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Reflections on the Monolith: Kubrick, McCracken, Zeppelin, Nothing

2001 A Space Odyssey - Monolith with apes

John McCracken - Nine Planks IV (1974)

Led Zeppelin - Presence album cover

Nothing

Images from top to bottom: 1) Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Monolith with apes; 2) John McCracken, Nine Planks IV (1974), with viewer; 3) Led Zeppelin, Presence (1976) album cover; 4) a Nothing object (2013-present).

The artist John McCracken (1934–2011), who I had the privilege to know and work with as an undergraduate art student, began making his famous leaning “plank” sculptures and freestanding “monoliths” in the mid-1960s, before Stanley Kubrick’s famous monolith appeared in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). McCracken apparently didn’t care for the connection, as noted here in this William Poundstone review of the Stanley Kubrick exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), November 1, 2012–June 30, 2013, which made the connection by including one of McCracken’s iconic planks:

LACMA has added a few more generally related works by better-known artists. A John McCracken plank sculpture, Nine Planks IV (1974) appears in the 2001 gallery in lieu of a monolith. McCracken produced his first planks at just about the time that Kubrick and sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke were adapting Clarke’s 1951 story, “The Sentinel,” into the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey. In Clarke’s original story, the alien artifact is a tetrahedron. In the screenplay it became a black monolith of 1:4:9 proportions. It’s unlikely that Kubrick/Clarke knew of McCracken, or vice-versa. For years afterward, McCracken was annoyed by comparisons of his art to the 2001 monolith. He was not the first L.A. artist to feel steamrollered by the movie business.

He may have been annoyed with the 2001 monolith comparison, but McCracken was very much into such topics as space and time travel, extra-terrestrial beings, and psychic phenomena. In his 2011 obituary of John McCracken, the art critic Jerry Saltz wrote:

[McCracken’s] remarkable exhibition at David Zwirner in 2006 consisted of tall, black, shiny columns that had the presence of sentinels or guideposts and seemed to mark some kind of landing strip for extraterrestrials or UFOs, both of which he spoke of often. These almost-perfect freestanding keepers-of-metaphysical-secrets and celestial-navigation devices made Chelsea slip away and other worlds seem possible, even probable, as I entered a blessed-out dimension where these obdurate things, with the bearing of basalt Egyptian columns, became abstract angels in the architecture. I thought of Wallace Stevens’s writing about “a geography that would be intolerable except for the non-geography that also exists.” A physical fullness filled the almost empty room.

McCracken kept what he called a diary of “Remote Viewing & Psychic Traveling,” in which he recorded contacting “aliens,” “high-minded beings,” “the ghost of my grandfather,” and of being “in a spaceship with a female copilot…approaching earth,” seeing “huge, spider-like creatures.” He concluded that these creatures were “expressions of fear coming from the human race.” All this, he wrote, had “the feeling of home, a good feeling.” It’s no wonder that many thought that the monolith featured in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey was a McCracken sculpture.

Eight years after 2001 came the Led Zeppelin album Presence, with a cover by Hipgnosis, the art-design collective that created the cover art for many rock albums from 1968-1982, including the Pink Floyd’s iconic Dark Side of the Moon album. The Wikipedia page for the Presence album tells the story of the album design and the mysterious “object” featured in multiple tongue-in-cheek photographs:

The cover and inside sleeve of this album, created by Hipgnosis, features various images of people interacting with a black obelisk-shaped object. Inside the album sleeve, the item is referred to simply as “The Object.” It was intended to represent the “force and presence” of Led Zeppelin. In the liner notes of the first Led Zeppelin boxed set, Page explained:

There was no working title for the album. The record-jacket designer said ‘When I think of the group, I always think of power and force. There’s a definite presence there.’ That was it. He wanted to call it Obelisk. To me, it was more important what was behind the obelisk. The cover is very tongue-in-cheek, to be quite honest. Sort of a joke on [the film] 2001. I think it’s quite amusing.

The background used in the cover photograph is of an artificial marina that was installed inside London’s Earl’s Court Arena for the annual Earl’s Court Boat Show that was held in the winter of 1974–75. This was the same venue where the band played a series of concerts a few months after the boat show, in May 1975.

