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Gordon Matta-Clark, Tree Dance, 1971, 9:32 min, b&w, silent, 16 mm film. For the exhibition Twenty-Six by Twenty Six at the Vassar College of Art Gallery in Poughkeepsie, New York, Matta-Clark created a performance inspired by spring fertility rituals. He performed in a structure made of ladders, ropes and other materials, which he built at the top of a large tree. |
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Gordon Matta-Clark Splitting, 1974; photograph; gelatin silver print, 16 in. x 20 in. (40.64 cm x 50.8 cm); Collection SFMOMA, Gift of The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark; © Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. |
Gordon Matta-Clark, Clockshower, 1973, 13:50 min, color, silent, 16 mm film. In this film of one of his most daring performances, Matta-Clark climbed to the top of the Clocktower in New York and washed, shaved and brushed his teeth while suspended over the streets in front of the huge clockface.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Humphrey Street Splitting, 1974.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect, 1975.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Fresh Kill, 1972, 12:56 min, color, sound, 16 mm film. This film records the complete process of the destruction of Matta-Clark's truck (which he called "Herman Meydag") by a bulldozer in a rubbish dump. Part of 98.5, a compilation of films by Ed Baynard, George Schneemar and Charles Simons, this piece was shown in Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany. Camera: Burt Spielvogel, Rudy Burkhardt. Producer: Holly Solomon, Burt Spielvogel.
Gordon Matta-Clark Splitting, 1974.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Bingo, Installation, Centre Pompidou, Airs de Paris, 2007.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Bingo, 1974, Building fragments, three sections, Overall: 69" x 25'7" x 10", The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Nina and Gordon Bunshaft Bequest Fund, Nelson A. Rockefeller Bequest Fund, and the Enid A. Haupt Fund, 2004; copyright Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Digital Image copyright The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Food, 1971. Matta-Clark cofounded Food, in SoHo, New York, with Carol Goodden, a restaurant managed and staffed by artists. The restaurant turned dining into an event with an open kitchen and exotic ingredients that celebrated cooking. |
The Pulitzer Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) used neglected structures slated for demolition as his raw material. He carved out sections of buildings with a power saw in order to reveal their hidden construction, to provide new ways of perceiving space, and to create metaphors for the human condition. He spoke of his work as an activity that attempted “to transform place into a state of mind by opening walls.” When wrecking balls knocked down his sculpted buildings, little remained. He took photographs and films of his interventions and kept a few of the building segments, known as "cuts." They include a section of an apartment floor (Bronx Floors: Double Doors), three parts of a house near Love Canal (Bingo), a window from an abandoned warehouse on a pier in New York City (Pier In/Out), and the rooftop corners of a house in New Jersey (Splitting: Four Corners). For this exhibition, the Pulitzer is borrowing these very cuts from The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and from the private collection of Thomas and John Solomon. The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark and David Zwirner, New York, are also lending nearly fifty photographs, while the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, is providing numerous works on paper, including eleven drawings. Two of Matta-Clark’s films, Fire Child and Conical Intersect, will also be shown, offering a means to understand better the performance aspect of his art. The placement of Matta-Clark’s work in the exhibition spaces designed by Tadao Ando at the Pulitzer will encourage new ways of looking at art, architecture, and the urban environment. Ando’s pristine building will not only heighten the roughness of Matta-Clark’s cuts, but it will also recall the artist’s lost interventions. Both he and Ando sought to break the visual and metaphorical boundaries normally associated with the architectural “box” by allowing light to penetrate spaces in unexpected ways. Reminiscent of an alchemist, Matta-Clark pursued the transmutation of a discarded object into something filled with “hope and fantasy.” He was deeply concerned with the abandonment of buildings and the fate of urban communities. He