Art in Balance: From Anadol's AI Ooze to Serra's Steel "Equal"

First posted on FB, Feb. 16, 2023.

I had an hour or so to spend at the Museum of Modern Art yesterday, and it occurred to me later that in my random wanderings, mostly through recent and contemporary art, I'd experienced a kind of yin/yang revelation. On the one hand there was the astounding, rather psychedelic, machine-dream digital video creation of Refik Anadol, "Unsupervised." The pulsing, wall-sized, ever-evolving blob was a kind of macro abstraction in three-dimensional motion, which (and speaking of AI) had its origins in actual MoMa imagery transformed by the computer brain. It was mesmerizing, performatively electric and extremely captivating given the quantity of phone cameras and gawkers (self included) in its presence. On the other hand there was the room that held Richard Serra's "Equal," a suite of four stacked pairs of steel cubes. This, I realized, was Anadol's opposite, an experience in solidity and stasis. Mesmerizing in its own way, it asks us to slow down and look inward. MoMA The Museum of Modern Art

From the Archives: In the Whirly World with Julie Blackmon

The photographer Julie Blackmon has rocketed to commercial success from her modest and raucously domestic base in Springfield, Missouri. Last night (Oct. 7, 2022), she opened a new exhibit, “Metaverse,” at Haw Contemporary in Kansas City. It’s a stunning display of her recent work, and there’s also a survey of her earlier work in two galleries upstairs. I chatted with Julie for a few minutes during the crowded affair. We had connected, alas, only by phone in late 2008 for a magazine piece I wrote about her. At the time, she had begun to evolve beyond black and white photos into a glorious and surreal world of color, mostly involving children—hers and those of her siblings and neighbors—in theatrical and often eerie compositions. She was just beginning to get noticed. She told me how grateful she was for this story, which was one of the first in-depth pieces that took her and her art seriously. Friends gave her laminated copies of the multi-page article. The story is largely lost and virtually unobtainable in KC Star archives; I was able to snare black-and-white copies of the magazine pages. But I also miraculously found a printed-out draft of the article, which I’ve used for the text here, with a few silent and immaterial edits. (I’ll overlook a couple of my clunkier sentences.) The story appeared Feb. 1, 2009, in the Kansas City Star Magazine, under the headline “Controlled Chaos” and accompanied by numerous photos from her work at the time..

 In the gallery above are my photos from the Haw opening. The event was populated with as many as 40 of Julie’s relatives. She said it was a gathering that may never happen again. I didn’t catch the name of the girl who re-enacted her physical enlargement in “Tall Girl.” But It definitely was a moment. I’m also including Julie’s two pictures in tribute to George Caleb Bingham, “Flatboat” and “Paddle Boat.” They are extraordinary and quite compelling. And they may well become a signature pair of images that speak to Julie’s deep engagement with American history, culture, and emotional conflict.

By STEVE PAUL

If the history of photography is any guide, children and cameras were made for each other. As subjects of human innocence—when they’re not subjects of mischief-making—children have provided photographers and viewers endless fascination. We learn about ourselves by what we see in them.

            For Julie Blackmon, a Springfield, Mo., photographer who’s gaining wider art-world attention, the lives of children became not only a natural, recurring theme, but essential characters in her arrest, often wacky images of family life.

            It’s easy to understand why. Let’s see: She grew up in a family as the oldest of nine children. Now, at 42, she had three children of her own. Most of her siblings live in the same Springfield neighborhood, and they all have children, too. Then add in the cousins and their children.

            “It’s like some kind of Branch Davidian cult around here,” Black said by phone. “We’re not super religious. But I’m Catholic, and I ended up just having 75 relatives in the same neighborhood.

            Three dozen of her extended-family photographs are collected in her recent book, Domestic Vacations, published by Radius Books, a small, art-book specialist in Santa Fe, N.M.

