Showing posts with label James Turrell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label James Turrell. Show all posts

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Pan Recommends for the week of June 6 to June 12

Robert Boyd

It seems as if the summer season has begun--this week is fairly light on new art openings.  So maybe this is the weekend to see some shows at the Menil again, or check out one of the many art exhibits that opened last weekend but that you haven't gotten around to yet.

THURSDAY


 Light bulbs unlimited

"Jsut That Way," curator's talk by Rachel Hooper about andy coolquitt: attainable excellence at the Blaffer Museum, 6:30 pm. Hooper tells you everything you want to know about Andy Coolquitt, Austin's master of crackhouse art and combining crap with crap.

FRIDAY/SATURDAY



Introducing The Texas Punk Problem by Bill Daniel at Gallery Homeland, 7 pm. Friday and 7 pm. Saturday. Photo exhibit, film screening, panel discussion, punk rock music and a fundraiser for a book project by Bill Daniel, the filmmaker who made Who Is Bozo Texino?. We've got nothing better to do than get nostalgic about old punk rock and have a couple of brews.

SUNDAY

 
James Turrell: The Light Inside from Museum of Fine Arts, Houston on Vimeo.



James Turrell: The Light Inside at the MFAH, June 9 (through September 22). Hard to imagine a better way to spend a hot Sunday than taking a cool light bath in James Turrell's retrospective. However, the MFAH is severely rationing photons for this show and recommends that you make a reservation.


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Friday, January 4, 2013

What I'm Looking Forward to Seeing in 2013

Robert Boyd


Forrest Bess, Untitled, 1947, oil on canvas

Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible at the Menil Museum, April 19 to August 18, 2013. This is not a full-scale retrospective, apparently--the show will consist of 40 paintings and several works on paper, and will incorporate the Robert Gober-curated Forrest Bess mini-show that was part (the best part) of the most recent Whitney Biennial. I can't wait, but I wish it was bigger.


Ken Price, Underhung, 1997, Fired and painted clay, 23 ½ x 21 ½ x 16 in. 

Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective at the Nasher Sculpture Center from February 9 to May 12, 2013. You can see this show at LACMA for two more days, if you happen to be in L.A. this weekend. Its next stop, at the Nasher Sculpture Center, definitely justifies a road-trip to Dallas.


DeFeo working on what was then titled Deathrose, 1960. Photograph by Burt Glinn

Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective at the Whitney Museum, February 28 to June 2, 2013. I'm definitely taking a trip to New York to see this. I've greatly admired the few Defeo pieces I have seen in person and have longed to see her famous Rose.

 
James Turrell, Acro, Green, 1968, projected light

James Turrell: A Retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, from June 9 to September 22, 2013. Before he became a designer of aggrandizing ziggurats, James Turrell made some pretty compelling artworks. I look forward to wandering through darkened galleries looking at piece like the one above.

What art are you looking forward to seeing in 2012?


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Saturday, June 16, 2012

Rice's New Mound

by Robert Boyd

James Turrell's Rice University Skyspace is finally complete. The official opening was Thursday night. I wasn't there (my invitation must have gotten lost in the mail), but you can read about it at CultureMap. Many fabulous people were there--but the article doesn't mention Turrell being present. I'm sorry I missed the light show, but Swamplot has a bunch of photos (although I'm told that photos are a poor substitute for being there). But I went to look at it yesterday afternoon.

Skyspace
James Turrell, Skyspace, 2012

I wonder what Ricardo Bofill thinks about having this earthen ziggurat plopped down in front of his broad colonnade for the Shepherd School. Personally, I think it's an improvement.

Skyspace
James Turrell, Skyspace, 2012

Art-lovers rejoice, but groundskeepers are probably thinking, "Great--now we have to mow the side of a hill every week."

Skyspace
James Turrell, Skyspace, 2012

The stairs going up lead to a balcony that looks down on the central pit. This would make an excellent dog-fighting arena.

Skyspace
James Turrell, Skyspace, 2012

Turrell apparently took his cues from the designers of airline seating when he designed these benches for the balcony.

Skyspace
James Turrell, Skyspace, 2012

This is supposed to look pretty trippy at twilight when the colored lights are operating.

