The Plot

 

Site-specific art has subjects. Content needs to be parsed. In the best examples, the artworks initiate a kind of dialogue between place and viewers, illuminating where we are. Dreary forms of personal expression are at least once removed. Furthermore, it gets art out of galleries, museums and penthouses.

 

What I have never said before is that site-specific art harkens back to a time before easel paintings and the tchotchkas and mementos that now pretend to be sculpture. Unlike murals and monuments, however, the site-specific artworks of our times are usually temporary, so artists are free to experiment and take risks; here today, gone tomorrow. Does this then make such artworks a subset of theater? Well, if so, who cares? Artopia does not celebrate categorical purity; if anything, we enjoy and encourage the reverse. Or, as Walt Whitman once wrote: "Unscrew the locks from the doors!/Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!"

 

Not all of the works in Creative Times' "PLOT/09: This World & Nearer Ones" are site-specific, although the best ones are. All of them, however, are what the curator, ex-Londoner Mark Beasley, calls "site-sensitive," thus giving himself and the artists a bit more leeway. Perhaps.

 

Much more of the Artopian point of view will be revealed as I go through the various artworks that make up "This World," now spread over the 172 acres of mysterious Governors Island in New York Harbor. I say "mysterious" because New Yorkers have seen the island from a distance, but most of us have never visited -- unless we were stationed there during one war or another. Sold back to New York State by the federal government for one dollar in 2003, it is now ours to enjoy, at least on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays (until Oct. 11). The boat that leaves every hour on the hour (but check here because "schedule will vary") from the Battery Maritime Building to the left of the Staten Island Ferry Terminal is unequivocally, absolutely, mysteriously free.

 

But I also use "mysterious" because even curator Beasley proposes in his preface to A Guide to This World/ Nearer Ones that a number of his invited artists came up with works of a decidedly supernatural cast because they staked out their sites in the gloomy winter.

 

Of course, the old buildings left behind by the various military and government operations stationed on the island are bound to be haunted by history and long-gone events. Old structures are like that. Even in the harsh sunlight of July, there is something creepy about this island. We do not associate military sites with peace and joy, do we? Beyond the vale, dead soldiers linger.

 

Located between Brooklyn and Manhattan at the mouth of the East River,  Governors Island is the perfect site for preventing any invasion launched from Jersey City or Bayonne, on the other side of the Statue of Liberty.

 

At the tip is Castle Williams, fortress then barracks then military prison,  built between 1807 and 1811; its curved stone wall is visible from Lower Manhattan. Star-shaped Fort Jay at the island's highest point dates to 1776. It was thought to be impenetrable and even has a moat.

 

Now there are lawns galore. No cars. Bikes can be rented and picnicking is allowed. And there's art.

 

More interesting than the two forts -- although you can't beat an old fort for little-boy fun -- are the ordinary buildings, many of which have not been open to the public: the Officers' Houses along Nolan Park and on Colonels' Row, and a movie theater forgotten by time, as they used to say, that time being what, 1965? To enter the movie house, you have to sign a release, because who knows what lurks behind those moldy wall-coverings. The same is true for the much less interesting Liggett Hall gym.

 

  

Maps and What They Allow

 

 

Two artworks are visible even before you hit Mystery Island. I found Mark Wallinger's piece less than audience-friendly: One side of the ferry is labeled GOATS and the other SHEEP. Who is separating the sheep from the goats? Which group do you, dear visitor, belong to?

 

Pulling out from the slip, one may also notice Lawrence Weiner's work on the  wooden fender-rack: AT THE SAME MOMENT in red-enamel letters. The relationship of this phrase to Governors Island, to the ferry, and/or to the fender rack is elusive. It could be placed anywhere and still have the same meanings.

 

There is a third artwork that involves the ferry and the passage across the waters, but I will save that till last because I did not find out about it until I was heading home.

