Source: Electronic Arts Intermix
Video: Static Reaction

Left: Mt. St. Helens erupts, May 18, 1980. Right: Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps, 1801. Oil on canvas, 259 × 221 cm (102 × 87 in). Musée national du château de Malmaison, Rueil-Malmaison, France. Click to enlarge.

This day in history: In the famous painting above by Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), from 1801, the artist depicts Napoleon Bonaparte leading his reserve army through the Great St. Bernard Pass on their way to Italy to reinforce French troops. In a striking example of precognition, Napoleon points to–and his horse is spooked by–the May 18, 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens, half a world away and exactly 176 years after Napoleon became emperor of France, on May 18, 1804. Asked what so spooked him and his horse, a visibly shaken Napoleon muttered something under his breath that the official French army poet recorded as,

They make saints of all the Helens of Troy
blowing their tops at every man and boy
George Washington may be in a State
where exploding earth will mark his fate

Or so it seems from the remote vantage of 2012, on this day in history, all mashed-up.

Top: Sesshu Toyo, View of Ama-no-Hashidate (c.1501-1506). Hanging scroll, ink and light color on paper. Kyoto National Museum, Japan. Bottom: John McLaughlin, #8 (1966). Oil on canvas. Greenberg Van Doren Gallery.

As I noted in a previous post (In praise of the artist John McLaughlin), the California artist John McLaughlin (1898-1976)  is one of my favorite artists. McLaughlin’s favorite artist  was a 15th century Japanese monk-painter named Sesshu Toyo. Here his the Kyoto National Museum blurb about the Sesshu painting shown above:

This masterpiece depicts a bird’s-eye-view of the famous sandbar in Tango province, one of the Three Famous Scenic Spots in Japan. It can be dated by the coexistence in the painting of the two-storied Chionji temple pagoda, which was built in 1501, and the buildings of Nariaiji temple, which burned down in 1507. It is remarkable to think that the artist, who was well into his eighties at the time, climbed to such heights to paint the scene! The painting’s combination of soft, wet ink tones, precise brushwork and sublime composition represent the acme of Sesshu Toyo’s (1420-1506) art.

This painting can be considered the masterpiece of an artist who went to China to study painting from life and the art of the Song and Yuan Dynasties and sought the unity of Zen and art throughout his life.

John McLaughlin lived in Japan for three years in the 1930s, and after that opened a Boston gallery that sold Japanese prints. “During World War II, he used his fluency in Japanese to do Marine Corps intelligence work in China, Burma and India,” wrote art critic Christopher Knight in his article about McLaughlin, Open your eyes to John McLaughlin. Here is an excerpt from that article, where Knight discuses the influence of Eastern art and thought on McLaughlin’s work:

For McLaughlin, though, the void was fundamentally different. His is a visionary envelope, an open space of expansive thought, creative energy or the spirit. It’s a void that represents the highest aspiration within Japanese aesthetics rather than Western tradition.

McLaughlin had deep admiration for traditional Japanese and Chinese painting. He was inspired by it as much as by Mondrian or Kazimir Malevich, the spiritual Russian Suprematist. In fact, Sesshu Toyo, the 15th century Japanese monk-painter, was his favorite artist.

Eastern painters were aware of Western perspective, but they rejected it. Instead, they designed paintings to draw a viewer into a profound visual excursion through time and space. McLaughlin did too. The modern Western tools of color and shape in geometric abstraction fuse with the Chinese manner of monochrome painting. Solid merges with space, line with shape.

McLaughlin’s easel paintings, never more than 4 or 5 feet on a side, also dispense with the public scale of a mural, which New York School painters demanded. His paintings are instead designed for intimacy — for the one-on-one experience of contemplative interaction that describes, say, a single Japanese scroll hanging in a tokonoma alcove. The modest size maneuvers a viewer into an optimal place a few feet away, from which to cogitate in splendid isolation.

“I want to communicate only to the extent that the painting will serve to induce or intensify the viewer’s natural desire for contemplation,” the artist once said, “without the benefit of a guiding principle.”

