nots on Tony Smith 3

“In about 1962, I became intolerant of the capriciousness of clients and I gave up building. I had some steel boxes made and placed them around my yard. I don’t know exactly what my intentionas were.”

Tony Smith in: Eugen C. Goossen, Nine Sculptures by Tony Smith, catalog, 1970

more notes on Tony Smith 2 – on silhouette

[Smith's new works] lie low and express even more fully his distaste for silhouette in sculpture.  Those who exploit silhouette in a three-dimensional work effectually eliminate one of the three dimensions; the very purpose of sculpture as such is thus lost and the piece becomes pictorial. The silhouette of a Smith piece is more or less an accident and because it tells little about whqat the piece actually in essence is, attention is necessarily directed toward mass as described by the directional force of the surfaces.

Eugen C. Goossen, Nine Sculptures by Tony Smith, catalog, 1970.

Michael Fried before Tony Smith's DIE, 1967

“The beholder knows himself to stand in an indeterminate, open-ended – and unexacting – relation as subject to the impassive object. In fact, being distanced by such an object is not, I suggest, entirely unlike being distanced, or crowded, by the silent presence of another person; the experience of coming upon literalist objects unexpectedly – for example, in somewhat darkened rooms – can be strongly, if momentarily, disquieting in just this way.”

Michael Fried: Art and Objecthood  (1967)

Tony Smith's account of a nightly ride on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike

“When I was teaching at Cooper Union in the first year or two of the ’50s, someone told me how I could get on to the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. I took three students and drove from somewhere in the Meadows to New Brunswick. It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines,railings or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes and colored lights. This drive was a revealing experience. The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn’t be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. At first I didn’t know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there which had not had any expression in art.”

“The experience on the road was something mapped out but not socially recognized. I thought to myself, it ought to be clear that’s the end of art. Most paintings look pretty pictorial after that. There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it. Later I discovered some abandoned airstrips in Europe — abandoned works, Surrealist landscapes, something that had nothing to do with any function, created worlds without tradition. Artificial landscape without cultural precedent began to dawn on me. This is a drill ground in Nuremberg, large enough to accommodate two million men. The entire field is enclosed with high embankments and towers. The concrete approach is three 16-inch steps, one above the other, stretching for a mile or so.”

– From “Talking with Tony Smith” by Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr., Artforum, Dec. 1966, quoted in Robert Storr’s essay, “A Man of Parts,” in MoMA’s catalogue of the Tony Smith exhibition.

BLACK CUBE concept January 2010

notes of our discussion:

1) The subject of the LP is the situation as described by Michael Freid in his 1967 essay Art and Objecthood: the “strongly disquieting experience of coming upon a literal object”. We have no clear indication where and when this situation took place, Fried describes it in generic terms, but we have to assume that he himself – or at least someone – made this experience: feeling as if… So for better understanding we henceforth call this person Michael Fried and use his text as a document of this situation.

2) This situation was created by or with an object entitled Black Cube, by TonySmith. The art work by Smith is not the situation, it is the object only, meaning that we can not know if Smith intended to create this situation or not. In any case, he is the initiator of the object’s realisation and display (initiator because he neither „made“ nor „put“ the object anywhere himself, but had it fabricated and set up by other people on his request) So Tony Smith stands at the beginning of a narrative, that eventually leads into this situation. This narrative of course includes other protagonists, places and situations, first and foremost of course the visitor/spectator, but also the museum space, curator etc pp.

3) The interesting quality of this situation for us is that being in a museum, Fried experiences a situation that is „theatrical“, holds the qualities of theater. There is a shift occuring from one mode of art encounter (visual arts, museum) to another (object, theater) or at least a confusion between the first and the latter mode, creating this „strongly disquieting experience“. This, Fried explains, is brought forht by the „literalist“ quality of the object. (I will not discuss this here, see Fried or our blog on Black Cube)

4) If this situation is the subject of the LP, our task is to create a NEW situation that produces a similar experience of shift or confusion to that of the original situation while distancing the audience from it and allowing them to reflect on it. This WHILE can mean one single situation or a temporal and spatial sequence of situations tied together to form one LP. We can hence speak of a re-enactment of this original situation with an additional quality or element. (???)