 

Special bright blue flags designate "This World" sites on the island itself, but the artworks are so spread out -- as they should be if one of the goals is to give art-worlders a taste of Mystery Island -- that a map is really necessary. However, finding the Creative Times visitor center, which is House No. 20 in Nolan Park. requires asking a guide stationed at the top of the hill from the dock.

 

Why, I asked, are there no art maps available when you first arrive? The Parks Department does not allow the distribution of handbills or any single sheets of paper, was the answer. The only solution is to buy the $5 A Guide to This World/Nearer Ones at the hard-to-find center; it's mysteriously not available at the book and gift shop right off the ferry landing. You need a map to find the maps.

 

There are two maps you can look at online before you go. One from Governors Island does not indicate the art sites. The other is a Google map from Creative Time with signature pushpins. These when clicked give you art descriptions. If you click on the satellite view, you will get  a good idea of the lay of the land, but that is of little use when you are on the island at ground level.   

 

Furthermore, the maps in the Guide are not as clear as they should be. The numbering is curiously erratic. Thank goodness for the volunteers stationed at each art site. They were all very helpful at pointing out the direction I should take for whatever numbered site I pointed to in my Guide. Next time when Creative Time returns with what promises to be an important quadrennial, I am sure the mapping will be better. But this year perhaps there could be a trail of breadcrumbs from site to site.

 

Just kidding.

 

Also note that you should be prepared for quite a hike. You can rent a bike near the dock -- on Fridays bikes are free. My investigation on foot, including watching several films, took about four hours! This is nothing like a museum survey that you can breeze through in under an hour.

 

 

At House No. 20 you can also gain the temporary use of an iPod-like device containing a Patti Smith "tour" with piano music by her daughter, Jesse. It's free, but they hold your i.d. captive until the device is returned. This not a real audio tour. Instead, alas, it's a sentimental text called Message in a Bottle, and it neither illuminates nor amuses. Smith was more poetic when she hung out with Robert Mapplethorpe and was everyone's favorite punk star. Have a listen on the porch -- it's only 20 minutes, but one of the longest 20 minutes I have ever experienced -- and then return it as soon as you can.

 

Noted on my way to the Info Center but not seen close-up was Teresa Margolles' Shot-Up Wall, lifted cinderblock by cinderblock from the site of an organized-crime shooting in Mexico.  Reconstructed, the wall is placed in the middle of Nolan Park and is pocked by bullet holes and flecked with what could be dried blood. I suppose it is a kind of anti-monument, the negative of heroic statues that might be found in a park, except that it is a markedly different kind of war that is being commemorated.

 

Margolles sounds like an interesting artist indeed. The Guide informs us she is one of the founders of the Mexico City collective called Forensic Medical Service (SEMEFO is the Spanish acronym). The group  "uses cadavers, the clothing of the deceased, and morgue paraphernalia in works spanning from videos to public interventions."  A 2003 work of her own called Papeles (Papers) involved creating portraits of the dead by "letting watercolor paper absorb blood and other organic fluids left behind."

 

 

 

Near by, in House No. 15, is Judi Wertheim's double video called La Tierra de los Libres/Land of the Free. Wertheim gave a Spanish translation of the U.S. national anthem to a group of dispossessed Columbian farmers trying to make a living as musicians and asked them to sing the lyrics with their own improvised music. Because the site is close to Ellis Island, the U.S. port of entry, the project makes sense here. What's really clever is that when you enter the bare living room of the house, you see a straight-on video projection of the group performing and then, when you circle the screen, you see another projection of them performing from the rear, with captions in English.

 

I next saw Anthony McCall's fog and light-beam moving sculpture called Between You and I in the pitch black Saint Cornelius Chapel. It was elegant but, on the whole, I am not fond of walking blindly into an unknown space. I would have rather seen the Chapel.

