Dying to See You

A couple of months ago, the conservator of Lincoln Center's artworks collaborated with me on a sort of VIP Art & Architecture tour, so I got a chance beforehand to chat with him. I asked him about this painting, and he said it likely won't be returning. He also said the Yaacov Agam sculpture, Three X Three Interplay (1971), probably won't be coming back either, which I also find very disappointing. He said the Agam sculpture is very large and there really is no place for it anymore. I really think they should have created a new spot for it. For the painting this post discusses, there does happen to be a perfect spot, at the western end of Alice Tully Hall's lobby, in a curved alcove that I believe contains doorways to back offices. He said that there was some resistance on the part of Diller, Scofidio + Renfro to reintroducing this painting in the space for some reason.

As much as I think I've made clear the enormous respect I have for this trio of architects, I have to say, I'm disappointed. Part of my defense of this painting is selfish, because I would LOVE the opportunity to tell this wonderfully disturbing story to the snotty, uninterested high school kids with whom I often have to contend. But the other part is that I think it's a brilliant piece, suited very well to the space. The third argument I'll make is that the painting was a gift from the artist to Lincoln Center. To just callously throw it away as a useless addition to the building is kind of a slap in the face of this gracious gesture. And the point remains that there is a perfect place to re-hang it, so there is no excuse.

I do feel justified in calling for this painting to be hung once again in Alice Tully Hall. At this point, I suspect it never will be. I hinted at this before, but since I probably won't have the opportunity to ever tell this story on one of my tours, I thought I'd share with you the (here revised) essay I wrote about it in creating the Art & Architecture Tour for Lincoln Center.

The piece I'm referring to is Black Dahlia (acrylic on canvas, 1971) by Gene Davis.

"What? THIS is the piece you're defending?" Yes, this is the piece.

First of all, Gene Davis (1920-1985) was from the Washington Color School of painters from D.C. along with Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and others. He started out as a sports journalist. As a writer he also covered the Roosevelt and Truman presidential administrations and often played poker with Harry Truman. He worked predominantly in acrylic.

Vertical lines fascinated Davis because he felt that they're conceptually infinite. His pieces therefore draw a contrast between the limits of the physical painting and the conceptual limitlessness of the lines in them. They aren't canvases dissected by lines. They're lines represented on the canvas that theoretically extend beyond its borders. He pushed this idea to its extremes in both directions of scale. In 1972, his Niagara, painted at a parking lot in Lewiston, New York, was the largest painting ever created at 43,680 square feet (4058 square meters). His smallest works were as tiny as three eighths of an inch square (a .95 centimeter square). Likewise, Tully is the venue in the complex dedicated to the smallest of the classical music performance types, Chamber Music, a question of scale.

Davis' works also often have musical themes: Banjo, Black Grey Beat, Solar Beat, Sonata, Sun Sonata, Yukon Sonata, etc. The vertical bars of color form obviously rhythmic patterns across the canvases. The connection may be that, like his paintings, music is orderly and restricted in form yet expansive and expressive in concept and meaning.

There are some deep reddish-purple dahlias said to be "black" like their counterparts in the rose and tulip families. The secondary level of signification no doubt appealed to Davis, but this botanist reference is so uncommon as to make the following explanation infinitely more probable. Many of you, especially from the West Coast, already know where I'm going. Surprisingly, considering my fascination with True Crime and anything disturbing, I'd not ever heard this story before I began to research this painting. The "Black Dahlia" was Elizabeth Short (1924-1947).

Little is known about her life, except that she moved around the country quite frequently as a teenager and had relationships with quite a few military men, leading some to speculate that she was a prostitute. This was later refuted by grand jury reports. A telegram sent by Short places her in Washington, D.C. around 1944. Although he was still only fourteen, there remains the possibility that Davis knew her, or at the very least, that he believed he might have met her. She was found dead in a vacant lot in Leimert Park, Los Angeles, at the age of twenty-three.

Her body was horribly mutilated. She was cut in half at the mid-section, all the blood had been drained from her body, and her face had been cut from the sides of her mouth all the way to her ears, what's known as a "Glasgow Smile." Because she liked to dress in all black, possibly she was nicknamed "The Black Dahlia" at a Long Beach drugstore where she hung out, as a play on the title of the currently-running film The Blue Dahlia (1946), starring Alad Ladd and Veronica Lake. In other accounts, newspaper reporters covering the murder coined the nickname.

At the time, it was the largest murder investigation ever conducted by the Los Angeles Police Department. Hundreds of people were considered suspects and were questioned. Around sixty people falsely confessed to the crime. In his book, Black Dahlia Avenger, published in 2003, Los Angeles police officer Steve Hodel claimed that his father, psychiatrist George Hodel, had murdered Short. The claim was never substantiated. Surrealist photographer Man Ray, who was very close with Hodel, has also been suggested as the killer. The crime remains unsolved to this day.

In their 2006 book, Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder, authors Mark Nelson and Sarah Bayliss put forth a fascinating theory. Numerous details about the way Short's body was found, with her arms posed above her head and the ways that her body was mutilated, have direct correlations with specific works by surrealist artists. They therefore propose that Short's killer was well acquainted with the work of the surrealists (as was Hodel), and that the murder itself had been an extremely twisted work of surrealist art. The book's title comes from the parlor game played by the surrealists wherein each participant writes one word on a folded piece of paper, so that when unfolded, a nonsensical sentence has been composed. The authors go on to suggest the possibility that, similarly, Short's body had been passed around amongst a whole group of people, each of whom performed some disturbing act of surrealist-inspired mutilation to her cadaver.

