A recent encounter with a stranger yielded a gift. She had perused my art website, found it to her liking and saw parallels in choice of topics to a favorite artist of her’s, Holocaust survivor Samuel Bak. She gave me a catalogue of his recent show in Boston, Just Is, that pretty much blew my mind. The gallery website below contains biographical and artistic information.

https://www.puckergallery.com/artists/#/samuel-bak/

I had, of course, never heard of the guy. Nor had I heard of any of the women painters focussed on abstract work that I was able to see at a different exhibit in Boston two weeks ago. Today’s photographs give you a pretty accurate description of the range  – from boring to fascinating, traditional to truly inventive. The ones that had an implied narrative stuck with me for the longest – it is just easier for most of us to remember a story than to recall a pattern, no matter how beautiful.

Given the sheer number of people able to make art these days, and the number of real and electronic outlets available to bring the work to the public, it is of course not surprising that even people who are keen on painting or other forms of art know only a minuscule percentage of what is out there. Which brings us to a local treasure, Oregon ArtsWatch, an invaluable source of information when it comes to being better informed about art.

Beverly Hallam, Crossed Rock, 1966

About 6 years ago a group of the smartest journalists in town decided to fight the attrition of art news that went hand in hand with the downfall of local print journalism. Single handedly, without serious financial backing at the time, and for all I know around a kitchen table, they started publishing a nonprofit online arts journal,  orartswatch.org

Lest you think that a business model á la The Little Art Critics that Could is doomed, marvel at their success: the group has posted more than 3,000 stories that attract tens of thousands of readers every month. They have sponsorship agreements with more than 40 arts and education organizations, content-sharing partnerships with TravelPortland and Artslandia, more than 200 individual donors (most of them sustaining, annual donors), and an active social media presence.

Barbara Takenaga,  Tremolo, 2005

Writing is done by a diverse set of free lancers of whom 30 or so regularly contribute. Diverse indeed: the organization aspires to offer view points from a variety of writers in terms of age, educational background, active or passive involvement in the arts and political orientation. The only constant element is the quality of the writing. The founders focus on identifying contributors of younger generations and mentor them in what could otherwise be yet another endangered species: smart art criticism.

Meg Brown Payson, Drift, 2006

I learn much from them, beyond staying informed as to what’s going on around town. The essays make me think about my own approach to making art, my difficulties within the art scene, my desire to combine my political reasoning with my creativity as a photographer and writer. I am friends with some of them, owe all of them.

Christin Baker, Diaphanous Leverage, 2016

Do yourself a favor and sign up to their website http://www.orartswatch.org

or Fb  page https://www.facebook.com/ArtsWatch/.

Do all of us a favor by supporting them, if you can, financially, since every $$ comes back to all of us in added value of knowledge about art at a time when art education has dropped from the agenda. Nonprofits like this are never out of the woods – they need us, almost as much as we need them!

The earliest three-dimensional art was probably carvings, shortly followed by pottery. Ritualistic and functional purposes found artistic expression. Soon 3-D became large, representing religious ideals and worldly egos by its size – just think of the tomb carvings in Mesopotamia and the statues attached to Egyptian pyramids. The Greeks matched their sculptures to their view of the centrality of man – it had to be the perfect body…..

Early Christianity was hampered by one of the commandments forbidding the use imagery. Once they found a way around that by claiming this prohibition only referred to idolatry, the dam broke. Just look at the ubiquitous carvings, statues, reliefs in Christian churches – I will need a whole other month to blog about the beauty found there. Eventually.

Today I want to focus on the ways sculptures are used as monuments, specifically memorializing power. (Which reminds me I could also do a week on war monuments and comparative sites of unspeakable horror. Maybe.)  Today’s example was found in Innsbruck, Austria. My friends and travel companions who know e v e r y t h i n g about cool historical sites guided me to the Hofkirche, the church and (empty) burial site of emperor Maximilian I, surrounded by 28 of his favorite relatives…

Imagine: on his deathbed, in 1519, this guy expresses a wish to be sepulchered in some chapel, surrounded by 40 larger-than- life statues made of bronze. Well, the 28 who are eventually completed are too heavy for the chapel. So his grandchild Ferdinand builds a new church, the Imperial Court Church, puts a cenotaph (empty grave) into it, and flanks it by the “black men” as they are known. Never mind that about half of them are women. I am not kidding you.

Think how it must feel to come to services every Sunday being surrounded by this wealth, this overwhelming imagery, this size of those who rule you.

Attached link is a video of the church.