 

In another dark room, the assembly hall of the Officers' Club, I was able to see my way to the single bench available to watch Adam Chodzko's 13-minute video Echo. As sort of a cross between The Blair Witch Project and The 13^th Victim (plus Joseph Cornell's home movies), the fiction (?) here is that military brats once had a game of "loser wins." In other words, the winner would be whoever gave away the most valuable things for something of hardly any value at all. In 1624, the Dutch Governor of New Netherlands traded "two axe heads, a string of beads, and a few nail heads" with Native American owners Cakapeteyno and Pehiwas for all of Noten Eylant (Governors Island). And of course you can't help but think of the 2003 deal between the feds and N.Y. State, right?

 

A further fiction is that the archive of the "game" has recently been discovered.

Found footage and ominous music make the whole thing work.

 

I had 10 minutes to kill before the next showing of The Bruce High Quality Foundation's Isle of the Dead in the Fort Jay Theater. So I scooted ahead to take a look at Tue Greenfort's Project for the New American Century in the Brick Village, formerly Coast Guard housing. Following a path through the site demarcated by chain-link fencing, one sees the oppressive housing, derelict playground equipment, and other poignant debris.

 

 

 

 

 

Time for the Isle of the Dead screening. "Is this the zombie movie?" I ask. "Yes," says the volunteer.

 

There are only four of us in the audience. Why so few?

"Well, you know, ordinary people are afraid of art," one out-of-town visitor volunteers before the movie starts.

 

"Afraid of art? This is New York City," I answer. "People are afraid of their neighbors, not art."

 

The 19-minute film by the Brooklyn-based Bruce High Quality Foundation collective is terrific. We see the art world die at various locations: MoMA, Chelsea, the Whitney. Serious-looking people are dropping dead everywhere. The corpses are intercut with montage sequences of found material showing JFK, the Art Workers Coalition, The Guerrilla Girls, and much, much more. The steps of the Met are strewn with corpses. And then....

 

Spoiler ahead!

 

Guess what? The cast of hundreds, most of whom look like art students, comes back to "life" and begins to walk like zombies toward Governors Island, then on Governors Island, then they are sitting in the Fort Jay Movie Theater watching the same movie you are watching. The art world made up of zombies has now moved to Governors Island. When I leave the musty theater and reenter the blinding, leafy daylight, I affect a zombie gait.

 

The volunteers, who seem not to have seen the film, don't really notice. Or at least they don't let on. That is how real zombies behave; they're cool. And, in the video, they wear a lot of black eye-shadow. 

 

                                      

As fate would have it, across the lawn, Klaus Weber's gigantic wind chime was tuned to the devil's tritone: "the mysterious diabolus in musica tritone, a musical interval that spans three whole tones, to dissonant and melancholic effect." See here (rather, hear here) Giuseppe Tartini's Devil's Trill Sonatas, one of my favorites. The tones indeed are kind of a downer, but the happy picnickers stationed below seem not to mind. Was this tree a hanging tree? Was the field a potter's field?

 

 

 

Then on to another haunting: Edgar Arceneux's Sound Cannon Double Projection, in Building 404A on Colonels' Row. We get to explore an empty house. But there are eerie sounds, mostly on the second floor. I hear a low rumble. The Guide reveals: "Researcher have suggested that infrasound ... might be present in certain allegedly haunted locations, and cause a feeling of uneasiness. Infrasound can induce bizarre feelings such as anxiety, extreme sorrow, paranoia, or even the chills."

 

Two houses down in 406A was the documentation for one of my favorite pieces: Insular Act by the Mexico City collective Tercerunquinto. One member, after much calculation and negotiation, threw a rock at a window in an historic building across the way, breaking the glass. The glass was immediately replaced. Again the question: why are certain building preserved and other not?