            From the cover image of the barefoot, red-caped, apparent troublemaker in “Time Out” to her many antic arrangements of space, color, cavorting kids and carefully orchestrated details, Blackmon’s photographic project clearly is the work of a keen-eyed artist and cultural critic but also a sometimes harried parent.

            “I think this body of work is about me sorting it out,” she said—sorting out the stress of high-pressure parenthood and balancing the memories of her mother’s scream-filled household with the challenges of her own.

            Just the other day, with a writer on the other end of the phone, screams erupted in the background. It seems her 9-year-old son, Owen, was tormenting one of his teenage sisters over the matter of a smashed Wii.

            It was a teacher work day, and the kids had a day off from school.

            “There’re way too many of those,” Blackmon said.

***

            Like Sally Mann, Ralph Eugene Meatyard and a legion of other photographers before her, Blackmon, with her richly composed narratives, explores childhood imagery in the borderland of surrealism.

            Take “Birds at Home.” Five children appear on, around and under a dining table, each seemingly lost in his or her own moment. The infant on the table pets a cat. A girl stands on a chair, the hem of her dress in her mouth. Another leans on her elbows, hand holding chin, like a princess in then making. A boy on the floor looks at a toy dinosaur. Another kneels on a chair, his face buried in a picture book from which the photograph takes its title, Birds at Home.

            Despite the daylight a chandelier burns bright. There’s a mixing bowl on the table, an errant beater on the floor and whoever left the Starbucks cup at table’s edge is nowhere in sight.

            Controlled chaos for sure.

            But wait, there’s more: An egg carton lay open and six shells broken neatly in half litter the table and floor, lending the scene a Gothic twist. Have these five children been hatched in some nightmare fantasy? Dows the sixth broken egg belong to the parakeet perched at photo’s edge, or to the black-and-white cat, or the red-headed doll sprawled in the lower corner like some fallen putto?

            This is typical Blackmon. Her pictures are multi-layered scenes, compressing time, action and psychological states of mind. It’s almost as if a short film had been collapsed into a single frame. There’s always something in the deep space or a tiny detail in a corner that she wants you to notice—an errant piece of gum, a fallen “tippee cup.” Children appear upside down, on the verge of danger and every which way, especially loose.

            “There’s a playfulness and a huymor to her work that is really refreshing, said April Watson, assistant curatorof photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, which acquired two of Blackmon’s images not long ago, including “Birds at Home.”

            “She shows the activity of childhood play is not just sugar and spice. There’s decapitation of dolls, that kind of thing. There’s a lot of violent acts, I think, that anybody who has young children knows it’s a very much part of play.”

            Some of Blackmon’s scenes consciously reference the paintings of Jan Steen, a 17th-century Dutchman so well known for his raucous pictures of everyday life that they spawned a cliché—“a Jan Steen household.” :ike Steen’s canvases, Blackmon’s frames are filled with good-humored satire.

            And in their topsy-turvy domestic worlds, both speak to contemporary parenthood, Watson said.

            “You can never quite keep things together,” she said. “And the kids sometimes ssem to be ruling the roost. That’s one of the things I definitely love about her work.”

            Blackmon’s pictures converse with contemporary culture, consumerism and art history in general. Sephora bags and iPods appear not just as name-brand props, but as comments on social priorities. And it’s not hard to make the visual connection, in “Candy,” between the girl in a blue velvet dress and the framed reproduction behind her of Thomas Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy,” an iconic childhood painting and once one of the best-known piece of Western art.

            ***

            After a decade of being a housewife and mother, Blackmon renewed a long interst in photography six years ago by taking classes at Missouri State University, where her husband, fiction writer W.D. Blackmon, heads the English department. Years earlier, she’d been a photography major, but never finished her degree.

            “I wanted to do something besides watch ‘Oprah’ every afternoon,” she said. “So I thought I’d take pictures of kids. The idea was to take better photographs to hang on the wall.”