Here is another example of monumental expression, with a (from my perspective) lovely political twist. I have never seen the terra-cotta soldiers protecting the grave of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang Di. He, too, had plenty of company for his eternal rest. But I did see a feminist take on this army in Paris, some years back. Prune Nourry, with the help of artisan copyists from Xi’an, created an army of 108 girls, the Terra Cotta daughters, to question gender selection with a bias towards boys in China.  They went on a world tour before they were buried at a secret location in China. I was so lucky to be at the right place at the right time. Looking at all these girls’ faces was a powerful reminder of how selective abortion preempts female lives.

http://www.prunenourry.com/en/projects/terracotta-daughters

And last but not least here is a monument to the photographer, which concludes this week on sculpture.

If you ever want to go tripping without ingesting chemical substances into your body, travel to the hidden depths of Hamilton, New Jersey.  You’ll find a sculpture park there that immediately puts you into a state of altered reality, fake poppies included. Disney world for the arts, for lack of a better description.

Originally old Fair Grounds, the 42 acres were purchased by Seward Johnson, heir to the Johnson&Johnson medical fortunes and now a sculptor himself (having majored in poultry husbandry in college…) If you want to laugh today, read this NYT article about him; his biography in some way resembles the feelings you get in his park: larger than life, weirdly concocted, slightly off-color, hard to believe and at its core exhilarating for the sheer force of it.

This is said about his art:”Mainline art critics have not been kind to Mr. Johnson, whom they see as a rich guy who bought his way into the club. ”Kitsch,” ”Hallmark” and ”Norman Rockwell,” are barbs frequently hurled by those who feel that art should be cool, collected and at arm’s length. ”Johnson’s work is chocolate-box rubbish,” said the art critic and author Robert Hughes. ”It has no imaginative component that I can see and apparently appeals to dull corporate minds like his own — the sort of people who run American motels and malls.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/30/nyregion/seward-s-follies.html?mcubz=0

It actually appeals to those average people visiting the park, as the photographs of interactions with the sculptures show. It has elements of fun and accessibility that are inclusive rather than reserved for elites who “know about art.” They might mock it as Seward’s Follies – I’d say, more power to him!

Grounds for Sculpture was planted from scratch with thousands of trees and tens of thousands of plants, delicate grasses included. The collection, other than Johnson’s own work, is varied; it sure is large, though, and the only thing lacking is subtlety.

Actually, I had a fun visit there. Once you overcome the shock of being in this strange environment you cannot help but admire the chutzpah of the people putting it all together, combining serious three dimensional art with skyscraper-sized figures of Marylin Monroe in full skirt-lift mode. I also could not but marvel at the largesse of Johnson’s philanthropy which surely matches the size of his sculptures. I mostly read up on the sites I visit after I’ve been there, so that my eyes are open without being influenced when I first experience the art. But reading about the people who initiate these ventures as private persons gives me direly needed hope in humanity: there are folks out there who care, who are generous, who want to share their passion. The rest of us are grateful beneficiaries. And in Hamilton, New Jersey, getting high.

Blown. or should I say: blown and blown. I am referring to the sculptural art I am describing today and the hurricane that blew across it. All of this can be visited at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden near Miami, FL. Or rather, can’t be visited right now, since they are trying to clean up after the damage, with hordes of volunteers expected tomorrow to pick up the plant debris.

I really wonder what they do with the glass sculptures during natural catastrophes like Irma. The installations are too big, for the most part, to be moved easily. Maybe they have containers that settle around them, anchored in some fashion?

Fairchild is a truly beautiful garden, with humongous cacti and palm tree collections; it contains a large number of pieces of Chihuly’s work. Or at least work that has his name on it – there are now intense questions, accusations and law suits swirling around, claiming that he exploited his assistants, plagiarized them, stole from them ideas and revenue. This kind of conflict is not new when it comes to work made by groups of people when no single person can pull it off solo.

I read somewhere that Henry Moore, for example, did the drawings and small models for his sculptures, then had others execute the large versions we see in the museums. Ideas over craftsmanship, I guess. Except that ideas are shared when you co-produce, too.

http://www.tampabay.com/things-to-do/visualarts/who-is-really-making-chihuly-art/2334662

I visited the garden three years ago and had my usual mixed feelings when I encounter these larger-than-life explosions of Chihuly glass. They did something magical to the landscape, or echoed its magic. They deliver intense color and amorphous forms, cascading at times in ways that are really impressive regarding the skill of their construction. But a hint of gaudy always makes me step back, and all the talk in the world about how Chihuly bridges the gap between the decorative and art is not convincing me to think of it as predominantly the latter. This is of course the person speaking who vastly prefers Biedermeier over Rococo, something elegant but plain over something elaborately ornate.