4b) We should also reflect on our role in this, where and what position we hold as the authors and lecturers of this LP. Ideally we manage to include and disquiet our position IN the situations we create!

5) The conditions – What needs to be taken in account:

- the historic difference between 1967 and today: there are some qualities of the original situation that are strongly tied to the historic situation and others that are nor a) the shock or provocation is strongly tied to the newness of the object, (connected to that) the element of provocation, the different cultural and media surrounding, the different art scene, technical and industrial developments etc pp. b) the objectiveness (or literality) is not tied to these factors but can be regarded as superhistorical – at least as the difference between 1960 and now is concerned.

- the theater(-festival)setting we are presenting in: the audience’s expectations are towards a theater event and they will hence display a theater behavior. So the outset is contrary to the original situation: here we start from theater (or lecture-performance) and shift to visual arts/museum. In addition we are dealing with the format of lecture, which also needs to be taken in account.

6) A list of the means for creation our situation:

- the space (open or closed)

- light (theatrical, presentation, normal…)

- performance by us or a museum guide ( a very theatrical element)

- duration

- audiomaterial to be injected in the situation to a) create atmosphere or b) narrative or c) to structure the time

-the object itself – when do we have it present, how do we use it’s presence

- text, lecture

die ikone unserer Zeit

“L’icône de notre temps”.
So hat Malewitsch seinen schwarzen Quadrat auf weissen Hintergrund bezeichnet. Das finde ich echt sehr packend.
Die Frage ist dann, was er genau damit meint.

- Meint er, dass das Bild seine Zeit verkörpert? Wie andere Ikonen, Heilige?
- Meint er, dass dieses Bild das wichtigste Bild dieser Zeit ist, also die Zeit sozusagen repräsentiert?

Vielleicht müssen wir diesen Kubus vom Standpunkt der Ikonen Theorie betrachten. Wir haben schon öfters darüber gelesen und gesprochen. Aber die Idee, dass sie Heilige repräsentieren, die schon im Jenseits sind, die in einer Idealen Welt sind, die schon transfiguriert (verklärt) sind aber auch gleichzeitig da sind, vor uns, in voller Präsenz. Diese Idee ist die zentrale Idee des Christentums. Und irgendwie geht es so mit dem Kubus auch.Oder? Er ist auch da. Er ist auch radikal von woanders, radikal fremd. Er Bietet “immersion” und nicht. etc.

Inside the Black Cube Amsterdam: New Ideas

in cologne we developed some new ideas for BLACK CUBE in Frascati.

- we will try to work with a real museum guide to introduce the audience to the Cube in the middle part of the performance

- instead of the night-text we used in Mannheim, we will look for a new text in dialog form. either we have to fake something – like we did for the column – or we do find something by tony smith or michael fried. This text in any case should either be very close to the story of the cube or so remote, that the audience will not read it as an interpretation of the situation or the artwork.

- the lecture at the end of the LP can deal with questions of ethics, possibly the concept of “golden rule”, focusing on the aspect of subjectivity in  BLACK CUBE and the resulting ethic problems.

This means, we currently are looking at the following structure:

- audience enters in the black space, darkness

- very slow fade in to arrive at the presence of the cube in the space

- museum situation, which is after a while, taken up by the museum guide to introduce the artpiece. the guide talks about tony smith’ black cube.

- new text and new atmosphere, since we threw the light inside the cube out. this needs to be solved! What is the situation, what do we see, hear, feel?

- audience leaves the space to enter an adjoining space where they watch the video LECTURE. The visuals here are also still unclear and need to be solved.

two quotes from O'Doherty for BLACK CUBE

There are two quotes from O’Doherty that I believe are important for the LP we are doing now: The first one is simple, it relates to the darkness/night:

Seiner Sicht beraubt, hielt [der Zuschauer] sich an sich selbst und entwickelte aus sich den Inhalt des Ereignisses. [In einem Instant-Kunstwerk] verschmelzen die beiden Träger von Erwartungen, die Galerie und der Betrachter, im weißen Raum zu einem einzigen System. (117)

The other one is more complex and I want to discuss this sometime this week. There are 2 things here: 1) the separation between eye and body, which is important for the question of size of the cube. and for the whole first part of course. 2) the idea of absence. I don’t understand his point, but of course i can realte to the idea of absence in Die.