Image sources: Kyoto National Museum | Getty Museum

See also: In praise of the artist John McLaughlin

Spalding Gray. Nancy Campbell/IFC Films.

I came upon this wonderful New York Times book review /article / tribute / remembrance of monologist Spalding Gray from October 28th 2011 entitled What Spalding Gray Left Us by Ron Rosenbaum. Gray was a painfully funny man and I miss his wit, his candor and his brave suffering.

Gray Matter: Clips

• Swimming To Cambodia (1987)
• Gray’s Anatomy (1996)
• Poetry in Motion II

Chris Burden, Samson, 1985. Turnstile, winch, worm gear, leather strap, jack, timbers, steel, steel plates; dimensions variable.

“A museum installation consisting of a 100-ton jack connected to a gear box and a turnstile. The 100-ton jack pushes two large timbers against the bearing walls of the museum. Each visitor to the museum must pass through the turnstile in order to see the exhibition. Each input on the turnstile ever so slightly expands the jack, and ultimately if enough people visit the exhibition, SAMSON could theoretically destroy the building. Like a glacier, its powerful movement is imperceptible to the naked eye. This sculptural installation subverts the notion of the sanctity of the Museum (the shed that houses the art).”

Source: Zwirner and Wirth

See also: Chris Burden: In keeping with the bicentennial spirt the post Watergate mood and the new atmosphere on Capitol Hill

Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1970. Distemper and chalk on canvas.

No particular reason to post this, other than that I find it beautiful and inspiring. But what else could possibly matter as much as that, anyway? The beautiful images of slime molds I posted earlier today in a story about intelligent slime molds must have got me thinking about Twombly’s work.

See also: Cy Twombly, April 25, 1928 – July 5, 2011.

Crayon portrait of Henry David Thoreau as a young man, 1854, by Samuel Worcester Rowse.

“Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.”
~Henry David Thoreau

An article in yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Review, The Wisdom of Slime, by Andrew Adamatzky and Andrew Ilachinski, asks, “Would America’s highway system be better if it had been designed by mold?” The article discusses some of the latest scientific research into the lowly slime-mold, a creature with no brain that nevertheless possesses a sophisticated intelligence. Here are some excerpts to whet your whistle:

An interesting fact about this slime mold is that it is highly intelligent — or at least it behaves as if it is. In locating food in its environment, it builds networks that have been shown to be optimally efficient in transporting the nutrients over the area in question. If placed in a maze, for instance, with a source of food outside the maze, the slime mold will discover the shortest path out.

The Japanese researcher Toshiyuki Nakagaki and his colleagues have demonstrated that the slime mold’s foraging behavior can be used to perform sophisticated computations, as long as the problems are represented spatially. Problems solved by the slime mold include not only the shortest path out of a maze, but also other complex mathematical challenges (like creating a Voronoi diagram and a Delaunay triangulation).

Despite its ability to solve an array of problems, the slime mold was designed by evolution to solve just one problem: how to build an optimal transport network (for its nutrients).

… What did the resulting network look like? It looked remarkably like the United States interstate highway system.

… For all of these countries, we found that the slime mold network matched, at least partly, the network of human-made transport systems, though the closeness of fit varied from country to country. The United States highway system, for instance, is less slime-mold-like than that of Canada.

That’s right, slime molds build their networks at least as intelligently as humans build interstate highway networks. And, as the images above attest, they can be quite beautiful in their slimy moldishness. The only major question left unanswered is, What kind of music do slime molds like to listen to while traveling along their slimy Route 66s?

Everyone’s watching, to see what you will do
Everyone’s looking at you, oh
Everyone’s wondering, will you come out tonight
Everyone’s trying to get it right, get it right

Everybody’s working for the weekend
Everybody wants a little romance
Everybody’s goin’ off the deep end
Everybody needs a second chance, oh
You want a piece of my heart
You better start from start
You wanna be in the show
Come on baby lets go

Everyone’s looking to see if it was you
Everyone wants you to come through
Everyone’s hoping it’ll all work out
Everyone’s waiting they’re holding out

Everybody’s working for the weekend
Everybody wants a little romance
Everybody’s goin’ off the deep end
Everybody needs a second chance, oh
You want a piece of my heart
You better start from start
You wanna be in the show
Come on baby lets go

You want a piece of my heart
You better start from start
You wanna be in the show
Come on baby lets go

You want a piece of my heart
You better start from start
You wanna be in the show
Come on baby lets go

“Working For The Weekend,” originally by Loverboy.

