ARTS ON THE TOWN
KFNX 1100AM
6:00pm, Sundays
Arts on the Town is the Valley's only radio show about the arts. Every Sunday at 6pm over KFNX, 1100 AM, Susan and Kenneth LaFave talk with the artists, actors, musicians, dancers, writers, producers and curators who help make the Phoenix area a lively place for the arts. The last Sunday of each month features CF's Clark Olson discussing a work in the contemporary wing at Phoenix Art Museum. More than 50 podcasts of interviews with local arts personalities are available for download at the show's website, www.artsonthetownaz.com.
Josiah McElheny, The Last Scattering Surface
2006, handblown glass, chrome plated aluminum,
rigging, electric lighting
Museum purchase with funds provided by
Jan and Howard Hendler
Josiah McElheny was born in
Boston and educated at the Rhode Island School of Design. He then studied with premier glassblowers throughout the world.
His significant exhibitions and projects have been shown at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Art Institute of Chicago, Seattle's Henry Art Gallery, the Whitney Biennial, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco's De Young Museum, SITE Santa Fe and Phoenix Art Museum on the upper level of the Katz Wing.
The Last Scattering Surface is McElheny's second piece in his Big Bang Series which describes the creation of the universe. His first Big Bang Sculpture, An End to Modernity, is a dazzling and daunting complex assemblage that may be interpreted as a crystal chandelier, hung incongruously low so that its core is at eye level, or just as appropriately, the viewer may see An End To Modernity as a scientifically accurate representation of the expansion of the universe following the big bang. An End to Modernity is in the collection of the Tate Modern in London.
The Last Scattering Surface is Josiah McElheny's second piece in the Big Bang series. This ten-foot spherical sculpture of gleaming metal and glass also floats just inches from the floor, and it refers to both the history of modernism and the science of the Big Bang. But the poetry of the title of The Last Scattering Surface comes directly from the scientific concepts the sculpture represents. The last scattering surface is the scientific term used to describe the moment when the universe transitioned from the opaque to the transparent, when the light particles that filled the hot early cosmos decoupled from normal matter and began to travel freely through space. Subtle variations in the intensity of this light were the result of fluctuations in temperature and density and these seeds of variation have grown by gravity into the galaxies, stars and planets that fill the universe today.
The Last Scattering Surface attempts to explain the creation of the universe by postulating that it emerged rapidly from an extremely dense state 14 billion years ago. Physical evidence led support to the theory in 1965, and McElheny's great leap of the imagination is to equate this theory philosophically and aesthetically with the contemporaneous appearance, in the mid 1960s of minimalism in the world of ideas and art. McElheny marries these two intellectual events into an object based on the designs for the chandelier commissioned for New York City's Metropolitan Opera House in 1965 which was meant to be a minimalist tour de force and to have a galactic appearance.
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Chuck Close, Philip Glass State 1, 2005, Jacquard tapestry
On loan from Barry Berkus and Family
Stepping off the elevator on the uppermost level of the Katz Wing is a whole new experience. There, in all its glory, is a tapestry by Chuck Close portraying the composer Philip Glass. After two years of tests and refinements, Chuck Close has completed his first tapestry with the Magnolia Tapestry (Oakland, California) project. This monumental portrait is modeled after a photograph of Close's long time friend, composer Philip Glass. Close is known for such portraits, which he creates by translating photographs into immense works of art using a grid and a module: a stroke of paint, a fingerprint and now, a stitch.
The black and white format is a revisitation of Close's 1969 series in black and white, where the now iconic portrait of a young Philip Glass first appeared. From a distance, this contemporary depiction of Glass appears photorealisitc: the viewer can clearly see the changes time has worked upon his face. Up close, the image dissolves into an abstract field of woven color and texture.
Philip Glass State 1 was woven in Belgium with a ten-foot-wide, double-head electronic Jacquard on a Dornier loom. The tapestry is here on a long-term loan, but it's a piece you will want to see again and again.
