Buttering Up The Iron Lady

by Drew Martin

Butter is an ancient material - thousands of years in the making. The word originates from Greek - bouturon: bous, cow + turos, cheese. Butter has been used not only for food, but also as medicine and as a hair product. Tibetan lamas have used yak butter for hundreds of years as a medium for large-scale and colorful sculptures and facades (pictured left). According to a legend dating back to 641, a Buddha statue was brought for a royal wedding but there were no fresh flowers to adorn it so they were made from butter. I just saw The Iron Lady in the theater, which has a minor butter theme. It is a diet concern, a staple and an economic indicator. It is also a metaphor for the mind...minding the butter and the former prime minister's dementia. The elderly Margaret Thatcher tells the hallucination of her deceased husband, who is having breakfast with her, not to put so much butter on his toast. A young Thatcher (née Roberts) leaves her family's hiding spot during a WWII Luftwaffe air raid to cover the butter in their corner grocery shop. And finally, later in her political career, when one of her party members suggests she is out of touch with the people, she lists a few brands of butter and margarine and how much they cost to prove she is down to earth.

Glassy-eyed

by Drew Martin

This week's My Favorite Mistake page in Newsweek is by composer Philip Glass and is about his having two pairs of children with two wives, three decades apart. He writes about the notion of the solitary artist, spending time with his children as the finest moments in his life, and how his second family gave him a second chance to be a more involved father.

The mention of Glass influenced me to watch Naqoyqatsi: Life as War, which is accompanied by his music. Glass also created the scores for the first two films in this Qatsi trilogy - Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi. These films look at the contrast of modern and traditional life but Naqoyqatsi examines the transformation of a natural environment to a technological landscape.

The film starts with the Tower of Babel and gorgeous pans of dilapidated and empty buildings, and then moves on to glimpses of anything and everything (most of it in slow motion): athletes, soldiers, binary code, endless fractals, body scans, atomic bombs, happy people, sad people, traffic, factories, data centers, motherboards, trading floors, satellites, wax museum celebrities, assassination attempts, wildlife on the move, uprisings, police crackdowns, and ends with skydivers and stars.

The film is so stylized, digitally manipulated and intensely edited that I felt detached from the theme and it simply became a montage of images that reminded me of Czesław Miłosz’s poem Tidings:

Of earthly civilization what shall we say?

That it was a system of colored spheres cast in smoked glass,

Where a luminescent liquid thread kept winding and unwinding.

Or that it was an array of sunburnt palaces

Shooting up from a dome with massive gates

Behind which walked a monstrosity without a face.

That every day lots were cast, and that whoever drew low

Was marched there as sacrifice: old men, children, young boys and young girls.

Or we may say otherwise: that we lived in a golden fleece,

In a rainbow net, in a cloud cocoon

Suspended from the branch of a galactic tree,

And our net was woven from the stuff of signs,

Hieroglyphs for the eye and ear, amorous rings.

A sound reverberated inward, sculpturing our time,

The flicker, flutter, twitter of our language.

For from what could we weave the boundary

Between within and without, light and abyss,

If not from ourselves, our own warm breath,

And lipstick and gauze and muslin,

From the heartbeat whose silence makes the world die?

Or perhaps we’ll say nothing of earthly civilization.

For nobody really knows what it was.

Isles of Tiles

by Drew Martin

When I was kid I thought islands floated around the oceans and that you could swim under them. Islands are paradoxes...beautiful getaways and prisons for castaways. Unlike other chunks of land (deserts, mountain ranges, plateaus, plains, etc.) an island is not an island unless it is dwarfed by a vast body of water. This relationship of dry land and water is very much like my basement, which sits only a few inches above the water table. When that rises with the winter snow-melt and the spring downpours, my cellar floor is inundated with ground water. It is a very stressful time because I depend on a sump pump in a well to remove the water. If the water rises too quickly and overtakes the pump or if a storm knocks out the electricity then the water will rise a few feet and kill the boiler, hot water heater and appliances. Even if the water is constantly removed, the concrete floor can be wet for days. A neighbor has been giving me scrap tiles for projects so I started making tile islands around the basement. I do it in part as an art project but at the same time these elevated areas are placed in areas that I frequent and will hopefully remain dry. (Click here to see a video of one of the larger and more formal tile islands - in it I am cleaning off extra grout)