 

 

 

Readers may wish to know that having been the Visual Arts Director of Snug Harbor Cultural Center in Staten Island, I have a particular interest in historic preservation. My office had been Thomas Melville's office when he was president of Snug Harbor, founded in 1821 to house "ancient, decrepit and worn-out sailors." When Herman Melville's ghost came to visit his brother Thomas' ghost, as Herman had visited Thomas in real life, I would see them both out of the corner of my eye while I was filling out loan forms and grant applications, which must have been a puzzle to them. Furthermore, I am now trying to save an old lodge in Brookhaven Hamlet on Long Island. The house, which has 14 bedrooms, was once the summer home of one G., or George, Washington, the inventor of instant coffee. We want to turn it into a cultural center ... with a coffee bar, of course.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More ghosts: In 407A we can peek through what could be glory holes and see the remains of Invocation of the Queer Spirits (Governors Island) by Canadians AABronson (formerly of General Idea) and Peter Hobbs: candles, flowers, empty bottles, dirty dishes. Hmm. No doubt Native American medicine men displaced by the Dutch gay soldiers and sailors once stationed on the island, and certainly the ghosts of all those shamanistic closeted members of the Coast Guards, came to visit during the séance.

 

Back across the way, however, Guido van der Werve's two interminable videos, I don't want to get involved in this; I don't want to be part of this; talk me out of it and The clouds are more beautiful, are not even site-sensitive, never mind site-specific. They would bore viewers anywhere, although some might thrill at the artist falling from the sky after playing Chopin in one and failing to get a rocket to work in the other, the humor of which escapes me.

 

 

Then I hiked to Nils Norman's tent city called Temporary Permanent Monument to the Occupation of Pseudo Public Space.

 

For good luck and to chase away the evil spirits, it was time for one of my interventions. I twice circumambulated the nearby Castle Williams and did a single spin inside.

.

 

 

Still had three more artworks to go.

 

I should have checked out Tris Vonna-Michell's No Deviation Possible: Folded in That Precise Triangular Fashion at the beginning of my tour, if for no other reason than to get inside Pershing Hall. Alas, in spite of the blue flag, it was locked up tight, and I then found out No Deviation had been a lecture-like performance that left no residue.

 

 

 

Exhausted, on to Krzysztof Wodieczko's Veterans' Flame, a video projection of a single candle, accompanied by taped interviews with veterans, deep in one of the Fort Jay "magazines" where ammunition was once stored. Fort Jay definitely needs to be circumambulated.

 

I missed Susan Philipsz' sound piece called By My Side, all the way at the end of the island. Will have to hear it some other time, since I was counting on a 5:30 ferry, the last back to Manhattan. This is what all the signs proclaimed. However, I noticed a huge line at the dock. It seemed that the last ferry for visitors was actually 4:30. The 5:30 trip was for staff only! It was four o'clock, but it would have taken me 40 minutes back and forth to Philipsz' piece.

 

Off the Map

 

And then, last but not least, as promised, another artwork inspired by the ferry. Jill Magid -- not Maggid, which means a Kaballah spirit guide. Magid prides herself on collaborations with nonartists (having shadowed a New York cop on his rounds and once been hired by the Dutch Secret Service to interview personnel to "humanize" them), began her project by talking with the Governors Island ferry captain, who wished he could make passengers aware of  "the peaceful intrigue of the space between the islands." Magid's artwork, which you can discover, as I did, by carefully reading The Guide, was developed from this conversation. The idea became to stop the ferry at midpoint to allow the passengers to contemplate the unassisted movement of the boat on the waves, which of course could not be done. Instead, we are to imagine such a halt.

 

 

Ghostbusters                                           

 

So why this spook show on Mystery Island? I think it is much more than the buildings that generated these hauntings. Other factors to consider might be the death of the art world, the death of the economy, the death of poetry, the death of the novel, and all the other endings that have been proliferating. Everyone has a favorite funeral to attend: print journalism, serious cinema, higher education, broadcast television, cheap energy, rock-n-roll, avant-garde music, jazz. For though we have long passed the turn or the century, we are at a turning point. It is at periods of great change that people, even artists, turn to the supernatural. Continuing to channel Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol may no longer be enough.