Marcel Duchamp's final work, Étant donnés (probably NSFW, unless you work in an art gallery), installed posthumously at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is suspiciously and eerily similar to Short's crime scene.

In a brief and pleasant email correspondence with Nelson, he revealed to me the possible Washington, D.C. connection with Davis. The day I received my copy of Exquisite Corpse in the mail, my curiosity took hold and I began reading. I literally could not put it back down again, and finished the entire book that evening, something I never, ever do. For anyone interested in Art History and especially surrealism, the macabre or disturbing, or True Crime, I must highly recommend this brilliant and fascinating read. Although maybe something for the weak of constitution to avoid, the photos are illustrative but (purposely) not particularly the most graphic or vomit-inducing.

I'd also like to add a brief discussion of this crime from a Feminist perspective. I won't delve deeply, I think that's better handled by someone more informed than myself. But I think what this violent act says about both the Hollywood system and the Art World is quite poignant. It's how the female body in this case was viewed as a purely aesthetic object to it's most horrifying conclusion. Short's body was the artwork, and it had to be devoured, destroyed in order to be so. In fact, the very destruction of her body was the work's most defining feature. 

In our day and age, we've seen how the mutilation of one's body falls fairly easily into the category of Art. Tattoos and piercings are great examples, not to mention of course cosmetic surgery of any kind, but especially the most extreme cases. Note Jocelyn Wildenstein. In some cases, indeed the very act of mutilating one's body as it might be in a work of Performance Art clearly takes the name. 

From the other direction, most serial killers consider what they do to be a cathartic, precise, sick sort of art form. Ed Gein was, to be far too generous, a fashion and furniture designer (as were some of the nazis). But to my mind, only in the case of the Black Dahlia murder do all these troublesome qualities come together to make one powerful, shocking statement about American popular culture's view of and attitudes toward the Female Body. It alone speaks perhaps more than any other psychotic act of how and to what extent our cultural machine feels the Female Body should be (allows it to be) used and consumed, at least how it did in the 1940s.

On a much lighter note, due to the unbelievably morbid subject of this Gene Davis painting, one might be inclined to suggest that Davis was almost playing a practical joke on Lincoln Center, and that those in charge of curating the artworks were and still are unaware of this explanation (not even the published author of the book on LC's artworks had any idea about it when I mentioned it to him).

Davis is clearly saying something very specific about the piece by giving it such a provocative title. It may be proposed that the physicality of the stretched canvas is deliberate and very consciously considered. Its proportions necessarily cut the vertical lines into particular lengths, a key element in the artistic expression of the piece. At the same time, to cut the canvas into specific proportions may be akin to "murdering" the lines, in that it robs them of the infinity Davis praised them for having. In this sense, representing the lines in a painting becomes murder with an artistic purpose, much like the above theories surrounding the fate of Elizabeth Short.

Although no one who could make the final decision will likely ever read this, I do hope I've made my case for the reintroduction of Black Dahlia to the beautifully-renovated Alice Tully Hall. Perhaps I should get a petition going.

[EDIT: I found it. Black Dahlia is now hanging in a hallway on the ninth floor of the Rose Building at the northwest corner of the campus. It's the floor containing Lincoln Center administrative offices and conference rooms. I discovered it there purely by accident: "wait a minute, that's the Gene Davis painting!" Memorizing the exact colors, widths, and arrangement of the lines to compare with the image above was not easy, but luckily I'm a visual thinker.]

©2010, Ryan Witte

Man on Campus--Part 2

This was not the smorgasbord of sculpture of PepsiCo by a long shot, but I thought these three pieces were very interesting. I first stumbled onto a Henry Moore, Three-Way Piece: Points (1965).

There was a student there who appeared to be sketching this sculpture, but I didn't inquire. It stands on three "legs," one a point, one curved, the third with a straight edge and a rounded one. There's some uniquely bad analysis of this piece going around the web. A lot of it claims with a perfectly straight face that it encourages the viewer to walk around it and look at it from every direction. This is about the most redundant thing you could say about a sculpture, since pretty much all sculpture does that, being a three-dimensional art form. In any case, it manages to work quite nicely against the wildly various architectural backdrops of this part of the Columbia campus.

Much more interesting is that, looking at the base, I was fairly certain it turned, so I gave it a push. It wouldn't budge. One source claims it was powered by a motor until the energy crisis of the 1970s, when it was permanently shut off. Another seems to suggest that it can be rotated by pushing it, which students do, necessitating special conservation measures. If that's true, it clearly requires more than one person to turn it and there were no drunken fraternity boys around for me to ask for help. The student sketching it probably would have been very irritated if I'd changed its orientation, anyway.

Then there's this great piece by David Bakalar called Life Force (1988).

Bakalar is kind of an interesting character. He got a degree in physics from Harvard and metallurgy from MIT. He then went on to work for Bell Telephone Labs, which was a research powerhouse at the time. He was president of Transitron Electronic Corporation from 1952 to 1984. I'm sorry to say I don't think all of his work is terribly successful. A lot of it is way too simplistic and obvious. You basically don't even need me to tell you what Computer Man looks like for you to guess what it's about.