Debasement

by Drew Martin
Basements are scary places. It is where gangs of spiders hang out. In films, they are equated with unspeakable perversions - dungeons of death. When I hear about people like the Austrian man who raised an incestuous family with his kept daughter in his basement unbeknownst to his wife upstairs I am horrified but also curious about the actual space. Do they not have periodic house inspections for tax and code purposes? I have a reoccurring dream that underneath my house is an endless cavern or multiple levels of an underground structure. No one is ever in these spaces but me, alone, exploring. I have an interesting house. It is a bit of a shack that was built 130 years ago so there is an old, stone foundation, which has a couple newer crawl spaces with cinder-block foundations. The walls were falling apart last year so I spent six months rebuilding them with stone and more than 2,000 pounds of concrete, which I mixed by hand. One of the walls had a hole that went into the adjoining crawl space. I dug into it deep enough to get in and store things but I originally had ambitions to turn it into a gallery or speak-easy. Pictured here is an arch and "secret" door I made for the hole.

Like a Rock

by Drew Martin
A big medical office building is going up across the street from my house. The excavators dug a huge, deep pit for the foundation. At one point, when the hole was rectangular, perfectly flat at the bottom and tidy all around, a lone, big rock stuck up out of the ground; the tip of a boulder the size of a car. There was something mesmerizing about this scene. Here was a rock that had been buried under soil and clay for hundreds of years, maybe much longer. It reminded me of a Zen garden. It was not surrounded by pebbles raked by Buddhist monks, but packed earth with a rippled pattern of metal tank treads. I thought it would be nice if the builders would leave the rock and just pour the foundation around it so there would be this surprise in the basement. One late afternoon I decided to go out and photograph it but the sun had set and it was very dark. So I set up my tripod and because I was shooting black and white film I overrode the shutter speed and exposed the film for almost twenty seconds. The result is the image here. The next day the workers showed up with jack hammers and backhoes and broke the rock up into little pieces and put it on the side to be carted away later. The ground was flat.

The Broken Vase

by Drew Martin
It is bulk-trash pickup today in my town. It is a day when I should be blindfolded, bound with zip-ties and locked in a windowless room. Bulk-trash pickup day happens twice a month and you can put anything bulky out on the curbside and the town garbage collectors will pick it up and toss it in their truck. I live in a nice town so people throw out nice things, often because they are bored of them but usually because there is something broken. I never go out of my way for it - some people drive around in pick-up trucks the night before and collect everything they can - but I certainly have had absurd bounty: electric lawn mowers, cross-country skis, museums pedestals, etc. This morning I was running through the hills of my town. It was still dark, which is a time you should definitely not trash-pick because it is hard to assess the condition of something. Midway through my run I saw a huge, broken Greek vase. It is entirely kitsch but it was also such a great big sculptural object. So I picked it up and ran about two miles with it home and placed it on my art/junk wall outside my house.

Dating Dorian Gray

by Drew Martin
A couple years ago, I swapped computer assistance for French classes. It turned into more than just helping a lady revamp her website: I also helped her set up online dating profiles. She was in her 60's, looked like she was in her 70's, posted that she was in her 50's and was looking for men in their 40's. She would scoff at anyone nearing her years. Although she was not realistic about her age, she was candid about the situation. "I hope you never have to do this" she said to me in a deeply sad voice. Yesterday I was reading the Get Naked page of Time Out New York and there was a 59-year-old man who wrote in that he was passing himself off as a 37-year-old guy to his 20-year-old boyfriend. I never understood this. It is flattering to be told you look younger than you are and to feel like a twenty-something as you pass through your middle years because you exercise, eat well and have good genes but why on Earth would you want to set yourself up to appear to be a poorly aging younger person as opposed to a timeless older person? If anything, the latter means you hold the secret to extended youth.