            She started working in black and white, convenient given that a previuous owner had equipped the Blackmons’ century-old house with a basement darkroom. Her sisters encouraged her to put the darkroom back in action.

            And the more pictures she made, the more serious she got, and as she began to get feedback from awards judges, curators and her sisters, she knew she was onto something. She turned to color, and her photographs became increasingly complex scenes.

            As an art form photography operates under a big tent. Some believe in a kind of pure photographic truth, where a documentary artists, composing a frame and snapping the shutter at a proverbial “decisive moment,” captures light and life in a way that makes mere reality more meaningful.

            Blackmon began there, wielding her Hasselblad to take a documentary approach towards children at play.

            Nowadays she tends to belong to the camp where artists make their truths with far more obvious interventions: staging events, constructing narratives, manipulating images with all the tools PhotoShop has to offer.

            But her evolution involved more than just technology.

            “You could see the path she was on,” said Kathy Aron Dowell, who showed Blackmon’s work at the now-defunct Society for Contemporary Photography gallery. “She was doping black and white work of her children. It was beautiful, but it didn’t have the personal vision that I see in her work now.”

            Experiment and manipulation in photography dates back to some of the earliest daguerreotypes of the 19th century. And, said Watson, the debate over purity in photography heated up again in the 1970s and ‘80s as photographers such as Sandy Skoglund, Cindy Sherman and C=Gregory Crewdson adopted what was termed the “directorial mode,” staging scenes and inventing installations to be captured on film.

            “They were creatimg something to be photographed as opposed to ging out intothe world to make photographs of what one encounters,” Watson said.

            Digital technology has expanded the available tools exponentially, making it that much easier for photographers and “new-media” artists to blur the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction.

            Blackmon compares her way of working to writing, painting and film-making. Just as her husband borrows and exaggerates real details of life to write stories, she arranges, compiles and composes pieces of real life with fanstastical inventions and combinations of multiple images.

            “Sometimes I can get an image all in one shot,” she said. “Sometimes it’s 17 shots. In the end, it doesn’t matter. It’s just a different way of working.”

            But she also believes that, despite working two weeksor more to plan a picture, her best work results from those spontaneous convergences of light and action—thank you, dear child—that remain the essence of photography.

            “There’s just a degree of that you can never totally create,” she said. “Some of that is completely out of your hands.

            Lately Blackmon has been making prints—huge ones, as wide as 54 inches—for new exhibits, including one that opened in Januaty at the Fahey Klein Gallery in Los Angeles. Shows will follow this year in San Francisco and Boulder, Colo. The Nelson-Atkins is planning an exhibit for later this year of contemporary photography and children and Blackmon “almost certainly” will be in it, Watson said.

            What with the holidays and printing, Blackmon said, “I haven’t madea new image since November.”

            And then there’s that thing called real life.

            Another interruption: Owen is standing nearby with his coat on. A charger for a Nintendo is lost and they’d have to use the one that works in the car. But mom’s on the phone.

            “Here I go, out to the car,” she said. “Trudging through the snow.”

From the Archives: Remembering Laura DeAngelis

More than 14 years ago I spent a bit of reporting time following around the artist Laura DeAngelis, who was in the midst of creating a large public-art project in the heart of downtown Kansas City. She was a ceramicist, a visionary, a birder, and a gentle soul, who, if I recall correctly, also was an accomplished barista at Broadway Coffee in Westport. Well, those who knew Laura were saddened and shaken to learn this spring that she had died. Apparently, amid a mental-health crisis, she’d taken her own life. Laura had left Kansas City many years ago, and I’d had no contact with her, pretty much since I wrote this long magazine piece for The Kansas City Star Magazine. It appeared Jan. 20, 2008 under the headline “An Idea Takes Flight.” One corrective: When I dug out the story, I was horrified to learn that I’d committed a little crime against journalism: For some reason I can’t recall, Laura’s name appeared with a space in it (De Angelis) throughout the story. Mea culpa and apologies to Laura’s legacy and her family and friends. I’ve fixed that here. And another note: Not mentioned in the story, because Laura asked me to keep it out, was the presence in her apartment, in addition to her canary named Victor, of a crow she had rescued. She feared the wildlife authorities would not approve. I recently stopped by Oppenstein Park to gauge the current state of the installation, 14 years after its dedication. The park—property, I think, of Jackson County rather than the city—seems a little forlorn. And it’s hard to imagine that the mechanical star map still works (please correct me if you know otherwise). But it is nice to see that signage about Laura’s project as well as her metal bird medallions and lovely ceramic tiles remain in place.