became socially and politically active during the 1970s and wrote that he focused on buildings, “for these comprise both a miniature cultural evolution and a model of prevailing social structures. Consequently, what I do to buildings is what some do with languages and others with groups of people: I organize them in order to explain and defend the need for change.” The exhibition programming connects the artist’s social activism to present-day St. Louis. The Pulitzer, in collaboration with Washington University's George Warren Brown School of Social Work, is organizing programs that build upon Matta-Clark’s desire to imbue abandoned objects, buildings, and parcels of land with new meaning. The Pulitzer hopes to help carry Matta-Clark’s legacy into the 21st century and to inspire a new generation of social activism through creative acts. An interactive web presence reflects this community-driven programming at mattaclark.pulitzerarts.org/transformation. A web catalogue will also correspond with the exhibition at mattaclark.pulitzerarts.org. Matta-Clark (June 22, 1943-August 27, 1978) was an American artist best known for his site-specific artworks he made in the 1970s. He is famous for his "building cuts," a series of works in abandoned buildings in which he variously removed sections of floors, ceilings, and walls. Both of Matta-Clark's parents were artists: the American Anne Clark and the Chilean Surrealist painter Roberto Matta, artist of Basque, French and Spanish descent. His twin brother Sebastian was also an artist, who committed suicide in 1976. He studied architecture at Cornell University, but did not practice as a conventional architect; he worked on what he referred to as “Anarchitecture.” At the time of Matta-Clark's tenure there, Cornell's architecture program was guided in part by Colin Rowe, a preeminent architectural theorist of modernism. His vision of modernism later influenced much of Matta-Clark's own work in its relation to modernist practice and theory. He also spent a year studying French literature at the Sorbonne in Paris and was in Paris during the student strikes of May 1968. It was in Paris that he became aware of the French deconstructionist philosophers and Guy Debord and the Situationists. These cultural and political radicals developed the concept of détournement, or "the reuse of pre-existing artistic elements in a new ensemble." Such concepts would later inform his work. He is most famous for works that radically altered existing structures. His "building cuts" (in which, for example, a house is cut in half vertically) alter the perception of the building and its surrounding environment. Matta-Clark used a number of media to document his work, including film, video, and photography. His work includes performance and recycling pieces, space and texture works, and his "building cuts." "An Ark Kit Puncture, Anarchy Torture, An Arctic Lecture, An Orchid Texture, An Art Collector …" In February, 1969, the "Earth Art" show, curated by Willoughby Sharp at the invitation of Tom Leavitt, was realized at Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Matta-Clark, who lived in Ithaca at the time, was invited by Willoughby Sharp to help the artists in "Earth Art" with the on-site execution of their works for the exhibition. Sharp then encouraged Gordon Matta-Clark to move to New York City where Sharp continued to introduce him to members of the New York art world. Matta-Clark's work, Museum, at Klaus Kertess' Bykert Gallery, was listed and illustrated on pages 4–5 of Avalanche 1, Fall 1970. In the early 1970s as part of the Anarchitecture group, Matta-Clark was interested in the idea of entropy, metamorphic gaps, and leftover / ambiguous space. Fake Estates was a project engaged with the issue of land ownership and the myth of the American dream — that everyone could become "landed gentry" by owning property. Matta-Clark "buys" into this dream by purchasing 15 leftover and unwanted properties in Manhattan for $25–$75 a plot. Ironically, these "estates" were unusable or unaccessible for development, and so his ability to capitalize on the land, and thus his ownership of them, existed virtually only on paper. In 1971 Matta-Clark cofounded Food, in SoHo, New York, with Carol Goodden, a restaurant managed and staffed by artists. The restaurant turned dining into an event with an open kitchen and exotic ingredients that celebrated cooking. The activities at Food helped delineate how the art community defined itself in downtown Manhattan. The first of its kind in SoHo, Food became well known among artists and was a central meeting-place for groups such as the Philip Glass Ensemble, Mabou Mines, and the dancers of Grand Union. He ran Food til 1973. In 1974, he performed a literal deconstruction, by removing the facade of a condemned house along the Love Canal, and moving the resulting walls to Artpark, in his work Bingo. For the Biennale de Paris in 1975, he made the piece titled Conical Intersect by cutting a large cone-shaped hole through two townhouses dating from the 17th century in the market district known as Les Halles which were to be knocked down in order to construct the then-controversial Centre Georges Pompidou. Matta-Clark died from pancreatic cancer on August 27, 1978.