His abstract works, on the other hand, can be a bit better, and I think this is one of the most successful of them. Its form is primary enough to allude to a lot of different things without being blatant. It's a simple piece, but I think that works in its favor here. In fact, I think he's stumbled onto something extremely intense and dramatic. It's located beautifully in the middle of the plaza, as well.








And the last one, which previous photos almost revealed, is over the entrance to Greene. It's Bellerophon Taming Pegasus (1967) by Jacques Lipchitz.

Bellerophon was sent to kill the Chimera, which was thought to be a fatal mission that would cause his demise (long story, you know how those demigods were), so he needed the help of Pegasus. Athena gave him a golden bridle to help, but it was evidently still quite a task taming the winged horse. The law student sitting on the steps told me that the sculpture symbolizes the triumph of man over nature and the imposing of laws, an analogy for what goes on inside the building. His friend was like "really? Is that what it means?" The somewhat sculptural canopy had been there since the building went up in 1961, but there are varying claims as to when Lipchitz' piece was created and installed. Most likely this cast was made in 1973 from a maquette from 1967. It was donated to Columbia in 1977, allegedly by alumni, and shipped to the United States from Europe in eight pieces. It's evidently one of the largest outdoor sculptures in Manhattan.

Despite what I've had to say about Cubist sculpture, I do actually kind of appreciate Lipchitz' work. Obviously he had gone different directions by the late-'60s. It's fascinating to me that any artist would be working with Classical themes as late (or early) as 1967, but I guess those themes have remained timeless. It was only the Modernists who rejected them, and that only lasted about thirty or forty years out of thousands. I'd be tempted to say that this was a very Postmodern choice of subject if it weren't for the fact that Lipchitz had been doing it for years.

At this point I figured I'd better get to doing what I had gone there to do, and headed over to the Avery Library. I did need to ask one person for directions, but it wasn't difficult to find. There's just way too many buildings there and the signage is spotty at best. The girl at the entrance desk to the library was one of these really weird, tweaky Library Science types. If you've never worked with a librarian, it's difficult to explain them, but they are a really strange breed. It's not exactly bad social skills, although it can be that, also. It's more that they have this really strange way of interacting with people.

My first real introduction to this character type was volunteering to work in the library at the Municipal Arts Society. The librarian in charge, Claudia I think was her name, was extremely meticulous and surely would have had her hair in a bun and looked at me over the top of her bifocals if she'd been older. The one thing I'll take away is that she had the irritating habit of referring to it as the "Citicore Building." This is a major pet peeve of mine and everyone needs to please stop it. It's not a "corps," with two silent consonants at the end. It's a "corPoration," with a "P" in it. "CiticorP." I tried saying it properly for her, but she never did get the hint, much to my annoyance.

Anyway, Librarian Girl told me I couldn't get right in with the Metrocard, but I had to go over to the office in the Butler Library to get an access pass. First she assumes I know exactly what that is, even though I'm clearly not a Columbia student. So I say, "I don't know the campus that well, can you be a little bit more specific?" So then she proceeds to give me these really long, convoluted directions about walking along paths and turning right and left and going down stairs, when all she really had to say was that it's the enormous building on the south side of the main quad and utterly impossible to miss. When I got through her directions and realized that was the building she meant, I'm thinking, "THIS is where those directions were supposed to be leading me?"

So I get to Butler. The woman behind the desk in their front office basically took one look at me and instantly decided that she was not going to let me into the library. It's kind of mysterious, really, because I am so very handsome and charming. Barely even looking at my Metrocard, she says with condescension and patronization just dripping from her voice, "ooohhh, nooooo, this isn't going to wooork. Ooohhh, noooo, you need the bluuuuue card." I'm like, "oh, wow, is there anything you can do to help me out because it's not all that easy for me to get up here." "Noooo, this is the wrong caaaard. Oooohhh, noooo, this isn't going to work at aaalllll." Siiigh.




"So you're saying that I have to go all the way back downtown to get a different card and then come all the way back up here again?" Eventually she got around to informing me that there is in fact a regular New York public library branch right around the corner. That was a relief, so I set out for that branch.

After waiting at the public library information desk for about an hour while a big long line of people checked out laptop computers (did you know you can check out laptops for free at the library? I didn't.) I finally got up to the desk. I put on my absolute friendliest, cheeriest tone of voice, asked the desk attendant how she was doing, and explained that I had the wrong card. They don't have the blue cards there, they never do.

Can you see the steam shooting out of my ears?

I decided to go back over to Butler anyway and just beg and plead for some kind of consideration. This time, the first woman was helping someone else. So I went instead to talk to her coworker, a much younger woman who was very likely a Columbia student. I explained my predicament. She's like "oh, SURE, that's no problem, just show me your driver's license." What. She really was my savior. If only I'd been able to deal with her the first time around, it could have saved me about a half-hour.

I take my fancy new access pass and head back over to Avery. Weird Librarian Girl tells me that now I have to have specific call numbers for her to allow me inside. Well, I didn't have call numbers, that was the whole point of needing the blue Metrocard in the first place. I was researching a subject, not looking for specific research materials. But I did manage to find in their computer system a list of drawings that seemed like a good place to start.