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Frederick Hammersley, Even #3, 1962, oil on linen
On loan to Phoenix Art Museum by anonymous donor
ArtPick 2007 has now officially ended with three works of art that were ArtPick choices on display at Phoenix Art Museum.
Richard Misrach's Untitled #1179-04 (Beach Series), ArtPick 2007 winner, was the first to be displayed. The second piece now on display in the Hendler Gallery is Still Life by Waltercio Caldas which was acquired by Phoenix Art Museum with funds donated by Miriam and Yefim Sukhman. And recently, a private donor purchased Frederick Hammersley's Even #3, and it is currently on loan to Phoenix Art Museum. It can be seen in the Anderman Gallery on the main level of the Katz wing.
Frederick Hammersley, born in Salt Lake City in 1919, is one of America's best known Hard-Edge
painters. He studied at art schools in Los Angeles and began teaching in the 1950s. He taught at Pomona College during the 1960s, and in the 1970s joined the faculty at the University of New Mexico. After giving up teaching to devote his full energy to painting, Hammersley remained in New Mexico.
The 89-year-old painter is one of four artists whose landmark work in 1950s Los Angeles came to be known as the school of Hard Edge Painting. In contrast to the contemporaneously New York Abstract Expressionists whose work relied in part on spontaneity and chance, Hammersley and his cohorts intellectualized the interplay of geometric forms and colors. What is surprising is the renewed level of interest in Hammersley's geometric forms and colors which hasn't changed significantly in almost half a century. "Geometric paintings were unpopular. I was unpopular -- invisible for years," Hammersley says. Not anymore. Hammersley has exhibited at every major art museum across America and is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the Museum of Art, Santa Fe.
Hammersley's abstract work is intuitive. He has been particularly interested in resolving oppositions between contrasting color and shape in works such as Even #3. This is not to say his paintings lack emotion, rather the opposite is apparent in the dynamism of simple mirrored forms in opposing fields of color.
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Waltercio Caldas, Still Life (Black Series), 2005
stainless steel, granite, wool yarn and glass
Collection of Phoenix Art Museum
Museum purchase with funds provided by
Miriam and Yefim Sukhman
It's a great joy to announce that as a result of ArtPick 2007 an additional work of art, a sculpture by Waltercio Caldas, has been added to the collection of Phoenix Art Museum. Funds have been provided for this acquisition by past Phoenix Art Museum Trustee Miriam Sukhman and Yefim Sukhman.
Waltercio Caldas is a mid-career sculptor emerging on the world stage. He was born in 1946 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and studied with painter Ivan Serpa (two works in Phoenix Art Museum collection) in the 1960s. He still lives and works in Rio while showing his work internationally.
Precise and geometric, Caldas' sculpture does not fit with any specific style. It evokes an ethereal, poetic beauty while consisting of industrial materials. The sculptures from the artists "Black Series" force these materials into intimate relationships with each other, showing they are not as different as one might think. The heavy granite floats, the yarn seems to have the same property as the steel rods and the transparent glass works as a mirror.
Caldas represented Brazil in the 1997 Venice Biennial and the 1996 Sao Paulo Biennial. In 2007, his work was again included in the Venice Biennial. A retrospective exhibition will be shown in Brazil next year and will travel to the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, and to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia. His work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art and the Nueu Galerie, Kassel.
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Richard Misrach, Untitled #1179 (Beach Series), 2004
Chromogenic color print
Museum purchase with funds provided by Contemporary Forum (ArtPick 2007 Winner)
Untitled #1179 (Beach Series) was chosen as first choice for ArtPick 2007 and is the newest acquisition for the contemporary collection at Phoenix Art Museum. It may be seen on the main level of the Katz Wing.