In 1977 Hipgnosis and George Hardie were nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of best album package.

Ultimately, this scenic detour into the world of the monolith arrives at Nothing, a smallish, nicely-finished black rectangular block of sculpture, with a perfect name. The promise of presence has arrived at the evocation of absence, of Nothing.

Let’s conclude this journey with another Kubrick-McCracken pairing. Top: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Monolith in the Louis XVI-style bedroom in space; Bottom: John McCracken, three column sculptures, from left to right: Luster (2006), Stardust (2006), and Ring (2006), installation view of the 2009 solo exhibition John McCracken at Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh; image courtesy David Zwirner gallery.

2001 A Space Odyssey - Monolith in the Louis XVI-style bedroom in space

John McCracken -- 3 columns, installation view, 2009

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The cutaway: The bisected sets of Anderson, Godard, Lewis, Berkeley, Keaton and Parrott

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, a Goings On listing written by Richard Brody noted that the Museum of the Moving Image was screening the Jerry Lewis film, The Ladies Man. In the movie, Lewis plays Herbert H. Heebert, “a high-strung and wounded young man who seeks a secular sanctuary from sex and ends up in Hollywood, as a handyman in a women’s boarding house.” Brody goes on to write, “The house where Herbert lives and works is one of the greatest and most influential sets of all time,” which got me thinking about where else have I seen this “colossal dollhouse-like cutaway” approach before and, for that matter, since.

A recent example of an epic “dollhouse effect” is Wes Anderson’s set piece for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which featured a fantastic cutaway/bisected research vessel dubbed the Belafonte. The Belafonte, complete with mini-sub and helicopter, is of course a loving homage to oceanographer Jacques Cousteau’s vessel, the Calypso. And yes, Harry Belafonte played calypso music on an album called Calypso. Seu Jorge, on the other hand, is a Brazilian Samba musician and the Belafonte’s resident recording artist who performs haunting David Bowie covers at intervals throughout the film. But I digress. The point is, after doing a little research on the making of the Belafonte set I stumbled upon Anthony Balducci’s blog, which itemizes a half-dozen examples of this visual trope, which apparently has been around for at leat 95 years.

Here are some examples, traveling back in time from the present:

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Wes Anderson, 2004)
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Wes Anderson, 2004)
Tout Va Bien (Jean-Pierre Gorin, Jean-Luc Godard; 1972)
Tout Va Bien (Jean-Pierre Gorin, Jean-Luc Godard; 1972)
The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis, 1961)
The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis, 1961)

[Read more…] about The cutaway: The bisected sets of Anderson, Godard, Lewis, Berkeley, Keaton and Parrott

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Symmetry and one-point perspective in the films of Stanley Kubrick and Wes Anderson

TOP: Kubrick // One-Point Perspective from kogonada on Vimeo.
BOTTOM: Wes Anderson // Centered from kogonada on Vimeo.

These are beautiful video compilations that demonstrate quite vividly Stanly Kubrick’s love of symmetry and how the director made use of one-point perspective in his films, and the influence he has had in this regard on the contemporary director Wes Anderson.

Visit kogonada.com to see move very interesting video “essays” on the work of great directors.

See also: The cutaway: The bisected sets of Anderson, Godard, Lewis, Berkeley, Keaton and Parrott

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How HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey” got his name…and no, it’s not IBM minus one

HAL 9000The HAL 9000 computer is one of the stars of Stanley Kubrick’s science-fiction film masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the novel it is based on by Arthur C. Clarke. It has often been a legend that the name HAL was derived because each letter comes one place before IBM in the alphabet. Arthur C. Clarke has always denied this, and the true origin of HAL’s name is recounted on the HAL 9000 Wikipedia page:

Although it is often conjectured that the name HAL was based on a one-letter shift from the name IBM, this has been denied by both Clarke and 2001 director Stanley Kubrick. In 2010: Odyssey Two, Clarke speaks through the character of Dr. Chandra (he originally spoke through Dr. Floyd until Chandra was awoken), who characterized this idea as: “[u]tter nonsense! […] I thought that by now every intelligent person knew that H-A-L is derived from Heuristic ALgorithmic”.