Wabash, Follow the Flag

The Wabash Railroad takes its name from the Wabash River. The Wabash is a 475-mile (764 km)-long river in the eastern United States that flows southwest from northwest Ohio near Fort Recovery, Ohio across northern Indiana to Illinois where it forms the southern portion of the Illinois Indiana border before draining into the Ohio River. “Wabash” is an English spelling of the French name for the river, “Ouabache.” French traders named the river after the native Miami tribe’s word for the river.

At the end of 1960 Wabash operated 2,423 miles of road on 4,311 miles of track through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, and Ontario (see map).

The Wabash Railroad Merger Tree

1982 Norfolk Southern Railway
1964 Norfolk and Western Railway
1941 Wabash Railroad
1931 Wabash Railway
1908 Wabash Pittsburgh Terminal Railway
1889 Wabash Railroad
1879 Wabash, St. Louis and Pacific Railway
1877 Council Bluffs and St. Louis Railway
1865 Toledo, Wabash and Western Railway
1865 Great Western Railway of Illinois
1853 Sangamon and Morgan Railroad
1847 Northern Cross Railway
1865 Illinois and Southern Iowa Railroad
1865 Quincy and Toledo Railroad
1865 Toledo and Wabash Railway
1958 Wabash and Western Railroad
1858 Toledo and Wabash Railroad
1858 Toledo, Wabash and Western Railroad
1856 Lake Erie, Wabash and St. Louis Railroad
1856 Toledo and Illinois Railroad
1865 Warsaw and Peoria Railroad

Sources: The Wabash Railroad Historical Society and Wikipedia.

See also:

• Fallen Flags
• Chance encounters: A history of the Frisco Railroad name and logo

What is going on here? What incident has taken place? It is a mindblowing 1991 installation at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, by the great Russian artist Ilya Kabakov, called The Bridge. Below are some excerpts from the book, Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away, 1996, by Amei Wallach, describing this strange and haunting installation:

Passing through a small dark corridor, in all two meters long, the viewer opens an old door that has been painted green many times, ascends a slight incline, and winds up on a narrow wooden bridge with handrails suspended above the floor. The viewer walks along this bridge to the center of the room, whereupon the bridge turns to the left, and one can get down from the bridge only through the opposite door, which leads out of the installation. The viewer cannot get off of the bridge and walk around the room: the handrails and the bridge are tightly pressed against the doors, and it is only possible to go in one direction, toward the exit.

In a large room (15 x 10 meters) only the center is brightly lit by an oval of light. The corners and walls of the room are not illuminated, they are immersed in semidarkness. The illuminated center, at first glance, appears to be completely empty. However, just outside the borders of the light one can see all sorts of things in total disarray which have been pushed back against the walls–chairs, wooden benches, boxes, wrapping paper, a table covered with a green tablecloth–and behind all of this, flush against the wall and barely visible in the darkness, stand large and medium-sized paintings that have not been hung. The walls themselves, if one looks closely, are divided at even intervals by vertically hanging red panels, which lend the entire area a sort of pompous air, and the very color of the walls and the table holding a carafe containing water and glasses all indicate that, to all appearances, what we have before us is an official area intended for solemn occasions. But why are there such disorder and chaos in it?

A wooden board with an explanation is affixed in the center of the bridge at the very place where it turns toward the exit, and here the viewer may read to find out what is going on, or more precisely, what went on. From this text (cf. text “explanation” [below]) the plot/theme of the installation becomes clear, as does the significance of the five binoculars available along both sides of the bridge and through which the viewer will definitely look once he has read the text. Having looked through them, one will see that the illuminated circle on the floor, which seemed empty to the naked eye, is really covered in many places with groups of little white men. Their origin and their significance in this installation is still not quite clear, even after reading the “explanation.” Actually, the very installation itself raises these questions: What are these little white men, how did they wind up here, where are they from? And what really happened here? And what’s depicted on the paintings, of which there are many (eighteen) and which cannot be seen on account of the darkness and the chairs which are blocking them?

