Elizabeth Peyton originally painted this portrait, Michelle and Sasha Obama Listening to Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention August 2008, for the art issue of W magazine. It was added to Peyton’s Live Forever retrospective at the New Museum on the day after the election, when the show had already been up since early October. Why? Senior curator Laura Hoptman deemed it “appropriate.”

The release from the New Museum is as follows: “The New Museum joins Elizabeth Peyton in paying tribute to incoming First Lady Michelle Obama, whose portrait with her daughter Sasha will be unveiled today on the 4th floor as a new component of the exhibition Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton. This is the first time this newly created painting is on public view. Please join us in celebrating as we look forward to rousing changes both large and small.”

Now that she’s been added to the show, is the First Lady coming here when Live Forever packs it up to the Walker in February?

This article from the New York Times by Nicolai Ourousoff about the new California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, designed by Renzo Piano and across the park from Herzog & de Meuron’s deYoung, was just too beautiful not to share, particularly the opening and closing paragraphs. Ahh, I remember those African Hall dioramas well:

Not all architects embrace the idea of evolution. Some, fixated on the 20th-century notion of the avant-garde, view their work as a divine revelation, as if history began with them. Others pine for the Middle Ages.

But if you want reaffirmation that human history is an upward spiral rather than a descent into darkness, head to the new California Academy of Sciences, in Golden Gate Park, which opens on Saturday.

and

The museum has also preserved its African Hall, with its gorgeous vaulted ceiling and dioramas of somnolent lions and grazing antelopes, integrating it into the new design. Built in the 1930s, this neo-Classical hall is a specimen of sorts. Its massive stone structure reflects colonial attitudes about the civilized world as a barrier against barbarism. It was intended as a symbol of Western superiority and a triumph over nature.

By contrast, Mr. Piano’s vision avoids arrogance. The ethereality of the academy’s structure suggests a form of reparations for the great harm humans have done to the natural world. It is best to tread lightly in moving forward, he seems to say. This is not a way of avoiding hard truths; he means to shake us out of our indolence.

Images, of course, from the New York Times.

… is the Eero Saarinen-designed Jefferson Memorial Expansion aka Gateway Arch aka St. Louis Arch.

I placed it near my City Capitol and a couple blocks away from Mayor Saarinen’s house in the city of Gateway. Sure looks nice!

I’m pretty excited to announce that out of the plethora of answers to the game I posted, nobody got all the answers right. I’m happy to report that this black and white interior picture (fig. 1) stumped everybody. I’m lucky to have found it; there aren’t many pictures available online of the interior of Monsanto’s House of the Future. Opened in Disneyland’s Tomorrowland in 1957, it was demolished in 1967, when they decided, ten years later, the white, plastic, Modernist future previously depicted was just not tomorrow enough.

Earlier this year, a set of drawings used for the planning of the House of the Future showed up on Ebay(and sold for $8000.) All the twitter about this find on various blogs notes the strong Eames influence evident in the drawings. They are quite gorgeous, and just like many fashion sketches, look more stunning on paper than they did in practice (fig. 2.)

Saarinen was a long-time collaborator and lifetime friend with Charles Eames. In fact, Eames was inspired by Eliel Saarinen, Eero’s father, and was invited by him to attend Cranbrook to further study architecture. The group at Cranbrook at that time included Florence Knoll and Ralph Rapson (of Guthrie fame). For their first collaboration, Eames and the younger Saarinen designed a winning entry, a molded plywood chair (fig. 3) for an organic design competition organized by the Museum of Modern Art in 1940. The influence of the basic industrial structure of this chair’s design can be seen in the rest of both the designers’ careers.

Saarinen created a range of beautiful furniture with Florence Knoll. They designed such staples as the Tulip Chair and the Womb Chair, which will look familiar to millions and millions of people because of their inclusion in the best-selling PC game of all time: The Sims, a human-life simulation game. Stay with me, here–I can’t remember exactly how and when I became familiar with the Eames furniture by name; it might have been from visiting various museums as a child, or maybe some art history 101, but I do know that to millions of people who have never heard the names Saarinen, Knoll, or Eames, this modernist furniture is going to look very familiar. There is no doubt that IKEA has been evoking 40s and 50s furniture design in their extremely streamlined and industrial giant European operations, and that might give people a point of entry, but I swear I’ve furnished some of my Sims’ houses with a Knoll Saarinen Coffee Table, Tulip Chairs, and Stools multiple times (fig. 4.) Of course, these items aren’t named like so, but they are essentially identical. I don’t own the game anymore because my computer is too old, and the Walker decided not to buy a new graphics card for me even though it’s for work-related purposes so I don’t have any images of my perfect modernist house, but I sure wish I did.