Clarke more directly addressed this issue in his book The Lost Worlds of 2001:

As is clearly stated in the novel (Chapter 16), HAL stands for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer. However, about once a week some character spots the fact that HAL is one letter ahead of IBM, and promptly assumes that Stanley and I were taking a crack at the estimable institution … As it happened, IBM had given us a good deal of help, so we were quite embarrassed by this, and would have changed the name had we spotted the coincidence.

Also, IBM is explicitly mentioned in the film 2001, as are many other real companies. IBM is given fictional credit as being the manufacturer of the Pan Am Clipper’s computer, and the IBM logo can be seen in the center of the cockpit’s instrument panel. In addition, the IBM logo is shown on the lower arm keypad on Poole’s space suit in the scene where he space walks to replace the antenna unit, and may possibly be shown reflected on Bowman’s face when he is inside the pod on his way to retrieve the body of Poole (there is speculation as to whether or not the reflection is that of the letters “IBM” or the letters “MGM”, the film studio).

HAL has become such an icon of our culture that we are fortunate neither Clarke or Kubrick noticed the downshift from “IBM,” or this epic computer may have been named “Siri.” Or Dora. Or Obie. Or any one of these other names of fictional computers.

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The cinema and visual poetry of the Lettrists of Lettrism (AKA Lettrisme or Letterism)

Littrist cinema
Stills from Maurice Lemaitre’s Le Film Est Deja Commencé? (1951). Image from Vertigo (see below).

Lettrism (or Lettrisme or Letterism) is a French film and visual poetry movement that enjoyed a brief heyday as the avant-garde du jour in 1950s Paris, and is often associated with the French Revolutionary Student Movement of 1968. Founded by Elvis lookalike  Isidore Isou (born Ioan-Isidor Goldstein, 1925-2007), Lettrism influenced other forms of art and poetry in Europe and Latin America up to the present and likely into the future, even as most Viners and Snapchatters remain unaware of this strange fold in the space-time continuum of art.

From the Wikipedia article on Lettrism:

Lettrism is a French avant-garde movement, established in Paris in the mid-1940s by Romanian immigrant Isidore Isou. In a body of work totaling hundreds of volumes, Isou and the Lettrists have applied their theories to all areas of art and culture, most notably in poetry, film, painting and political theory. The movement has its theoretical roots in Dada and Surrealism. Isou viewed his fellow countryman, Tristan Tzara, as the greatest creator and rightful leader of the Dada movement, and dismissed most of the others as plagiarists and falsifiers. Among the Surrealists, André Breton was a significant influence, but Isou was dissatisfied by what he saw as the stagnation and theoretical bankruptcy of the movement as it stood in the 1940s.

In French, the movement is called Lettrisme, from the French word for letter, arising from the fact that many of their early works centred around letters and other visual or spoken symbols. The Lettristes themselves prefer the spelling ‘Letterism’ for the Anglicised term, and this is the form that is used on those rare occasions when they produce or supervise English translations of their writings: however, ‘Lettrism’ is at least as common in English usage. The term, having been the original name that was first given to the group, has lingered as a blanket term to cover all of their activities, even as many of these have moved away from any connection to letters. But other names have also been introduced, either for the group as a whole or for its activities in specific domains, such as ‘the Isouian movement’, ‘youth uprising’, ‘hypergraphics’, ‘creatics’, ‘infinitesimal art’ and ‘excoördism’.

Vertigo Magazine has an excellent article about Lettrism, The Negation of Cinema: Some Brief Notes on Letterist Cinema 1950 – 1952, by Louis Benassi; here are some excerpts to further elucidate the story of Lettrism: [Read more…] about The cinema and visual poetry of the Lettrists of Lettrism (AKA Lettrisme or Letterism)

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Everyday mysteries: Saul Leiter, a master of lyrical color street photography

Saul Leiter - Snow, 1960

Saul Leiter, perhaps the most famous non-famous New York street photographer, has just passed away at age 89. A pioneer who worked mostly in color in an age when street photography was still a predominantly black and white medium, Leiter captured the ineffable details than can only be seen and appreciated if you slow down and pay attention. Notes the obituary in today’s New York Times:

Mr. Leiter was considered a member of the New York School of photographers — the circle that included Weegee and Arbus and Avedon — and yet he was not quite of it. He was largely self-taught, and his work resembles no one else’s: tender, contemplative, quasi-abstract and intensely concerned with color and geometry, it seems as much as anything to be about the essential condition of perceiving the world.