Finally, I descend the stairs into what they clearly consider to be the great holy sanctuary of Columbia's Avery Library. The drawings are only available for view by appointment...and I don't have one. Of course.

The woman handling the desk downstairs was very nice, and called back to the drawings collection. Jason, who I had emailed a couple of weeks earlier, and who I soon learned was the person she'd gotten on the phone, quite graciously allowed me to come back to the drawings archive anyway so that I could make an appointment. He was also very nice and helpful and explained what I would need to do so my next trip wouldn't be as ridiculous as the first. I didn't know when I'd be able to return, however, so I just got his contact information and would have to wait for a good day to go back again.

Next up: International Affairs.

All text and images ©2010, Ryan Witte.

Placing the Blaine

It's an interesting accident that for Halloween today, I have something related to the holiday to discuss. It concerns PS1 Contemporary Art Center. For those readers living in other parts of the world, it's a sort of branch of the Museum of Modern Art that's been set up in a converted school building out in Queens. "PS" is how New York City designates its Public Schools, and the ones that aren't named for a dead president or someone are all numbered. PS1 concentrates on more contemporary work than its mothership, for the most part.

The MoMA is probably the greatest modern art museum on the whole planet. I mean no disrespect to the great museums in any other part of the world, but I say that because MoMA came into existence at the very moment that New York was about to explode as the world leader in Modern Art. It was the love child of some of the wealthiest people in the world who could provide it with a collection of artworks from this era unparalleled by any other institution. The tides may be turning away from New York now, granted. To where, I don't know. Berlin? Tokyo? The Netherlands? I suppose it remains to be seen.

Despite all that, it is, ironically, an old school institution. It has a long tradition in the Modern Movement, but it's big. It's corporate. It has responsibilities to Monet, Van Gogh, and Mondrian, so to speak. The stakes are too high. It's what made PS1 such a fantastic complement to the monolithic MoMA. PS1 could be edgier, more hip, more futuristic, more thought-provoking a destination. I haven't been to one for a few years, but their outdoor afternoon parties on summer Sundays drew one of the coolest crowds I'd ever seen: mature but energetic, international but drawn together by an elusive sense of belonging, ridiculously hip but without trying too hard. They'd get superb DJs and the installations in their courtyard were interactive, innovative, and fun.

All this has made recent events all the more disappointing. The first thing that happened was, in my humble opinion, completely unforgivable. In one of their galleries they were hosting a performance by Ann Liv Young. Young's act was offensive, obscene, angry, insulting, disgusting, loud, and perverse. So halfway through, the director of the museum, Klaus Biesenbach, shut off the power in the room to put an end to her performance. At one point there was a video of the performance that included the censoring moment, but it appears to have been taken down. If you do manage to find it, it is obviously NSFW.

SO WHAT. In this day and age, art is not about making people happy. It's not about being pretty. It's about challenging and questioning and altering people's perception of the world and themselves. That's not always a pleasant undertaking. I'm not suggesting her work accomplished any of that. I'm not even saying that I found it all that interesting or good. And Young's antics are a romp through a field of daisies compared to some of the hijinks Karen Finley was pulling over twenty years ago. That's hardly the point.

If Biesenbach shouldn't be fired, and I believe he should be, then he most certainly should be shunned by anyone who cares at all about contemporary art. At the very least, he should hide his face in shame. How someone who would even dare to think about censoring an artist is allowed to direct an art institution in New York City is completely beyond me. What have we come to in New York? He almost makes me ashamed to live here with this deplorable behavior. Small mention should be made, as at least one article pointed out, if there were concerns that her performance was actually putting audience members in danger, shutting off all the lights was about the most dangerous solution he could have come up with.

I've just not been able to get past it. When I get email blasts from PS1 now, all I can think is, "eh. What of truly forward, mind-altering interest could they possibly have to offer me when they'd have the nerve to censor artworks?" It was the same reason that I permanently boycotted Blockbuster many years ago, after hearing that they'd taken it upon themselves to re-edit certain films to make them more family-friendly. "Who in the hell do they think they are," I thought to myself, to alter the work of an artist, a filmmaker, because there was something they didn't think people should see? But there is much more at stake for a contemporary art institution than a couple of questionable video tapes.

Then I got the most recent notice from PS1. David Blaine is performing there. David Blaine. I know, I get it, Halloween: magician. I absolutely love his work. His Harry Houdinian feats of endurance are maybe even more impressive than his mystifying illusionism. He brought something back into the art form that I'd truly never seen before. Despite the vaguely sinister twinkle in his eye, he has a surprisingly classy air about him, stoic and determined.

Oddly enough, I think he was a great match for Lincoln Center. The s(c)h(l)ock-value weirdness of his act there didn't rob LC of anything. In fact, it only really served to emphasize this as a performing arts acropolis across all standards. Practically speaking, it drew crowds of people who otherwise might never have walked up the stairs into that complex. Most poignantly, the endurance required by his spectacle was just an amplified distillation of what every performer goes through, especially the ones on the stages in the buildings that surrounded his fishbowl. From the other direction, the location gave his performance a boost of legitimacy that he'd been slowly earning all along on his own merits. Everybody wins.