Notably, however, people have taken it upon themselves to teach the Sims-playing world about the history of furniture design. There are millions of downloads available online for people who create their own furniture for the Sims, to be imported into the game and played with. Shino & KCR, a featured ‘artist’ at one of the biggest download sites, The Sims Resource, has a whole line of Eames inspired furniture (fig. 5). The Sims, already one of the biggest blurs between reality and technology, has recently engineered deals with H&M and more recntly, IKEA, to bring clothes that are available in real life and furniture that is available to purchase for your own home, into the game so you can purchase them for your own home. But on the computer.

And, with the steep dollar prices that accompany any Saarinen-designed furniture, a tulip chair in The Sims will only cost you a couple hundred Simoleons.

Extra, extra: This amazing featurette on Monsanto’s House of the Future. Part 1 and Part 2.

Answers: A, D, E, G, and H are Disneyland. B, C, F, I, J are Saarinen.

It’s official name is, of course, the Beijing National Stadium and it is Beijing’s newest crown jewel. Site of the most stunning Olympic opening ceremony anybody I’ve talked to can remember, the stadium has been warmly embraced by China.

Very warmly.

But then again, so was the Walker.

Right about the same time Herzog & de Meuron were in the thick of working on the Walker project, they were also working on the Allianz Arena in Munich, a precursor of sorts to the Beijing stadium. It is a distinctive building whose flashiest features even serve an awesome function. As a stadium for two German soccer teams, Bayern Munich and TSV 1860, the exterior of the entire arena glows a different color depending on which team is playing: red for Bayern Munich, blue for TSV 1860, and when the German national team is there, it glows white. Like the Beijing stadium, locals love it, and it has been nicknamed The Rubber Dinghy. Also flashy: a hydraulic pitch entrance that lifts up to reveal players emerging from Batman’s lair onto the playing field.

Several months after the grand re-opening of the Walker, the de Young Museum in San Francisco re-opened, albeit with much more controversy than any of their stadiums. Selected from a pool of applicants in June of 1999, Herzog & de Meuron submitted a design, complete with a purely tourist-centric tower, with a very similar aesthetic to that of the Walker, a project that began only a year later. Both buildings are covered in industrial materials that reveal themselves to be more intricate the closer up a viewer is. The de Young is covered in copper panels with a green patina which Herzog & de Meuron hope will evolve with its Golden Gate Park surroundings. Also friendly to its surroundings? Its carbon footprint, enormously reduced from the museum’s former building that had been irrevocably damaged in the 1989 earthquake. Although the de Young is meant to blend in with its natural surroundings and California palm trees, it has been called a “copper iceberg,” interesting because of the Walker’s certainly more icebergian building in ice-producing Minneapolis:

And while the two buildings have things in common, notably ambiguous metal skins that use patterns of perforation for subtly decorative effect, Herzog, who certainly has no fear of controversy, characterises the Walker as a feminine building and the de Young as an essentially masculine project.

These are dangerous words for an architect to use, especially since Herzog seems to be suggesting that the Walker’s deferential presence and internal prettiness are feminine qualities while the self-confidence of the de Young, a copper iceberg, is a masculine attribute. – The Guardian

Enter the period of the even more environmentally aware. In two projects currently in development, Herzog & de Meuron have designed buildings that seriously improve energy efficiency. For the Miami Art Museum, slated to open in 2011, they were inspired by tropical rainforests, the climate of Miami, and the nearby Biscayne Bay. Situated in a park, they wanted to create a seamless passageway from the green space into the museum. How to do that? Bring in the trees. Not strangers to incorporating plants as a major design component, as in the case of the CaxiaForum in Madrid (opened earlier this year, below), they have created a canopy topped off with standard building materials, but enhanced with hanging plants, a la Babylon.

