on the set at The Listening Array photo and video shoot
I have spent my week listening to secret tapes from Kennedy’s office during the Cuban Missile Crisis and reading the transcripts of Reagan and Gorbechev’s Cold War dinner parties in Reykjavik, Iceland. It all boils down to espionage, really, and the bug the Russians put in the U.S. seal at the American embassy in Moscow. That seal, plus fifty-year-old listening devices and gold halos in historical art: that’s the jist of this project.
It doesn’t necessarily make sense, and that used to bother me, back when I was suspicious of postmodern art, before I started making serious art myself. Yet it does make a kind of sense when you see it all in context. This project we're working on is called The Listening Array: a term that refers to a series of microphones connected in different intervals that correlate data to determine position. It’s a device used for spying. It’s also exactly what it sounds like: an arrangement of things that are used to listen. In this project, it references both meanings.
Continue reading "The Listening Array: Essay" »
[I wrote the following review when the Smithson retrospective opened at MOCA last fall. Since the show has just opened at the Whitney in New York, I thought I'd dust if off and post it. I haven't yet seen the show at the Whitney, so I have no idea how the exhibition is handled in that particular space. Check out From the Floor for an up-to-date look at the NYC exhibition.]
The Robert Smithson retrospective at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles has been widely touted as a successful exhibition, particularly in the West Coast media. The exhibition is an uncannily timed coup, taking advantage of a natural phenomenon — the drought which has lowered the level of the Great Salt Lake, thereby exposing Smithson’s most acclaimed Earthwork, Spiral Jetty, which has been submerged for most of its existence — and this has led to increased public interest and media coverage of the influential artist.
Continue reading "Rendered Null: A Review of the Robert Smithson Exhibition" »
The Voyage of the Icebergs, Frederic Edwin Church, 1861
"The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water."
Ernest Hemingway, Death In the Afternoon
The museum is mostly empty. Except for a guard rocking sleepily on her heels the next room over, I am the only person in the painting gallery. I’ve skipped school again. When my bus let me off this morning, I looked both ways for teachers, and headed quickly in the other direction, towards the arts district.
Downtown Dallas is an empty showroom: all glass buildings and concrete with no pedestrian traffic. The one-way streets downtown are particularly deserted on a weekday mid-morning, and I walked to the museum with skyscrapers rising all around me, aware that many work-a-day eyes sealed behind tinted glass could spot me, truant.
Continue reading "Icebergs" »