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Day's End, 1975, 23:10 min, color, silent, Super 8 film. In May 1972, Matta-Clark worked on an abandoned pier in New York for two months, where he cut sections of the door, floor, and roof. Camera: Betsy Susler.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Day's End, 1975, 23:10 min, color, silent, Super 8 film. In May 1972, Matta-Clark worked on an abandoned pier in New York for two months, where he cut sections of the door, floor, and roof. Camera: Betsy Susler. |
Gordon Matta-Clark, Doors, Floors, Doors, Installation view for Rooms, 1976, Courtesy P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. |
Gordon Matta-Clark, stills from Bingo X Ninths, 1974, Film, 16mm, transferiert von Super 8mm Film, Farbe, ohne Ton, 9 min 40 sec, Auflage 1/10. |
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Nashashibi / Skaer, Flash in The Metropolitan, 2006, Silent 16mm color film, 3’25” min., Courtesy of the artists and doggerfisher, Edinburgh. Commissioned by Spike Island. Supported by the Elephant Trust. |
Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Still from The Right Way, 1983, Video, Courtesy of the artists and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.
Dave Hullfish Bailey, Ditch/School, 2008, Mixed media, dimensions variable, Installation view, Mesler & Hug, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist and Mesler & Hug, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White.
Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Ordnung und Reinlichkeit (Order and Cleanliness), 2003-2009, Set of 15 photocopies, 11-¾ x 16-½" each, Courtesy of the artists and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.
Patrick van Caeckenbergh, Chapeau! (Hats Off!), 1988-89, Mixed media, Courtesy of the artist and Zeno X, Antwerp.
Rosemarie Trockel, Dessert 2, 2007, Ceramic, glazed, 2701/2 h x 28-1/4 x 12-1/4", Private Collection, New York. Courtesy Donald Young Gallery, Chicago. Photo: Tom Van Enyde.
Matt Mullican, Untitled, 1982, Sign paint on paper, 50 x 38", Courtesy of the artist and Tracy Williams, Ltd. Photo: Cathy Carver. |
Contemporary Art Museum We begin in Ancient Greece, with Socrates announcing, "I know that I know nothing.” Clearly, confusion has always been at the heart of wisdom. Centuries later comes a statement many have attributed to Charles Darwin: “A mathematician is like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there.”As a scientist committed to cataloguing, explaining, and drawing a clear picture of nature, Darwin mocked the mathematician’s inability to describe the physical worldin anything but abstract and speculative terms. But artists also understand the world in speculative terms. With their help, we can learn to enjoy the experience of not-knowing and the playfulness of being in the dark. This is for the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there. Artists Include: Anonymous, For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there, organized by Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis Chief Curator Anthony Huberman, is the first large-scale collective exhibitionsince the Contemporary’s inaugural show in 2003, For the blind man … celebratesthe speculative nature of knowledgeand proposes thatcuriosity matters more than understanding. While the artists featured in the exhibition all share our common urge to understand the world, they are also eager to keep art separate from explanation. As speculations, the works on view each allude to a search for knowledge, whileinsistingthat art is not a code that needs cracking. Embodying a spirit of playful non-knowledge, unlearning, and productive confusion, For the blind man … is dedicated to the inquisitive mind and to the pleasures of finding our way in the dark. Sarah Crowner re-inserts into circulation the two issues of the 1917 journal The Blind Man (edited by Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, and Beatrice Wood), offering copies on sale at the museum’s front desk at the publication’s original cover price of 10 and 15 cents. In search of an explanation of a painting, Marcel