This is something quite different at PS1. I just could not resist my urge to respond to that email: "Will you be shutting the lights off halfway through Blaine's performance, also, or is he 'safe' enough for you?" Although it is a game of Rock/ Paper/ Scissors, hopefully you'll understand how I mean this: Theater is Illusion. Theater is Art. But Art is not Illusion. "Of course it is!" you exclaim, and refer me to a thousand different paintings throughout art history. But I disagree. I maintain that Art is always about Truth, in its purest, deepest sense. In the sense that when Jackson Pollock first started dripping paint to express some inner state, he had discovered something radically more "True" than anyone before him. Even in Theater, the audience imagination required to reconcile the sometimes barest of scenery with the reality of being inside an auditorium is only the mechanics of the situation. The very best plays in history capture the most intimate Truth of human experience. It's why Romeo & Juliet endures.

Unlike at Lincoln Center, David Blaine at PS1 feels like a clown making balloon dogs at a five year old's birthday party. His presence makes PS1 look insipid and utterly irrelevant. The PS1 location isn't really helping him, either. It's not elevating what he does to the level of high art--and I do think that, to some degree, what he does is most certainly "art." For those who might encounter him who are aware of all the brilliant things that have been perpetrated by mainstream performance art over the past few decades, what he's doing will look not much better than superficial trickery without substance. I find this state of affairs personally and professionally disappointing.

I can only hope that this was a Halloween fluke. I can only hope that in the days to come, PS1 will both realize that its reputation has taken an unflattering blow and will endeavor to repair it. They owe it not just to themselves but to all of New York and to the art world in general.

©2010, Ryan Witte

Having a Pepsi Day--Part 2 (Sculpture)

The grounds are officially called the Donald M. Kendall Sculpture Garden. Donald Kendall was the CEO of PepsiCo from 1971 to 1986. Speaking of Mad Men, if anyone remembers the episode where they copy the opening number of Bye Bye Birdie for Patio Cola, Kendall was the one to change Patio Cola to Diet Pepsi. He was also the one to bump out Joan Crawford, who called him "Fang." He wanted to foster an atmosphere of creativity at the headquarters, so lucky for the rest of us, he filled the grounds with amazing artwork.

Admittedly, my principal interest was the architecture. I knew there was an astonishing collection of sculpture there. I also knew there were pieces that I wasn't seeing. I only really photographed the pieces with which I came into contact while exploring the architecture. My timing worked out perfectly doing it this way. Had I really tried to find every piece of sculpture on the property, I likely would have been there for another hour or two. I would eventually like to go back again, and maybe take some people with me to show them how extraordinary a place it is.

In addition to the ones I saw up close, they also have works by Jacques Lipchitz (Towards a New World, 1934), Seymour Lipton (The Codex, 1961), Aristide Maillol (Marie, 1931), Louise Nevelson (Celebration II, 1976), and David Smith (Cube Totem Seven and Six, 1961 and 1962), all of which I wish I'd seen because we have pieces of theirs at Lincoln Center. There's also a Kenneth Snelson (Mozart II, 1985) which I could barely see and an Isamu Noguchi (Energy Void, 1974) that I wish I'd spotted because I love his work. C'est la vie.

I think under different circumstances I might discuss these in a different order, probably chronologically (I love chronological order). As I mentioned, here I was more interested in how the sculptures worked with the architecture and the landscape. Besides, there are collections that make more sense in terms of the era when they were assembled (the works in Philip Johnson's Koch Theater come immediately to mind). This collection spans over a century. Stone himself continued to add pieces to the grounds until his death in 1978. Instead, this was the order in which I encountered them as I explored the site.

Claes Oldenburg, The Giant Trowel II (1976)

Happily, this is a perfect place to start. I think Oldenburg may be my favorite Pop artist. His work was so much more intellectually sophisticated than Warhol's. Of course, Warhol would have been the first person to agree with that assessment. In fact, it was the blind stupidity of Warhol's work that made it so brilliant, because it could absorb culture like a sponge without value judgments or overthinking. Lichtenstein's work was very smart, but I'm not convinced his subject matter had a broad enough cultural reach to make it great Pop. He did occasionally stumble onto something brilliant (his cartoon brushstrokes, his firearms, his food), but it often strikes me as accidental. Oldenburg had the best of both, extremely smart work that also had sufficiently broad reach.

The Trowel was a great choice for this site, also. Unlike a desktop object identifying it as a corporate campus, this gardening tool beautifully emphasizes the natural, scenic qualities of the landscaped grounds. Still, there is also the connotation of industriousness, of work. It is a tool, after all.

George Segal, Three People on Four Benches (1979)

I'm not really the biggest fan of Segal. His work strikes me as being sort of creepy, almost so voyeuristic that it feels uncomfortable. In another sense, it has this not very subtle "interact with me!" quality to it that I find a bit too gimmicky. Evidently people occasionally plant big red lipstick kisses on their cheeks, which Segal liked. I will admit that they work quite well in this setting. The stark whiteness of them is perhaps more dramatic here, where it can allude to the "synthetic," than it might be in an urban environment where it could read as more about cleanliness or sterility. I will also concede that there are interesting connotations of brokenness and also entrapment, if you consider that they're basically encased in plaster casts.