Richard Misrach, one of America's leading photographers over the past thirty years, has written about his current series of monumental photographs, "On The Beach:"
"I was drawn to the fragility and grace of the human figure in the landscape. My thinking about this work was influenced by the events of 9/11, particularly by the images of individuals and couples falling from the World Trade Towers, as well as by the 1950s Cold War novel and film, On the Beach. Paradise has become an uneasy dwelling place; the sublime sea frames our vulnerability, the precarious nature of life itself."
This series is currently on exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago and featured in a major book by the Aperture Foundation.
Misrach, born in 1949, came to prominence through his two-decade series, "Desert Cantos," which characterized the beauty of the desert through its harshness. He studied photography at the University of California, Berkley. Misrach has published several monographs of his work, exhibited in scores of major institutions and has work in over 70 museums.
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Julian Opie, Julian and Suzanne Walking, 2007
animated LED display
Museum purchase with funds provided by
Jan and Howard Hendler
Julian and Suzanne Walking
A new and very exciting sculpture by the renowned artist Julian Opie, has arrived at Phoenix Art Museum, and has been installed in a new and very exciting location. Forty feet above street level on the McDowell façade of the museum is a niche that has been quietly waiting for just the right piece to fill it. The piece portrays two twelve foot tall figures, in white LED lights, a man and a woman walking into the future.
Each of Opie’s works starts from a mundane reality: in this case two people walking. This sculpture portrays the artist and his friend, Suzanne, chosen for her captivating stride, as they continually pass each other. Opie removes his subjects from their setting and takes away their distinctive features – in this case the features which make these two people recognizable. Now these two could be any man and woman walking. They are no longer specific. They become symbols that stand for any couple strolling anywhere, moving forward, out of the past and into the future, part of an endlessly interchangeable series.
Julian Opie’s highly stylised work, derived in part from the reduction of photographs or short films into figurative reproductions which are created using computer software. His work challenges the distinctions between sculpture, painting and the everyday objects of our modern environment. His pared-down, minimal style recalls the economical aesthetic of computer icons or board games. But, although his sculptures retain a flat pictographic quality, they also have a physical presence. With movement, we are given the chance to explore an artificial environment within real time and space.
The artist was born in London. He received his degree from Goldsmith’s College of Art in London, and achieved some early gallery success, thereby having some influence on slightly younger artists attending the same college, including Damien Hirst. One of his earlier works, which brought his style to the public eye, was an album cover he did for one of Britain’s well-known bands. His work has been exhibited at the Tate Britain, and he shows with the top gallery in London. He is the subject of a film profiling contemporary visual artists as well as the subject of a book produced by Tate Publishing as part of their Modern Artist series.
The environments Opie creates suggest urban spaces that include combinations of functional units, with little regard for individuality or the texture of life. In its repetition and anonymity, the work conveys a certain pleasure, a sense of freedom even, that only such neutrality could allow.
Julian Opie has said, “I am always referring to the world, to things that seem poignant to me and then try to synthesize or make my version of these things. Not with individual, specific objects but more as an example of something.”
-- Faith Sussman – Research Docent
Phoenix Art Museum
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ANISH KAPOOR
UPSIDE DOWN/INSIDE OUT, 2003
resin and paint
One of the major conflicts in art has always been centered on the balance to be struck between the necessary visible aspect, the color, space and material employed in the work and the spiritual, invisible level desired and inserted by the artist’s intellect. For Anish Kapoor, the physical reality of his objects is the indispensable beginning of a process, the end point of which connects directly to the world of ideas and the mind. One of the most influential sculptors working today, Anish Kapoor is renowned for his enigmatic sculptural forms that permeate physical and psychological space, often alluding to, and playing with, dualities (earth-sky, matter-spirit, lightness-darkness, visible-invisible, male-female and body-mind).
