projections in berlin

Presently I am in a group show at Galerie Crystal Ball in Berlin.

Curated by Alena Williams and Manfred Kirschner,  In a Shadow Box consists of drawings by twenty-seven artists. We all received transparencies and glass slides in the mail, drew on them with ink, and then mailed them back to be projected on the walls of the gallery.

{Susanna Bluhm, Untitled (In a Shadow Box 2), ink drawing on glass slide, 2010}

Images in the show are fleeting, interrupted, and altered by what came before or after. While most drawing shows feature works materially attached to the wall, with accompanying title notes, the dark space of this show offers no grounding for the work or the viewers moving through the space. The drawings float together and create an ephemeral installation in the “empty” space. I imagine people are walking away with odd memories of lines and shapes layered on top of each other in a way that will be different from person to person, animating internal shadow boxes.

{Susanna Bluhm, Untitled (In a Shadow Box 1), projected drawing on transparency, installed in Galerie Crystal Ball Berlin, 2010}

A BOOK ABOUT DEATH

A BOOK ABOUT DEATH is a project by Matthew Rose that hundreds of artists all over the world are participating in. It will be an unbound book, and anyone that comes to its exhibition (at The Emily Harvey Foundation Gallery in New York) can walk away with its pages, for free.

To create the “pages,” artists made and mailed 500 postcards to the gallery. All postcards contain the words “a book about death.”

The geographical scope of the participating artists is vast. Anyone on earth could write a book about death.

I made 500 postcards cut from Seattle’s surviving printed newspapers.

L’Orangerie, Paris (Favorites, No. 3)

Monet’s cycle of eight Nymphéas are not so much paintings as they are an installation. Many people “know” them (or have a vague sense of the water lily paintings in general) via their reproduction on umbrellas and calendars, but you really must be at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris in order to see them in their entirety. I guess this could be said about any painting and its reproduced incarnations, but here I’m being literal. Over 19 feet long, the paintings are too big to take a picture of. They will not fit in a singular field of view; rather, they are a field, and the viewer is surrounded and suspended in it.

Wrapping the walls of two oval-shaped rooms, the canvases are not flush against a flat wall; they are convex on a curved wall, so that to stand in front of them is to move into them in space, literally. They are an environment, complete with an elliptical sky of diffused light above. It is precisely the installation that Monet intended.

I felt alone in these rooms, even though there were other people stumbling around. I felt submerged in color, thrilled to the core, yet peaceful at the same time. As paintings, the Nymphéas are flawless, whether viewed up close or fifteen feet away. I might say that this is my favorite work of art, ever. And damn, I love the French. They let you take pictures inside their museums, saying “Here, this is for you, too.”

Speaking of the Biennale…

Is anyone else wondering what Chihuly is doing there? Is he the artist representing the U.S.?  What is John Buchanan smoking? (that is, when he said Chihuly is “the world’s greatest living artist?”) I thought Chihuly was king of a different art universe? Am I committing Northwest blasphemy? Is a glass-blowing mafia going to come after me and my family?

Postcard from Venice (wish I were there!)

My old friend Alena sent pictures of Miranda July’s Eleven Heavy Things at the sculpture park at the Biennale.

 

 

 

Favorites, No. 1: Mariele Neudecker’s Winterreise

On days that I would like to get out and be inspired by art in person, but the baby is not wearing his sociable face, I will revisit my favorite works of art seen in days past.

I saw Mariele Neudecker‘s Winterreise (A Winter’s Journey) at Temple Bar Gallery in Dublin in 2005.  Projected large on the wall in a dark room, Winterreise is a series of 24 short films with music.  The films correspond to Schubert‘s 24 songs in the song cycle also titled Winterreise. Schubert’s 1827 Winterreise sets to music 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller.

In Neudecker’s Winterreise, Schubert’s song cycle, with voice and piano, plays on a loop along with the film. Müller’s poems float as English text over slowly changing imagery.  The film uses scenes of landscape and life on the 60th degree of latitude on the globe. Winter. Iceland, Russia, the Shetland Islands. Sometimes the images mirror the poems in content, sometimes they don’t.  Sometimes the images breathe contemporary content into the poems, striking and perfect. There is the feeling of being held in suspension between the old and the new, with the combination of the old music and the new medium of video/installation. They go beautifully together.

I sat through the whole cycle with eyes like saucers, in disbelief at how perfect it all was. Then I came back the next week and sat through it again, taking pictures of each scene. I wanted to have something to remember it by.

Dee Dee does the White House

Our own Deborah Lawrence was asked to create an ornament for the White House Christmas Tree, to be unveiled tomorrow by Laura Bush.  If you know Deborah’s work, you’re probably not surprised that a virtual fist fight has broken out over her ornament. The debate is primarily centered around whether Deborah should or should not have used a Christmas tree ornament as a political platform.

I had to add my two cents:

Deborah Lawrence is a thoughtful, highly regarded artist participating in the international contemporary art community. She was asked to make an ornament. She made one. She was invited to the White House. She went. I think any contemporary American artist would jump at the chance to do these two things. And they would do it their way, just as Deborah did.

I think this is a great project, and I am impressed with Laura Bush’s decision to leave the artist selection process to the professionals, rather than manhandling every ornament. With a president as disastrous as her husband, she must have considered that a dissenting ornament was a possibility. In taking this risk, she clearly values the integrity of the project over a politically homogeneous Christmas tree. Applause.

* UPDATE on Dec.3rd *

ha ha ha!  I knew something was fishy about giving Laura Bush that much credit.