Grand Canyon Journal 4: Critique Is Destruction as Joy
CityCenter is the biggest thing to happen to art in Las Vegas since Steve Wynn put his finger through a Picasso. The mixed-use, residential, gambling, fine dining, clubbing, high-end retail, luxury hotel behemoth opened in December with the explosive fanfare usually reserved for the demolition of buildings in Vegas. CityCenter boasts a collection of fine art consisting of existing works and commissioned pieces by the likes of Maya Lin, Jenny Holzer, Nancy Rubins, Donald Judd, Isa Genzken, Jack Goldstein, Tony Cragg, and Frank Stella. Like the attractions that shape the identity of every hotel on the Strip (the fountains at the Bellagio, the volcano at the Mirage, the Eiffel Tower at Paris, etc.), these works, installed throughout the interior and exterior of the massive development as opposed to a gallery space, are meant to create an ambience that will draw tourists, but also, in the case of CityCenter, tenants — to play, stay, and come back for more. But what does this context do to their status as art objects? How is a work of art’s relative autonomy impacted by its placement in a landscape of attraction? Conversely, what does the designation of these objects as art (a status denied the countless other unsigned attractions that pepper the CityCenter campus) lend to the new development? And if “starchitecture” is its other primary attraction, how does the artwork fare in relationship to the assemblage of buildings that comprise CityCenter?
Based on my recent visit to CityCenter (on my way to the Grand Canyon, which I assure you we’re headed back to in the next post), the short answer to the questions posed above is that the art doesn’t do very well. In fact, like David Copperfield’s Statue of Liberty, most of it disappears. The Judd woodblock prints that grace the wall above the escalators to the Aria Self Park Entrance Lobby probably could have gotten better service at the valet, the Stella seems to have been chosen for its formal similarity to the Mandarin Oriental hotel logo and, despite their immense scale, the mud wall-paintings by Richard Long are barely visible behind soaring curtains of glass. While, as evidenced by the video above, the whirling stainless steel Cragg sculptures get a lot less attention than the tornados of water designed by WET Design, the water feature design firm that also did the fountains at the Bellagio, because they are art objects, they inevitably seek more attention than the swirling, metal tree-columns inside the casino itself. Similarly, Maya Lin’s potentially dramatic Silver River, a representation of a section of the Colorado River (Grand Canyon, here we come) cast entirely in reclaimed silver, is nearly entirely reclaimed by the glass and steel supports it hangs in front of. This ambivalent position between anonymously blending in with the overall ambience and emerging as a star attraction is paradigmatic of the confusion that lies at the heart of what it means to place art work in Vegas and is perhaps why Sin City has had such bad luck with art.
Grand Canyon Journal 3: The Painter of Video to Life
Our previous guest blogger, Karthik Pandian, continues his Grand Canyon journal in the following post. — Ed.
Has there ever been such an elegant dramatization of the power of illusion as David Copperfield’s “The Painter”? Art and magic share the stage (which strangely recalls both David Letterman’s set and Monica’s apartment from Friends) in a trick that only gently conflates the initial discomfort of Harold and Maude with Copperfield’s problems with the law. This trick has surprisingly old-fashioned art direction compared to the techno-industrial fetishism we’ve come to expect from Copperfield. Perhaps this is to suggest that art is the dustier of the two illusory practices, in need of far more maintenance by doddering old maids. Indeed, in the first few moments of the video, Copperfield’s artist puts down the paintbrush in favor of the magician’s rose. While “The Painter” is certainly not his most spectacular trick, it thematizes an emerging struggle between art and magic that is surprisingly relevant to the experience of post-thematic Las Vegas today and does so through a romantic vision of geriatric love without recourse to even a single bathtub!
“Video to Life” provides more evidence to support our hypothesis that members of the Italian architecture collective Superstudio art-directed Copperfield’s performances after they disbanded in 1978. The recurrence of the motorcycle in his oeuvre (it’s one of his go-to entrance and exit strategies) also warmly reminds us that we got here not only from the Grand Canyon on David Copperfield’s magic carpet, but also Ed Harris’s trusty steed. But what “Video to Life” also brilliantly dramatizes is how video as conjured by television, and not painting or even performance, is the central medium of Copperfield’s work and of the countless magicians that follow in his footsteps to take advantage of this already deeply illusionistic medium. However, rather than play with the formal codes, framing and documentary pretentions of television in the age of the flatscreen á la David Blaine (who is the verité-dedicated Jean Rouch of illusion) and Criss Angel (the more gothic Grunewald-ian who gets extra points for location scouting and the use of available light), Copperfield is more like the Nam June Paik of magic, preferring to use TV-like objects in his performances. The box in “Video to Life” is in between an inverted rear-projection TV (with the projector on the outside) and a magic hat which Copperfield pulls televisual objects out of. Copperfield works his magic by conducting the beliefs and disbeliefs that are entangled in this strange object. These include our belief in the light projected from a projector and the shadows cast by a body moving before it, our disbelief in the images projected from that projector or any TV, but also our totemic belief in television as a medium that speaks to us and that we have the potential to occupy. Thus, there is another immaterial projection, embodied by the physical projector at the bottom of the frame, that speaks to our desire to enter the image, to get on the motorcycle, to be Copperfield: “David Copperfield.”