Henry Moore, Reclining Figure (1956)

This was a great location for one of Moore's reclining figures, right smack in the middle of the entrance court. It's clearly a modern building, with a relentlessly formal, central, symmetrical courtyard. Being a bit more representational than some of Moore's later works, this one allows the vaguely classical posture of the figure to remain apparent. Much like the building it accents, it's at one and the same time new and modern but formal and restrained.

David Wynne, Girl with a Dolphin (1974)

Although the strictly realist execution of this David Wynne piece might be approached in the same classicist sense as the Moore, I was not impressed. It strikes me as being a little bit corny. Certainly the human subject interacting in a friendly and equitable way with a dolphin is not something you'd find much before the 1970s' renewed interest in and respect for nature. I also have the feeling like I'm watching a show at SeaWorld, which is an interesting nod to both Pop and Performance Art, but that's what I found corny about it. I also do wish the fountain had been running. That may give this an entirely different quality, especially lit up at night. It's not my favorite piece, but I thought I may as well show it. Perhaps they should turn their fountains over to WET to see what they can do with them.

Henri Laurens, Le Matin (1944)

They have another piece by Laurens, as well. You can see the Rodin influence in this, and it's interesting that I'm such a huge fan of the Cubist painters and the Futurist sculptors, because I'm really not all that crazy about Cubist sculpture. I think the problem with it is that what made Cubist painting so revolutionary was that it was a two-dimensional depiction of a three-dimensional scene. This one in particular does nothing for me. I get the Mannerist contortion of the body, but it has no grace. I get the expressionistic pose, but it feels painful, tortured. Like a discordant note, it does make me feel something, but it's something dark and not altogether pleasant. I don't feel exhilarated by it. It's sort of a shame, too, because the location of this piece, out over the sunken reflecting pool, is one of the loveliest in the entire complex. I suppose I should appreciate that contrast, and I do think it was a smart place to put this piece.

Henry Moore, Locking Piece (1962)

I really do like Moore's locking pieces. They were inspired by a couple of pebbles he found on his property that somehow got locked together, and he had difficulty separating them again. His reclining figures seem so static. While they represent an animate subject, there's something very still about them, as if to say "a figure that has reclined," that is, the termination of any movement. Whereas the locking pieces, though derived from inanimate objects, seem to be "pieces that are locking together." The apparent permanence of their locked state is in terrific tension with both the act of them becoming locked together and with the potential movement of them being separated.

If you look at that more closely, there is water trickling down the stone base. Of course, no one did that better than Noguchi; here it almost feels like a bit of an afterthought. Still, I always like water features and think there's never enough of them. There's something so soothing about flowing water that compares to little else.

Henry Moore, Sheep Piece (1972)

This is a little bit funny because it vaguely appears to be sheep mating. Moore said he would rather see his sculptures in a natural setting than adorning the most beautiful building in the world. Fortunately, this sculpture got both a natural and an architectural backdrop, and I think it works beautifully with both. This one was inspired by drawings he did of sheep on and near his property. The field where a version of it stood next to his estate was used by a sheep herder, which Moore insisted it be. You can find pictures of it with the sheep walking around through it and using it for shelter. I'm sure it's nothing magical, but I can't help but feel there's something transcendent about the fact that the sheep like it. I recently discovered that my cat likes Simon & Garfunkle, not that I'm all that surprised, but I think that's a great compliment to them. The same thing holds here. Of course, PepsiCo doesn't have sheep. Perhaps dogs are allowed on the property. I didn't see any.

Gidon Graetz, Composition in Stainless Steel No. 1 (1979)

This was one of my favorite pieces in the collection. It was such a wonderful choice. Its sensuous, swirling forms are in such incredible contrast with the sharp angularity of the architecture. This would be infinitely less interesting sited near the Guggenheim Museum or a Frank Gehry building, for instance. There's something almost like fuselage about its forms. Certainly it reaches for the sky, that's easy. But it almost reads for me like the flight path of a fighter plane, an insect, or a sea bird feeding on a school of fish. In that sense, its very highly machined but organic at the same time.

The close-up shots are the best illustration of how the piece takes its environment and distorts, contorts, and reorders it. The fact that you can see me in them, as well (I had on a black shirt and brown cargo shorts), underscores how interactive it is. Its surface is so mirrored that the piece almost acts as if it wants to disappear altogether, leaving only the visual distortion behind, sort of like how the Predator looks when cloaked. It's purely about seeing a three-dimensional object. I'm not convinced that, by 1979, we really needed all that much more abstract sculpture in the world. For that matter, it's conceivable that Brancusi could have gone in this direction decades earlier. Still, I think it's a wonderful piece.

Joan Miró, Personnage (1970)

Here's the Miró piece I sort of referred to in the first post. Now you can see how genius this is. Right in the middle of this stark, linear, unforgiving moment of the landscape design is this delightfully goofy piece of surrealism with its extraterrestrial head popping up over the bushes and what very much appears to be a penis. Not a graphic, obscene appendage, but rather one that would make ten-year-old kids giggle hysterically. Everything else I might say about this I probably already said in my review of the Miró show, but I think it's fantastic.

My encounter with the next one was sort of funny, too. As I was walking around the ponds looking for shots, I heard something in the reeds. Probably it was a frog, but I couldn't tell. It actually sort of startled me a bit. So I went to see if I could find the creature making this strange noise, and I discovered this.