By STEVE PAUL

            Laura DeAngelis is bundled up against a wind whipped morning chill. She wears a brown quilted jacket and tan denim pants. A work crew is laying a bed of concrete in a vest-pocket park downtown, and DeAngelis, an artist, is about to make a gesture that’s the biggest of her short career.

            She kneels down on pads atop the quickly firming concrete. She bends over and places a steel emblem of a bird—a finely detailed kingfisher with a berry in its beak onto the pavement-to-be.

            Soon one of the workers, Mike Ward, takes over, further pressing the bird into the stiffening gray goo. He starts to clean the edges. It’s a fine bit of troweling and trimming that he keeps up for the next 30 minutes.

            Fourteen more of the artist’s birds eventually will end up in the concrete. A wren, a green heron, a yellow-billed cuckoo. And that’s only the beginning of the transformation of Oppenstein Brothers Memorial Park.

            The centerpiece of the redesigned park will be a 10-foot wide interactive map of the stars set on a base tiled in intricately carved ceramics, also from De Angelis’ hands.

            At 12th and Walnut streets, the 7,000 square-foot- patch of urban calm has long been a symbol of civic renaissance—and failure.

            Once described in this newspaper as a place where even the pigeons wouldn’t stick around, Oppenstein is on the verge of becoming the little park that could.

            DeAngelis, along with a t3m of designers, planners, builders, bureaucrats and boosters, has been working for more than a year to make that happen.

            The story of DeAngelis’ public art project, called “Celestial Flyways,” illustrates the complications that accompany the transformation of public space. But it also shows how a single artist can expand her creative vision, help forge a piece of civic identity and, despite the bureaucratic wringer that defines so much of the process, maintain her passion.

            “I don’t think I had any idea how many aspects you had to deal with to make a public art project in comparison to being a studio artist,” DeAngelis says. “It makes you practice some good time-management skills. It makes you think that things should happen so much easier than they do.”

            As a new graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute in 1995, Laura DeAngelis did her part to blaze the urban frontier. She spent four years transforming a third-floor industrial space on the northeast edge of downtown into a light-filled, high-ceilinged home and studio.

            “I didn’t make a single piece of art,” DeAngelis, now 34, says of that renovation period.

            Small teapots now line the top of a door frame. Ceramic tiles she designed cover the bathroom floor and walls. Her canary, Victor, chirps loudly in the sunny living room.

            As an artist, DeAngelis frequently turns to the past for inspiration. The large ceramic, figural sculptures she has shown in recent years with great success, appear as if they stepped out of Renaissance canvases.

            A few years ago, as she thought aobut applying for a public art project, she began wondering about the astrolabe. That ancient instrument helped astronomers reconcile time with the positions of the sun and stars in the sky. The astrolabe was a computer of its day—or, more properly, a slide rule, given its manual operation.

            DeAngelis had encountered astrolables as a child at the Adler Planetarium in her native Chicago, which has one of the world’s largest collections.

            “I’ve always loved old instruments,” she says. “They looked mysterious.”

            While researching her project she found James E. Morrison, a retired computer engineer in Delaware, who had created a Web site devoted to the astrolable.

