I’m taking a long weekend. See you Monday.
For just about as long as I’ve done this blog, I’ve urged curators and museums to launch a full-scale Richard Diebenkorn Ocean Park survey. There’s been a retrospective, there’s been a works-on-paper survey, but never has a curator and an institution done a show examining the apex of American abstract art, the body of paintings Diebenkorn made in the Ocean Park neighborhood of Santa Monica.
And now it’s coming: In October, 2009 curator Sarah Bancroft (who co-curated the Gugg’s Rosenquist retro) and the Orange County Museum of Art will debut Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, 1967-1988. The show will travel to three or four TBD venues, including a likely stop in Washington. [The painting above is Diebenkorn's 1970 Ocean Park #36, from OCMA's collection.]
Related: Thoughts on the Phillips’ Ocean Park No. 38 here and here.
On the tenth anniversary of Robert Irwin’s Central Garden at the Getty, Paula Panich Q&A’s Irwin in the Los Angeles Times.
For a couple years now I’ve been talking about the possibility that there will be a permanent Robert Irwin installation at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Now it’s confirmed: Chinati is moving forward on a permanent Irwin installation.
Chinati is presently working with an architectural firm and with Irwin on planning and drawing. Fundraising is ongoing, and the foundation expects to begin construction in 2010.
Irwin’s design for Chinati has been the most open secret imaginable: Different stages of Irwin’s 2002-2007 designs for the project were on exhibit in MCASD’s terrific Irwin show. (Most of those drawings are promised gifts to the museum by way of collector LJ Cella. The piece shown here is Irwin’s, and was also included in the exhibition.)
The Irwin work would be sited across the street from the entrance to Chinati, in the rectangular building at the center-left of this Google satellite image. During the Fort D.A. Russell days, the building was the Army outpost’s hospital. As you can sort-of see in the satellite image, the structure is a concrete shell with a central pavilion.
Irwin’s design (click on the image for a larger version) includes a series of scrims that affect light as it enters the windows that run the length of the perimeter of the building. The way in which the light is mediated by Irwin is revealed in the tops and bottom of the drawing. Can’t wait.
Related: Irwin’s 2006 temporary installation at Chinati.
I’ve got three Robert Irwin posts for you today…
First up: The Indianapolis Museum of Art has commissioned a massive, three-story Irwin for its three-story entrance hall. Titled Light and Space III, the new piece will be made out of fluorescent light and scrim. The museum has not made available a photograph of the design or of Irwin’s drawings, promising donors a first-look at a museum event. However the museum’s press release describes the work as:
… a 60×60-foot screen [that] will stretch across three adjacent planes by the main escalators. A series of white floor-to-ceiling scrim panels will bracket five channels of fluorescent light mounted in a grid-like pattern across the wall surfaces. Visitors will be blanketed by a tunnel of light as they move between the three gallery levels of the IMA.
It sounds like the Indy Irwin is related to this piece that Irwin did while in residence at the MCASD last year. Maybe. Possibly.
Last week I started a Q&A with Robyn O’Neil, who is included in the American Folk Art Museum show Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger. We’re talking about influence and how the work of other artists finds its way into O’Neil’s work. Here are parts one, two, and three. This is the final part.
MAN: So speaking of weather in your drawing, the Courbet and its influence: I think it’s interesting that there’s no real evidence of wind in the Courbet, which is titled, possibly or probably posthumously Gust of Wind [above], but in your drawing there’s definitely wind: the grass in the lower left-hand corner. I’m guessing that’s the title of the painting creeping into your thinking?
RO’N: Yeah. Let me think about that.
MAN: I mean, if you look at the storm and where it seems to be going, and the trees and how they’re not exactly blowing… well, something doesn’t compute. If anything in the painting is actually moving, it seems to be moving in opposite directions from the storm, which is Courbet mainly composing a massive diagonal to dramatize his fictional landscape.
RO’N: You’re right, the [vegetation] would have to be much more feathery. The treatment of everything in the painting… it would have been more obvious that there was a gust of wind coming through. I probably wouldn’t have seen wind were it not for the title. I wouldn’t have seen wind as the main issue in mine or in the Courbet. But yeah. It got me going.
I think it’s funny because those are tricks you can play when you draw or you paint trees to make them maybe look like they’re blowing. And yeah, Courbet has his tree blowing in the opposite direction. But I knew that just kind of counting from the corners, just technically that’s the way to go about it.
As a viewer of the scene in my drawing, it looks like you’re peering into HUGE pieces of grass — they’re up to my thigh or something. [Ed: Staring into the blankness, they fell in order to begin, is 76.5 inches by 144 inches. It's at left, and a detail is below.] So I thought it would be even more threatening to have the grass like that. It definitely doesn’t look safe. The pastoral landscape which I’ve drawn as still and serene is really a trick. Some of the wind is coming from behind the viewer with the way it hits the grass.
MAN: The tree in the Courbet has recently fascinated me, probably because when the Fontainebleau show was recently at the NGA I noticed that there’s some pretty serious art historical fudge on whether Gust of Wind is a Fontainebleau landscape or not. I’d bet not. Houston says yes, the NGA suggested, uh, no. I’d bet no – and my guess is that Courbet saw a Ruisdael print and based the painting on it. It’s funny – Gust of Wind has or had never been considered a major Courbet – Gerstle Mack, Courbet’s biographer, never mentioned it.
RO’N: There’s one distinct tree in my piece that may be a very, very minor hint at the Courbet tree. The van Ruisdael — I know what you’re talking about. The trees are pretty much identical. Maybe we artist think we’re real clever – just like the big diagonal weather in my painting gets at a part of the Courbet, I go the opposite direction with the tree, and hide it. We artists kind of disguise influence that way.