“Seeing is a neglected enterprise,” Mr. Leiter often said.

Where other New York photographers of the period were apt to document the city’s elements discretely — streets, people, buildings — Mr. Leiter captured the almost indefinable spaces where all three intersect, many of them within a two-block radius of the East Village apartment in which he had lived since the early 1950s.

… Unplanned and unstaged, Mr. Leiter’s photographs are slices fleetingly glimpsed by a walker in the city. People are often in soft focus, shown only in part or absent altogether, though their presence is keenly implied. Sensitive to the city’s found geometry, he shot by design around the edges of things: vistas are often seen through rain, snow or misted windows.

“A window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person,” Mr. Leiter says in the recently-released feature-length documentary, In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life With Saul Leiter, by the British filmmaker Tomas Leach. Here is the trailer for the film:

The New York Times continues: [Read more…] about Everyday mysteries: Saul Leiter, a master of lyrical color street photography

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Sightings: Bigfoot, Elf, and J.D. Salinger

Bigfoot, Elf, J.D. Salinger
Three mysterious creatures in the wild: Bigfoot, Buddy the Elf, and J.D. Salinger (photo: Paul Adao, 1988).

The classic Bigfoot image is from a 1967 film by Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin, at Bluff Creek in Northern California (see video below). The Bigfoot might be fake, but the scarred and battered film stock is the real deal, real enough perhaps to inspire a few new Hipstamatic filters. The movie Elf is a Christmas classic from 2003, starring Will Ferrell as the feral elf, Buddy, seen here in Central Park in homage to Patterson’s Bigfoot. And the alleged and unverified photo of the late great J.D. Salinger was snapped by Paul Adao in 1988. Another Adao photo illustrates a wonderful New York Magazine story by publisher Roger Lathbury from 2010, Betraying Salinger. I scored the publishing coup of the decade: his final book. And then I blew it.

Bonus: there’s been another Bigfoot sighting — in our portfolio.

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The Clock by Christian Marclay

Christian Marclay - The Clock (composite)

Chances are by now that you’ve heard of Christian Marclay’s brilliant work of art, The Clock (2010), though less likely that you have actually seen it (I haven’t as yet). As described by Wikipedia, the piece “is in effect a clock, but it is made of a 24-hour montage of thousands of time-related scenes from movies and some TV shows, meticulously edited to be shown in ‘real time’: each scene contains an indication of time (for instance, a timepiece, or a piece of dialogue) that is synchronized to show the actual time.”

A lot has been written about The Clock, and from what I’ve read, this is much more than just a collage of film images. The images not only work in sequence as a clock, but the pacing of the editing builds to moments of climax, as the top of the hour approaches, and then to a more relaxed pace after the hour has passed. And the soundtracks of the clips are overlapped and blended across transitions, creating new correspondences and “dialog” between disparate scenes. In short, this is a living, breathing clock, more like a day-long dream (a contemporary Ulysses?) than a typical film, clock, art work, or “typical” anything.

Check out this wonderful New Yorker profile piece by Daniel Zalewski, The Hours: How Christian Marclay created the ultimate digital mosaic. Here is an excerpt about how Marclay transforms the ordinary into art:

Part of Marclay’s fascination with the cinematic archive had to do with the way it resisted transfiguration. It wasn’t hard to turn a recorded sound into an estranged abstraction, by slowing it down or folding it into a new rhythm. But, even if you chopped a film into a single frame, specificity clung to it: Audrey Hepburn, Givenchy, Manhattan, 1961. Marclay wondered if he could fashion from familiar clips a genuinely unfamiliar film, one with its own logic, rhythm, and aesthetics. In his view, the best collages combined the “memory aspect”—recognition of the source material—with the pleasurable violence of transformation. If Marclay could turn the sky green for one day, he’d do it.

