William Harsh. Untitled. Courtesy the artist.

This past summer, San Franciscans were treated to an art smorgasbord from Paris’s Banquet Years, before the Great War. A Picasso exhibition came to the de Young Museum, and an exhibition of the Gertrude and Michael Stein collections came to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Cubist faceted planes were everywhere, and artists who had been taught to dismiss Picasso as irrelevant (inconceivable to earlier artists!), got a belated lesson in art history—assuming they went. Painter William Harsh certainly did, because he reveres “old Pablo” as “a freak or a monster of nature” and “the kind of genius that only comes around very infrequently, every five hundred years or so.” Recently I visited Harsh’s studio in the small port city of Benicia, north of San Francisco. While his recent works are better than ever (with ambiguous creatures reminiscent of Theo Jansen’s walking sculptures now emerging from the Surrealist junkyard wastelands), a review is not the subject of this article; Harsh’s insightful comments, as we chatted over wine on his backyard patio, are informed by his forty-year study of Picasso, Max Beckmann, Giorgio di Chirico, his former teacher, Philip Guston, and many others. In 2003 I cited Guston’s Old-World drinking ritual in an article:

Musa Mayer likens her father’s all-night chats with friends [including the author Philip Roth] to the Russian men’s custom of “drinking vodka, brooding, reciting grievances,” Razdirat’ dushu, to “tear out” or “bare one’s soul,” (And of course Guston’s kvetching with Roth would have produced such literate philippics.)

While my conversation with Harsh was jocular rather than lacerating, the issues raised are worth considering in our current cultural climate. Excerpted below are a few of Harsh’s passionate, erudite, ironic, self-deprecating comments about painting, art history and the mystery and melancholy of esthetes, stumblebums and holy hermits alike.

William Harsh. "End of the Line," 2008. Oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist.

“I am interested in painting because it seems to feel like the right medium —and it has for a very, very, very long time—for what I am groping and struggling to say. … Anybody who is visually inclined …is going to see that the most profound and sophisticated repository of visual images is contained within the whole tradition of painting…. Painting can express certain things that other media can’t, and no doubt other media can express things that painting is too limited to do, but I am definitely a painter…. I have chosen to go deeply into that.”

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Exterior view of Bunker Berlin. Courtesy The Boros Foundation.

Located on a relatively quiet street in fashionable Berlin-Mitte stands a hulking, imposing building known as Bunker Berlin.  With its stark concrete façade, the daunting structure contrasts sharply with the neighborhood’s quaint bookstores and boutiques and the medley of modern architectural styles that surround it.  Unlike those of its sleek neighbors, the stout, two meters thick exterior walls of this incongruous monolith are deeply scarred—pocked with bullet holes and disfigured by mysterious gouges, in places so deep that the rebar of the reinforced concrete lay exposed to the elements.   From the outside there is little indication that this formidable structure houses The Boros Collection of contemporary art and offers one of the most memorable experiences to be had in Germany’s capital city.  For unlike so many other contemporary art collections set in industrial looking buildings with an interesting historical past, in Bunker Berlin the history of the structure itself is in intimate dialogue with the art contained inside.  And what an extraordinary history it is.

Built in 1942 by the Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft (the national railway under the control of the Reich), Bunker Berlin originally served as a civilian air raid shelter—unusually constructed above ground due to the geological limitations of the area.  A look at the interior wall plan of the square shelter reveals a carefully and meticulously symmetrical design, based in part on the Italian Renaissance master Andrea Palladio’s Villa Capra outside Vicenza, Italy.  In Nazi-era Berlin, however, Palladian precision and symmetry served not the humanist values of the Italian Renaissance, but rather the expedient movement of crowds into and around the building’s interior during Allied bombings. Intended to accommodate up to two thousand people, the bunker often protected several times that number.