„Zuerst nahm das Auge von dem Objekt wie von einem Gemälde Besitz, und dann führte der Körper das Auge um das Werk herum. Dies bewirkte ein feedback zwischen der Bestätigung der Erwartung und der bis dahin latent gebliebenen körperlichen Empfindung. Auge und Betrachter verschmelzen dabei nicht miteinander, sondern arbeiten aus gegebenem Anlass zusammen. Das fein eingestellte Auge erhielt einige Sinnesdaten von der Seite des Körpers, den es verlassen hatte (Empfindung von Schwerkraft, Bewegung etc.). […] Der Betrachter und das Auge sind die Notare unserer Erfahrung. Sie begleiten uns, wenn wir eine Galerie betreten, und die Einsamkeit unserer Kunstwanderungen ist obligatorisch, weil wir die ganze Zeit ein kleines Seminar mit unseren Stellvertretern halten. In diesem Sinne sind wir nicht da. Vor einem Kunstwerk gegenwärtig zu sein, heißt, dass wir uns zugunsten von Auge und Betrachter absentieren, die uns berichten, was wir gesehen hätten, wären wir da gewesen. Das abwesende Kunstwerk ist uns oft näher als das gegenwärtige. (Ich glaube, dass Rothko dies besser als jeder andre Künstler verstand.) Diese komplexe Struktur der Kunstwahrnehmung ist unser Trip nach „Anderswo“, sie ist eine fundamentale Bedingung unserer provisorisch eingerichteten moderne Identität, die von unseren labilen Sinnen immer wieder aufgerichtet wird.“ (63 / 65)

So let’s keep these two in mind!!

two quotes from O’Doherty for BLACK CUBE

There are two quotes from O’Doherty that I believe are important for the LP we are doing now: The first one is simple, it relates to the darkness/night:

Seiner Sicht beraubt, hielt [der Zuschauer] sich an sich selbst und entwickelte aus sich den Inhalt des Ereignisses. [In einem Instant-Kunstwerk] verschmelzen die beiden Träger von Erwartungen, die Galerie und der Betrachter, im weißen Raum zu einem einzigen System. (117)

The other one is more complex and I want to discuss this sometime this week. There are 2 things here: 1) the separation between eye and body, which is important for the question of size of the cube. and for the whole first part of course. 2) the idea of absence. I don’t understand his point, but of course i can realte to the idea of absence in Die.

„Zuerst nahm das Auge von dem Objekt wie von einem Gemälde Besitz, und dann führte der Körper das Auge um das Werk herum. Dies bewirkte ein feedback zwischen der Bestätigung der Erwartung und der bis dahin latent gebliebenen körperlichen Empfindung. Auge und Betrachter verschmelzen dabei nicht miteinander, sondern arbeiten aus gegebenem Anlass zusammen. Das fein eingestellte Auge erhielt einige Sinnesdaten von der Seite des Körpers, den es verlassen hatte (Empfindung von Schwerkraft, Bewegung etc.). […] Der Betrachter und das Auge sind die Notare unserer Erfahrung. Sie begleiten uns, wenn wir eine Galerie betreten, und die Einsamkeit unserer Kunstwanderungen ist obligatorisch, weil wir die ganze Zeit ein kleines Seminar mit unseren Stellvertretern halten. In diesem Sinne sind wir nicht da. Vor einem Kunstwerk gegenwärtig zu sein, heißt, dass wir uns zugunsten von Auge und Betrachter absentieren, die uns berichten, was wir gesehen hätten, wären wir da gewesen. Das abwesende Kunstwerk ist uns oft näher als das gegenwärtige. (Ich glaube, dass Rothko dies besser als jeder andre Künstler verstand.) Diese komplexe Struktur der Kunstwahrnehmung ist unser Trip nach „Anderswo“, sie ist eine fundamentale Bedingung unserer provisorisch eingerichteten moderne Identität, die von unseren labilen Sinnen immer wieder aufgerichtet wird.“ (63 / 65)

So let’s keep these two in mind!!