Skyspace
James Turrell, Skyspace, 2012

Looking down on this from above, my first thought was that it looked like a combat pit. But sitting in the pit was nice and cool. There is something about the way this is built that makes the temperature inside the pit significantly cooler than the outside. It's a relaxing environment. Skyspace is within easy walking distance of McNair Hall, the business school building. I wish Skyspace had been here when I got my MBA (class of 2008). This would have been a pleasing place to study or just unwind. So as much as I make fun of it above, I suspect it will become a hangout for students, which is really the best thing one could hope for.



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Thursday, November 24, 2011

Moving toward the Office Light

By Dean Liscum

Fluorescent lights.

If someone utters that phrase to me in the context of Houston's art scene, I think of Dan Flavin's installation at The Menil's Richmond Hall or James Turrell's The Light Inside at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Fluorescent lights.

If someone utters that phrase to me in the context of work, I flashback to a windowless office I used to occupy in which even the plastic plants wilted.

Fluorescent lights.

In this context, it's actually the medium in Curt Gambetta's Office Light showing at the Lawndale Arts Center from November 18, 2011 through January 7, 2012.  The installation in the Mary E. Bawden Sculpture Garden is twelve 2' x 4' LED office lights in a ceiling grid with a perimeter of 18' x 28'. The structure has a height of 6' which causes the bottom of the light boxes to hover approximately 5 1/2' above the ground.


This design repels most viewers, causing them to skirt the installation.


However, some viewers move toward the office light.



The light sculpture crowds out the cosmos. It illuminates those that inhabit its space. Man-made light sources dominate the nocturnal urban landscape. The light leaks, pools, seeps into the furthest corners of the city. Halogen halos line the streets and form islands in parking lots. Walls of fluorescent light spill from empty office buildings and saturate the side walks and side streets. The artificial light is ubiquitous. It pervades the predawn hours of the sleepwalkers and night workers.

As a "profoundly ambivalent medium of Urban experience" (to quote Gambetta), artificial light has become part of the mythology of modern life like a jet plane's shadow passing over us or an ostensibly profound revelation transmitted by our radios as they automatically scans the stations.


We don't know if they are ominous or auspicious, and we're left contemplating our own luminescent blue aura and it's meaning.


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Friday, September 30, 2011

A Tomb Grows at Rice University

by Robert Boyd (Rice BA, 1992, MBA 2008)

You have probably heard about the big new James Turrell thing being built at Rice. Called Skyspace (he couldn't come up with a new title?), it will sit in front of the Shepherd School in the no-man's land between the Jones School and the Baker Institute. This is what it's supposed to look like.



James Turrell, rendering of Skyspace

Here's another imaginary photograph of it:



James Turrell, Skyspace, Pomona College

Ha! Fooled you. (Fooled me, too, initially. A reader with good eyes pointed out my error.) That is a photo of another James Turrell Skyspace, made in 2007 at Pomona College. He's going to keep making them until he gets it right, I guess (or until people stop paying him to). Ours is currently being built. Here it is last night (I was over at Rice for a class and for the latest Rice Gallery show).



James Turrell, Skyspace, under construction



James Turrell, Skyspace, under construction

It looks like a tomb for a minor Sumerian tyrant. It really does have the look of an ancient burial mound. Instead, it will be apparently used as a musical performance space for Shepherd School students. I guess that's because concert spaces are something that they lack, unless you count this or this.

Skyspace is prominent on Rice Public Art, a new website (new to me, at least). This is a good thing to have because Rice's campus has a lot of interesting art on it, and this website provides a stroller with a guide. There's just one problem--it's incomplete. It lists nine pieces, including one in Fondren Library and one in the BioScience Research Collaborative that I don't know are accessible to the general public (I'll go check them out and report back). But it doesn't list Jim Love's Paul Bunyan Bouquet in the courtyard of Lovett College (is it gone?!) and most bizarrely, it doesn't list Willy's statue--the statue of William Marsh Rice right smack dab in the middle of the main quad.

It's like they are only interested in showing off their newest public art (although the Heizer piece has been there for a long time).