Broodthaers interviews his cat in a recording from 1970 in his Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles. For their 16mm film Flash in the Metropolitan (2006), Nashashibi/Skaer (Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer) wander through the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the lights off, using a strobe light to briefly illuminate portions of small sculptural statues and vessels, as if the long story of the Metropolitan was reduced to a series of short poetic haikus. A 17th century anonymous illustration of a Renaissance Wunderkammer, or curiosity cabinet, reminds visitors that museums have long been places where people enjoy discovering extraordinary things that they donot understand. Peter Fischli and David Weiss struggle to understand the world, embracing large metaphysical and ethical questions about the human condition. In The Right Way (1983), dressed in rat and bear costumes, they walk through the infinitely beautiful Swiss countryside, through streams and glaciers, stopping to consider existential questions along the way. With a mix of humor and anguish, their childish discoveries offer playful explanations, also represented in a newly revised Completely covering 900 square-feet of wall space, Matt Mullican’s large site-specific installation animates his epic topology — a highly subjective theory of everything — with drawings, flags, diagrams, rubbings, photographs, and prints. Preferring the folkloric and the miniature, Patrick van Caeckenbergh’s intricate sculpture shares a legend about a man unable to forget. Rosemarie Trockel quietly responds with the blank stare of a non-reflective ceramic mirror. Although he made over a thousand works, Giorgio Morandi seemed to insist that to paint a still-life would always be a speculative proposition. To the noise of the modern era’s machines, wars, and technology, Morandi maintained a diligent curiosity about ordinary and familiar things. He painted table-top arrangements of bottles and bowls over and over again, as if always refusing to understand them. In a similar but more playful spirit, Bruno Munari tirelessly looks for comfort in an uncomfortable chair. In a major new sculptural installation, Dave Hullfish Bailey constructs a sprawling research laboratory built in modular parts and folding out from the metal frame of a trailer. The form reflecting its content, the project devotes itself to survivalist living and do-it-yourself systems. In a more modest attempt at categorizing information, Hans-Peter Feldmann shows one pound of strawberries in 34 small photographs. Two monitors present a video about a coffee fortune-teller by Ayse Erkmen and a series of mock-professorial lectures by Eric Duyckaerts. Based on an imaginary face-off between Nietschze’s wise eagle-serpent and Rimbaud’s dumb donkey, Jimmy Raskin’s new installation includes sculpture, video, wall graphics, collage, performance, and site-specific interventions. Also linked to language and hesitation are new collages by Frances Stark and a two-channel projection by Falke Pisano. Finally, bringing the exhibition back to mathematicians and to blindness, Mariana Castillo Deball hangs a car-sized piñata in the shape of a Klein Bottle in the museum’s performance space.On the exhibition’s last day, a crowd of blindfolded museum visitors will break it apart. For the blind man … is accompanied by a new publication conceived, edited, and designed by Will Holder, and includes a selection of stories, images, digressions, and games.
Rachel Harrison, One Ton Prop, 2008, Wood, polystyrene, cement, Parex, acrylic, ski, 79-½ x 33 x 19", Collection of Candy Barasch, New York. |
Giorgio Morandi, Still Life with Flask, 1953, Oil on canvas, 14-1/8 x 15-7/8", Courtesy of The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.. Gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, 1966. © Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. |
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Marcel Duchamp, Hat Rack (1964; 4th version of 1917 original). Wood, 8/8, 9-7/16 x 17 5/16 x 13". Indiana University Art Museum: Partial gift of Mrs. William H. Conroy. |
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Max Ernst, L’Oil du silence (The Eye of Silence), 1943-44, Oil on canvas, 43-1/4 x 56-1/4". Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. University purchase, Kende Sale Fund, 1946. |
François Morellet, 40,000 carrés, 1971. Portfolio of eight serigraphs, edition Galerie Denise René, 31-1/2 x 31-1/2" each. Collection of the artist.
Ellsworth Kelly, Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance V, 1951, Collage on paper, 39 x 39”. Collection of the artist. © Ellsworth Kelly.