My Pacific Northwest readers can easily judge for themselves – Seattle has an entire glass garden devoted to Chihuly, and the glass museum in Tacoma has him prominently in their permanent collection.

With all that said, I had a splendid day at Fairchild – walking around corners and discovering these pieces hidden or not so hidden in the vegetation instilled a sense of whimsey.

Almost enough to forget my annoyance that the insanely high admission prices prohibit your average-income family to visit and thus secure a mini paradise for the elites. Which is now blown.

I could not believe my luck when I realized the Lincoln, MA sculpture park had a Gormley sculpture in its permanent collection. He is my absolute favorite of the contemporary sculptural artists (although closely followed by Emily Young.)

You can find a good sampling at their respective websites: http://www.antonygormley.com  –  http://www.emilyyoung.com.

Gormley has a knack for site specific installations and quite often they involve reflection. They can be small, like the one in Lincoln, or huge, like the one in Hamburg, Germany, that I visited in 2012 ( faithful readers have gotten their share of those photographs before…. but it’s worth the repetition.)

The former is the form of a man who seemingly looks into a pane of glass and sees his reflection. In reality and very quickly visible, these are two identical sculptures, mirror image reversed, that are facing each other, divided by said glass. The acquisition of this piece was guided by a commitment to showing sculpture both inside the de Cordova and outside in their magnificent park. Or so says the website….

The latter – Horizon Fields –  was located in a former market hall in Hamburg, that has become a place for changing art exhibits. The hall was filled with a platform suspended from the roof across the entire length and width of the building. The top of the platform was a mirror, walking on it (in your socks, once you had overcome the embarrassment of potential holes in them) was not for the faint of heart. The reflections were disorienting, and the suspension of the platform made the hole thing swing lightly. But, oh, the views! The sense of a manipulation in space with you at some difficult-to-assess spatial point right in it was truly exhilarating.

http://deichtorhallen.de/index.php?id=257&L=1

Last year Gormley showed his political colors in a show that featured 600 cast-iron human skyscrapers, expressing his anger about London’s testosterone-fuelled corporate expansion.  “We are living in a really strange time,” Gormley said. “Yet we are all sleepwalking through it. And it is urgent we wake up. We are sort of aware the centre cannot hold, that 250 years of industrial activity has undermined and fundamentally disturbed our world – yet we feel somehow not responsible.” He called Sleeping Fields “manic, but incredible good fun.“

Seems like the fun ended, though, when 3 months ago another one of his projects was altered by some unknown artist, or vandal, depending on your point of view. His series of figures at Crosby Beach in England acquired some polka dot bikinis and the like.

Attached is a video of the installation. It give you a taste of the full scope of the installation.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/jun/22/antony-gormley-crosby-beach-sculptures-vandalised-bikini

This reminds me of my friend Steve Tilden whose large metal horse sculpture in North Portland was “decorated” with a lot of knitted and crocheted garments, time and again.  Maybe someone thought the horse was cold…..

my trip to the East Coast last week I visited a sculpture park in Lincoln, MA. It was founded by a tea merchant of Jamaican descent, Julian de Cordova, who poured his riches into traveling the world and collecting art that he brought home to his mansion – a hobbit-like structure on steroids. After his death in 1945 it all became a museum. His own collection was sold for lack of artistic value, but his generosity enabled a focus on modern art, and eventually sculpture. Details can be found here:

https://decordova.org

The museum and grounds are a spectacular setting for some 60 pieces of art ranging from figurative to abstract to can’t-be-defined by your’s truly but made for a great play ground.

Luckily things are explained to the clueless.

A centerpiece is an area called Alice’s Garden, which contains figurative work that echoes Caroll’s fantasy world, Alice included.

I could not quite understand why a disembodied head of a little black girl was included – I would have placed it next to another figurative bust by Jaume Plensa at the other side of the park.

The works in Alice’s Garden impressed with a variety of materials: wood,

metal that reflected the environment,

plastic casts,

stone and as many ideas.

I think my favorite here was Terrence Koh’s sculpture Children of the Corn – Totempole. A title borrowed from a horror story by Stephen King, by a Chinese-Canadian artist who runs around dressed in white and often donning bunny ears seemed a fitting reference to the state of our world. This self-named asianpunkboy is now represented in major museums of the world, including MoMa, the Schirn, the Whitney, Tate Modern etc.  Here is a clip with his good friend Lady Gaga.

The strongest piece in the collection, for my taste anyways, will be described tomorrow. Until then, let the whimsey seep into your day, if only a little bit.