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I was a graduate student in art history at Williams three decades ago, a time when there
were limits to the number of Jews
or Blacks admitted each year, gay was a lyric in a Cole Porter song, and contemporary art was certainly
not a subject deemed
worthy of discussion, let alone a full semester's course, despite the fact that the Williams College
Museum of Art had hosted
a major retrospective of Jackson Pollock's paintings, organized by Clement Greenberg, in 1952. It is
personally rewarding
to see such a phenomenally orchestrated and powerful show now at MASS MoCA, a few miles east of the college,
and remarkable
that the museum dedicated its wall space, re-furbished an old building, and collaborated on such a project
in this day and
age of "we need a blockbuster to stay alive." The project, therefore, is not only a nod to the ideal
of the museum as a
place to view and think about art, but equally a nod to the museum as an important classroom for
young and old alike.
While MASS MoCA has functioned for some time as a laboratory for experimental programs, this classy retrospective
of 105 works
actually allows visitors to the Berkshires an opportunity to visit and revisit the show over time.
Every time the drawing is made, the mark of the maker is apparent: thinner lines perhaps, slightly deeper colors, and other
varied nuances that allow each iteration of the wall drawing to have its own character –you never
step in the same river
twice; ergo, you never produce a given wall drawing the same way twice, either.
At the root of the work is a firm belief in the honesty of geometry and mathematics. At his best, LeWitt
discovered, or perhaps
the better word is uncovered, a system by which he could engineer and reengineer a seemingly endless
stream of permutations
of forms, linear charts, and colors, including occasional decisions to switch to black and white. What
is most extraordinary
about this extraordinary vision is the nearly inexhaustible range of shapes, forms, colors, and styles
that LeWitt was able
to derive from this simple idea. At times, the wall drawing is quite austere, in bold primary colors
that energize the wall
surface, while at other times it can be a sea of wavy lines, or a frenetic jumble of shapes, or precise
horizontal, vertical
and diagonal lines, or even, as in the last series of works before his death, a controlled pattern of
scribbles. Here, LeWitt
brilliantly took the idea of random doodling and transformed it into a series of renderings that exploit
the qualities of
black graphite on a white wall. The walls seemingly radiate light. If Barnet Newman and Clyfford Still
ventured into the abyss
with the scale and saturated colors of their grand Abstract Expressionist canvases, then LeWitt certainly
broached the same
Herculean scale with his conceptual drawings.
As former Curator for the Microsoft Art Collection, Michael Klein commissioned a LeWitt
wall drawing for
the collection in 2001. The finished work, Wall Drawing #1000, is a remarkable 20 x 50 foot work
in a large cafeteria
enjoyed by employees and visitors in Redmond, WA. He now operates Michael Klein Arts in New York and is
an artist’s
agent and private dealer. |
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At 22, Choque Photos focuses his lens on contemporary social issues, particularly urban
youth expression. Amidst the chaos of São Paulo, Choque sees photography as a survival tool. His greatest pleasures in life
are nighttime photo shoots and a big bowl of açaí.
The issues surrounding the
archive fundamentally inform Cornell’s aesthetics and working methods.
In his family home in Queens, where he lived his entire adult life with
his mother and brother, Cornell amassed a vast private archive—“a
clearinghouse,” as he called it, “for dreams and visions . . . childhood
regained”—comprised of dossiers, memorabilia, and outmoded artifacts
devoted to such subjects as film stars (Garbo, Bacall, Monroe), ballerinas
(Fanny Cerrito, Tamara Touvanova), popular entertainers (the singer
Raquel Meller), and nineteenth-century poets (Emily Dickinson,
Goethe, Hölderlin) to name but a few of the less eccentric and arcane
subjects found among Cornell’s immense collections. From these
archives, Cornell culled the materials that went into his box constructions.
Much like Marcel Duchamp’s own “portable museum” Boite-en-Valise
[Box in a Valise] (1941), which Cornell helped assemble, these
small, elegant boxes function as miniature archives, housing the precisely
arranged collages of old photos, trinkets, and baubles the artist collected
on his haunts of second-hand stores throughout New York City.
Of the hundreds of boxes Cornell created, many of them, such as Untitled
(Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall) (1944-46), Fanny Cerrito
in Ondine (c.1947), Untitled [Caravaggio Boy] (c.
1950), or Untitled [Medici Princess] (c.1952-54), to name
a few, explicitly strive to recover what Cornell was fond of calling
“the light of other days.” Cornell’s film work shares
with his work in assemblage a fascination with memory and the recoverability
of the past, discovering in film the potential to set down, as he called
it in a 1946 letter to French film historian Claude Sebanne, "a
record Atget-like." And, just as the sheer immensity and
inscrutability of Atget’s photographic archive seems to displace commonly
held ideas about originality and authorship, the "found" aesthetic
that Cornell imported into his filmmaking complicates notions of individual
creativity. Remarkably, not only did Cornell not shoot
any of his own films, he never even learned how to work a movie camera.
Instead, Cornell commissioned other directors and photographers, such
as Brakhage, Rudy Burckhardt, and Larry Jordan, to shoot the sequences
he later edited. Or, even more ground-breaking, he re-edited in his
own idiosyncratic way “found footage,” creating highly personal
film collages. It is this latter technique of manipulating existing
footage—an approach to filmmaking that Cornell may have initiated—that
he deployed for his first, and no doubt most famous, film, the haunting
Rose Hobart. Having purchased from a New
Jersey warehouse for a ridiculously low price a print of the early grade-B
“talkie” East of Borneo (1931), Cornell took the film home,
eliminated the original soundtrack and dialogue, and replaced it with
Nestor Amaral’s jaunty composition “Holiday in Brazil.”