After the war the five-story, eighty room bunker saw use as a prison by the Soviet Army and as a warehouse to store fruit, and after reunification became home to one of the most infamous night clubs in Europe, the dense labyrinth of rooms becoming the site of fetish, fantasy and thumping techno dance parties throughout the 1990s.  And as much as its outside walls bear the visible scars of Berlin’s dramatic history, the bunker’s interior rooms retain the vestiges of its layered history—in fading graffiti that hint at the bunker’s legendary roll in Berlin’s fin-de-siècle techno scene to more sobering wall markings, including glow-in-the-dark signage originally used to help those sheltered in the building navigate the maze of rooms and staircases during air-raid blackouts.

Olafur Eliason. "Berlin Colour Sphere," 2006. Colour-effect filter glass, metal, light, steel. Courtesy The Boros Foundation.

One of the most extraordinary aspects of Sammlung Boros is how many of the works on display evoke rather than veil this incredible and complex past.  With several of the works site-specific and many of them installed by the artists themselves, the art repeatedly draws the viewer’s attention to the unique history of their surroundings.  Olafur Eliasson’s beautiful Berlin Colour Sphere (2006), for example, hangs from the ceiling of one room like psychedelic disco ball, casting a kaleidoscope of colors onto the walls.  And if at first Berlin Colour Sphere’s resplendent light and vibrant colors seem to be little more than a formal transformation of an otherwise bleak and even claustrophobic environment—a purely optical experience—one can almost hear the thumping dance beats from the 1990s echoing through the labyrinth of concrete rooms while standing before it.

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Drawing for "Neukom Vivarium," 2006

This past spring at the National Art Education Association’s annual conference in Seattle, Art21 brought Mark Dion not only as a keynote speaker, but also to explore his work and consider the possibilities for interdisciplinary teaching, especially through his interactive Neukom Vivarium.

On the heels of last week’s post, I would like to share a few excerpts from a group conversation that took place last April in Seattle between Art21’s Director of Education, Jessica Hamlin and the following panel members:

• Jenn Wilson, manager of education and school programs at the Seattle Art Museum
• Kristin Jamerson, an ambassador at the Olympic Sculpture Park and one who works directly with the Neukom Vivarium helping facilitate dialogue with people who come to see the work
• Jessica Levine, a 6th grade middle school science teacher in Seattle
• Tamara Moats, an art history teacher at the Bush School in Seattle
• Mark Dion

Jessica Hamlin: We have a lot of documentation about Neukom Vivarium but it’s a very different experience to actually be in it and to think about it as a living, breathing thing. And after you make something like Neukom Vivarium, what happens when you have a really dynamic, living, breathing thing that’s both a work of art and an ecological system? What does it mean for both how we teach art, for how we think about what museum education does, for how we think about talking to other people who are not necessarily looking for art or science, but are simply interested in coming in out of the rain one day? And what does it mean as an artist to create something like this and then think about what its legacy is afterwards?

Jenn Wilson: We get to have a place like Olympic Sculpture Park that allows us to kind of push the boundaries of what an art museum conversation is into the world of environmental science, sustainability, and ecology. For me, I get to work a lot with teachers and educators to kind of push the boundaries of conversations about not only what art is but also what science is.

Jessica Levine: I come to my science education from a background in biology and environmental studies.  I’m also an artist and photographer doing my work in the Seattle area. I consider the work that I do teaching about the science of sustainability and that means that thinking about sustainability as a context is more a methodology in teaching science and approaching that work, so arts integration is of course very important and the inquiry spirit of both science and art is essential. But I also come to the work in the classroom from being a wilderness educator and a landscape ecologist, so for me Neukom Vivarium is an important piece in Seattle as a place-based educator to have a space to go to within the city to experience the wilderness that is just west of here. I think my first initial connection with the piece was sort of it as a specimen and looking at the connection between small detail and large scale understanding of, in this case, sort of an ecosystem.  Having the nurse log taken from a forest and brought to the city environment allows that juxtaposition to sort of come right into your face and say: What is wilderness? What is natural? What is nature? It gives us that opportunity to sort of really investigate and be in that green space to confront those questions personally. I’m particularly impressed that the piece also reveals the human aspect of natural history and so it pays homage to our natural history’s greatest with Rachel Carson’s name on the wall and others that are there. If one is to look at the log itself and then turn around to see the artists interpretations, the things on the tiles, and the curiosity cabinet that exists there, you discover that science is a human endeavor and art of course is a human endeavor and those two, both art and science, those are at the very nature of what it means to be human and that process of asking questions. Continue reading »

Preface (or Subtext).