Notes on: Brian O’Doherty “Inside the White Cube” Pt 1

engl. kurzfassung:
http://www.societyofcontrol.com/whitecube/insidewc.htm

Brian O’Doherty hat in den Siebziger und Achtziger Jahren in einer Reihe von Essays die Gesetze und die Entwicklung des Ausstellungsraums, insbesondere der Gallerie, thematisiert. Auslöser sind die Installationen und Environments der Sechziger Jahre die teils aus ästhetischen, teils aus gesellschaftspolitischen Gründen die Regeln des Ausstellungsraums in Frage stellten. Allerdings geht diese Praxis der, wie er sagt, „künstlerischen Gesten“ zur Infragestellung des Ausstellungsraums auf die Avantgarden des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts zurück, especially Duchamps. He remains in many ways on the surface of his subject, describing and catagorizing artistic gestures and hinting and political implications, but not asking for the deeper layers of meaning and, as Ranciere would say, regimes. In this it is more an account and a polemic on the recent developments than a serious analysis.

The „white cube“ is a space designed not for bodies but for eyes, implying a reduced human, all eyes and brains, no limbs and torso.

„Der Galerie-Raum legt den Gedanken nahe, dass Augen und Geist willkommen sind, raumgreifende Körper dagegen nicht – höchstens dass sie als Gliederpuppen für Studienzwecke zugelassen sind. Dieses Paradox à la Descartes wird durch eine Ikone unserer visuellen Kultur bekräftigt, das Ausstellungsfoto ohne Menschen. Hier endlich sind die Betrachter, wir selbst, eliminiert. Wir sind da ohne da zu sein; einer der größten Dienste den die Fotografie ihrer Rivalin Kunst leistet. Das Ausstellungsfoto ist eine Metapher für den Ausstellungsraum.“(11)

This idea of the bodyless space will be broken up by the minimalists (among others) as we will later see. Greenbergs critic of the „theater of representation“ in Smith Die means just that: an object which invites the body into the space, makes it central again in the act of perception. In O’Doherty’s logic the white cube is the direct opposition to the black cube (Die) in as far as it’s influence on the role of the body is concerned. That is why I included the notion of white cube in the description for the LP in Mannheim. If we work on Die we have to take this dialectic in account.

History / Teil 1

The reason why I think this chapter is important is, that O’Doherty writes art history from the perspective of the space, the gallery,which means, he writes about situations, rather then objects. This is very close to my own desire.

He follows the roots of the gallery space into the salon of the 19^th century. (art – non religious that is – becomes public only after the french revolution. See also Malraux.) A gallery therefore was a salon with a wall full of pictures. Yet the famous „Petersburger Hängung“ as it was used in many salons in the 19^th constituted a very different aesthetic practice than today’s gallery does. How was this justified?

„[Dadurch] dass nämlich jedes Gemälde als eine selbständige Einheit galt, die durch einen schweren Rahmen nach außen und durch ein komplettes System der Perspektive nach innen vollkommen vom hautnah an drängenden Nachbarn abgeschottet wurde. Raum war damals unzusammenhängend und teilbar, genauso wie das Haus, in dem die Gemälde hingen, verschiedene Räume für verschiedene Funktionen hatte. Der Geist des 19. Jahrhunderts war auf Messung und Unterteilung aus, und das Auge des 19. Jahrhunderts respektierte die Hierarchie der Genres und die Autorität des Rahmens.“ (13)

That is a superficial analysis but nevertheless: the role of the frame is a central theme here. What I find interesting is, that the Petersburger Hängung requires a much greater work on the part of the spectator, than todays practice. In fact we are talking about a greater degree of abstraction, since the contemplation into a painted landscape that hangs this close to a Stilleben or Sea Scenery is much more difficult to accomplish. The other central theme is perspective as an artistic strategy. Perspective orders all elements within the frame in such a way as to draw the gaze into it, helping to avoid seeing the rest of the wall. O’Doherty speaks of transgression here:

“Man geht förmlich in so ein Gemälde hinein, oder man gleitet mühelos in es hinein. Je größer die Illusion, desto stärker wird die Einladung an das Auge des Betrachters; das Auge wird von seinem fest verankerten Körper abgezogen und wird in das Bild hinein versetzt, um sich mit dem Raum vertraut zu machen.” (14)

An interesting question would be whether the style of presentation (historically) followed the invention of the central perspective or whether the Petersburger Hängung required such a technique. I assume that the first is the case (perspective came first). However the opposite would be imaginable as well. What made the central perspective necessary? If it is a strategy to draw the eye into the space of the painting, what was this practice trying to avoid? If later artists omitted the central perspective again, what are the social or aesthetic necessities for either development? In fact, the central perspective was merely a phase in painting – maybe 200 or 300 years – not a guiding principle or a technical necessity.

