LA in Da House

Bruce Yonemoto lecture at Steinberg Auditorium, Washington University, night before opening of his show at the St. Louis Art Museum.

SLAM and Wash U have a smart set-up going. With funds from the Freund Family, the curator and artists at both institutions put out a call for a one-year faculty appointment. Each artist who receives the faculty appointment has a one-person show at SLAM.

St. Louis is brilliant for this kind of cooperation and resource sharing. Bravo.

Bruce talked about his past work in new media, and his up-coming work in Peru, where he will stage an opera in the still-active ancient Peruvian language Quechua. Bruce's droll description of the on-going colonization of the Other by Western powers was understated but powerful.

What struck me with the brief clips he showed of his work is how prescient his work has been, and how he has vaulted over a generation of artists still grappling with an eclipsed Western visual culture.

Bruce's show adds to the vibrant presence of LA in da STL house. Today you can find at Stephen Prina at CAMSTL and Sharon Lockhart at the Kemper, Wash U. We at Laumeier are talking to a range of California artists--Sam Durant and Kelly Mason--about possible future projects, which will allow us to represent the "other" coast (here on the Mississippi we're the "fourth" coast, but that's another issue) in our programs.

Spring, at last!

Spring has hit Laumeier Sculpture Park--finally!

Everyone has told me that the weather in St. Louis this year has been unusual, from the soggy October through some bitter cold days and snow (though thank goodness we didn't get socked like the East Coast).

This past weekend, while artist Mark Newport was doing a gallery talk and hosting a "knit-in" in the park, the grounds put on a fabulous display.

The colored landscape, dotted with trees abloom in white, pink and purple, made the winter worth it!

Heaven on Earth

Fuzzy fugitive photo by furtive fan.

I am still recovering from a four-day trip I led to New York with students from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Along with colleagues Dr. Ruth Bohan, chair of art and art history, and Gretchen Schisla, graphic design professor, we ran 12 students all around town.

It was exhausting but a lot of fun. Everyone was engaged, even if quiet, eyes were wide open. That was the goal!

The program, founded by former UMSL professor Susan Cahan, who is now at Yale, is an amazing program whereby students travel for free, (almost) all expenses paid for the trip. Friday we were at MoMA for four hours, with tours by Connie Butler, head of drawings, Emily Talbot, assistant in prints and illustrated books, with time for William Kentridge and Yin Xiuzhe. Then Marian Goodman, Greenberg VanDoren Gallery, a tour of Pentagram, then up to the Whitney for a tour and brief introduction by Biennial co-curator Gary Carrion-Murayami.

Then, the Met.

My favorite areas of the Met are the proto-Renaissance galleries, Velazquez, the Oceania rooms, Greek & Roman glass.

But they had up a show that made me weep with joy.

The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry was an exquisite show. Each page was mounted in a two-sided glass sheet so I could poke my nose in as close as I could, sans glasses.

I felt shivers of recognition with the works, thinking about the first time I was ever abroad, visiting the cool Gothic cathedrals all over France. I remembered taking an early winter train to Padua to see the Arena Chapel by Giotto, poking my head out of a round window in a foot-thick earthen wall in Ravenna while visiting the Byzantine mosaics, the insane cab ride I took my last trip in Istanbul to see some precious churches buried inside a bazaar.

I love my job, but in the flood of paperwork there must always be art at the center of the whirlwind.

Sore feet and hoarse voice aside, my eyes were wide open in New York. Again.

Signs of LA

Oliver Michaels Museum Postcards, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, March 6 - April 3, 2010. All pictures are by the author.

I was in LA last weekend for some architecture business and had the chance to drive around the city and see some sights.

Some sights!

Oliver Michaels's show at Shoshana Wayne made me and deep peep Laura Esposito laugh out loud (how often does that happen in a gallery in a good way?) Michaels animates postcards of classic objects from museums around the globe, and creates situation comedies that are ominous or ruinous, political or sentimental. He plays off of the political contexts of these sculptures and replaces them with mostly specious pop culture overtones. What a great critique of our formal fetishization of historical objects.

