Dieter Roth, Kleiner Sonnenuntergang (Small Sunset), 1968), Sausage on paper in plastic bag, 16-15/16 x 12-9/16". Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg.
Victor Brauner, Jacques Hérold, Violette Hérold, Yves Tanguy, and Raoul Ubac, Untitled "Cadavre exquis" ("Exquisite Corpse"), 1938, Graphite and collage on paper, 10-3/8 x 8-1/16”. Collection of Howard and Mauree Miller, Pennsylvania. |
Mildred Lane Kemper Dripping or flinging paint; flipping coins to compose musical scores; letting the progressive decay of organic materials determine a composition — since the early 20th century avant-garde artists have used these processes and many others to explore the creative possibilities of chance and its attendant release of authorial intent. Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis presents Chance Aesthetics, a major loan exhibition investigating the use of chance as a key compositional principle in modern art. Organized by Meredith Malone, assistant curator for the Kemper Art Museum, Chance Aesthetics features more than 60 artworks by more than 40 avant-garde artists from Europe and the United States, including Jean Arp, George Brecht, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Ellsworth Kelly, Alison Knowles, François Morellet, Robert Morris, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Dieter Roth, Niki de Saint Phalle and Yves Tanguy, among many others. At the exhibition's heart is a central paradox involving the tension between chance and choice. While many artists have championed the creative possibilities of the arbitrary and the accidental — both as an attack on reason and logic and as a counterpoint to officially sanctioned aesthetic tastes — artistic subjectivity is never entirely ceded. The controlled and the arbitrary variously interplayed throughout the 20th century, stimulating new forms of creative invention that challenged longstanding assumptions about what might constitute a work of art and the role of the artist as autonomous creator. Chance Aesthetics explores these ideas in three thematic sections: "Collage, Assemblage and the Found Object," "Automatism" and "Games and Systems of Random Ordering." Each section addresses key avant-garde strategies designed to subvert or rework traditional forms of artistic expression as well as the bourgeois values and ideals they were understood to represent. These categories also provide a basic framework through which individual movements — including Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Nouveau Réalisme and Fluxus — can be traversed, allowing viewers to compare and contrast the use of chance-based processes across diverse historical and cultural contexts. "Collage, Assemblage and the Found Object" examines three closely related practices employed by artists as means of destabilizing accepted views of the world through fragmentation and juxtaposition while negating traditional criteria for judging a work of art such as the direct trace of the artist's hand. Marcel Duchamp's Hat Rack (1917) and Jean Arp's Objects Arranged according to the Laws of Chance III: Symmetrical Configuration (1931) provide early touchstones, informing a wide range of subsequent artworks. Particularly in the post-WWII era, assemblage, coupled with chance — as evinced in works such as Daniel Spoerri's snare paintings and Niki de Saint Phalle's shooting paintings—offered artists a compelling means of social critique as well as a strategy for pushing the trajectory of artistic production toward process, performance and ephemeral events. In his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism André Breton defined Surrealism as "psychic automatism in its pure state." Appropriated first from physiology and psychiatry, the term "automatism" was applied to various techniques of spontaneous writing, drawing and painting. Examples range from André Masson's sand paintings and automatic drawings to Max Ernst's otherworldly frottages (rubbings). Intended to bypass the conscious mind, these Surrealist experiments later were adapted by Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, who explored chance effects of gravity and momentum on falling paint. But by the late 1950s diverse responses arose in opposition to the Surrealist legacy, including Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely's humorous production of painting machines, which took aim at both postwar gestural abstraction's heroic mark-making and the supposed liberations of automatic production. The final section, "Games and Systems of Random Ordering," examines chance as generated through the implementation of randomizing systems and procedures. Though parameters typically were stipulated in advance, results were left largely to serendipity. Duchamp's promotion of nonintention on the part of the artist and his notion of "canned chance," which describes processes that depend on chance yet paradoxically attempt to fix or standardize it, aptly characterize many of the artistic practices represented. The type of indeterminacy derived from games and arbitrary systems of order — such as the simple toss of a coin, where one of two outcomes is equally likely — provided John Cage, Ellsworth Kelly, François Morellet and other artists with a means of undermining concerns of style and personal expression, thus facilitating the liberating exploration of unorthodox methodologies for making art. A fully illustrated color catalog — distributed by the University of Chicago Press — accompanies the exhibition. Essays by Susan Laxton, Meredith Malone and Janine Mileaf draw connections across media and disciplines while linking the genesis and meaning of artistic production through chance to larger socio-cultural, historical and theoretical contexts. The catalog also features extended entries on all works in the exhibition, focusing on the processes employed and the rhetoric used to describe and theorize them.