Robert Davidson, Frog (1985)

A frog. I even thought that possibly this sculpture had a sound device in it, but it's very unlikely, since the artist doesn't appear to have done anything like that that in any of his other work. I'd never heard of Davidson before, but his heritage is Haida, which is a tribe native to the Pacific Northwest that reaches up into Canada. He was born in Alaska in 1946 but now lives on the Haida Gwaii archipelago (or Queen Charlotte Islands) off the coast of British Columbia, the Haida name for which means "islands at the boundary of the world." He studied under Haida artist Bill Reid and much of his work has a very Native American feel to it. The PepsiCo site at one time evidently had a grouping of Davidson's totem poles, but I never saw them, and they're not listed as being part of the collection any longer. It's sort of Primitivist work in that regard, but to me it looks more like an ancient and regional stylistic tradition being approached with a modern sensibility.

Arnaldo Pomodoro, Triad (1975-1979)

As I mentioned, this group of sculptures was another highlight of the collection, and I can fully understand why they were given such a prominent location on the site. It's interesting that the pieces ended up here in the story, right after Davidson, because they have a very obvious totem pole quality to them. Rather than an ancient symbol from the animal kingdom, here it's a totem to the Industrial Age.

I have absolutely no idea why Pomodoro has never been asked to do production design for a Science Fiction movie. He has done production design for Shakespeare's The Tempest, Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, and an opera at La Scala, amongst other things. But his aesthetic is incredible.

It was also a perfect choice for this particular complex. It's a bit plainer with his spherical pieces, which look like planets carved by fault lines or ancient riverbeds. But here, also, you have this absolutely rigidly perfect geometric shape, a cylinder, as perfect as the manicuring of the grounds in which it sits. Then it's broken open by a long haphazard gash, in this case like a tree that's been hit by lightning. The innards it reveals are these chic, industrial, extremely mechanical forms, like the inside of an old typewriter or an industrial strength grinder--much like the "grind" or industriousness PepsiCo executives no doubt hope will be going on inside the building behind it. There's also something quite architectural about these three columns, like the ruins of an ancient monument built by aliens from outer space.

Henry Moore, Double Oval (1967)

It's certainly debatable, but I think this is the best Moore in their collection. The prominent and truly perfect location of the piece on the site is definitely helping. But it incorporates so beautifully so many of the themes that Moore worked with through his career. It's vaguely reminiscent of the human form, but at least very strongly suggests something sensuously organic. It also has the quality of something ideally suited to a landscape. It's well known that Moore was heavily influenced by the rural property on which he lived and worked and intended for his sculpture to be entirely harmonious with it. Much further, this piece has a delightful formal rigor that, for instance, Sheep Piece lacks to a degree. I think this one has the best of everything. And as a piece that alludes to the human form, a geological phenomenon, along with its sculptural clarity, in my opinion it perfectly sums up what I said about the compound as a whole being the glorious marriage of three art forms.

David Wynne, Grizzly Bear (1976)

Another Wynne. It was difficult to get a really good photograph of this because the sun was pointing the wrong direction. I wasn't that impressed, anyway. This piece has a sort of subtle, passive beauty to it. But...eh. It's not as corny as the one in the fountain, but it's kind of just cute. It might be nice outside the front of a national park visitor's center. It's possible he's captured the majesty of a great, noble creature of the forest, but I'm not all that convinced.

Alexander Calder, Hats Off (1969)

This, of course, is much more me. I suppose I don't need to tell you how much I love Calder. The artist himself actually sited this piece on the grounds. I think his choice of location was fantastic. You can see it in some of the wider shots, but it's at the top of a small hill in the corner of the property surrounded by trees that make the bright primary red really pop. Getting pictures of it was sort of like being in a live video game because all of the lawn sprinklers around it were turned on. It was hot enough that getting sprayed wouldn't have been a horrible tragedy, but I still had to time it just right so as not to ruin my camera.

While this is a stabile and not a mobile, his subject is a motion: people removing their hats. More than that, it's a motion that carries multiple levels of social significance. On the one hand, it may be deferential courtesy--removing one's hat is the polite thing to do. But deferential to what? To the natural environment? To the architecture? To the corporate might of PepsiCo? I'm not sure it matters. In this sense, this huge, bright, towering sculpture, impossible to ignore, professes its humility. In another sense, removing one's hat is a rejection of public formality, something demanded by being inside the privacy of a home. How one might choose to read the symbolism of the piece also has traditional gender roles attached to it, since hat etiquette varies markedly across gender lines.
The obscurity this creates in the reading of the piece is, I believe, part of its genius. It was created in 1969, when not only were the stuffy establishment concepts guiding social norms being questioned with great cynicism, but traditional gender roles were being entirely reevaluated. In purest Calder form, he's chosen the silliest, most innocuous manifestation of these cultural traditions to call attention to something much larger and more poignant. And in a way, it's exactly what his (and most all relevant) art was doing at this very moment in history: questioning the nature of formal, symbolic signification by pointing out its apparently arbitrary ambiguity.