More radically still, he re-edited the original feature film’s running
time down to approximately 19 minutes, focusing the viewer’s attention
now almost exclusively on the film’s somewhat androgynous female lead,
the actress Rose Hobart. Slowing the projection speed down to
16 frames per second (the standard speed for silent film) and projecting
the film through a deep blue glass plate, Cornell created something
of a cinematic equivalent to the homages to actresses, divas,
and performers of times past in his box constructions such as Legendary
Portrait of Greta Garbo [destroyed] or in his magazine article entitled
“Enchanted Wanderer [excerpt for a Journey Album for Hedy Lamarr]”
published in View (Dec. 1941/Jan. 1942). The film, however,
raises interesting questions about just what is being archived.
The opening shot of a crowd
gazing skyward announces one of the film's
key motifs, that of vision. The film that follows, comprised mostly
of close-ups of Rose Hobart, emerges as a meditation on the seductions
of film stardom, dwelling on themes of distance and desire, fascination
and unattainability. The actress’s closely cropped hair and masculine
attire—riding gear, trench coat, mannish suit and hat—recall other
androgynous actresses in Cornell’s work, while the recurring "proscenium
shots" of Rose—framed in doorways or emerging from behind curtains
or netting—also invite comparisons to his boxes, whose photographs
of stars and performers were often placed behind glass, tiny window
frames, or lattice-work. In contrast, however, to the materiality
and “touchability” of the boxes (which were, after all, meant to
be picked up and handled by the viewer), the projected film’s immateriality
and temporal unfolding suggest that Rose Hobart attempts not
to archive a tangible object but rather to preserve or arrest one of
the more peculiar and evanescent experiences of cinematographic modernity—the
moviegoer’s visual possession of the Hollywood star. In addition to using found
footage in Rose Hobart and other “collage films,” such as
“Bookstalls” (late 1930s), “Jack’s Dream” (c. 1930s), and
“Children’s Party” (c. 1938), Cornell also hired others to shoot
original footage for him. Nevertheless, the graininess, abrupt
cutting, and other “amateurish” touches of these films significantly
give them the look of found footage. Like Rose Hobart,
several of these films seem to take as their subject the archiving of
fleeting aesthetic experiences. Two of the most beautiful of these,
A Legend for Fountains (Cornell’s favorite of his films) and
Nymphlight, both from 1957 and shot by Rudy Burkhardt, take New
York City as their primary subject. Borrowing its title
from a Lorca poem, A Legend for Fountains (b/w; 19 ½ min.),
for example, follows Cornell’s assistant Suzanne Miller through some
of Cornell’s favorite neighborhoods in Little Italy and the Lower
East Side. With her trench coat and short hair, the somewhat androgynous
Miller appears to function in the film as a female stand-in for Cornell,
wandering the city streets, gazing in shop windows, engaged in just
the kind of flanêrie that Cornell himself so often enjoyed.
The recurring images of the actress walking through corridors and doorways
suggests that Miller, in contrast to Rose Hobart, is not so much the
aesthetic object as the subject of the aesthetic gaze. Lingering in
some of Cornell’s favorite stomping grounds, Miller seems to “collect”
aesthetic experiences from just the kind of banal objects and situations
that inspired Cornell’s art—shop windows, birds in flight, and children
at play. Nymphlight
(color; 7 ½ min.) provides an interesting counterpoint to A Legend
for Fountains. Where Legend embraces urban flanêrie,
Nymphlight, shot in another of Cornell’s favorite haunts, Bryant
Square Park behind the New York Public Library, contemplates the urban
pastoral. Shot in color, and to be accompanied according to Cornell
by Claude Debussy’s “Cloches à travers les feuilles,” the film
follows twelve-year old Gwen Thomas, daughter of painter Yvonne Thomas,
on a leisurely stroll through the park. The opening shot of the
film, a flickering glimpse through the parapets of a little stone wall
of Gwen running, announces the film’s key theme: the evanescence of
aesthetic experience. Dressed in a white party dress and carrying a slightly sullied and broken parasol,
Gwen leisurely strolls through the park, taking in the park’s fountains,
birds, and passersby. The birds in flight (one of Cornell’s
major motifs) may suggest poetic transcendence or the fleetingness of
aesthetic experience, while the focus on fountains (so common in Cornell’s
films) may teasingly evoke Duchamp’s own Fountain (1917), the
retrieval of aesthetic experience from the most unlikeliest of sources
being the cornerstone of Cornell’s aesthetics. The image of the fountain returns
in “Angel” (1957; color; 3 min.), one of Cornell’s most poignant
films. Dedicated, as Cornell said, to his friend, the painter
Pavel Tchelichew, who had recently died, the film offers a rather moving
meditation on mortality. Comprised of static shots of a statue
of an angel and a fountain in a Flushing cemetery, the film’s elegant
and quiet close-ups against an expanse of blue sky of the statue’s
solid yet partly decaying marble brilliantly capture a sense both
of the earthly and time-bound and the unworldly and eternal. The
film’s stylistically innovative dissociation of moving image from
moving subject (a technique Cornell also largely deploys in “Centuries
of June” from the same year) anticipates by several years the daring
cinematic experiments of Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1963) and
Empire (1964), foregrounding duration, in contrast to movement,
as cinema’s true subject. Speaking of the difference
between still photography and film, the surrealist Jean Cocteau once
called attention to the fact that in film, “time courses through”
the object. Cornell’s films appear particularly sensitive to
this reality, exploiting the medium’s unique relation to time to construct
a cinematic archive. His beautifully enigmatic films thus provide
not only a provocative counterpoint to his work in assemblage but also
a critical chapter in the history of American avant-garde cinema.
Robert Stalker is an Atlanta-based freelance arts writer.
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