Laura E. inside Bengston's recreation (although that furniture is new).

Bill Al Bengston's show A Re-Creation of the Ferus Space (Not Exactly but Close to Scale) and other work at Samuel Freeman Gallery (the old Patty Faure space in Bergamot station) brought back my years spent at the Newport Harbor Art Museum [NHAM]. Bengston's iconic chevrons and hearts, and a surprising graphic painting of an i, were a great surprise. Even though I'm not a huge fan of Bengston's work, that he is re-placing himself within the Ferus canon is interesting, and that the gallery allowed him to burn candles under those works is astonishing. Is this reification or R.I.P? Given how LA's art world is so well-known now, who can blame Bengston for wanting a bigger slice of the historical pie?






















Noted LA-based video artist Diana Thater had a beautiful installation Between Science and Magic at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Thater films magician Greg Wilson pulling a rabbit out of a hat, over and over again and from many different angles. The film you see here was then screened at the Los Angeles Theatre, a lavish memorial to the importance film has had for the arts and for Los Angeles. Film, and now video, truly pull tricks out of nowhere (I'm thinking Rocky and Bullwinkle though!) A lovely work.

















Then off to Redondo Beach and a Sunday morning walk in Palos Verdes where we saw the "other" LA freeway in action!

















I spent four years at the NHAM thinking about the history of the visual arts in California. What was always clear to me--having moved to LA from NY--was that the many great schools, artists who stayed and plenty of intellectual room has given rise to one of the best artist communities on earth. LA has a unique combination of factors that mostly have nothing to do with the cliches of sand, swim and surf.

Every smaller city in America needs to find their own unique combination--what will ours in STL be?

Along the Mississippi, part I

Pontchartrain Park. All photos courtesy the author.

I went to New Orleans last week for a site visit to see Joe Baker, Executive Director of the Longue Vue House and Gardens . We're working on connecting our places, and we spent time driving around the city after looking at every nook and cranny of Longue Vue (fabulous mansion, too bad about the plants killed by the freak frost!)

The founders of Longue Vue, Edith and Edgar Stern, were socially engaged civil rights leaders who, in addition to creating Longue Vue, built Pontchartrain Park, one of (if not the) first middle class African American sub-divisions in the country. This area was also devastated by levee breaches caused by Katrina, but the destruction was not reported in the way it was in the Lower Ninth Ward. (Perhaps there is something more nefarious, undermining about the word "ward?) The city is in a state of enormous flux--but we all know about this from the reporting that has happened since Katrina.

















We were also lucky to tour the new arts area of St. Claude to see galleries The Front, Trouser House, KK Projects, Antenna and Barrister's Gallery. Most are non-profit and speak to the revitalization artists can bring to place.

Above is an image across from KK Project's main space--the white house was the site of Mel Chin's safe house from Prospect I, now being dismantled to make way for more projects and an urban garden out back.

The houses in this neighborhood look worse than those of Pontchartrain Park--due to devastation of the man-made kind, not nature! Many of these places seem to be ruins--but it is often hard to tell if they are degrading or coming alive, as in most urban areas. Where are the Sterns of this day and age?






















Before we got on our plane back to STL we were sipping a glass of wine and enjoying a shrimp boil at Amy Graham and her partner Macon's place over-looking the Mississippi.

I'll be back.

Sculpture as the Symbolic Heart of a City

St. Louis Arch, February 6, 2010. All pictures courtesy the author unless otherwise noted.

Sculpture is the symbolic heart of St. Louis. Not architecture, as we've come to expect with urban "starchitecture" of the past decade.

At the edge of St. Louis is the Gateway Arch, a truly exquisite structure that soars above your head like an arrow to heaven.

Unfortunately, too many city buildings crowd the Arch to its west. Very sad that city leaders allowed architectural ambition to sully this gorgeous sculpture.