 

 

FOR AN AUTOMATIC ARTOPIA ALERT, E-MAIL: PERREAULT@AOL.COM

 

  

 John Perreault: Critical Mass Redux (1971-2008) 

 

 

How History Is Rewritten

 

Yours truly has finally managed to get a few things off his chest. Or, more correctly, off his back. As keeper of the Street Works and Performance flame, I have carted around a burden these many years since the late '60s, waiting for someone, anyone, to delve into these phenomena.

 

Two-hundred-and-forty-two sheets of paper and various souvenirs are now on display in an experimental, au courant, witty art space called The Laboratory for Art and Ideas at Belmar. (For more images, go to The Antics, then Photo Album, and also click on The BLAB.) Humor plays a large part in its branding. Surprisingly, it's in a newly created, upscale satellite of Denver in Lakewood.

 

Belmar? Lakewood? These names are not strange to me: I spent an important part of my childhood in the New Jersey seaside resort town of Belmar. Inland,  the mostly Jewish resort of Lakewood was a car ride away, where in all seasons one could see wizened old women with and without their mates, sunning and airing themselves on porches in the pine-scented air.

 

This Belmar and this Lakewood are very different. At an altitude of 5,000 feet, there is not a beach or a pine tree in sight. Where am I? Somewhere flat. Flying into Denver is like preparing to land on a big quilt. The squares are fields, some swiped with enormous circles created by the wands of irrigation's one-armed clocks; here and there, tractor-generated pillars of dust move slowly, slowly. And then you see the startling, stark-white "tents" of Curt Fentress' 1995 Denver International Airport, meant to rhyme with the distant Rockies, but imparting the odd feeling that you are about to touch down somewhere in the Arabian peninsula. Perhaps Dubai?

 

 

Curt Fentress: Denver Airport Terminal, 1995

 

Later, Belmar itself turns out to be a nascent but flattened La Jolla, minus the beach. Or is everything around us one big beach?

 

Just as imagined, my 242 photocopies are stapled to the pristine walls of the Lab as part of an exhibition called  "In Plain Sight: Street Works and Performances 1968-1971." They document now-ancient yet still relevant artworks initiated by an exceedingly and self-consciously avant-garde cadre consisting of Vito Acconci, Scott Burton (1939-1989), Eduardo Costa, Bernadette Mayer, Marjorie Strider, Hannah Weiner (1928-1997) and yours truly.

 

 

In Plain Sight  (installation view) 

 

We, the instigators/producers of Street Works and early Performances, were writers of one sort or another who suddenly proclaimed ourselves artists through our daring deeds, propaganda, and organizational skills. (The exception was Strider, who had already been inducted as an artist into the annals of Pop.)

 

Acconci, Mayer, Weiner, and I were already published poets. Acconci and Mayer edited the mimeographed magazine 0-9, now a treasury of poetry's next step after the New York School. The New York School of poetry (John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara) were named after the New York School of art (Pollock, de Kooning) because of social, professional, and aesthetic correspondences.

 

Burton was a would-be playwright. Costa had studied with fabulist Jorge Luis Borges and was one of the authors of the Happening That Never Happened hoaxwork (in Buenos Aires). One of Costa's  "Fashion Fictions" had even made the cover of Italian Vogue. Acconci, Burton, and I were also art critics.

 

"In Plain Sight" is in plain sight until Jan. 4, 2009. Art historian Judy Collischan and I are the curators.

 

Along with the photocopies of leaflets, flyers, press releases and press coverage  (a small part provided by myself in the Village Voice, where I was the art critic at the time and such tactics were not forbidden) there are a number of choice souvenirs. Viewers are exposed to Strider's Frame Dress from the Fashion Show Poetry Event of 1968 held at the Center for Inter-American Relations in N.Y.C.; it was modeled by the naked dancer/choreographer Deborah Hay. Also on view is one unit of my Hair Piece, here displayed as a kind of apron to shield the privates of a female dummy, whereas in real life (i.e., the Fashion Show), the two-unit sculpture was a veil, skirt, arm- and leg-cuffs modeled by poet Anne Waldman.