Since we have pieces by two of the big-name Earthworks guys at Rice, we should go for four-of-a-kind and get pieces by Nancy Holt and Walter de Maria.


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Sunday, June 20, 2010

A Brief Note on Claire Ankenman

Robert Boyd



Claire Ankenman, Phase (Complete) #5, mixed media, 2010

These photos are taken from the Moody Gallery website, where Ankenman has a show up. I tried taking some of my own, and they are just as inadequate as these at showing what you are actually seeing when you look at one of Ankenman's pieces. They are made of layers, some of which seem to be plastic or vellum sheets with holes in them. I think there is pencil involved, but it is hard to tell. These artworks seem to dematerialize before your eyes. I would say Ankenman is following in the footsteps of Robert Irwin and James Turrell.



Claire Ankenman, Phase (Fallible) #1, mixed media, 2010



Claire Ankenman, Phase (Fallible) #3, mixed media, 2010

I liked seeing these pieces. I saw them opening night, in a crowded party atmosphere--and that was all wrong. I had to come back. You need quiet contemplation to appreciate them. They barely exist as it is--any distraction will make them disappear completely.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Last Night I Dreamt About James Turrell

I had this dream last night. A friend of mine (let's call him "C") were on the run from some insistent secret agent types in Philadelphia. We escape by disappearing into the Philly subway system (I have no idea if Philadelphia has a subway). After a number of close calls, we manage to shake them lose. We get help from some other secret agent types, who help us boost a car (a Porsche). I wondered if those agents are actually on our side or are agent provacateurs.

We drive out to the edge of town into some low hills, and we take a dirt road that leads us to a wide flat expanse. Around us are brand new buildings, townhome-style apartments, built of red brick, concrete, and granite. Looking out over the vast field in front of us, I can see the campus of Rice University.

"I know where we are," I tell C. "This is where the new construction for Rice is happening. I think these are new married student apartments or something." I tell him that in order to escape, we should drive across the field to the main campus.

But the drive is blocked by several enormous construction machines. These things seem to be engaged in breaking up huge slabs of granite and concrete. They work so rapidly that there is no safe way to drive past them. We call and gesture for them to let us pass, but they ignore us.

"Those guys are assholes! Let's hoof it."

We have no qualms about abandoning the car (it was stolen anyway). We walk around the machines carefully along the south end of the field, where a man is busy planting bushes. The bushes are being planted in an interesting pattern. I ask him if he is part of this new construction going on.

"Well, sort of," he replies. "The University hired me to create an art piece in the field to visually connect it to the rest of the campus."

"That's cool, but I have to tell you, your co-workers over there," pointing to the machines, "are grada-A assholes."

He smiles a crooked smile of acknowledgement, puts out his hand, and introduces himself as James. He looks to be in his 40s or 50s, has a full head of somewhat curly hair, mostly grey, and a moustache. He is wearing jeans and a blue work-shirt.

"I'm going to take a break--you want some coffee?"

We agree, and he walks over to the completed apartments. He and his family are the only tenants--they are living there while he works on his piece. He mentions having a kid, but we only meet his wife. We make small chit-chat and he tells us a lot about the piece. Then he announces he has to walk over to the main campus where he has a studio set up.

We start to walk when a light-bulb goes off in my head. "Are you James Turrell?" He had never told us his last name.

"That's me."

C looks confused, and I tell him that James Turrell is a well-known artist. I start to mention the tunnel at the MFAH, but C is not the type of guy who goes to museums, so I leave it at that.

Turrell has a studio in the art department at Rice, where he is working with a bunch of students. You can see models and drawings of different ideas for the space. He seems to have both the respect and the casual friendship of the students, and he is generous with his time in talking to C and me. He is genuinely likable.

Then I woke up.

I have no idea what James Turrell looks like. He is, however, creating a piece for the space between the the Shepherd School, the Baker Institute, and McNair. That's great because that open space has long been a weirdly dead area. No one hangs out there.

Hilariously, the press release proclaims "Multimillion-dollar gift will bring Turrell masterpiece to Rice University." Richard Connelly of the Houston Press has some fun with that. I'll be happy if Turrell in real life turns out to be as cool as Turrell in my dream.