When the digital becomes physical

             

After three years of construction, the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria reopened its doors on Saturday. The renovation/expansion was designed by Thomas Leeser, a Frankfurt-born architect who used to work for Peter Eisenman on signature projects like the Wexner and La Villette. I guess he's been on his own for quite a while now - this new building, probably his first significant built work, doesn't reflect much of his Eisenmanian background.

From 35th Avenue, all you see is the original 1920s white stucco building. The three-story new addition bulges out from the back as a dull and windowless big-box volume. Clad in triangular light-blue aluminum panels, the exterior tries to bring some interest with its dia-grid surface. But it seems to me that it's just a game of pattern making, and the treatment of open joints in different widths further confirms its decorative nature. Leeser talks about triangulation as a motif of the "digital," a science fiction language - like the virtual wireframe blueprint seen in Iron Man. Isn't that just a superficial and graphic interpretation of the emerging digital culture?

The main entrance is still on 35th Ave. Again, the triangles appear at the front door. The public spaces on the ground floor are blindingly white, so pristine that they make you worry how they may look like in a few years. (In fact, the polymer floor and the bottom of the painted gypsum walls have already become quite dirty after two days.) I guess when you render with white in the computer, it looks so good that you just want to stick to it. But the computer doesn't tell you how materials age through time in the physical reality.

Ticketing, coat check, and entrance to the theater

On the wall is a 50-ft-long seamless projection City Glow by Chiho Aoshima

Museum Store

Cafe

I am not trying to be 100% negative here. In fact, there are several interesting moments in the museum, especially in the circulation. As you move through ramps and stairs, the experience of the dynamic space unfolds as if in a moving picture. The impressive large pieces of Corian guardrails and benches enhance the seamless transition of space.

The exhibition itself is a good combination of the digital and the physical. There are physical set models, Star Wars action figures, antique arcade video games, as well as immersive digital projections, augmented sculptures, and interactive work stations.
 

The circle of Star Wars vs. Star Trek!

Antique arcade video games

Augmented Sculpture (2007) by Pablo Valbuena

Interactive station to create your own stop motion animation

Cut from the pristine white lobby, the access to the theater is a futuristic luminous blue tunnel. Inside the theater, the Cindy Sirko designed curtain bears striking graphics of something like a zooming cyberspace. On the walls and the ceiling, the triangular motif appears again, but in this case made of vibrant Yves Klein blue felt panels. When asked about the choice of color, Leeser explained, "blue is the color of the digital world." Oh boy, I thought the triangles are already very literal...

                

Holey, wholly, holy

         
Hole

In the middle of the vast atrium of MoMA stands a lone baby grand piano. This is not just a normal piano; the Bechstein has a large hole carved out in the center of its case! Is this a sculpture then, like those by Gordon Matta-Clark or some sort? But you know it's more than that - the reversed pedals give it away. The object seems like the wire that Philippe Petit put between the twin towers, quietly awaiting some magnificent performance to occur.

 Whole

A performer approaches the piano, puts his hands on the rim and pauses. He ducks under the piano, and reemerges from the hole. Then he bends over and starts to play, from inside the piano, upside down and backwards. The relationship between the musician and the instrument is far more intimate than ordinary music performances. Here, the musician is part of the instrument. He inhabits it, like a hermit crab finds its shell. The two become a hybrid whole.

Once in a while, the performer pushes the piano and moves with it to a new location, causing the audience to move along. Seen from the upper levels, it almost looks like a shepher herding a group of sheep. Through collective choreography, the viewers/listeners participate as part of a spontaneous group dance.

Holiness

This is the performance piece by artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. Maybe it's because of the Christmas/New Year season, they picked Beethoven's Ode to Joy. By altering the instrument, they alter the music, in a way that reminds me of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol's manipulations of Mona Lisa. The hole removes two octaves of strings, so the music is recognizable but incomplete. When it gets to the middle section of the keyboard, the notes are reduced to mere percussive sounds produced by the fingers hitting the keys. Due to physical constraints, the performance itself is by no means perfect. But it's exactly through this imperfection you see the performer's effect and vigor. Someone from the audience says, "Poor guy! He has to unlearn everything he learned to do this." This is precisely why the performance is so charming. On top of the physical challenges, there are psychological endeavors involved. This is a true ode to joy - the joy of passion; the joy of love.
               