Wallach continues to discuss concepts in, and interpretations of, The Bridge, and a larger photo and installation diagrams are also included. This is, by the way, and extraordinary and beautiful book, that goes into great detail about all aspects of Kabakov’s work, from illustration to paintings to large installations such as The Bridge.

Here is the text “explanation” of this event that is mounted on the wooden board at the bend in the bridge, the prime viewing are for the “little white men”:

Text in the Installation

“The exhibit didn’t take place, something happened here.”

In the club of ZhEK No. 8 in Moscow, a place where meetings of the residents of the region are held, lectures are read, and comrades’ courts are convened, an important event it expected to take place at the end of March 1984: the public investigation of paintings which are of a harmful, “burgeois” nature, defaming our Soviet way of life, hostile toward our ideology. Important critics and art scholars were expected to arrive at the meeting. The paintings and posters which always hung on the walls of the club were removed for this occasion and the workers were supposed to begin hanging up the “works” that were being delivered since morning….

Suddenly, someone brought a strange message. On that day, something unusual, or even unheard-of, was supposed to happen in Moscow. Someone, or something, was supposed to appear on that evening, in the city, and not just somewhere, but right in the very middle of this hall which must therefore be vacated immediately for this event.

There couldn’t be any talk of a meeting at all. All the works were instantly pushed to the corners and walls, forming something like a circle in the center.

And the event which everyone anticipated, some with hope, others with disbelief, actually did occur around eleven o’clock in the evening. As to what really happened, the eyewitnesses disagree in the most resolute way. But one circumstance, strange and inexplicable, was obvious: after the event the entire floor in the middle of the hall was strewn with groups of little white people who were constantly changing places….

At the suggestion of the commission which was specially created to look into this, the entire place was left just like it was when the event occurred, and it was decided to build a temporary bridge over this spot, in the first place, as a special precaution, and secondly, for the purpose of observing these strange aliens, which can only be seen through powerful binoculars.

Source: Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away, 1996, by Amei Wallach. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York, pp. 198-191.

Alice Neel: Late Portraits & Still Lifes
David Zwirner, New York
May 4 – June 23, 2012

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of portraits and still lifes by Alice Neel, on view at the gallery’s 533 West 19th Street space. This is the second solo exhibition of Neel’s work since David Zwirner started representing her Estate in 2008.

With a practice spanning the 1920s to the 1980s, Alice Neel (1900- 1984) is widely regarded as one of the greatest figurative painters of the twentieth century. Based in New York City, Neel chose her subjects from her family, friends, and a broad variety of locals: writers, poets, artists, students, textile salesmen, psychologists, cabaret singers, and homeless bohemians. Her eccentric selection was thus also a portrayal of, and dialogue with, the city in which she lived. Through her forthright and at times humorous touch, her work engaged with ongoing political and social issues, including gender, racial inequality, and labor struggles.

Neel’s works are characterized by a poised, fluid handling of paint, which combines precise attention to detail with abstract or sketch-like strokes. Her compositions frame her subjects centrally while retaining a sense of autonomy, which in turn broadens the focus of the portrait beyond the face of the sitters to the rest of the canvas.

Neel’s practice was remarkably impervious to the fluctuating artistic movements it witnessed, and she famously reaffirmed her commitment to the human body at a time when her avant-garde contemporaries were denouncing figuration. A stylistic development is nonetheless apparent in her paintings from the 1960s onwards. Coinciding with a growing reputation in the art world, where she had thus far only remained on the margins, Neel’s work grew brighter and more experimental during this decade, and increasingly explored the medium of paint for its expressive qualities.