Niki de Saint Phalle, Grand tir – séance Galerie J, June 30-July 12, 1961, Plaster, paint, wire mesh, string and plastic, 56-5/16 x 30-5/16". Niki Charitable Art Foundation. |
Jean Tinguely, Metamatic No. 9, 1958, Round rubber belt, steel rods, painted sheet metal, wire wooden pulleys, two clothes pins and electric motor, 35-1/2 x 56-5/8 x 14 1/4". Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Gift of D. and J. de Menil. |
Daniel Spoerri, Le Tiroir de ma mère, 1960, Objects on wood, 15-7/16 x 15 x 5-1/8". Niki Charitable Art Foundation. |
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Fumihiko Maki, Golgi Structure, 1967. Digital photograph of model. Courtesy of Maki and Associates. |
Dennis Crompton, Computer City Project – Axonometric, 1964. Photoprint from ink drawing with added color film, 40-1/8 x 28-3/8”. Courtesy of Archigram Archives.
Peter Cook, Plug-in City Study – Overhead view, 1964. Print off ink on tracing drawing with added color, 40 1/8 x 28 3/8”. Courtesy of Archigram Archives.
Warren Chalk and David Greene, Electronic Tomato – Collage, 1969. Ink, tape, newsprint and felt-tip pen, 28-3/8 x 20-½“. Courtesy of Archigram Archives. |
Mildred Lane Kemper Amidst the cultural and political ferment of the 1960s, avant-garde artists and architects began embracing biological and scientific models as well as the potentials of emerging technologies to explore radical new directions in urban design, developing projects that were at once fanciful, complex and conceptually serious. This fall the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis will present Metabolic City, an exhibition surveying work by the British collective Archigram; the Japanese Metabolists (whose members include Fumihiko Maki, architect of the Kemper Art Museum); and the Dutch painter Constant Nieuwenhuys, an early member of the Situationist International. Curated and designed by Heather Woofter, assistant professor of architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Metabolic City will feature approximately 70 drawings, plans, models and conceptual projects, including rarely seen materials drawn from private archives and a sampling of work by influential predecessors. Organized thematically, the exhibition explores theoretical and conceptual overlaps between these groups, all of which came to view the city as a kind of living organism, in which civil infrastructure forms the basis for social interaction and individual liberty. At the same time, though they articulated their views in explicitly political terms, each pioneered distinctive — and remarkably prescient — means of architectural representation, often employing techniques and processes that are only now entering mainstream practice. Networks of urban circulation were a major area of focus. Mechanical systems, roadways, pedestrian passages and other built environments frequently were conceived in relation to electronics, media and other immaterial connections. Archigram's Computer City (1964), for instance, tracks the infrastructures that allow its futuristic Plug-In City (1962-64) to operate. Maki's Golgi Structures (1968) — named for Nobel Prize-winner Camillo Golgli, who developed techniques for visualizing nerve cell bodies — alternate dense urban areas with unstructured open spaces. Encasing the latter are light-absorbing cells that facilitate communication, energy distribution and mechanical systems. These figures also shared a belief that adaptable habitats could foster unprecedented levels of freedom and mobility. Archigram's Walking City (1964) consists of mammoth "pods," or cities built as ship-like vessels, capable of traversing the earth. Nieuwenhuys' •New Babylon North• (1960) suggests