MAN: The last thing I wanted to ask you about is this big, dominant horizontal in your drawing. It’s implied in the Courbet, behind the landscape and the hill on the right and all, but it’s not even remotely visible.
RO’N: That’s a good question. It has a lot to do with where my work has gone from the beginning of the days when I was making large scale work. I started making work that had so much to do with mountainscape and traditional landscape-type imagery in the background and using that as a stage set for what was happening with ‘my men,’ whether they’re throwing a ball or fighting or killing each other or whatever. All of those things happened amidst a romantic landscape. If you did a timeline of my work it all was very mountainous and you never would have seen a flat landscape like that.
Then as the weather began enveloping what was happening in my work, the mountains — they were always snowy landscapes and the snow began to melt and the mountains began to crumble and the men just got smaller and smaller and more and more in the dist.
There are no trees in my new drawing and in the early days of my work it was all about trees and mountains. The skies became bigger. The skies would be a tiny strata at the top of my drawing — and here, now the horizontal line is way low, which normally you don’t do if you have mountains. So basically it was knowing that the work was starting to be about nature winning over the men. It’s more stark and bleak to have nothing.
MAN: So the MFA Houston should obviously acquire your drawing. You live in Houston, it may be the best painting in the museum. But they haven’t yet?
RO’N: (Laughing.) Tell them to!
From Adrian Searle’s delightfully entertaining podcast on being inside a Dan Graham:
The other thing about Dan Graham’s pavilion is the flies. It seems to be a fly magnet. Flies like it more than people do in here. I’m sure we’ve got lots of different species. We’ve got little grommitty ones, we’ve got big fat ones, we’ve got the odd bee that seems to have managed to get itself stuck in here. There’s quite a lot of fly poo about the place. They all seem to be waiting; I wonder what for. It suddenly strikes me that what this is like is being stuck inside one of Mr. Damien Hirst’s vitrines and I’m not sure quite how I feel about that.
On Tuesday I started a Q&A with Robyn O’Neil, who is included in the American Folk Art Museum show Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger. We’re talking about influence and how the work of other artists finds its way into O’Neil’s work. Here are parts one and two. I originally thought this would be a three-parter, but it will actually be four. Part four will run on Monday.
MAN: It seems to me that Staring into the blankness, they fell in order to begin [above, and the 'first' work in the Dargerism show] is deeply influenced by Gustave Courbet’s magnificent Gust of Wind, which is in the collection of the MFA Houston, where you live.
Robyn O’Neil: Ahhh, Gust of Wind. [Left.] I love it as much as you do. The economy in the conception of this painting is so marvelous. It’s a gust of wind. It’s simple, but huge. It’s invisible and it’s not. It’s so pared down that is is perfect. And that damn sky! I was a volunteer weather watcher for most of my adult life. That means you log the highs and lows of the day and take rain gauge measurements, and then call them in to your favorite meteorologist. A true nerd’s
obsession. (Henry Darger was also obsessed with the weather and constantly wrote about the temperature. He took particular pleasure in noting when the newspaper’s weather predictions were wrong.)
I think it was the mere mention of wind in Courbet’s painting that did it for me and I was reading a fabulous book called Defining the Wind by Scott Huler. It’s basically a long essay on how the Beaufort Scale, and wind in general, is poetry. Such a great sentiment. I also loved the quote in the beginning from Hemingway (writing to John Dos Passos): “Remember to get the weather in your goddamned book — weather is very important.” I couldn’t agree more.
MAN: So I’m guessing that as you started Staring…, that you started in the upper left, with that dramatic bit of weather in the Courbet?
RO’N: Absolutely. That was the jumping off point. I don’t know if it is to you, but I always thought it was a gorgeous passage but also so incredibly strange. Look at the way the weather is at a 45 degree angle, and on a diagonal. As someone who makes images, I look at nature all the time and you realize how those things happen constantly, things that look bizarre in a painting or drawing aren’t bizarre at all. But the way you crop an image can haunt people and make them feel eerie, but it’s natural in real life.
Courbet and Frederic Church did this as well. If that image, the Courbet, were cropped — say he’s planning the painting and we’re it to cut off even six inches further on the left hand side than it does, the weird sweeping of the clouds might not have looked so weird. What I love imagining is a painter like Courbet knowing how much more strange and threatening it looked with that dramatic diagonal. That’s one of the reasons painting resonates with people. Looking at it, it’s a fucking wave, it’s the ocean, it’s a humongous wave in the sky.
Back to your very basic question: The wind and the weather. It’s the weather that was definitely the main thread and connection between my drawing and the Courbet.
MAN: I noticed in the Flickr picture to which I linked yesterday [and at right] that you had tacked up onto the wall of your studio several pictures of dramatic cloud formations, and that next to them was a small sketch for Staring... Were you working off of those too?
RO’N: I have those all over my studio. I forgot about hat. When I’m working on anything there’s usually some image of weather hanging near it. What I’ve been doing for the last seven years is making the world eat up anything human-like. Anything that’s living and is trying to maintain a life is being enveloped by nature or clouds or the weather. It has become bigger and bigger – the atmosphere has – while the people have become tinier and tinier.
When I started doing these pieces many years ago, the men in my drawings were as big as my hand. Now they’re barely the size of my pinky nail. I kept making them smaller and the world bigger so as to literally eat up the humans.
So back to these clouds: Being an avid weather-watcher, I have tons of weather books. I bought doubles of the National Geographic series on weather, so I could cut up one because they have insanely great images of clouds and weather. Those photographs have those pure blacks the way my drawing and Courbet’s painting does.