Portrait with a Low Brow: Whistler's Mother was a "Mad Old Cow"

by Drew Martin
In the film Bean, Mr. Bean is a narcoleptic sitter at the Royal National Gallery. He is gladly shipped off to America when the Grierson Gallery of Los Angeles seeks an expert to receive Whistler's famous painting known at Whistler's Mother from the Musee d'Orsay. The painting is actually titled Arrangement in Grey and Black. Bean is anything but a specialist and is mistaken as a quirky genius. When asked about his position, he says "I sit in the corner and look at the paintings." The curator is impressed by this simple approach for a scholar. The movie is full of lowbrow antics: Bean sneezes on the head in the painting and tries to clean it up with paint thinner but ends up dissolving it, which he then replaces with a cartoon face. He fixes the disaster by swapping the damaged canvas with a poster. In his speech at the unveiling, Bean offers that it is a large painting, which is good because if it were a small painting - microscopic - no one would be able to see it, and that is about family, which he has discovered on his trip is the most important thing. He says that even though Whistler's mother was a "mad old cow" he was still thoughtful enough to spend the time to paint her picture.

Comic Book Confidential

by Drew Martin

I watched Comic Book Confidential online today, which is a film that surveys the history of the comic book medium, starting with the hero characters created during World War II. The movie is from 1988 but it is dated in all the right ways. For one thing it is a time when the comic book was still a comic book. A young Art Spiegelman, who is interviewed in the film, had published his first completed volume of Maus only two years prior. Although the label graphic novel had been around for some time before, it was with Maus that I recall the term got traction in the general public, mainly because the content about the Holocaust was too grave to refer to as a comic. Along with Spiegelman, the film features more than twenty artists including Frank Miller, Stan Lee, Will Eisner, Robert Crumb and William Gaines - who says his father invented the comic book from the Sunday comics. One of the treats of the film is that several of the artists read from their works. Eisner succinctly expresses the draw to creating comics,

"I can tell a whole story at two levels. I can deal in writing and I can deal in acting. It has a completeness to it that satisfies me."

Project Light

by Drew Martin
Projected and transmitted light plays an important part in two shows, a stone's throw apart, in the West Village. Uri Aran (at Gavin Brown) uses multiple video projections, a slide projector and one small, black and white Spectra television (pictured left - top) to display his content. David Lamelas (at Maccarone) projects light in a very different way. He uses old movie projectors - one of them points at the glass doors of the entrance to the gallery. The other one is turned in the opposite direction and projects a modest patch of light on a white wall - pure light (pictured left - bottom). It is as if the two artists were given the same class assignment to use projections of light in their work and each of them executed the concept with very different interpretations. Aran idles in front of his camera - listing "cuisines of the world" in one of his small rear-projections. In another similar rear-projection he describes ten soiled balls hammocked beneath his talking image. The detached Aran dunks a tea bag and fumbles with cookies in one of the larger wall projections. The television loops a scene of a mother and son snuggling while the mother strokes his hair. The carousel projector with 80-slides shows details of Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street with cookies. Cookies are a major theme here. They are childish doubloons and symbolize home as well as the crumbling fragility of boyhood. In one part of another large projection, which has a whole gallery room dedicated to it, Aran repeats "Look mom. Look at that." He says it in his adult voice but with the tone of a child who is desperate to get his mother's attention. Melancholic music and table-displays of scrappy, unsophisticated objects all work together to create a very troubled feeling of loss and insecurity. There is something very sad about Aran's installation...not depressing just neglected...like he is waiting for his mother to come to him with tea and cookies and to clean up his mess in the gallery. Considering Aran's show next door, Lamelas' use of movie projectors is very poignant. While Aran seeks attention and projects something like a substitution of home movies, Lamelas projects the absence of them. There is no film, no image, just light. The projectors make their metallic ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta sounds, the light flutters and the extended arms, which would normally hold the film reels, seem pointless now, especially the rear arms, which spin effortlessly. The light hitting the glass front doors temporarily blinds the visitor and the light hitting the wall is without incident unless you pass by it, which would then cast your shadow on the wall in the frame of the lit rectangle.