a sprawling serpentine structure that could be shaped and reshaped by inhabitants, their labors supported by factories hidden below ground. Wall City (1960), by the Metabolist Kisho Kurokawa, envisions a series of movable plug-in units for living and working, the increased efficiency of which would shorten the workweek and encourage leisure travel. Growth patterns and life cycles are a part of all living systems, an observation that deeply influenced Kurokawa's Metamorphosis (1965), which employs techniques derived from biological modeling to represent the transformation of urban spaces. Growth patterns of a media-based variety inform Archigram's utopian Instant City (1960), in which large airships descend onto population centers to install infrastructure supporting community events, ranging from circuses to political rallies. As the airships move on to other locations, those infrastructural networks remain behind. Underlying many projects was a hopeful yet critical view of new engineering technologies. Though this generation of artists and architects witnessed the effects of World War II and the mass destruction made possible by technological inventions, the emerging space age nevertheless sparked a sense of optimism and potential. For his Marine City (1961), the Metabolist Kiyonori Kikutake collaborated with marine engineers to detail entire metropolises constructed out at sea. Comprised of multiple towers connected in a ring, these structures would submerge beneath the waves during inclement weather and return safely to the surface as waters grew calm. |
Peter Cook, Instant City – Airship M3, 1968. Collage of photographs and newsprint, overdrawn, 40 1/8 x 28 3/8”. Courtesy of Archigram Archives. |
Reizei Tamechika (Japanese, 1823-1864). Twelve Poetic Immortals and Their Poems, 1850. Pair of six-panel screens; ink colors and gold on paper; 84 cm x 315 cm. Kato Real Estate Fund.
Noguchi Shohin (Japanese, 1847-1917). The Gathering at the Orchid Pavilion, 1900. Pair of six-panel screens; ink, colors, and gold on silk; each 182.5 x 391 cm. Gift of Roger L. Weston.
Hasegawa Soya (Japanese, 1590-1667). Willow Bridge and Waterwheel, c. 1650. Pair of six-panel screens; ink, color, gold, and silver on paper; each 175 x 376 cm. Kate S. Buckingham and Frederick W. Renshaw Endowments.
Nukina Kaioku (Japanese, 1778-1863). Calligraphy of a Shi Poem by Li Bo and a Lyric by Su Xiang in Cursive Script, 1850. Pair of six-panel screens; ink on paper; each 171.5 x 364 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum, Funds given by Mrs. Florence Morris Forbes (181:1987.1-2).
Kishi Ganku, (Japanese, 1749-1838). Bamboo, 1829. Pair of six-panel screens; ink and gold on paper; each 178 x 376 cm (70 x 148 in.). Russell Tyson Purchase Fund income. |
Tosa Mitsuoki (Japanese, 1617-1691). Flowering Cherry and Autumn Maple with Poem Slips, 1654/81. Pair of six-panel screens; ink, color, gold and silver on silk; each 144 cm x 286 cm. Kate S. Buckingham Endowment.
Kano Koi (Japanese, c. 1569-1636). Pheasant and Pine, c. 1626. Six-panel screen; ink, colors, and gold on paper; 170.2 x 380 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum, Funds given by Mary and Oliver Langenberg, Mr. and Mrs. Richard A. Liddy, and Susan and David Mesker (105.2002).
Artist Unknown (Japanese). Maize and Cockscombs, mid 17th century. Six-panel screen; ink, color, and gold on paper; 170.2 cm x 357 cm (67 in x 141.7 in.). Kate S. Buckingham Endowment.
Sakai Hoitsu (Japanese, 1761-1828). Fans and Stream, 1820/28. Pair of two-panel screens; ink, colors, gold, and silver on silk; each 166.9 x 174.6 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum, Friends Fund (140:1987.a-b).