I am a first year MFA candidate in the Sculpture Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Located in the middle of the Detroit suburbs, its beautiful brick buildings and expansive grounds seem like an anomaly within otherwise banal surroundings. With no classes, structure, tests or GPAs, Cranbrook’s curriculum consists of a full-time studio practice, critiques, reading groups, and learning from peers. Because of this, many students draw comparisons between attending the program and a monastic lifestyle. The Academy consists of ten departments, each working under one “artist in residence,” or mentor. A lot of exchange occurs between the departments, and visiting artists as well as weekly lectures and student shows provide a wealth of viewpoints and liveliness.

II. Stirring Deep Waters

My studio is open. Peers with studios on the same floor as mine have to pass through my space to get to theirs. From my desk, I can hear other students microwaving frozen Trader Joe’s meals and bantering in the kitchen. A large-paned window on one wall looks out to the wood shop, metal shop, and spray booth – which is also the place where people tend to congregate for a post-crit smoke. I am not alone. Often as artists, we have to make a lot of really bad work to get to the good stuff. Flush out the impulses that we need to get out of our systems, hoping something more interesting will come about as a result. In the fish bowl of grad school, someone is always watching. Unexpected guests pop into the studio, and god forbid my best work isn’t displayed. This feeling often halts experimentation and making bad (but necessary) work, although we are told to follow every impulse, to try everything, and break all the rules. “Making art can feel dangerous and revealing. Making art is dangerous and revealing. Making art precipitates self-doubt, stirring deep waters that lay between what you know you should be, and what you fear you might be,” write Bayles and Orland in Art & Fear.

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In the coming weeks, we’ll be introducing our newest class of Open Enrollment bloggers, saying farewell to our recent graduates, and welcoming back those whose studies continue. Stay tuned for a full update on Open Enrollment comings and goings, but right now I’m pleased to introduce a new Open Enrollment blogger who is joining us late in the term, as it were. Lindsay Preston Zappas received her BA in Art and Design from Point Loma Nazarene University in her hometown of San Diego. As a sculptor and installation artist, much of her work is informed by her experience growing up in Southern California’s suburban culture, and delves into themes of the individual, material culture, home, and memory. In 2008 she co-founded Yeller, a group of like-minded individuals dedicated to the creation of accessible art and the promotion of local San Diego artists. Lindsay is currently in her first year of candidacy for an MFA in sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art. You can find her personal blog here.

Lindsay Preston Zappas

A warm welcome to Lindsay, whose first Open Enrollment post will appear early this afternoon; we look forward to welcoming the full roster of Open Enrollment writers soon!

Andy Vogt. Untitled studio piece produced at Headlands Center for the Arts.

Certain contemporary artists find so much to explore in one material that artist and medium become almost fused in the art-collective consciousness: think of Richard Serra and rolled steel, for example. San Francisco sculptor Andy Vogt has created, over the past decade or so, a series of wall-hung relief works, drawings, sculptures and now installations that exploit wooden lath, those rough-cut redwood strips, a quarter-inch by one and a quarter inches, that were found, coated with plaster, in every house, before the advent of the sheetrock era. Vogt scavenges the discarded old, worn sticks from dumpster bins and employs them to construct planar reliefs that suggest their origins. They read both as partial models of stick-frame houses with shattered roofs and splintered wall paneling, their beams and trusses dissolving as if corroded by space and light, and, with their exaggerated or collapsed perspectives, as sophisticated abstractions like the playful 2D/3D geometric paradoxes of Josef Albers and Al Held. Vogt’s lath works combine the dumpster and blueprint, the geological and the architectural, merging manmade and natural environments.