The Common Vision of Churches and Casinos

by Drew Martin
I met up with my friend John Coburn after work today. John is an artist I have been following for a couple years and the first person I had a studio visit with as an arts writer, which is when I found out that he knew much more about art than I did. In 2010, I interviewed him (Bring It On: An Interview with John Coburn) and reviewed his show Fairlane Marauder.  John works as a decorative painter at EverGreene Architectural Arts, a painting studio dedicated to restoration, conservation and decorative painting. I stopped in tonight to take a look. I was amazed by the large spaces, huge paintings and supplies everywhere. Apparently a lot of the work is for churches and casinos, and many times it is difficult to tell which of the two destinations a painting will call home. One set of canvases being worked on (not by John), which I found interesting was an enormous painting of the sun shining through heavenly clouds. Taped to the wall, next to it, was a source for the work: a photograph from 9/11 of the sun setting through the dust of Ground Zero kicked up in the wreckage. I made two fly-on-the-wall videos when I was there: one of a religious painting on the wall opposite the sunburst and one of an artist drawing. There is also an interesting video EverGreene has online about historic finishes investigations.

A Well-Designed Future

by Drew Martin
Yesterday I watched the documentary Objectified, which is about the conception and production of things. It is a slickly made film, produced and edited with an attention to detail worthy of the industrial designers interviewed. In one scene, the retired Braun designer, Dieter Rams, trims a bonsai in his garden in Kronberg. He says that good design should be innovative, useful, aesthetic, understandable, honest, unobtrusive, long-lived, consistent in every detail, environmentally friendly...and "last but not least, good design is as little design as possible." The documentary returns to Rams at the end for a slightly apocalyptic comment...."The value, and especially the legitimization of design will be, in the future, measured more in terms of how it can enable us to survive, and I don't think this is an exaggeration, to survive on this planet." Rams points to Apple as today's best design firm, which prompts an interview with Jonathan Ive, Apple's Senior Vice President - Industrial Design, who speaks about undesigning and getting design out of the way. Karim Rashid questions why we need to keep revisiting the archetype; why for instance, does a digital camera try to reference a film camera, which had been designed for the way film loads. This documentary addresses cradle-to-cradle design issues of sustainability. What I found most interesting were the designers who spoke about design beyond products; using design to understand situations and to design solutions.

First Impressions: A Look at Homepages of 40 Museums

by Drew Martin

I am embarking on making a website for The Museum of Peripheral Art. I had one before but I took it down just before I turned my attention to this blog. I thought I should first take a look at the websites of internationally renowned museums as well as a few that I had good memories visiting. Museums come in all shapes and sizes and have very different revenue sources but on the Internet the opportunities to present an institution is a fair game. Some organizations do a decent job of representing who they are, while others fail miserably. A museum website should embody the heart and soul of a museum. Presented here are thumbnails of "print screens" of 40 museums, the majority are in the United States, with a large number in New York, but these also include museums from Australia, China, Czech, England, France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, India, Israel, Japan, Qatar, Russia, Spain and Switzerland. I just realized that I completely forgot to look at Italian museums' websites (of course they would know how to put on a good show) but when I clicked on the website for the Uffizi, I was more than disappointed. My comments are beneath each set of four images:



I like simple homepages without too much clutter and when they give you an impression of what they are about. I think it was important for the New Museum to show some of its gallery space with an exhibit. The Metropolitan and the Louvre - both classy. The Rubin, OK, I know I am heading East.



These are examples with an urge to tell you more about themselves and they do a good job of it, each in a way that represents the respective organization well. There is a trend now in website design towards cleaner looks but I like the richness of these pages. There is information but they do not seem informational.



These try to do the same thing but have a bit of a breakdown in layout. The Rijks kills it on the lower left in the same way that the Tate's right "shop" navigation bar and bottom-center "follow us" section seem misplaced. MAD overuses its logo and MoMA looks like it is selling ad space and only whispers its name.



There is something wrong with all of these but they all have something going for them. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney is too busy and the top navigation is quirky (perhaps too cute) but I actually found it amusing...while it is loading a little janitor is mopping the top header and then people walk into the header and assume a place in the navigation. When you mouse over each one, he or she waves and then a speech bubble pops up over him or her, with subcategories. I like it because, starting with the janitor, it shows you that the museum is about the staff too. I really liked the Prado's homepage when I first saw it because it looked clean and organized but each time I go back to it, it looks more and more boring. Although The National Museum of Moder Art, Tokyo's page is almost void of images, I do like how they make it super clear what they are about Art - Craft - Film. The Virginia Museum of Fine Art has a gorgeous new addition and an impressive collection but this page does not show that and it has banner overkill.