Later in the piece, Zalewski offers this observation about the paradoxical nature of time both in The Clock and in the viewing of it:

There were darker resonances, too. People went to the movies to lose track of time; this video would pound viewers with an awareness of how long they’d been languishing in the dark. It would evoke the laziest of modern pleasures—channel surfing—except that the time wasted would be painfully underlined.

… There was a lineage of avant-garde cinema that, with varying degrees of obscurity, examined the temporal qualities of film. Marclay’s contribution to the cinema of duration, though, would be pleasurable to watch. He sensed a creepy challenge. If his film was sufficiently seductive, he might coax people to sit for hours, literally watching their lives tick away.

There are several copies of The Clock owned by museums or private collectors that are in circulation, touring the globe for short-run performances. Be sure to catch all or part of it when it comes to a city near you, and watch your life tick away. I can’t wait.

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A Fine Ending: 1950s movie end titles

Film end titles from the 1950s

A composite of 1950s American, Italian and French movie end title screenshots from one of our favorite websites, The Movie Title Stills Collection, created by the most excellent designer Christian Annyas. Here are the film titles, from left-to-right, top-to-bottom:

  1. FINE: Il Cammino Della Speranza (1950)
  2. THE END: Human Desire (1954)
  3. FINE: Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi (1950)
  4. The End: Big Heat (1953)
  5. FINE: Grido (1957)
  6. THE END: Desk Set (1957)
  7. FINE: Un Maledetto Imbroglio (1959)
  8. The End: It Happened To Jane (1959)
  9. FINE: Un Americano a Roma (1954)
  10. The End: Teacher’s Pet (1958)
  11. FIN: Bob le Flambeur (1955)
  12. The End: His Kind of Woman (1951)
  13. FINE: Guardie e Ladri (1951)
  14. THE END: From Here To Eternity (1953)
  15. FINE: La Grand Guerra (1959)
  16. the end: 12 Angry Men (1957)
  17. Fine: Le Notti di Cabiria (1957)
  18. THE END: Not As A Stranger (1955)

To END this silly dialectic with one last FINE, I originally posted here a quick video of the end title sequence of Un Americano a Roma (1954), which I found after I had already begun contrasting the title languages; alas, the video has been pulled. But here is an still image, with the character in the hospital bed “erasing” the “FINE” end title that you can see in the middle-right of the montage above:

 

For a related post, see: The End (1991) by Ed Ruscha.

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Pile Up Gawking Slack-Jawed and Rubbernecked: Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) by Monte Hellman

James Taylor is The Driver, Warren Oates is G.T.O, Laurie Bird is The Girl, Harry Dean Stanton is The Oklahoma Hitchhiker (as H.D. Stanton) and Dennis ‘Beach Boy’ Wilson is The Mechanic! Monte Hellman directs this 1971 bunch of small town car freaks chasing me across two states, make that three states. Pink slips for cars where to? DC? Then on down to Florida. Florida? Yes Florida. Color me gone, baby. Check out the rear end. This man is on something officer and may very well want to suck us up his tail pipe. And all they think about is cars, them small town car freaks. Are you trying to blow my mind in the far-out world of the high-speed scene! SFX: screeching careening tires and dueling approaching colliding car horns. Yes it is truly a mess, a muddle, a pickle, a befuddle, a heap, a botch, a blunder, a bust, a ruin, a fumble, a bumble, a snafu, a goof, and an utter shambles of a film, but what a glorious mess it is. And like any good wreck this 19 car pile up is bound to leave you gawking slack-jawed and rubbernecked. In fact Hellman’s Blacktop and Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny (2003) would make wonderful drive-in double feature. Here is an excerpt from the Criterion Collection synopsis:

“…Yet no summary can do justice to the existential punch of Two-Lane Blacktop. Maverick director Monte Hellman’s stripped-down narrative, gorgeous widescreen compositions, and sophisticated look at American male obsession make this one of the artistic high points of 1970s cinema, and possibly the greatest road movie ever made.”

