon Theater, a project by Nova Jiang and Michael Kontopoulos, was the most intriguing and beautiful work I saw at the festival (admittedly, I didn’t get to see/interact with everything due to the crowds). It was of particular interest to me since I’m applying to UCLA this fall and both the artists are currently enrolled in the D|MA program. A projection of the moon onto a disc provided a stage for shadow puppetry. Puppet-like silhouettes were generated by a computer observing the shapes people made with their hands in front of another glowing-white disc embedded in a large white console about 30 feet away from the moon.

Moon Theater allows for the overlay of individual narratives through a controlled device in a new public format (i.e. you can make up your own stories/reasons for the characters appearing on the screen), which is its main attraction as a user. However, the separation between the projection and the control led to some confusion with the piece, with many people simply standing in front of the projector to cast their shadows. Simply raising the projector so people couldn’t get in its way would have helped the piece a lot. It also seems like it would be very successful in more of a gallery setting, where the connection between controller and display is more obvious — the crowds hid the relationship between the two components.

Haque’s work, ‘Primal Source’, alternated between sound-responsive flourishes and generative patterns projected onto a screen of mist sprayed over the beach. The work was photogenic and attractive even from a distance. The motion of the streamers after their release into the fluid space was beautiful.

The variety of visuals in ‘Primal Source,’ a strength overall, weakened the interactive aspect of the work. Fences held back viewers/revelers from the projection and overly-sensitive microphones — the people standing near me couldn’t figure out whether they were impacting the piece at all. It would have been fantastic were we allowed to play inside the projection space, as one can do with Anthony McCall’s ‘A Line Describing a Cone’ (pictured below). The fences, however, guaranteed people were mostly observers, rather than explorers of or active participants in the artwork’s space.

More photos on flickr.