These examples are quite nice and they are all in the same family. They are simple but a little safe. I was expecting a little more of a punch from The Warhol, MOCA - Los Angeles is what I expected, the Städel's site is clean and organized like the museum and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art is very similar, but I have to admit - its use of a great exterior shot of the museum piques my interest in going there. It looks beautiful and modern.



The site for the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi has some clunky navigation but it actually do the best job of all the sites showcasing its collection. I immediately know what I am in for, which I like. I think if the Getty cleaned up its header, it would work better. The Art Institute of Chicago has too much going on and should show its new modern wing by Renzo Piano. The Newseum is the only site I included here that is not an art museum so in all fairness I cannot compare it as such. I just thought it was interesting to take a look at a museum based on mass media.



The Guggenheim commits the same act of design murder by inflating its name. It is busy and boring at the same time. SFMOMA's site would be better if it did not use a Flash build. Otherwise, I actually like how simple and simply different it is...it is growing on me. The Museum of Islamic Arts in Doha is a fantastic building by I. M. Pei and it should be shown off in the header instead of a bad, stylized rendering of it. This last one here pains me. I visited the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1992. I remember it being small but unique . This website des not recall its fascinating collection for me and it has the name/logo in the footer when it should be in the header.

 

They get worse: the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghei's website is too amateurish, apparently I should bring my MasterCard to Budapest if I want to look at art, the National Museum in Prague's website looks like they are still using a template from the 1990's and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw took a bad logo and made it huge but then the use of it in the upper left of the website looks like it was photocopied from the back of a discarded tram ticket.



These last four are crimes against humanity. I remember being awed by the Ishtar gate preserved at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin when I saw it as a young man. This site looks like a form. I spent a week next to the the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres about that same time in 1992. How could you go wrong designing a site about Dalí's work? I toured the Hermitage when St. Petersburg was still Leningrad and was blown away by it. The site should simply loop the trailer for Russian Ark - the movie with the longest "shot" in film history and the first feature film created in a single take, with 2,000 actors bringing to life 300 years of Russian history in 33 rooms of the Hermitage. I have never been to the Pompidou but it was in all my art history books - Piano's building turned inside out...this homepage is dead.



Eva Hesse: Picking up the Pieces

by Drew Martin
There is an interesting talk online, Drawing as Primary Medium, by the curator Catherine de Zegher about Eva Hesse, a brilliant artist who has a cult following that still mourns her untimely death and keeps her unique work alive in caring hands.

Hesse was born in Hamburg in 1936 but was sent to America via England when she was two to flee Nazi Germany. Her parents split when she was eight and her mother committed suicide when she was ten. Hesse died of a brain tumor at the age of 34. With this background it is common to describe Hesse's art as work about loss.

De Zegher relates the act of drawing as the outward gesture to another person as well as the first exploration - departing from one's mother. She is not the most engaging speaker but she is intimate with Hesse on many levels. De Zegher speaks of Hesse's work as the hybridization of sculpture and drawing and a union of opposites that can never be together; black and white, rejection and incorporation.

De Zegher says that Hesse "picked up" drawing in two ways...raising it from a subservient position in a painting and sculpture-dominated art world and by literally picking up materials for her work from the floor of a defunct textile factory in a suburb of Essen, which she and her husband Tom Doyle occupied as studio space when they returned to her homeland for a period. Hesse made an attempt to translate her drawings into paintings but it did not work for her. The reason for this was that her drawings were more like sculpture, which is why she developed such a natural relationship between the different disciplines. Hesse's work was pioneering because she used materials that were still ignored in the arts. De Zegher says that 70% of the artists she interviews mention Hesse as an influence because of her complex thinking around space, process and connectivity. She speaks for Hesse when she quotes Richard Tuttle in the talk:

"I ask the material to tell me what it knows and then I humbly listen. The payoff is greater than the humiliation."