Also in progress is the expansion to the Tate Modern. Although it opened fairly recently in 2000, its popularity and accommodation needs has already apparently exceeded its space – which is huge. We are talking about old power station huge. The new building will be 11 stories high and really fancy. Using heat from an already existing switch house, the new building will somehow capture raw elements that usually go wasted. They will be expanding the gallery space, and adding new education and interactive areas, as well as galleries devoted especially to photography, children, and rotational video and new media screenings. Floors 8 to 11 are the designated “Tate Social” areas – a members lounge, terrace, and restaurant – with the best views of the city saved for wining and dining. While the current Tate Modern is a rather squat, horizontally-favoring building, the expansion will be stacked vertically, with shapes and materials not dissimilar to the tower at the de Young, yet decidedly more functional.

This concludes the 2008 Herzog & de Meuron Progress Update. Score their progress in the comment box below!

To play:

Guess if each image shows a) something designed by Saarinen or b) something in Disneyland’s Tomorrowland.

A little bit of introductory information:

Eero Saarinen, known as a key modernist designer and architect in the 20th century. He often collaborated with Charles Eames and famously used sweeping architectural arches and curves.

Disneyland opened in 1955 and Tomorrowland was given a total makeover in 1967. The new Tomorrowland famously used sweeping architectural arches and curves to reflect the modernist view of the future.

Leave your guesses in the comment section!

a.

b.

c.

d.

e.

f.

g.

h.

i.

j.

Answers with the next post!

After flipping through Johanson’s book, Please Listen I Have Something To Tell You About Whatis (Witt noted our Arty Pants installation kind of resembled Johanson’s own installations and suburban paintings), I was excited about him visiting. Further research into Johanson & Jackson revealed the phenomena of the “Mission School” movement that really gained steam in San Francisco a few years ago.

A little more research into these artists: Glen Helfand – The Mission school, Leah Modigliani – Marketing the Mission.

It is difficult, as is evidenced in both articles, to market these artists. Not conventionally avant-garde, their involvement with the graffiti community and familiarity with cul-de-sacs, as well as being on the “wrong coast,” lends an easy title: outsider art. But, Modigliani argues, “the very idea of an outsider is problematic and naively nostalgic – it assumes you are outside of something, presumably the artworld.” Well you might say they are outside the art world because they are not in New York. But there is no lack of an art community in California – by marketing a group who has gained popularity outside of the Bay Area as “outsider art,” it tells the rest of the world that the art community in California is just that – outsiders. This is not a good way to promote these Mission School artists and any future artists wishing to gain relevance in the rest of the country.

This is hard. We know what, in the past, has happened to artists who came from the “streets” into the gallery. I’m talking about Basquiat, Keith Haring, and most recently, that former trouble-maker Banksy who now is selling his stencil art for millions (and I love Banksy, I do). We’ve also all seen Style Wars (at least I have about five times), that documentary about the origins of hip hop, featuring graffiti artists who, in the early 1980’s, riding on the coattails of Basquiat, got a few gallery shows and then were abruptly tossed aside, only to reappear in exhibitions with the word ‘graffiti’ in them. In an episode of Art21, Barry McGee says: “Every time I do a gallery piece, I have to put 110 percent more outdoors, to keep the street cred. It’s the audience I’m most concerned with.”

Modigliani argues that most of the artists in this Mission School movement – a short list is Johanson & Jackson, Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, Claire Rojas – were educated in private art schools. In his opening essay, Aaron Rose, curator and director of “Beautiful Losers,” the exhibition and film of the same name, states, “All the artists included in Beautiful Losers have at some point broken the law in order to express themselves. No other past group of artists can boast this. That is not to say, of course, that there haven’t been situations in the past where artists have brushed with the law, but never has it been such an intrinsic element of their culture.” Is this statement, then quick clarification, what should bring them together?I prefer to associate them with this quote from Jack Hanley in Helfand’s article: “So many of the artists play music, it’s truly a community, and they see each other at more than just openings.”