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Verisimilitude: Furniture Guy vs. Mattress Man


Just who is Vinnie “T” Testeroni, the would-be daredevil spokesperson for “The Furniture Guy”? And why doesn’t “The Furniture Guy” appear in his own commercial? Whoever Vinnie “T” is, director Paul Thomas Anderson went to great lengths to recreate his character in the 2002 film Punch-Drunk Love. In fact, the main antagonist in the film, Dean “The Mattress Man” Trumbell, played here by Philip Seymour Hoffman, was based on the above commercial blooper for “The Furniture Guy.” Interestingly, this re-enacted scene, which inspired Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character in the first place, was deleted from the final film. Fortunately, this lovely re-enactment was found on the cutting room floor. Either way it served its purpose as muse to director Anderson.

The original “The Furniture Guy” commercial poses more questions, however. Does Vinnie’s middle initial “T” stand for Testosterone? Is he a real life honest-to-goodness guitarist or a stunt man? Or perhaps a stunt guitarist? Who knows? I searched high and low, but I couldn’t find any information about Vinnie “T” online. What we do know is that Mr. Anderson has an acute eye for the sincere detail, or “truthlikeness,” in every scene. To illustrate this, here is a list of details for this scene, showing their appearance in the original “The Furniture Guy” (FG) commercial and in “The Mattress Man” (MM) re-enactment:

Scene Description FG MM
Ambient white freeway noise X X
Unamplified perfunctory guitar strumming X X
Black leather jacket with flames on the sleeves X
Mop of hair/wig resembling a condemned rodent’s nest X
Mop of hair/wig secured in place by a Karate Kid black head band X
Phone number is 351-3900 X
Awkward hesitation before opening line of dialog X X
Sad parrot infested “Southland” palm trees in background X
Red racing trailer parked oddly across 6 parking spaces X X
5 mattresses piled on roof of early 1980s Stretched Lincoln Town Car X X
Awkward walking and talking tracking shot X X
“…got queen mattresses sets for 99 dollars” X X
“…and king sets for 129” X X
Sack of potatoes ‘Foley’ thump when body hits mattress X
Account Executive with gray pants and compulsory “power” suspenders X
Stretched gold Lincoln Town Car adorned with red flames along the front fender to driver’s door X
Short cast shadows suggest mid-morning or mid-afternoon video shoot X X
Full name is obscured on the side of racing trailer X X
Production Assistant in mandatory black polo shirt holding note pad X
Videographer with obligatory “correspondent’s” vest and requisite mullet hairstyle X
Account Executive’s first response is to pick up the guitar cord X
Videographer’s first response is to steady the guitar X
Production Assistant’s first response is to adjust/reposition the mattress X
Videographer: “Try your arm and stuff” X X
Production Assistant: “He’s wearing leather” X X
Fallen Protagonist: “Did you get it on film?” X X
Videographer: “Yea” X X
Fallen Protagonist: “Alright” X X
Total running time in seconds 40 50

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Zabriskie Point redux: how you get there depends on where you’re at

Zabriskie Point screen shots
Screen shots of Zabriskie Point. Click to enlarge.

Concluding my recent obsession with Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 film, Zabriskie Point, here is the grid of 40 screen shots I mentioned working on in my previous Zabriskie post:

Every frame of this film is a work of art, and perhaps the best way to appreciate it is through stop-motion, frame-by-frame viewing of the DVD, something that was not possible to viewers back in 1970. That’s what I did, after first watching the film “normally,” in an effort to figure out how this thing was constructed. (I even shot a bunch of photos of individual frames, some of which I am putting together into a composite image for a follow-up blog post, to try to express visually this feeling I had while watching the film.)

Well, that “follow-up” post is now here. I took over ten times as many screen shots as you see above, so editing the grid down to this group of 40 images was challenging. You could easily make many other equally interesting composites out of different selections of images, and you might even find the task as interesting and enjoyable as I did.

As the narrator of the original Zabriskie Point trailer says, “Zabriskie Point. How you get there depends on where you’re at.” These 40 images represent where I’m at with this film, at this moment in time.