            Seeing the chance to bring the wonders of the old tool to a wide audience, Morrison offered to collaborate with DeAngelis on her project. They soon decided it would be more practical to create a simpler device called an anaphoric clock.

            A precursor to the astrolabe, dating back some 2,000 years, the anaphoric clock polots the sky and the passage of time but with fewer moving parts. That would make it more practice for a public, interactive installation, which here will mean a hand-cranked mechanism to align the date and time with the stars above the park.

            “This will be by far the biggest anaphoric clock that’s ever been made,” Morrison says.

            Morrison and DeAngelis e-mailed ideas and images back and forth. Morrison was impressed by his new astronomy student.

            “She’s learned very quickly,” he says.

            DeAngelis first proposed a public art project, including an anaphoric clock, at another down site, but it didn’t fly. When the Art in the Loop program sought proposals to re-energize Oppenstein Park, she was encouraged to try again.

            As she studied the park, DeAngelis knew she wanted to connect people to the stars andto inject a sense of nature into the city.

            “I’m in this very urban place, but I really love the country. I was thinking about all the things I love about the country and how I could bring it into the city.”

            She was fond of running her dog along the riverfront, where, as a bird watcher, she took note of all the avian visitors who pass through mostly unnoticed. Scissor-tailed flycatchers, hooded mergansers—these are impressive travelers. “If you’re not looking for them, you don’t see them.”

            DeAngelis also knew that to make a real impact on Oppenstein Park, she needed to come up with something more than a piece of so-called plop art.

            “I started thinking not just about an art piece, but engaging people and getting them to stay in the park.

            “Putting a sculpture in the park was not going to be enough.”

            Encouraged by Art in the Loop to create a team of designers and engineers, DeAngelis selected Dominique Davison. Davison had recently established an architecture and urban planning firm in Kansas City with her husband, Robert Riccardi, after working for top architect Cesar Pelli out of New Haven, Conn.

            Their plan evolved into a makeover of the park.

            Davison proposed new landscaping, concrete planters and benches, and she worked with DeAngelis on aspects of the bird pieces and the placement and design of the star disc. The metal disc with include 496 holes, pugged with acrylic lenses, lighted from below. Visitors will set the current time and date, and the disc will replicate the stars above that very spot.

            The disc will also have 50 constellation drawings by DeAngelis and Peregrine Honig etched into the surface.

            In addition to the large tiles cladding the star disc wall, DeAngelis also designed a suite of smaller ceramics that will line the risers of three wide stairs. Those pieces will join the birds already set in the paving along with arced grooves in the concrete representing their migratory patterns.

            The project won the Art in the Loop competition in October 2006 but, as these things go, rather than hunker down in her studio to produce the drawings and tiles, DeAngelis found herself sucked into the sort of process that rarely looks like art. Meetings and more meetings. For months.

            A year ago, she and Davison and two dozen other people sat in a workshop downtown for parts of two days exploring the issues of public space. Consultants from the Project for Public Spaces in New York guided the locals through exercises on designing effective parts and plazas.

            Among the participants was Bill Dietrich, executive director of the Downtown Council. When he arrived a few years ago to kick-start the council’s Community Improvement District, one of the top items on his to-do list was cleaning up Oppenstein Park.

            Sprint Center was rising around the corner, H&R Block was moving into its new building a block away and the Power & Light District was coming out of the ground. With every sign of surrounding progress the park had become more central and more attractive as an urban experiment.

            Dietrich, along with Art in the Loop’s Kate Hackman, gathered people who saw the need to improve the park not just for aesthetic reasons but also for a shared vision of community. County parks people and neighboring property owners found common ground.

            “That’s  new concept downtown: ‘Investing in public space enhances the value of my property,’ “ Dietrich said at the time.

            After the workshops came months of working out details and solving technical problems of producing the metal birds and the star disc from DeAngelis’ detail drawings. The total budget—including the art works, site demolition and deconstruction, surveys, permits, contractor fees, signage, insurance—eventually was set at $475,000.