 

And then there's Costa's gold ear-piece shown in a glamour photo by Richard Avedon and, from Street Works IV (sponsored by the Architectural League of New York in 1969), a "replica" of Weiner's Weiner's Wieners, which was a  rented hot-dog stand that offered free hot dogs at the curb in front of the League's headquarters. At the Lab, the stand-in for the original stand is displayed inside the second-floor gallery space and, at the opening, offered free dogs too.

 

Hannah Weiner: Weiner's Wieners 

 

Pictures of Acconci biting himself are up on the wall. And among the other mementos of our vital art movement, there's a large black letter A and 25 other objects, one for each of the remaining letters of the alphabet, all tied to a folding chair by black twine. This represents a performance I did at the Whitney Museum in 1971 called Critical Mass.

 

John Perreault: Critical Mass (props) 

 

For the opening of "In Plain Sight," I once again tied the 26 things to myself and crawled out of the gallery space, but this time my hair was short and I wore a Brooks Brothers suit and a tie. Also, to celebrate the opening reception, I  circumambulated a 10-ton, black-marble sphere imported from Russia that was sited behind the Lab in a little plaza, thus balancing the old with the new. Although the symbolism escapes me, when it is covered with and floating on a thin skin of flowing water, the sphere can be rotated with the touch of one finger.

 

 

 

 

John Perreault: Black Sphere Circumambulation, 2008

 

Back inside, through examining the ephemera displayed, the patient viewer will discern that there were over 200 hundred artists, poets and critics involved in the various Street Works. Now being celebrated at long last, the seven-person cadre itself also produced and starred in over 20 performance evenings within a short period, in venues as various as the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn. (the debut site of Virgil Thompson's Four Saints in Three Acts), Hunter College, the Whitney and the 14^th Street YMHA.

 

 

Marjorie Strider: Frame Dress; Perreault: Hair Apron, Fashion Show Poetry Event, 1968.

 

 

The first Street Work was initiated by Hannah Weiner in 1968; at that time she was a successful designer of women's underwear. The event occurred outside her loft on West 26^th Street. She hired two off-duty but fully uniformed Coast Guards to signal each other from one end of the block to the other, using regulation flags and flag codes. Wearing a gas mask, this writer wheeled his bicycle slowly down the street.

 

Above the clean-cut Coast Guard guys madly waving -- and above an assembly of 50 or so invitees -- poet and Paris Review editor Michael Benedikt projected a pornographic movie onto Weiner's loft window.

  

This led to bigger Street Work jamborees, as mysterious as they were ephemeral, but aimed more at the general public than an exclusively art-world audience. The first of these was on the Ides of March, 1968. At a time before cell phones, I made calls from one phone booth to another in a proscribed midtown area, hanging up before anyone could answer. Acconci walked back and forth in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral. During another Street Works installment, Burton cruised  the street in full drag and was not recognized by any of us. Costa claimed to have replaced missing street signs. Strider placed picture frames here and there. Critic Lucy Lippard drew chalk circles around each poet she came across. Avant-garde critic, artist and elder Lil Picard (who, like dance critic Edwin Denby, had survived the Weimar Republic) handed out art-world junk mail she had received the week before.

 

I have dedicated my "In Plain Sight" catalog essay to Picard and Denby. The catalog, in the spirit of Street Works, is a three-ring binder containing photocopies of all the photocopies stapled to the walls and slated for disposal.

 

I should note that Street Works were originally a response in part to Earth Works, which some of us considered elitist. It would take and still does take a considerable amount of cash to visit Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. Smithson was a friend and verbal sparring partner, so I couldn't help answering his own sarcasm with some of my own. I certainly didn't have the money to visit Utah.

 

It was also a time of social upheaval. The Vietnam war was not exactly popular. Assassinations seemed to be the order of the day: JFK in '63, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., in '68. In 1969, the Stonewall riots upset quite a few people, and in 1970 the Kent State massacre earned big headlines. Civil-rights sit-downs and peace marches proliferated.