Grand Canyon Journal 2: Let’s Get Medievalist on that Crevasse
With the haunting mix of bodily certainty and existential confusion that characterizes a case of morning wood, the naked, supine torso of Ed Harris comes to sudden erection in a primeval forest, shooting up into the verdant frame like a rake that’s been stepped on. The shot is a crucial one in the opening sequence of George A. Romero’s Knightriders. The precipitousness of the montage conjures up both the identification of man and nature, as figured by Harris’s out-of-body “crow’s eye view” flight through the forest as well as his sudden awakening to the central conflict between the Rousseauist utopianism of the merry band of Medievalist motorcyclists he leads versus the alienating threat that modernity and capital pose to their way of life.
While this image may seem an unlikely entry point into the Grand Canyon, the proliferation of Arthurian place names in the Canyon (Excalibur Tower, Modred Abyss, Lancelot Point, Holy Grail, Gawain Abyss, Bedivere Point, The Dragon, Guinevere Castle, Merlin Abyss, Elaine Castle, and Galahad Point) speaks otherwise. Moreover, Ed Harris’s ontological sit-up echoes the axial leap of the horizontal geological striations that spatialize time along the canyon’s walls to the arbitrariness of the names (an arbitrariness that we will hungrily feast upon) that identify vertical rock formations and voids.
Geological section of the Grand Canyon covering roughly 1.5 billion years of sedimentation
Let us rewind for a moment to the Edenic state of nature envisaged before “the rise” of Ed, if you will. During the “crow-cam” sequence that opens Knightriders, we can now imagine Ed Harris lying down naked, out of frame, presumably asleep or dreaming on the forest floor. In this as-yet-unseen state, the Ed Harris-to-come is a kind of pure potential, a horizontal being that has yet to emerge from the plenitude of the forest. This avatar of Ed Harris finds his mirror image in the horizontal geological strata exposed on the walls of the Grand Canyon. Whereas Ed, in his latent form, is being as pure potential, the spatialization of time and temporalization of space that characterizes the geological stratum make it a crucible for the materialization of being as history in which space and time are co-extensive. In the layers of the Grand Canyon, space and time refine and compress one another. Being travels further and further away from pure potential until it almost sublimates into it; hence, the feeling of irreality that, like the veils of smog that descend into the chasm during peak season, tends to both intensify and obscure the experience of the Canyon.
What does it mean to point to time? Could we point to the Middle Ages on the geological calendar wall of the Grand Canyon? Does the tip of Excalibur Tower, which is said to look like King Arthur’s legendary sword, contain the moment when its namesake was thrust into a soon-to-be-slain dragon? Does Guinevere Castle house a temporal room in which the Queen scandalously gave herself to Lancelot? The answer is no, since even the uppermost strata of the Canyon are approximately 200 million years old. Kim Novak’s character from Vertigo would have to ethereally drive a few hundred miles away from that ringed redwood in order to ethereally point to a time that would approximate that temporal distance.
Grand Canyon Journal 1: Fly-over
A few weeks ago, I was flying from St. Louis to Los Angeles on one of those clear, bright winter afternoons that makes America look like a Björk video. Since the entertainment option in the cabin consisted of watching Madagascar 2 from an angle so oblique that the form of a skull threatened to emerge, my face was mostly glued to the window, gazing down at the otherworldly panorama unspooling below me like an economy class version of Andrew Wyeth’s late career frequent flyer. Vast fields of white snow dotted with traces of civilization gave way to a stretch of Gabriel Orozco-esque center pivot irrigated parcels of land which slowly dissolved into a variegated expanse of desert before being swallowed up by the yawning chasm of…THE GRAND CANYON. Brief aside: granted it must be difficult to name massive land forms, but “The Grand Canyon” is a pretty uninspired piece of work. Unlike such visionary nomenclature as, ahem, The Grand Tetons in Wyoming, TGC falls into the patently less grand “Man with a Van” category of names: plucky with a dash of assonance. There’s a strange mix of hubris and embarrassment in this name that promises a glimpse of the sublime but delivers a Chevy Chase joke. And yet, the affectation of the name belies an anxiety that’s much clearer from 30,000 feet: as much as we love to name, we fear the fact that something so stupifyingly huge can look so incredibly small.
YouTube text comment posted in response to "David Copperfield - Floating Over the Grand Canyon"
Which brings me to David Copperfield. When I got back to LA, naturally, I searched YouTube to look for a video that resembled my aerial experience of TGC. Unfortunately, all the videos shot from commercial jets did just that – they resembled my experience. Peering through my browser window, I tasted little of the flavor of the dramatic shifts in scale, light, and color that I witnessed through my airplane window. I caught only a whiff of the uncanny multiplicity of speeds I experienced: the physical velocity of the plane hurtling through space, the slow pace of the landscape revealing itself like a tracking shot beneath me and the terror of erosion, that imperceptible force that thinks about the entire era of humankind the way we think about a “dog year.” It was then, in the “Related Videos” sidebar of my YouTube page, that I first encountered “David Copperfield – Floating Over the Grand Canyon.” This was a fly-over, nay, a float-over of an entirely different order.