On On Line

     
Walking through the galleries of the current MoMA show "On Line," I saw an amazing collection of brilliant works, featuring icons such as Picasso, Duchamp, and Kandinsky, as well as many less known but talented artists. At the same time, I felt rather confused - even lost. Is this just a survey of whatever art pieces that have beautiful lines in them? If so, why did they skip some usual suspects like Brice Marden but put in Jean Arp's square compositions? Maybe the curators made such selective decisions in order to make a point here? But what is it?

Study for the Muses (1991-1997) by Brice Marden,
whose work, for some reason, was not included in the show On Line

I went back to the entrance and read the curatorial notes. It says: "On Line ... argues for an expanded history of drawing that moves off the page into space and time." The exhibition "is organized chronologically in three sections: Surface Tension, featuring the artistic drive to construct and represent movement through line within the flat picture plane; Line Extension, composed of works in which lines extend beyond flatness into real space; and Confluence, presenting works in which line and background are fused, giving greater significance to the space between lines."

OK, they did try to voice a message and organize accordingly; just I didn't quite get it - maybe because I walked through the show backwards. It's a great concept to revisit and rediscover something as fundamental as line in art. But chronologically? Are we talking about a linear history here? (Maybe they are too obsessed with "line"...) I don't think developments in history works like that. When Picasso drew a line, did he only think about "tension on the surface" and not space or time? Is it fair to put Loie Fuller's dance in the first section with works that draw lines "within the flat picture plane," just because the performance took place more than a century ago?

Actually, I should be happy to see Loie Fuller's work in the show. In art, lines exist not only as drawn with pencil on paper or brush on canvas. Artists have explored many different mediums. A line can be created by cutting (Lucio Fontana, Gordon Matta-Clark), folding (Dorothea Rockburne), dancing (Loie Fuller, Trisha Brown), and walking (Richard Long). Materials can be thread (Anna Maria Maiolino, Ranjani Shettar), metal wires (Alexander Calder, Gego), Plexiglas (Georges Vantongerloo), or even horsehair (Pierrette Bloch). On Line successfully captures this expanded definition of drawing. But I think they missed out three important artists: André Cadere, Cai Guoqiang, and Dan Flavin. Cadere represents the process of sculpting a line (as opposed to sculpting with lines, like Gego), while Cai draws through gunpowder explosion. Flavin uses light as drawing material, and consequentially paints the wall.

Lines of different processes and materials
Clockwise from top left: Fontana, Matta-Clark, Fuller, Cadere, Gego, Flavin, Long.

Cai Guoqiang, Dragon or Rainbow Serpent: A Myth Glorified or Feared (1996)

Here, I am proposing a counter-curation of On Line. Instead of a flatfooted linear chronological display, we can explore multiple developments of the concept of line in the history of modern/contemporary art through different themes, and we can use the notion of "relation" as an organizational thread. First of all, there are compositional relations, which we can take examples from De Stijl (Mondrian), Russian Constructivists (El Lissitzky), Bauhaus (Kandinsky), and more recently, Ellsworth Kelly. These artists explore line in relation to the page and other elements on it. The meandering compositions by Brice Marden can serve as example of line that folds and unfolds onto itself.

Then there are dimensional relations. A line is one-dimensional. How does art express line in relation to point (0D), plane (2D), space (3D), and space-time (4D)? Space is the primary focus of the current exhibition (with Picasso's Cubist drawings and Sol LeWitt's three-dimensional grid). But it doesn't address much of the other dimensions. Line is composed by points. André Cadere's round bars could be understood as such. At a larger scale, The Gates by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, which didn't make it to the current selection, shows the point-line relation just as well. Many large wall drawings by Sol LeWitt (none of which was picked by the MoMA curators) are perfect examples of lines composing a plane. Tara Donovan's installation of loose folded plastic sheeting has a similar effect. The forth dimension is a bit tricky. MoMA features some dance and performance pieces. Perhaps also music? We can include works by Iannis Xenakis. His branching drawings remind me of the Algue screen that the Bouroullec Brothers designed for Vitra, which in fact is also a surface formed by many lines.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Gates (2005)

Sol LeWitt, Scribble (2007)

Iannis Xenakis, Study for Erikhthon (c.1973)

Now I have mentioned The Gates, the issue of scale and Land Art leads us to the notion of line in relation to nature. Other key figures under this theme include Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Richard Long, and Walter de Maria. These artists used land as the canvas, placing abstract geometry such as straight, curve/spiral, or zigzag lines in nature as symbols of human intervention. They also borrowed and reappropriated lines directly from nature, like The Lightening Field by Walter de Maria. I have to admit, I am so tempted to include The Palm Islands in Dubai here.