This exhibition includes portraits and still lifes made between 1964 and 1983, the last two decades of Neel’s life. The portraits affirm the shift in her work towards more luminous compositions, as witnessed for example in Abe’s Grandchildren (1964) and Richard (1969), where the background is partially rendered and supplanted by abstract areas of paint. Likewise, in the still lifes—a genre Neel continued to address throughout her career—such changes are evident in the arbitrary use of perspective and the artist’s bright palette. In Still Life (Breakfast Table) (1965), a bird’s eye view of a strident yellow table is set off by many of the objects on its surface, which are shown from their sides, and in Light (1980), a shadow cast by a sun-lit table omits the flowers arranged on its source. In other still lifes, potted plants and cut flowers take on anthropomorphic presences, and even hint at a subtle version of self-portraiture. Aside from two paintings made in her family home in New Jersey, and a portrait from San Francisco, all of the works in the show were painted in New York.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue co-published by Radius Books, featuring an essay by Tim Griffin, Executive Director and Chief Curator at The Kitchen, New York, and former Artforum editor.

Alice Neel was born in 1900 in Merion Square, Pennsylvania, and died in 1984 in New York. She had her first retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1974, and the Whitney mounted another solo exhibition of her work in 2000, which traveled to the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the Denver Art Museum, Colorado.

Since 2008, The Estate of Alice Neel has been represented by David Zwirner, New York, where her work was presented in 2009 in a critically acclaimed, two-venue solo exhibition, Alice Neel: Selected Works and Alice Neel: Nudes of the 1930s (on view at Zwirner & Wirth, New York).

In 2010, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in Texas organized a major survey, Alice Neel: Painted Truths, which traveled to Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden. Her work was recently on view in a solo exhibition in 2011 at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, which formed part of the Dublin Contemporary 2011, Terrible Beauty – Art, Crisis, Change & The Office of Non-Compliance.

Work by the artist is represented in major museum collections, including The Art Institute of Chicago; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Tate, London; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; among others.

Source: David Zwirner, New York
Image Credit: Alice Neel “1972 Jackie Curtis as a Boy” Oil on Canvas, 44 x 30 inches / 111.8 x 76.2 cm Private Collection

Abstract Expressionisms: Paintings and Drawings from the Collection
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
January 18th – June 10th

Abstract Expressionisms brings together approximately forty paintings, works on paper, and sculptures from BAM/PFA’s renowned collection of mid-twentieth century works of art. This international array of work in various media reminds us of the broad reach and long-running influence of the movement and of its many radiating branches.

In signature paintings by artists such as Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko we revisit the groundbreaking parameters of new art in post-World War II America. Powerful works from the 1950s and 1960s by Philip Guston, Theodore Stamos, Conrad Marca-Relli, and William Baziotes indicate the breadth and distinctiveness of achievement of the era. Bold, color-saturated works by American artists Sam Francis and Norman Bluhm date from the late 1950s when both artists were based in Paris. In a 1954 etching by German-French artist Hans Hartung, we are introduced to aspects of the dominant French expressionist movement, Tachisme. The CoBrA group, founded in Brussels in 1949, advocated vivid colors, fantastic forms, and interplay of line and color. A monumental work on paper by CoBrA cofounder Pierre Alechinsky demonstrates his dual interest in Japanese calligraphy and expressionist tenets; works by CoBrA cohorts Asger Jorn and Karel Appel also appear in Abstract Expressionisms. Antonio Saura, one of the leaders of Abstract Expressionist explorations in Spain, is represented by Carajaraña (1959), an aggressive black-and-white composition suggestive of Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. Abstract Expressionist qualities are also strongly evident in a variety of works by artists such as Mark Tobey, Leonard Baskin, and photographer Aaron Siskind. In addition, sculptural works by David Smith, Ibram Lassaw, and Peter Voulkos that accompany paintings in Gallery A and works on paper in Gallery C, suggest how Abstract Expressionism found expression in three dimensions.

Featured artists:
William Baziotes
Hans Hofmann
Norman Bluhm
Asger Jorn
Willem de Kooning
Mark Rothko
Sam Francis
Antonio Saura
Philip Guston
Mark Tobey

Source: Berkeley Art Museum
Image credit: Philip Guston “Untitled (book, ball and shoe)”, 1971