 

                                     Black marble sphere, Belmar, Colorado
 
  

 

Inequality, visible as always, now seemed intolerable. Artists too protested against perceived ill-treatment at MoMA during the notorious Machine Art show. There was an art moratorium. Even art critics were in revolt, and I found myself elected president of the American Section of the International Association of Art Critics, a group that had become moribund under critic Rosalind Krauss.

 

 

The Absurdity of It All

 

Street Works attempted to make the cityscape visible again, with the added virtue of shaking up rigid career hierarchies and in so doing challenging  institutional passivity and conservatism. Moving indoors, Performances were neo-Happenings constructed on a more conceptual basis. Both Street Works and Performances were firmly grounded in Futurism, Dada, Happenings and Fluxus -- with a dose of Situationism for good measure. Poets were, of course, well-read. And we knew about art.

 

As a viewer of as well as participant in Street Works, I can testify that once one was keyed up to search for artworks within a certain number of city blocks within a certain time, everything was vivified; everything was sculpture. Is the mother holding the hand of her child a dancer dancing? Are the scraps of paper in the gutter Schwitters-like collage? Is that billboard real or only an artwork? Is the panhandler who approaches you an artist? Are the products in the shop window sculptures-for-a-day? Why is that telephone in the booth ringing and ringing?

 

But other lessons can be learned.

 

At a time when commerce rules the arts, we need to be reminded that one can make art without a MFA and with little or no cash-outlay -- hors de commerce, as it were. One creates one's own venue; the arts do not have to be controlled by money interests. In Artopia, the definition of an artist is not an art-school graduate who makes his (yes, still usually his) living by selling art products. An artist is someone who makes us see.

 

Visual artists should look at poets. Was William Carlos Williams (Robert Smithson's baby doctor!) any less of a poet because he made his living by practicing medicine? Or T. S. Eliot less a poet because he was a banker? Was Hart Crane less a poet because he once worked in a bookstore? Am I any less an artist because I am a poet who has made his living as an art critic? Are there not clerical and factory-worker artists? Was Marcel Duchamp less an artist because he was in some ways Brancusi's New York art dealer? 

 

  

Eduardo Costa: Ear (Fashion Fiction), 1968

 

 

The Crawl

 

Vito Acconci became the leading proponent of Body Art and now focuses on architectural projects. Bernadette Mayer became the director of the St. Mark's Poetry Project, Eduardo Costa eventually made sculptures out of solid paint. The late Hannah Weiner began to see words on people's foreheads and became a highly regarded avant-garde poet. The late Scott Burton evolved into an artist of note, specializing in furniture as sculpture. Along with writing poetry and fiction (Hotel Death, 1998), making toothpaste paintings, mending stones and working as an critic, curator and arts administrator, John Perreault just kept on being John Perreault. He kept on traveling.

 

 

 

 

Artopia on the Road

 

 

Daniel Libeskind: Denver Art Museum, 2006

 

 

Travel is a great way to unravel.

 

When in Denver, you can't miss Daniel Libeskind's Denver Art Museum (2006). It nearly blots out the once controversial museum building next door by Gio Ponti (1971) and, fortunately, the Michael Graves library. Libeskind's escapade is like his Jewish Museum in Berlin: all acute angles and lethal-looking triangles. I like the DAM -- at least the outside, because it screams "this is the place!" It doesn't look like a Greek temple or a bank or a fort (which Ponti's building does). If it is not a Greek temple or bank or fort, it must be ... an art museum.

 

The problem with the DAM is inside. How do you show paintings on walls that tilt? You have to build false walls and add all sorts of props and shims. My idea for an exhibition is to show a year's worth of shims in situ without the art they held up. Or better yet, mount the shims on normal walls and then affix blank canvases to reveal the angles and tilts they would have had to battle. Note too that whereas the angles and cul de sacs (symbolic!) inside of the Berlin museum are photogenic, it is the outside of the DAM that most pleases the camera.