Lines in Land Art
Clockwise from top left: Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970); Walter de Maria, The Lightning Field (1977); Walter de Maria, Mile Long Drawing (1968); Richard Long, A Line in the Himalayas (1975); Christo, Running Fence (1972-6); Michael Heizer, Dissipate (1968)

I was very happy to see young Lithuanian artist Zilvinas Kempinas' Double O featured in the show. I saw it last year at Yvon Lambert and I still find it ingenious - the two dancing circles are formed by the combined forces of gravity, wind, and magnetic field. The installation comes to life through basic physics, constantly changing and always reflecting the complex conditions of "now."

Zilvinas Kempinas, Double O (2008)

In my alternative version of the show, I would like to add two other young artists who have also skillfully and gracefully dealt with lines. One is Tomas Saraceno, born in Argentina and now based in Frankfurt. Formerly trained as an architect, he follows the tradition of visionary architects like Buckminster Fuller and Yona Friedman, using elastic ropes to form spider's web or cloud-like tensile structures that somehow imply floating habitats.

Tomas Saraceno, Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web (2008)

Tomas Saraceno, Cloud Cities Connectome (2010)

The other is Seattle-based duo Lead Pencil Studio (Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo), who are also architects-turned-artists. Their recent installation at the US-Canada border near Vancouver looks like a giant Sol LeWitt wall drawing, but with depth. Interestingly, this piece touches almost all types of relations mentioned above. Countless metal bars are welded together to create a three-dimensional volume. Fuzzy on the outside, the volume frames an inner void with crisp edges. This "missing billboard" redirects attention to the landscape, and relates itself to nature in general. With exquisite elegance, it marks the socio-political line of the border.

Lead Pencil Studio, Non-Sign II (2010)

       

Impression of American cities

        
The New York Times has taken recent data from the Census Bureau and created an interactive map that visually displays the distribution of people (and their race, education, income status, etc) throughout the US. My exercise here is to take the map, zoom into several major cities, and turn it into a more abstract version of maps (at the same scale). The result is a series of almost impressionist patterns.

Green: White; Blue: Black; Yellow: Hispanic; Red: Asian
(Color intensity = Density)

New York, NY

Chicago, IL

Los Angeles, CA

San Francisco, CA

Washington, DC

Philadelphia, PA

Boston, MA

Miami, FL

Houston, TX

Detroit, MI

Cleveland, OH

What do we see from these patterns? It's quite obvious that there are very distinct sectors for different ethnic groups in most cities. The amazing patchworks of NYC and Chicago, and the harsh line of 8 Mile Road in Detroit are vivid examples. Also, Cleveland looks like a butterfly with wings in different colors. I don't know if I should be surprised by this or not...

The metropolitan areas of Detroit and Boston has similar population, but they take on very different density patterns. Boston was built by the early settlers with the memories of European cities, while in Detroit, people say, "we make cars, and of course we'll use them." Houston and Philadelphia have a similar difference in terms of density. The graphic comparison below (one dot = 100 people) shows clearly the distinction between the dense urban cores in Northwestern cities and the spread-out versions in the Midwest and the South.

Detroit (L) and Boston (R), at the same scale

Houston (L) and Philadelphia (R), at the same scale

We can't simply put "=" signs between education, money, and success. But when I switched between the distribution of Master's degree graduates and neighborhood median income, I saw uncanny similarities between the maps. This happens in NYC, Chicago, as well as LA. The following maps show "people with Master's degree or higher" on the left (the more the darker), and median income on the right (the higher the darker). I think this at least proves the importance of education. Did you just say "duh"? Well, obviously not everybody can see it - especially not politicians.

New York City

Chicago

Los Angeles