Like I said, this is a really difficult subject, because I don’t think this roundabout logic and arguing should take anything away from the artists. Let’s go back to this group of West Coast artists – their work is fun, approachable, and aesthetically inviting. Their approach is organic, their influences recognizable, and they seem to have the ability to acknowledge the dilemma of being marketed as outsider graffiti artists or acknowledge it and move on. They’ve learned from the 80s. It is this ability that moves a group of artists, or anyone, really, from being a target for negativity and criticism, to that next level of “cool.” That’s why I love the artists of the Ferus Gallery so much. They are not necessarily making fun of themselves, because that can get tiresome too, but acknowledging something outside of themselves, showing that they are aware and intelligently incorporating these things.

See -“Drumming Circle,” 2003, by Chris Johanson (actually, I just found out this piece really is about the ‘rhythm of life’) and Barry McGee and Josh Lazcano’s animatronic taggers.

THAT is what makes them so cool. And, I suppose, the fact that their art is really, really COOL.

*Images from Deitch Projects, Stretcher, Banksy’s website.

** Also the title is a reference to Grease and not much else.

I had to do a double-take when I saw these images on a blog. Turns out it was what I thought it probably wasn’t: Richard Prince pays homage to…Richard Prince.

Richard Prince, Untitled (girlfriend), 1993

Richard Prince, Untitled (girlfriend), 1993 / Richard Prince, Battlestar Galactica photoshoot, May 2008 Interview magazine

An explanation of sorts:

So Richard Prince revisits Richard Prince from 15 years ago. The difference, however, is that we are led to believe that Prince actually set up these pictures instead of clipping them from magazines. I would be delighted, tickled pink, if these pictures were actually originally published in a magazine several years ago.

Another instance of self-appropriation – I wrote this a while ago (that was a self-referential instance) – and posted this picture of Andy Warhol taken by Dennis Hopper in 1964.

In 2006, Dennis Hoppper made this:

.

Interview scans from fashionartedit.

And I thought, Wow, that’s saucy; that’s rather forward, cheeky, and assuming of them.’ Museums rarely have a sense of humor when it comes to marketing their exhibitions, so I was surprised, and pleasantly so, when I saw this. As far as I know, this phrase was only used in conjunction with the Disneyland exhibition.

Because we like you. Me? Little ol’ me? Was this written because everybody likes Disneyland? Was this written because they were pretending that everybody liked Disneyland but knowingly winking at us, saying we’re cool, we get it, you are educated members of the press, but we’re playing around, asking you to take this exhibition with a grain of salt, have fun with it, we get it?’ I don’t know! They might as well have included the phrase for the Frida exhibition. I’m pretty sure the people who received special invitations this time around would have felt particularly lucky for getting a personalized invitation to see Frida. (If anybody wants to organize a big Ed Ruscha show and send a card like that to me too, I’ll believe it.)

This week I found these posters used to market Andy Warhol: Supernova: Stars, Deaths, and Disasters 1962-1964 at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Pretty smoking[2], with a touch of dry humor. The Art Gallery of Ontario got a special makeover for their version of this exhibition because David Cronenberg, a MOVIE DIRECTOR, was guest curating it. They also commissioned a soundtrack “ conceived and narrated” by Cronenberg, with commentary by Dennis Hopper, Amy Taubin, James Rosenquist, and Mary-Lou Green. Also, there were BONUS TRACKS.

And a promotional hearse!

This discovery made me think of this poster from 1964, an exhibition poster from Los Angeles’ Ferus Gallery:

Because We Like You. We’d Expect This From David Cronenberg, But From Warhol? As A Public Service. These taglines share a tone of fake-but-maybe-not-fake bravado, of a silly inside joke. The Warhol posters assume that its audience is familiar with both Cronenberg and Warhol, able to nod its head at the reference to soup cans and the ironic “delightful assortment of colors” joke. I started searching around for other exhibition posters that might have the same feel, but I didn’t know where to start. If anybody knows of any, please leave a comment, I’d be curious.