 

Like his Jewish Museum, Libeskind's DAM building would be a great work of architecture if empty. Or could it be that we just have to get used to it? I remember the scandal of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim, now finally restored to its pale-beige glory. At first many opined that it looked like a gigantic washing machine, and even I thought that  having to stick paintings onto dowels to compensate for the curved walls in each bay was a bit much.

 

How swiftly we have rewritten architecture. Michael Graves rapidly replaced Robert Venturi, and now neither seems to have much influence. Buildings as icons are the rage. All that matters is how they look. They can be impractical and loony, but as long as they are photogenic they will carry the day. At least for a while.

                                               

                                                  

Hanging From the Cosmic Ceiling 

 

Vance Kirkland: Explosions on a Sun 70 Billion Light Years from Earth, 1979

 

So Adam Lerner, the energetic director of the Lab -- the DAM was in some way the Lab's launching pad -- said there's one more place I have to see: the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Arts, named after painter and educator Vance Kirkland (1904-81), whose studio it had been.

 

This charming museum is dedicated to its former owner's paintings. But that's not all. Seeded by Kirkland's collecting mania, the cottage-like museum also houses a huge collection of American "decorative art" (here meaning design objects), most of it from the '50s: by Russel Wright, Eva Zeisel, the Eameses. Everything is crammed together. Looked like home to me, but I zoomed in on the paintings.

 

 

 

                                                                  

In one of the rooms we see Kirkland's painting apparatus: leather straps hanging from the ceiling in great, drooping arcs over a broad worktable displaying an unfinished painting. He was a small man (5'1") and increasingly frail as he aged, so in the last and most glorious period of his art, he placed his canvases horizontally and suspended himself over them via these straps. Hovering arm's length over his surfaces, using dowels, he laboriously applied the final dabs/dots of paint on top of his oil and water grounds. Yes, oil and water.

 

  

   

 

Kirkland was a successful watercolorist in the '30s and showed at Knoedler in New York. After the Surrealism that followed his American Scene phase, he began to use oil paint as a resist for water-soluble colors. Then, in about 1951, living, working and teaching in Denver, he became an Abstract Expressionist without portfolio, painting the cosmos as it might be seen by someone with supra-spectrum vision or synesthesia. He did, in fact, see sounds as colors and vice versa. His great swirls of color, eventually dappled with brilliant dots, don't have preferred tops or bottoms, and quirky Kirkland resisted signing his abstractions because he didn't want them limited to a single orientation (sometimes, though, he signed them on opposing edges). I thought of the cosmos, but also of those big rectangular fields you see from the air when you fly into Denver; neither has a top or bottom.

 

 

Kirkland,The Energy of Explosions 24 Billion Years BC, 1978 (partial view) 

 

One cannot exactly call Kirkland an Outsider Artist, for he was obviously in touch with all the major trends in the art world; he was on the board of the Denver Art Museum and founded his own art school. As he matured, he spent more and more hours painting, often more than 12 hours a day every day for weeks on end, floating over his horizontal canvases, but selling less and less.

 

Kirkland was obviously talented, obviously charismatic, obviously capable of creating some astounding abstract paintings, obviously driven. But where shall we place him? In some cases, his dotting technique resulted in Op Art results, but he is primarily an Action Painting isolate, marching to his own drummer. A visionary of sorts, he synthesized opposites: oil and water, Op Art and AE.

 

Because Kirkland's paintings are displayed where he made them, sandwiched among piles and arrays of dishes, pots and furniture, visitors can enjoy them without the white-wall bracketing of most museums and galleries, and they sing. May they always be seen this way, and not removed to the slow death of standard display.

 

When art history is again rewritten, as it must be, there will be a special niche for Kirkland. But that art history will have to be of a new form created by those who can think outside the standard headings that slide lectures demand. How can we change the patterning of art history, the rote route, so it can allow the truth of an unofficial Abstract Expressionist making some of his best paintings -- and some of the best paintings of late-AE -- as late as 1980, in of all places Denver, Colorado, in a cottage, crammed with tchotchkas?

 

 

 

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