“Bei diesem Vorgang [dem hineingleiten] ist die Sicherheit, die der Rahmen gewährt, ebenso notwendig wie der Sauerstoffbehälter für den Taucher.”(14)

O’Doherty speaks of „neatly tied packages“ of perspective and gold frame. There were very few efforts towards a dissolution of the frame, namely those of CDF: „compositions that create pressure on the frame“, as he calls them. They are „surfaces of multiple meanings“, „oscillating between unending depth and flatness“.(15) The frame now becomes unreliable and the separation of the paintings in the space becomes necessary.

From the middle of the 19^th on O’Doherty sees two different strategies at work: one where the frame is central, which was important in early photography (which accepted the frame) and one which aims at Flächigkeit (two-dimensionality, laminarity) instead of depth and wants to overcome the frame. This development constitutes the first major brake in the concept of the gallery and art itself:

“Die Tendenz zur Flächigkeit trug am stärksten zur Durchsetzung seiner [des Bildes] Autonomie bei. Das Entstehen eines flachen Raumes, der erfundene Formen und nicht mehr wie der illusionistische Raum wirkliche Formen enthielt, übte weiteren Druck auf den Rand aus.” (17)

O’Doherty here throws two things in one (invented forms and flatness or real forms and illusion) which to my mind indeed conditioned and legitimated one another. But how exactly? And in which order and logic? He also totally ignores the development of the panorama, which coincides with CDF’s flat paintings. I don’t think that the argument of Flächigkeit creating autonomy of art holds true when looking at the Panorama: The panorama is totally illusionary, yet it omits central perspective and can be called flat. It does not need to draw the eye into it, because the eye (and the body!) is already in the middle of it! It also reunites body and eye, the separation of which O’Doherty regards as a central operation in the logic of 18t and 19^th century art.

He then writes something which I find very intriguing. He speculates that Monet’s approach to space might have been a result of his technical deficits. The lack of concreteness, the seemingly arbitrary framing of objects – O’Doherty calls them provisionary solutions. The fleeting or unfocused impression his art creates allowed “for the eye to look elsewhere”, he writes. (18) What a strange sentence! Where is this elsewhere? In the gallery space, in the painting? Monet he says painted like he was passing by his objects, instead of stopping to focus on them. If so, does this mean, that they should be perceived like in passing by? Does this technique imply a likewise perception? How so?

I do however understand, how such a neglect of focus further weakens the concept of illusionary space and thereby contributes to Flächigkeit of the painting. Monet also painted the huge Le bassin aux Nympheas, almost a panorama.

Returning to the question of Hängung, O’Doherty complains that we know too little about that. I agree, in fact I would love to learn more about this whole historical complex of presentations. He writes that it should be possible “to relate the inner story of a painting onto it’s outer hanging”. (22) What this means is that the concrete situation of encounter -the space in which it takes place – should play a role in evaluating the work. This is pure CATALOG OF SITUATIONS! Only he does not know it…

In the 50s and 60s – which is his main era of concern – the paintings started to take over the wall, literally invade the wall. O’Doherty writes that group exhibitions soon looked like the Balkan, with territory wars waging and everybody trying to steel some ground and push the others aside. The question arose, how much space does a painting need. By breaking the rectangular frame, the wall also became a focus, meaning the audience started to perceive the whole space. The space thereby becomes part of the artwork – which O’Doherty does not say. (But for example Karpow clearly stated)

O’Doherty returns once more to the exhibition photo: „Das Foto einer Colour-Filed Ausstellung kann als der logische Endpunkt der Tradition der Moderne angesehen werden.“ (29) This idea of the exhibition photo that allows only the eye, but not the body, reappears throughout his essays. It is a central trope.

He closes the chapter by summing the problem of space invasion up with another example of artistic gesture: William Anastasie West Wall, 1967.