Switching directions to some degree, I’m now thinking of The Ferus Gallery and its image, not created solely for “The Studs” exhibition. Photos of the artists at the Ferus Gallery and its exhibition posters never made me feel negatively, instead, they drew me in. Here are a couple of photographs from The Men of the Ferus Gallery and Some Women Family Album[3]:

This is not new territory for me; I wrote my senior thesis about Los Angeles and its artists in the 1960s, but I’m realizing again how much I wish there was some sort of group of cool-kid artists around today in the scheme of the bigger contemporary art market. The movie and television business has Judd Apatow and crew, Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney and friends, and the music biz has members from Broken Social Scene and Death Cab and Rilo Kiley moving around all the time, and basically everybody in hip-hop has a crew they consistently collaborate with. Even the writing profession has that hip and fun McSweeney’s crew. So where is the gang of fun-lovin’ artists? I am nostalgic for something I never lived through, that I only see pictorial evidence of.

The Ferus Gallery was the IT gallery of Los Angeles in the late 50s and early 60s. As “ it” as you could get: Los Angeles suffered, and continues to suffer, national neglect for its arts offerings. (Just read the last paragraph of this recent article about the Kara Walker show at the UCLA Hammer Museum; it broke my heart.) New York turns its blind eye to LA, instead choosing to see it as the combination of Hollywood and its extended vices, a cultures-less, road-congested sprawl that is, at the opposite end of the nation, the opposite of highbrow New York City.

Maybe this lack of pressure allowed these artists their “macho man” fun: politically incorrect and on the edge of good taste.

The most obvious “group” of artists I can think of in the past 20 years is that of the Young British Artists. Although most of them were schoolmates and many of them dated each other (not unlike the cliques in high school), instead of a group prepared to make fun of their overnight success and shock tactics, I imagine a room of them crawling all over each other, standing on each others shoulders, offering up their work to Saatchi, trying to be the most successful and knocking each other’s knees out in the process. (Especially Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.) It was not a cohesive group; it was not a loving group. It was a group bound together by the art market.

I know that there are plenty of groups of artist friends doing cool stuff all over the world but are only known locally. I am talking about the big leagues, the heavy-hitters – has it all become just much too serious?

I leave you with three images, the first, one of my favorite images of all time, a photo of Ed Ruscha by Dennis Hopper.

Andy Warhol by Dennis Hopper and Dennis Hopper by Andy Warhol. Two big guns, a merging of artistic worlds, hanging out, exchanging. Beautiful.

[2] Not smoking: picture quality….

[3] Unknown if album exists. Also, scans from 1960s Artforums and other old magazines.

I feel a kinship between myself and Karal Ann Marling, the curator of the exhibition. In the many interviews I read about this exhibition, she stands up for her area of expertise, “ pop culture,” with intelligence and wit, even with such pointed questions about Disney’s possibly “ untoward imaginative life rooted in childhood” and union labor disputes at the Disney studio in 1941. As for Disney conspiracy theorists? Insane. Television? “ If I’m away from the television for more than five minutes I get nervous.” “ Nothing human,” she declares, “ Offends me.” Her statements would have been a great reassurance to me as a pop culture-minded, aesthetically-driven first-year at a liberal, political college. “ Pop culture” is not historically a thing to be respected or studied by the “ educated.” While everybody opened up their student mailboxes to The New Yorker or The Nation, I opened up mine to Entertainment Weekly. Marling observes: “ There’s so much bashing of materialism at the university, the phrase consumer culture’ gets tossed around as though it’s the next best thing to original sin.”

So what happens when a member of that critical group decides to present these things for further observation?

On October 25, 1997, the opening day of The Architecture of Reassurance, the Northern Artists Front protested with picket signs reading Disney Kills Imagination’ and Corporate Art Still Sucks’ while little girls showed up wearing Tinker Bell outfits. The Star Tribune sarcastically described the show as “ one of those deliciously dirty-rotten-crummy jobs that somebody’s got to do” (October 24, 1997). The article in the Pulse that reported on this protest (the only one?) was titled “ Mickey at the Walker: Rodent infestation or high art?” The big D word obscured all other purpose behind the exhibition, at least in the eyes of the public. The exhibition Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes will clearly not be as well-attended or criticized, mostly because of its lack of a connection to any of the biggest corporations in the world. It will be, because of that, brushed under the umbrella art exhibition’ and that will be that.

