Detroit Part 3: DIA

The Detroit Institute of Art is often in the news since the city filed for bankruptcy. This was another reason for our road trip - to visit the museum and support the arts. I had long heard that DIA's general collection was one of the top ten in the nation and that proved to be true as we walked through galleries in amazement at their holdings. I will voice my dissent loudly if the city decides to auction the work. It is truly a tourist destination as there were visitors from all over the world last Sunday. Here are some of my favorite pieces that we encountered (some were expected and others were a sheer surprise).

Cracks in Albert Pinkham Ryder's The Tempest.

Hannah told me Ryder mixed bear fat in his pigments and it is a conservationist's nightmare. Some of his artworks need to rest on a flat surface to keep the paint from separating. The Tempest reminded me of my past failures in graduate school to create a cracked surface on negatives. Hannah made it a mission to finally figure out how this could be achieved after we discussed this work at length (and every other painting in the American Collection where this flaw was represented).

 

 

The Rivera Court generated quite the crowd while memories of teaching 20th century art at Washington State University - Vancouver flooded back. I spent more time looking at the details and how Diego Rivera sectioned off areas to paint while the plaster was still wet. We found his signature and marveled at how different the city was when he created these murals in 1933. There were elements of Cubism and Abstraction within the representational imagery of industry. We wondered if the upper left portion of the South wall featuring medical tools (including scissors) was painted with Frida Kahlo in mind.

Ray Johnson, January/February, 1966

I could have stared at this collage of painted wood and board on paper for far longer than we had time. After studying countless examples of his mail art, learning about this work broadened my view of his accomplishments.

Samuel van Hoogstraten, Perspective Box of a Dutch Interior, 1663 (with contemporary reproduction and blurry illuminated view through the peephole)

Whenever I talk about my inspirations for Strange Objects: A Photographic and Found Object Wunderkammer, this box is featured. It is one of my all time favorite art objects and I could not believe my eyes when Hannah and I encountered it in the Dutch Collection. I did not stop talking about it for hours and it was, hands down, the best thing I saw all weekend (despite a lot of competition). One of the many things I love about it is its failures. When the front panel is in place, it is too dark inside for viewers to see the details of the wealthy Dutch interior. DIA presented a far larger and well illuminated reproduction alongside the 17th century piece and for the first time, I could see what van Hoogstraten envisioned with his experimentation in trompe l'oeil.

We also encountered Eva Hesse's Accession #2, Morris Louis's Alpha Gamma, and a superb collection of black-and-white photographs by Gerhard Richter in the Foto Europa: 1840 to Present exhibition.

It was invigorating to spend the entire weekend looking at artwork. We have a list of nonprofits and galleries to see next time as a return trip will occur in the spring.

Wunderkammer (again and again)

After reading Umberto Eco's Infinity of Lists, thoughts of the wunderkammer reappeared (as they often do) in addition to the presentation of collections based on old curiosity cabinets. Here are some images that I have pondered over the past couple weeks featured in Eco's book.

Johann Georg Hainz, Collector's Cabinet, 1666, Hamburg, Hamburger Kunsthalle

From Eco (page 203): "Most of what remains of the Wunderkammern are pictorial representations or etchings in their catalogs. Sometimes they were made up of hundreds of tiny shelves holding stones, shells, the skeletons of curious animals and sometimes masterpieces of the taxidermist's art capable of producing non existing animals. Other times they are cupboards, like miniature museums, full of compartments containing items that, removed from their original context, seem to tell senseless or incongruous stories."

Reliquary Urn with pebbles from the Holy Land, 17th century, Paris, Musée des Civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée


 A place that I must visit someday: the Museo del Tempo Ozzano Taro.

The three images above come from this source.

Part of me wants to spend years toiling away on a site-specific wunderkammer that no one is aware of much like Marcel Duchamp's Etant Donné.

Umberto Eco - "The Infinity of Lists"

I packed Eco's illustrated book on the history of art and literature in relationship to the list to once and for all read and conquer during my residency. Mission accomplished!

Eco differentiates between "practical" and "poetic" lists, an area I found fascinating. From page 374: "A restaurant menu is a practical list. But in a book on culinary matters, a list of the diverse menues of the most renowned restaurants would already acquire a poetic value. In the same way, one might daydream about an abundance of an exotic cuisine on reading (not with a view to ordering, but for aesthetic reasons) the menu of a Chinese restaurant with its pages and pages of numbered dishes."

Rosa Klein (André Rogi), Bonnard's Palette, 1930 (from Coherent Excess)

Eco included Wislawa Szymborska's Possibilities (1985) in the section on "The Rhetoric of Enumeration":

I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.
I prefer the oaks along the Warta.
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.
I prefer myself liking people
to myself loving mankind.
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
I prefer not to maintain
that reason is to blame for everything.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer to leave early.
I prefer talking to doctors about something else.
I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquered to conquering countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms' fairy tales to the newspapers' front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven't mentioned here
to many things I've also left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.