Andy Vogt. "Shade Shape," a door-sized lath lattice (or ladder) that derives from the shadows generated by Vogt’s Hayes Valley installation. The 3D/2D/3D creative hall of mirrors could, theoretically, continue forever.

Andy Vogt's "Central Pane" reprises the artist's Southern Exposure Gallery window piece on a smaller scale. Parallel lath stripes simulate the descent of light rays through the glass (and perhaps the cross-hatching used in drawing to create half-tones) but they also generate complex shadows on walls and floor.

Recent installations at Southern Exposure Gallery and Adobe Books, a public sculpture in the Hayes Valley area, and a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in rural Marin County west of the Golden Gate Bridge have expanded Vogt’s practice even further. Vogt detailed, in a discursive, object-based conversation we had recently at his Headlands studio, his new interest in how the environment inflects and affects the artwork, the changing sunlight transforming his sculptures into generators of complex but transient shadow “interference patterns” (which, photographed, become themselves the subjects of new artworks). Concurrent with this expanded area of investigation is his experimentation with new materials: lights, lenses, mirrors, dichroic glass and time-lapse digital photography. Vogt’s Headlands studio show (now ended) and his current show in the Project Room at Electric Works in San Francisco reveal his work in transition, headed toward a tripartite “second phase” comprising, probably—can art writers predict the future, like esthetic versions of Minority Report Pre-Cognitives?—immersive installations (possibly executed in more permanent materials than lath) enlisting sunlight as a “drawing element” and animation source; more use of digital photography and video to explore the mechanics of perception; and, for gallery work, an embrace of the new digital printing technology.

Andy Vogt. Installation view of presentation at Headlands Center for the Arts Project Space.

We were not the same, though when we came together, we acted as one. Growing up together, seven girls in the suburbs of Northern California, we told each other’s stories and slept in each other’s beds; we shared bras and earrings and anything else that fit. We squished into the backseats of our parents’ cars, crowded the frames of group photos, and then posed identical, as so many suspected we truly were, in blue caps and gowns on a bright day in June.

Our world was three exits off Highway 24, a place with green hills in the winter and mazes of cul-de-sacs, with groomed yards and college stickers on every car in the Safeway lot. From outside, it looked like the next town over, and the one after that, like every other suburb within fifty miles of San Francisco. But from the inside, where we passed notes and met at Taco Bell every Friday night, where we laid in each other’s bedrooms on Sunday afternoons and made crank calls, it was a place defined not by the ways it resembled other places, but by how it was different, how it was ours.

Robert Isaacs. "Ticky Tacky Houses in Daly City," 1968. Courtesy Metropolis Magazine.

Our town began like so many other suburbs: it was first a countryside retreat for wealthy city dwellers eager to escape the smells, noises, and people that accompanied the urban industrialization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Later, in the 1950s and 1960s, it became a place for middle-class families, those not discouraged by racist housing covenants or less overt restrictions, to buy homes and lead predictable lives. In contrast to the city’s chaos, towns like ours offered standardization and uniformity.

Robert Adams. "Colorado Springs, Colorado," 1968-70. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Many artists have portrayed the trademark sameness of the man-made suburban environment. While their images often suggest generic scenes, their very act of depiction—the artists’ decision to focus on that particular town or house, car or lot—individualizes the subject matter. Images like Robert Adams’s Colorado Springs, Colorado (1968–70) capture the landscape’s clean lines and serial nature. But the lone woman standing inside reminds us that even in the most sterile and controlled environments, individuals persist. She remains unknown to us, and this distance amplifies the possibilities of her experience: Is she crying inside? Lonely or sad? Is she simply wondering what to clean next? Does she know she’s being watched?

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