Ikeda Keisen (Japanese, 1863-1932). Fish and Plants, 1908. Single six-panel screen; ink, color, and gold on silk; 137 x 287 cm. President’s Exhibition and Acquisition Fund; Alsdorf Discretionary Fund; Russell Tyson Endowment Fund; Purchased with Funds Provided by the Wetson Foundation. |
Saint Louis Art Museum The Saint Louis Art Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago have united to present an exhibition that showcases a selection of the finest examples of Japanese folding screens in their collections. This show is the first major exhibition to feature traditional Japanese screens on paper or silk along with modern and contemporary examples in less orthodox media such as lacquer and ceramic. The exhibition offers a rare and welcome chance for museum visitors to see numerous impressive works together and experience the collective impact of these large-scale works. Beyond Golden Clouds celebrates the full range of the screen format, made possible by the collaboration of these two Midwestern museums. Unique among shows of Japanese screens in the past, this exhibition displays a range of works, dating from as early as the 16th century to the contemporary screens of the past decade. Screens of various media are featured, including traditional examples on paper and silk as well as screens made of stoneware (ceramic clay) and one that appears to be done in lacquer. The particular role of screens as functional works Kishi Ganku. Bamboo, 1829. Russell Tyson Purchase Fund income. of art, their characteristic materials and painting techniques, their development in Japan and collection in the West, and their influence on the art of other cultures are explored. Highlights of the exhibition include a pair of screens depicting a bustling ink landscape by the 16th-century artist Sesson Shukei, the earliest work in the show. Willow Bridge and Waterwheel by Hasegawa Soya is a tour de force of the art of the folding screen produced during the format’s heyday in the 17th century. Kishi Ganku’s Bamboo of 1829 was likely set up around the perimeter of a room so that would-be literati would feel as if they were dwelling in an idyllic bamboo grove. Morita Shiryu’s 1969 screen Dragon Knows Dragon makes use of nontraditional materials; it is a calligraphic work wherein the characters appear in gold on a black surface that shines with the finish of lacquer. Curated in St. Louis by Philip Hu, associate curator of Asian art, Five Centuries of Japanese Screens: Masterpieces from the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago will be on view in the Museum's Main Exhibition Galleries. A beautiful catalogue accompanies the exhibition and is available in the museum shop. Featuring 130 color illustrations, the volume presents illuminating and engaging entries on each work of art along with essays by exhibition curator Janice Katz and other respected scholars. |
Sesson Shukei (Japanese, c. 1490 – after 1577). Landscape of the Four Seasons, , c. 1560. Pair of six-panel screens; ink and light colors on paper; each 156.5 x 337 cm. Gift of the Joseph and Helen Regenstein Foundation.
Imao Keinen (Japanese, 1845-1924). Bamboo Grove, early 1920s. Pair of six-panel screens; ink and gold on paper; each 174.3 x 372 cm. Margaret Gentles, Frederick and Natalie Gookin, and Russell Tyson Endowments.
Kaiho Yusho (Japanese, 1533-1615). Landscape, c. 1602. Pair of six-panel screens; ink and gold on paper; each 175.9 x 377.2 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum, Friends Fund (59:1962.1-2).
Kakutei Joko (Japanese, 1721-1785). Flowers and Plants of the Four Seasons, 1774. Pair of six-panel screens; ink on paper; each 170.5 x 372.9 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum, Funds given by the Mr. and Mrs. Oliver M. Langenberg Fund and Museum Shop Fund (20.1996.1-2).
Painting attributed to Hasegawa Togaku (Japanese, d. 1623), Calligraphy by Tetsuzan Sodon (Japanese, 1531-1617). Bamboo with Chinese Yew and Deer with Maples, c. 1605-10. Pair of six-panel screens; ink, color, and gold on paper; each 96.5 x 269 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum, the Langenberg Endowment Fund (61.2004.1-2). |