He breaks down the list into 21 categories including the visual, collections and treasures, mass-media, coherent excess, and the "ineffable." I was reacquainted with my love of the wunderkammer and know that I will probably make art about that subject matter again (hello site specific installation).

Vincennes University Exhibition Press

A surprise arrived in the mail last week: a real live printed publication (Hoosier Family Living Magazine) with a review of the Vincennes University exhibition from September. I love the "speechless circus clown's canvased wagon in another century" comparison. Note: the wrinkly page is part of the design not a bad scan on my part.

Remaking the template for "Strange Artifacts"

New paper.

New descriptions (not in cryptic metaphors).

Perhaps Strange Artifacts: A Found Object and Photographic Wunderkammer will be exhibited again.

If so, it's 100% organized (three days later).

Vincennes University Installation

Morgan Ford Willingham gave me this disk of installation images from The Object Transformed at Vincennes University. I was very happy with the exhibition despite the awkwardness of having three different series seen at once (awkward as in I never thought of that way but it made perfect sense once viewing in person). Thank you for the opportunity to show my work, Morgan!

"The Object Transformed" Press Release

The exhibition opens on Monday, August 20 and will be on exhibit through Thursday, September 13 in the Shircliff Gallery of Art.
 

Closing Reception will be held in the gallery from 11am - 12pm on Thursday, September 13, with an Artist Lecture from 2pm - 3pm that day in the Shircliff Auditorium, E101 in the Humanities Building.

Jacinda Russell is a photographer of objects - the object transformed into a self-portrait, a representation of place, a distant memory, or a symbol of fixation. Important influences in Russell’s work include found photographs, maps, 16^th century cabinets of curiosity, worn and dilapidated objects, obsessive behavior in collecting, repetition, and storytelling. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Art at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Russell received her MFA in photography from the University of Arizona and her BFA from Boise State University.  Her mixed media installations and photographs have been exhibited nationally and her work is represented in the collections of the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Reed College, Portland, Oregon.

The Shircliff Gallery of Art is located in the Shircliff Humanities Building on the corner of 2nd and Harrison streets. Gallery Hours are Monday - Thursday 8am - 10pm, Friday 8am - 5pm, and Sunday 12 - 3pm. The Gallery will be closed on Labor Day Weekend, September 2-3.

 

Vincennes University Installation

This week marked a 30 hour trip to Vincennes where I started the installation of the exhibition The Object Transformed. Never did I realize that the wunderkammer would have staying power. This is its fifth exhibition!

This was the first chance for me to see the mammoth paper bags together (not rolled up in a box). I'm really thankful they can be viewed as a grid. Thanks to Morgan Ford Willingham for the opportunity to show my work in this gallery! More photographs will follow next month when I return for the closing reception.

Ready for Vincennes University Solo Show

The amount of time these three Word docs took to make will remain nameless. All 86 pieces are packed and ready to go! One of the things they don't teach you in art school is that you must know how to drive a cargo van. Yes indeed....

Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler

I should have read this book in 2006 while working on the wunderkammer but better late than never.  The Museum of Jurassic Technology, along with finding John Baldessari's house, is one of the must-sees next time I am in Los Angeles. The odd hours Mr. Wilson keeps have never aligned with my schedule and it therefore becomes a more sought after location to visit when I've tried twice ending in failure. Plus, it's right next to the CLUI which I absolutely have to visit as well (one can't only visit the Wendover location and not see the real source!).

Some highlights from Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder include:

"The visitor to the Museum of Jurassic Technology continually finds himself shimmering between wondering at (the marvels of nature) and wondering whether (any of this could possibly be true). And it's that very shimmer, the capacity for such delicious confusion, Wilson sometimes seems to suggest, that may constitute the most blessedly wonderful thing about being human."

I enjoyed Weschler's investigations on whether or not the wall text in the museum was indeed true. He and Errol Morris most certainly have something in common as their research approaches obsessiveness. They call, they visit, and they must get to the bottom of everything. Eventually Weschler gives up and accepts the museum as it is but chronicles the path thoroughly.

"Ever since the late Renaissance... these sorts of collections got referred to as kunst- und Wunderkammern. Technically, the term describes a collection of a type that's pretty much disappeared today - with the exception, perhaps of the Jurassic - where natural wonders were displayed alongside works of art and various man-made feats of ingenuity. It's only much later, in the nineteenth century, that you see the breakup into separate art, natural history, and technology museums. But in the earlier collections, you had the wonders of God spread out there cheek-by-jowl with the wonders of man, both presented as aspects of the same thing, which is to say, the Wonder of God."