Just to the east of the Arch, down below, back on land, is a rather dismal parking lot ($4 rather than $10 in the covered city lot). I've never parked within lapping distance of a major river before.




















Images of the great flood of 1993 kept coming to me--what if the river rose just a few feet? My ride would be on a sight-seeing tour downstream before I knew it!

















The Museum of Westward Expansion, inside the Arch's "shoes", was chaotic Saturday. The huge line was not for the educational films on the building of the arch nor for the film on Lewis & Clark's voyage to the West coast.

No, everyone was in line to take a five-passenger elevator to the top of the Arch, where you can peer out at the surrounding landscape from itty-bitty windows. (I am just claustrophobic enough to leave that trip to others--and I've gotta prise my car from the maws of the river!)

I don't quarrel with the commercialization of this historic site, though I may question some of the narratives explored through the concentric half-circles of display materials in the Museum.















Image of Carl Milles fountain outside Union Station, St. Louis. © Sharron Archibald

To fulfill the promise of the Arch as a symbolic heart of St. Louis, a group of business people are working with the National Park Service to re-imagine this space. The primary goal is to move tourists more effectively between the casinos and the Arch. This new waterfront will then truly be linked to the Gateway "spine" of sculpture that includes the new City Garden (full of sculpture), the Richard Serra "Twain" piece (sculpture), hop over the courthouse and cascade through the fountains, crowned with the sculptures "The Wedding of the Waters" by Carl Milles, outside of Union Station, above.






















Henry Weber, The Captain's Return, 2006

Once the reconfiguration of the waterfront is completed, surely more people will see this sculpture in honor of the return of Lewis & Clark to St. Louis. [Note: the dog is not a Labrador, as I first thought, but Clark's Newfoundland who made the trip with the Corps of Discovery.]

The nation is on the cusp of a major ideological shift--in our understanding of our financial capacity and through our now-unbreakable bond with markets elsewhere--and the symbolic Arch complex has the chance to re-interpret our nation-building past in light of our nation-building future. Let the myths of western conquest and expansion be reconfigured; St. Louis can play an interesting role in this reinterpretation.

Our urban landscape, in great need of reparation and stitching back together, can represent the next phase of our American identity via sculpture.

Too Big to Fail?

Museum of Modern Art, New York, interior

I have been thinking recently about the increasing peril faced by non-profits in this economic downturn. My concern has come from two directions. The most obvious wind of fear comes from the drying-up of donor funds lost in the recent financial collapse. No need to explain further.

The other area of concern has been the proliferation of non-profits over the past decade and the sense that we have outgrown the capacity for the community to support all of us.

This morning I read James Undercofler's post about non-profit structure itself being responsible for the stifling of nimble, responsive artistic production. This analysis certainly describes the past 40 years of non-profit arts organizations who, having started up as artist-run collectives in the 1970s, say, hit their mid-teens and assume that it's time to "grow up." So the organization expands its board, professionalizes its staff to meet financial and reporting requirements, and shortly lose their original edge. Have some organizations become "Too Big to Fail"?

I have written before about the damage caused when you graft a for-profit business system onto a non-profit--it can distort the original vision of the non-profit.






















This image is from a panel discussion I attended last week at the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis. The topic--''The City as Studio"--points to how artists increasingly see a need to engage with a more dynamic, organic, open-ended structure such as "city" in order to make their work, by-passing non-profits for their often cumbersome processes and lack of resources.

By becoming "Too Big to Fail", do we disappoint the primary consumers of our work--artists and audiences?

Non-profits need to resist the for-profit "bigger-is-better" model, the failed 80s business model of endlessly expanding markets in order to preserve their core function. We of course need big encyclopedia museums--but what does "encyclopedic" mean in this global economy? Ultimately, this financial crisis is both forcing us, and allowing us, to be more precise and experimental with what non-profits do in order to inspire artists and their audiences.