Ten years separates The Architecture of Reassurance and Worlds Away, along with a slew of other ideological approaches as well as an active awareness of the other. What they share is surprisingly similar, and their first shared attribute is their subjects’ presence in everyday life and the everyman’s conscious, subjects art museums deal with usually only abstractly. Suburbia and Disneyland are inhabited and visited by millions of Americans, but are criticized almost across the board by the urbanite, the artist, and the academic.

But what links them most strongly together is the problem of the suburbs. Each exhibition is about solving the problem of the suburban sprawl and creating new, thoughtful environments that will not necessarily “ get rid” of the suburb, but improve it. The answer? Control. Don’t take that word too negatively.

Walt Disney has often been described as a control freak, and there is no doubt that he did view Disneyland as his own miniature utopia blown up to be life-size. But what he wanted is the same as what many of the artists and architects in Worlds Away are trying to do fifty years later. He hated the car culture and hated that nobody walked in Los Angeles anymore. In Disneyland, he made everybody leave their cars at the gates and walk. The only way to get around was using mass transportation – the railroad and the monorail. He created a Main Street that mixed the commercial with residential (his famous apartment that he never inhabited was above the Main Street fire station) and he put porches outside businesses and patios outside restaurants, all designed to persuade people to sit down, relax, and visit. It all sounds remarkably like the proponents of New Urbanism: “ Architecture physically defines streets as places of shared use. Care for the public realm adds character, builds value, promotes security, and helps residents feel proud of their community. Plazas, squares, sidewalks, cafes, and porches provide rich settings for interaction and public life.”

In Worlds Away, the answer is designers and architects who also propose creating new environments that will encapsulate the best of suburbia and get rid of the worst (i.e. big box store, separation of commercial and residential, roads as the only navigable thoroughfare). The exhibition points out that the majority of suburban neighborhoods are not designed by architects, but by contractors. The people who built Disneyland, likewise, were not architects, but artists, animators, and movie set designers, people whose language was aesthetics, not economics. Particularly fascinating is the architecture and design practice of Fashion Architecture Taste, whose work resembles what might have been the offspring of those “ imagineers” who designed Disneyland and todays socially and environmentally-conscious architects. Walt Disney was, in 1955, enamored with small town America in the early 20th century and suburbs were currently acting as the manifestation of the ubiquitous American Dream. The phenomenon was in its most fervent state. But imagine if Walt Disney were around today. Would he still be game for solving the “ problem” of suburbia? It is uncertain whether his ideal utopia would still resemble Main Street USA.

Even in 1966, Disney’s ideas turned more futuristic. He designed the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, aka EPCOT:

Disney planned radial cities whose air-conditioned cores would house office buildings, stores, theaters, restaurants, hotels, and a convention center. Ringing these commercial centers would be high-density apartments; beyond them would lie greenbelts of residential suburbs, office parks, factories, parking lots, and a ring road for automobiles coming from other EPCOTs a few miles away. The 20,000 people who lived or worked in the EPCOTs would travel by monorail to and from the business core (Land Forum, Fall/Winter 1997).

EPCOT was never built (Disney died a few months after revealing these plans) as a working community, but instead as a theme park in Orlando. The idea of an encapsulated downtown’ is terrifying, but Disney’s EPCOT plans would fit right alongside LTL Architects’ New Suburbanism project or FAT’s Bere Regis project, albeit at a larger and more ambitious scale.

One of the biggest criticisms of the Disney exhibition was its lack of connections to the “ real world,” although the exhibition’s press release advertised the idea that Disneyland’s design “ suggest[s] new approaches to the real-world’ architecture of the shopping center and the resort and subtly changing public expectations of the cityscape.” Yet in the section entitled “ Theme Park Architecture in the Real World,” the only Real World presented was that of the resort’s own hotels and a vague summary about how Disneyland’s design influenced entertainment complexes and malls. This section was clearly an afterthought, and it is disappointing that Marling, in all her wisdom, forgot about how important it was to finish off her argument for Disney as a pioneering visionary.

Worlds Away is concerned with the 21st century suburb whereas Architecture of Reassurance was set out to prove that Disneyland is more than a thrill-seeker and consumer’s paradise. The goals of each exhibition, however, while decidedly different, both speak to the public in the same way: Give this thing a chance.

(Images are from the Architecture of Reassurance exhibition catalog.)