I didn't realize that separation of art museums from history and technology was as late as the 19th century. If I could step back in time and see just one of these culminations.... That paragraph lends a little more history to what I didn't know about the inception of the modern day museum.

In his notes, Weschler also outlines the top ranking of "one-of-a-kind museums" compiled by Weissman Travel Reports in 1995. The Mütter Museum (one of my favorites) topped the list but these also sound intriguing: Museum of the Two-Headed Animals in Bamberg, Germany; the Barbie Museum in Palo Alto; and the Museum of Menstruation  (WTF?) that didn't make the list in Maryland. After perusing the Museum of Jurassic Technology's website and looking at its "Sympathetic Institutions," I can't help but want to visit some of these too.

Weschler ends the book with a wonderful quote from Italo Calvino in If on a Winter's Night A Traveler (which just bumped this book up in my library check-out list): "To my astonishment they take me home rather than to some secret hideaway and lock me in the catoptric room I had so carefully reconstructed from Athanasius Kircher's drawings. The mirrored walls return my image an infinite number of times. Had I been kidnapped by myself?"

Athanasius Kircher's drawing of a parabolic horn which could amplify sound waves for the enjoyment of listeners via.

Mark Dion's "Travels of William Bartrand - Reconsidered"

The other day when I was ruminating on building a curiosity cabinet, I was really thinking about Dion's Travels of William Bartram - Reconsidered but didn't know it until today.

From Ethan Hauser's New York Times Review: "Dion set about to recreate the journeys of William Bartram, a Pennsylvania-born naturalist who traveled through the Southeast in the 18th century. Though Dion tried to follow Bartram’s original route as closely as possible, there were detours spurred by both 20th-century interventions (strip malls, subdivisions, highways) and good old-fashioned whimsy (flea markets, barbecue joints). Along the way, Dion, an expert collector, documented his travels through delicate hand-drawn postcards, water samples from lakes and rivers, and the accumulation of everything from animal teeth to alligator-themed ashtrays."

Mark Dion, Travels of William Bartram - Reconsidered (Detail), 2008
Image via.

As Dion states in "The Culture of Nature: A Conversation with Mark Dion": "everything is fragmentary and imperfect. These important objects are presented side by side with curious and indefinable objects, things that are uniquely homemade, damaged, absurdly commonplace, and ravished by the elements."

I don't necessarily like how scientific it looks (and shiny and brown) but the presentation with drawers and bottles is appealing. As I get deeper into Autobiography and must contend with objects that will not work as photographs, a custom built piece of furniture becomes more important. The Clear Water Samples are also taking on a life of their own which will require a more thoughtful presentation. Considering I have never built anything complicated in the wood shop, this should be interesting. I may have figured out my fall project.

Curiosity Cabinets

It's not that I have enough to do already. This summer I'm tying up loose ends: making two self-published books & two artist's books, preparing for a solo exhibition in August and a big group show in November, learning encaustics, video, and experimenting with glass and cyanotypes, checking out over 50 books on library loan (and the summer is only half done), and applying for more exhibitions and grants. All of a sudden, I now want to take a furniture making class and learn how to make my own curiosity cabinet.

As part of my interlibrary loan catch-up list, I checked out Patrick Mauriès' Cabinets of Curiosity last week. I knew a lot of the early history from my initial wunderkammer research five years ago and was mainly interested in the last chapter. It focused on the last 100 years.

It was here that I discovered the Chateâu d'Oiron which will now be on my must visit before dying list (though the noise when clicking on the link nearly killed me before I did see the building). It is an old Renaissance house that is given up to 20-21st century interpretations of cabinets of curiosity. Christian Boltanski installed this as a portrait gallery (but rather than the owner's family and relatives, he used London schoolchildren).

Christian Boltanski at Chateâu d'Oiron

I was also drawn to Natasha Nicholson's cabinet containing her person mythology. Her website shows a more adequate representation of scale (it's not miniature!) and details. I could imagine making something like this if I lived in a house where I would never move.

Natasha Nicholson, Cabinet of Curiosities, 2000

Finally, Alistair McAlpine's antique shop turned wunderkammer is also fascinating. According to Mauriès, "McAlpine is a British collector who is fascinated by everything: classical sculpture, Australian minerals, a dinosaur egg, stone age flints, Egyptian canopic jars, dried crocodiles, etc. There is no theme to his collection and he lives with it as part of his daily existence."

Alistair McAlpine's Curiosity Cabinets

I predict there will be more about this topic as I am about to read Lawrence Weschler's Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Prolonged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology a mere six months after purchasing it.