Two huge three-dimensional half circles or spheres, facing in opposite directions, flow together into one intense, highly polished, black sculpture which sits directly on the floor. Each half circle has a deep concave space that draws the viewer inward. It is not possible to tell how deep the concave spaces are. Yet within that depth resides the images of the viewers, clear, sharp and upside down. For Kapoor, the material removed to create the concave space is replaced by spectator after spectator, each taking his or her place in the implied infinity of the illusionistic space. His intention is to engage the viewer, evoking mystery through the works’ dark cavities, awe through their size and simple beauty and fascination through their reflective facades.
However, what is also striking about this sculpture is the vivid materiality, high-tech craft and modernist glorification of geometry hidden within. Clearly, a great deal of technical knowledge was necessary to give its concave center the luster necessary to turn it into a mirror, and a special one at that, for the mirrored spectator remains strongly three-dimensional. Kapoor has said that he “wishes to make sculpture…about experience that is outside material concerns,” and he has certainly succeeded.
— Faith Sussman
Museum purchase with funds generously provided by Men’s Arts Council Sculpture Endowment, Susan and Eliot Black, Jacquie and Bennett Dorrance, Ellen and Howard Katz, Sally and Richard Lehmann, Robynn and Robert Sussman, Wilde Family Trust, Heather and Michael Greenbaum, Faith Sussman and Richard Corton, Mary Beth and Joseph Cherskov, Jerry Appell, Denise and Robert Delgado, and Patricia and Richard Nolan.
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Sol LeWitt, Master of Conceptualism, Dies at 78
Contemporary Forum, Phoenix Art Museum, treasures Sphere Lit from the Top, by Sol LeWitt which is located in the Atrium of the Katz Wing. The following are excerpted paragraphs from a lengthy article by Michael Kimmelman that appeared in The New York Times on Monday, April 9, 2007:
Sol LeWitt, whose deceptively simple geometric sculptures and drawings and ecstatically colored and jazzy wall paintings established him as a lodestar of modern American art, died yesterday in New York. He was 78 and lived mostly in Chester, Conn. The cause was complications from cancer, said Susanna Singer, a longtime associate.
Mr. LeWitt helped establish Conceptualism and Minimalism as dominant movements of the postwar era. A patron and friend of colleagues young and old, he was the opposite of the artist as celebrity. He tried to suppress all interest in him as opposed to his work; he turned down awards and was camera-shy and reluctant to grant interviews. He particularly disliked the prospect of having his photograph in the newspaper.
He reduced art to a few of the most basic shapes (quadrilaterals, spheres, triangles), colors (red, yellow, blue, black) and types of lines, and organized them by guidelines he felt in the end free to bend. Much of what he devised came down to specific ideas or instructions: a thought you were meant to contemplate, or plans for drawings or actions that could be carried out by you, or not.
To grasp his work could require a little effort. His early sculptures were chaste white cubes and gray cement blocks. For years people associated him with them, and they seemed to encapsulate a remark he once made: that what art looks like “isn’t too important.” This was never exactly his point. But his early drawings on paper could resemble mathematical diagrams or chemical charts. What passed for humor in his art tended to be dry. “Buried Cube Containing an Object of Importance but Little Value” (1968), an object he buried in the garden of Dutch collectors, was his deadpan gag about waving goodbye to Minimalism. He documented it in photographs, in one of which he stands at attention beside the cube. A second picture shows the shovel; a third, him digging the hole.
To the extent that Mr. LeWitt’s work existed in another person’s mind, he regarded it as collaborative. Along these lines he became especially well known in art circles for his generosity, often showing with young artists in small galleries to give them a boost; helping to found Printed Matter, the artists’ organization that produces artists’ books; and trading works with other, often needier artists, whose art he also bought. Some years back he placed part of what had become, willy-nilly through this process, one of the great private collections of contemporary art in the country on long-term loan to the Wadsworth Atheneum, his childhood museum and the one that again was in his neighborhood after he moved, in the mid-’80s, from Spoleto to Chester. He lived there with his wife, Carol, who survives him, along with their two daughters, Sofia, who lives in New York and works at the Paula Cooper Gallery, and Eva, a senior at Bard College.
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