Kodachrome Nights

September 29, 2005

Christo vs. Smithson, Round II

The Times reported yesterday that a miniature version of one of Christo's "Gates" was approaching the Smithson island. This is hiliarous. Who's art is it, anyway?

Approaching the Rachel Marie on its starboard side was a small motorboat, affixed to which was a replica of one of the saffron-colored gates created by Christo and Jeanne-Claude that dotted Central Park last winter. Captain Henry remembered "The Gates" and, putting two and two together, he worried that maybe the man in the motorboat was planning on boarding his little version of Central Park and planting a gate somewhere among the trees.

"He was coming up on me a couple of times," recalled Captain Henry, the owner of Island Towing and Salvage in Staten Island and a plain-spoken 40-year veteran of the harbor. "I was trying to wave him off."

He added, sternly: "When I saw the kind of rig he was running, I didn't want him getting no closer. Joker like that? In a motorboat? I don't need that."

As all this was happening, a group of graphic designers in a studio in the Dumbo neighborhood in Brooklyn, who had been monitoring the Smithson project's daily passing from their office window, caught sight of the little floating gate chasing the little floating park.

"We all thought it was kind of hilarious," said Ian Adelman, who took some photographs. A fellow designer, Elizabeth Elsas, went down to the waterfront, where the motorboat driver and a man with a video camera who had been towed behind the motorboat were already getting out of the water. A crowd of supporters were waiting, as if to receive Lindbergh after crossing the Atlantic. But the would-be art pirates, whom she described as being in their 20's and "art studenty," were not forthcoming with their identities or even particularly friendly.

"A Miniature Gate in Hot Pursuit of a Miniature Central Park"

Silly artists.

Posted by Mark C McKnight at 8:51 AM

September 18, 2005

"Time Turns Metaphors Into Things"

The Robert Smithson estate has in fact created what was merely a sketchy idea (pun intended) from Smithson's mind. The NYTimes had some great photographs of the island and this story about its genesis as well as this op-ed piece.


I like Randy Kennedy's discussion of the project in relationship to Christo's Gates and Olmsted's Central Park:

"The Gates" and "Floating Island" are like a split personality: "The Gates" invited public interaction and was, in effect, completed by it; the island, reflecting Smithson's intellectual and generally chilly aesthetic, floats off at a distance, inaccessible, inhabited by no one.

But Smithson's project is just as intimately connected to Central Park, which he regarded, in all its artificial pastorality, as a conceptual artwork of its own. (He revered Frederick Law Olmsted and said that he found him more interesting than Duchamp.) While not nearly as monumental as Smithson's most famous work, "Spiral Jetty," a 1,500-foot-long curlicue of basalt jutting into the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the island - which resembles a rectangular chunk of Central Park, neatly cookie-cuttered out - is a further twist on Smithson's career-long fascination with displacement. This generally meant taking art outdoors and bringing pieces of the land back indoors, into galleries. In the case of "Floating Island," the displacement is all outdoors, an exploration of land and water, urban and rural, real and recreated, center and periphery. As a paean to Central Park, it can be seen as a kind of artificial model of an artificial model of nature.

Posted by Mark C McKnight at 4:43 PM

July 20, 2005

Current Noguchi State: Energy Void

I just thought of a cool idea that I probably won't do, but here goes: You have all these Isamu Noguchi sculptures and designs on your computer or whatever and somewhere (your blog, I guess) you put up a Noguchi photo to explain your current mood/state or whatever- I guess like those stupid smiley faces for sophisticates.

My current Noguchi state? Energy Void. Yes, the vaginal symbolism is apropos.

Energy Void, 1971, granite. Collection of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation, Inc.

Posted by Mark C McKnight at 9:34 PM

July 1, 2005

Architecture of Density Exhibit

I really wanted to buy one of these Michael Wolf prints, but since I can't I'm going to pass this link on to you: http://www.photomichaelwolf.com/intro/index.html.

Wolf's large color photographs show the subtle variations within the repetitions of modernist housing in Hong Kong. Are these super-blocs dehumanizing? The large scale presents enough detail to show effects of human life and weather on these buildings, perhaps arguing something else entirely. Is this the future of humanity?

All of it- the color, the repetition, the density itself- comes from the structure of the human mind. Perhaps this is the real Garden of Eden. Well, okay, I'm not ready to go that far. But damn one of these prints would look good hanging in on the wall of a loft, perhaps with a couple Barcelona chairs for viewing... Anybody have a spare $5k?

Posted by Mark C McKnight at 5:49 PM