Marilyn Monroe Sculpture & Tribune Tower - Chicago

Seward Johnson's 26' tall sculpture of Marilyn Monroe attracted all the tourists last weekend. There was a steady stream of people wishing to be photographed under her skirt and the antics that they would do for the camera proved to be amusing.



Consider the space between her legs a platform with constantly rotating groups of people who would pause to run their hands all over her and even lick her limbs. Given how scuffed her feet were, this surely wasn't a sanitary affair.



David C. Nolan would be proud.



The Tribune Tower flanks the square alongside the Marilyn Monroe sculpture and I became acquainted with its rock collection for the first time. At first this proved interesting but then it became a source of contention. Over the course of time, correspondents for the newspaper returned to Chicago with fragments of rocks from around the world. 136 of them, including a piece from the moon (on display in a glass window), adorn the walls. All was fine and dandy when they came from generic places like the Revolutionary Battlefield but...



... once the sources became more specific (temples, bridges, buildings in the Forbidden City), it took on this pilfering of national monuments activity that I became uncomfortable with. Here come the Americans with their pick-axes chipping off ornaments from a bridge to display on a skyscraper in Chicago.


Only one specified that it was removed during "reconstruction" and one can only assume that the others were taken illicitly. The fact that it was the White House, an iconic American work of architecture, that the Tribune Towers felt the need to clarify, cemented the thoughts that other country's national monuments did not matter (and were open for "ownership").



One of the most interesting possessions I have is a rock chipped off the Taj Mahal by my great-uncle who was stationed in India during WWII (from the "wunderkammer" above). I have a love hate relationship with this and it directly relates to the Tribune Tower collection. I hate the fact that Uncle Bill defaced a national monument for a souvenir (much like I presume some of these correspondents did when acquiring the rocks for their employer). On the other side of things, who has a piece of the Taj Mahal?


Well the Tribune Tower that's who. Now we are both pilfers of by association - it's hard to feel good about that. [Photo by RSSB]

Another thought for California: (Part 1 of Braydee's Response)

This artwork depicts all the keys that were given to my father when he purchased the YMCA (except one which I added for variation). I was recently given a key which I signed a contract promising to return after one week. It was one of 17 or 18 keys made to open the front door of Braydee's house but it was quickly apparent that not one of them worked. Her project was based on a fabrication - on trusting an audience that may open her door and do harm to her space (or merely occupy it or, or, or). Ultimately, she controlled us by giving us a key that didn't work. I felt cheated once I knew my key wouldn't fit in her door so I didn't return it. Why should I remain true to the contract I signed when it was based on a falsehood? I am usually one to live up to my word (signed particularly) but I couldn't this time. I thought about burying it in her yard but I missed two golden opportunities to do so. Today I decided that her key would become my personal symbol for the "home" I'm trying to find this summer. I'm taking it to California and I'm giving it away. I'm burying it there. I'm attaching it to a piece of driftwood and sending it out to sea. I'm using it to open someone else's door. I'm continuing the lie by making it mine. It's the metaphor for the home I will not find.

The many exhibition faces (and otherwise) of "Strange Artifacts: A Found Object and Photographic Wunderkammer" Part 2

Today I put away the last piece of the wunderkammer. Yesterday's post and this one are in homage to the many ways it's seen the light of day. Who knows whether or not it will be exhibited again? Maybe someday I'll have one of those retrospective "things."

Harold Jones took this photograph in July 2006 in my converted garage studio - the first ten pieces in the series that began in mass that summer (the 50th one was finished in January 2007). I was proud to show one of my grad school mentors that I was still making art!



A quick set-up around the half way point in the cold studio in Portland, Oregon. Fall 2006 (way too orderly):



When I wanted legit photographs (49 completed), I packed everything up and headed to Astoria, Oregon and the YMCA for walls that resembled a gallery In November 2006. If I only knew how to make a gif (kidding):



















Detail with identification numbers that were never used again (at the Y):



I converted the spare bedroom into a "bring everyone to my house and show them my art project space" in Portland, Oregon in February 2007. This image was taken moments before all the artwork was packed in preparation for my move to Indiana. I miss those yellow walls (though not with artwork).



That remarkably led to my Reed College Case Works exhibition in May 2007 and an entirely different method of installation. [I am in negotiation for an exhibition at Reed College in March so that is another reason why these images were unearthed and the wunderkammer is on my mind.]







Then it traveled to JCrist Gallery in Boise, Idaho in October 2007 (my favorite installation and a homecoming of sorts for JR):





Most recently, it was exhibited at the New Harmony Gallery of Art, New Harmony, Indiana May 2010 following the format above.



Boxing up the keys that were returned from New Harmony last month:



It numbers 45 (not 50) now residing in various closet shelves and floors in 8 different boxes. It was the one project that I sold one of a kind pieces from and to this day wonder if that was the right thing. Ah... what would sculptors do?