Jean Debuffet, Kiosque l'evide (1970)

 

The plaque for this work reads, as written above, Kiosque l'evide. Likely the best interpretation of that would be "kiosque le vide," which means "the empty booth." This was another wonderful choice. Debuffet was a sort of Primitivist, which gives his work resonance in this natural setting in much the same way as it does with Robert Davidson's. He also coined the term Art Brut, otherwise known as Outsider Art. He therefore reflects perfectly the sort of thinking-outside-the-box creativity one assumes Kendall was trying to encourage by anointing the site with artworks in the first place. 

Debuffet's work with sculpture at this time had also begun to take on a vaguely environmental quality. This one is almost like a two-dimensional line drawing wrapped around itself to create a kind of "room." In a way, it's quite architectural. And because he was working primarily in black and white, it elegantly complements Stone's building. It's almost as if a giant monster bit off a chunk of the adjacent structure, chewed it up, and spit it back out again. Actually, it doesn't really sound elegant at all when I put it like that, does it. You know what I'm saying.

Arnaldo Pomodoro, Grande Disco (1968)

This is great for a lot of the same reasons as Triad, but I think a bit less successful. Where Triad perhaps evokes something natural (trees) or something architectural (columns), this is a wheel. At its most primary, it's a tool, at its most complex, an industrial object. So the contrast between the outer form and its insides is quite a bit less dramatic. Meanwhile, the insides are not as muscularly mechanical here as in the other piece. I also might suggest an allusion to a sun, if it weren't for the fact that Pomodoro also worked with complete spheres. Of course, unlike Triad, Grande Disco's flattened, polished surface reflects its surroundings, and its insides have cracked open enough to form holes through the piece. One is always aware in viewing the one side or the other of both what lies in front of it and behind it. The contrast drawn here, therefore, is with the utterly natural setting in one direction, and in the other, it forms a complementary relationship with the engineered, human built structure to which it's adjacent.

Alberto Giacometti, Standing Woman II and III (1960)

This is an interesting grouping of works, smartly arranged in proximity to one another. Giacometti was a friend of Max Ernst and is connected to Auguste Rodin by way of Emile-Antoine Bourdelle, Rodin's protégé and Giacometti's mentor. I'm not sure I have much to say about the Giacomettis because I actually prefer his earlier work. But certainly these two figures suggest a sharp, isolated individuality and a hardened, obsessive focus. It's been said they appear to almost attempt to see outside the realms of their own reality. There's also the fact that Giacometti worked his sculptures like mad, at times to the point of destroying them altogether. What remains of his work therefore must always represent both an industrious diligence and the knowledge of when to stop working.

Max Ernst, Capricorn (1964)

The original Capricorn is supposedly from 1948, created for Ernst's house in Sedona, Arizona, where he lived with the painter Dorothea Tanning. It's considered to be the most important sculpture he created during his time there. When this copy was cast, Ernst had already moved back to Europe, not that he couldn't have been involved with its inclusion here, of course. I'm not sure we needed another work of surrealism in 1964, but the piece does take on an added layer of pertinence in the wake of the psychedelic late-1960s. Ernst's use of Native American symbolism also accomplishes the same thing as the Debuffet and the Davidson pieces in its natural setting. The siting of the piece is great, too. Although it's a bit more exposed from front and sides than it might appear in this close photograph, it still does give one the feeling of emerging from a thick, dense jungle and discovering some ancient mystical temple.

Auguste Rodin, Eve (1881)

The last piece I came upon before returning to the car was the Rodin. I also tried as hard as I could to get a full view of the Kenneth Snelson, which is up on a hill just to the right of this. It was entirely cordoned off, and it was just not possible. Rodin is probably the most well known sculptor in history after Michaelangelo. There are probably about five people in the entire western world who have never seen The Thinker. I find that so incredible, when you consider how hermetic the world of art can often be, especially over the past three or four decades. I do suppose much fewer people know The Thinker is Rodin than who know the David is Michaelangelo, but still. One of the main reasons, I believe, is that Rodin was one of the first artists to fully embrace the new Industrial Age production technologies for replicating and disseminating his work. I think it makes him another great choice for the headquarters of a huge soft-drink manufacturer.

The choice of subject is pretty interesting here, as well. Coincidentially, Rodin's Eve was inspired by Michaelangelo, and it was also for his Gates of Hell, as was The Thinker. Unbeknownst to him at first, Rodin's model, Anna Abruzzezzi, was actually pregnant at the time he was sculpting this. He had to rework her slowly changing hips day after day and didn't know why until later. It was a fortuitous accident because Eve is, Biblically speaking of course, the mythological Mother of all Mothers. To me it's one of those acts of fate that makes this work of art truly transcendent. 

She's quite obviously been cast out of the Garden of Eden and hides her face in shame. I think I already mentioned the Edenic quality of these grounds, so I won't belabor that point. The reason she's cast out is because she now has the knowledge of good and evil, but philosophically, knowledge and self-awareness. To me, this is the evolutionary moment where we ceased to be ordinary animals and became human beings. The analogy of carnal pleasures (leading to conception) being considered a sin may be a part of this equation. I think the relevant connection here is that knowledge, so valuable to the creative corporate work expected inside the building next to her, is exactly what prevents her from being permitted to enjoy the beauty of the natural world, like the landscaped grounds in which she stands.

Part 3.

All text and photographs ©2010, Ryan Witte