            Meanwhile, DeAngelis tested ceramic ingredients and glazes. And she calculated every-shifting dimensions for the tiles she planned to carve, a mathematical process made more complicated by the curvature of the star disc base and the 13 percent shrinkage her pieces would undergo in the kiln.

            Over the summer DeAngelis got a chance to extend her bird emblems beyond the park. The early arrival, a bird with a key in its mouth, got pressed into a new sidewalk across the street, on the southeast corner of 12th and Walnut.

            One day she and her fiancé, Louis Rose, went to see it.

            “it was covered in dust,” she remembers. “Louis spit on it to clean it up, and a security guard comes over and asks, ‘Why are hyou messing with the pigeon?’ “

            “So we can see it better,” Rose replied.

            DeAngelis was happy that the guard was protective of her artwork, but what she really wanted to say was, “It’s not a pigeon, it’s a rose-breasted grosbeak.

            A few weeks ago DeAngelis stayed up all night to finish building a full-scale, quarter-section mockup of the star disc installation.

            All of her birds had been pressed into the park’s new paving. A new planter wall and concrete benches were in place. Many of the tiles she had labored over with carving tools and a gentle touch had been fired and were awaiting placement on the site.

            Installation of the star disc, which is being fabricated A. Zahner and Co., and most plantings will wait till late winter and a planned March reopening of the park.

            For now, the mockup wedge sat in her living room as Art in the Loop board members, county parks peoples and other visitors got to see up close what the finished centerpiece would look like.

            DeAngelis had even covered the low curved wall with plaster modls of the large tiles in progress, which include her stylized Missouri water lilies and curling, watery waves.

            “This is going to be a lot more dramatic than I realized,” says David Miles, president of the H&R Block Foundation and board member of Art in the Loop.

            Jonathan Kemper, of Commerce Bank, peppered DeAngelis with questions about the mechanics and materials of the star disc, the interior lighting and other aspects of the plan.

              “This is cool,” Kemper says. “The color is fantastic.”

            DeAngelis explains to Porter Arneill, director of the Municipal Art Commission, how she has put in hundreds of hours carving just the two largest tile, which she molded and repeated to make a total of 36.

            Arneill notes how the public rarely understands how much work goes into these kinds of projects.

            “We know more about how people make barbecue,” he says, “than we do about how all these artists make art.”

            Victor, the canary, sings in the background.

On Art, Books and More: Some Recent Writing

I’ve spent a bit more time reviewing books this year, including a handful of 175-word advance reviews for Booklist, the publication of the American Library Association. I was happy to write a somewhat longer review of an important new book that combines memoir and environmental reporting in what was once my home state of Maine. The book is Mill Town, by Kerri Arsenault. My review appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune in August:

https://www.startribune.com/review-mill-town-reckoning-with-what-remains-by-kerri-arsenault/572251082/

When the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art in June became one of the first cultural institutions to reopen since the widespread pandemic shutdown began in mid-March, I made a day trip down to Bentonville, Ark., to report on the museum for The Art Newspaper. Along with the precautions I found a surprising resonance with the social upheaval that began just a couple of weeks earlier after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis:

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/review/visitors-return-to-crystal-bridges-amid-adaptations-and-provocations

As the Charlotte Street Foundation prepared to finish building out its new headquarters building, I’d begun work on a profile of its executive director Amy Kligman. And then came the pandemic, which provided the story a sense of drama and urgency. Here’s the link:

http://kcstudio.org/the-art-of-adaptation-charlotte-street-foundation/

For KC Studio, I devoted my bimonthly column to the departure of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Arts curator of Native American art:

http://kcstudio.org/gaylord-torrence-transformed-native-american-presence-at-nelson-atkins/

And this one, which celebrated the contributions of Bobby Watson to the Kansas City jazz scene:

http://kcstudio.org/after-20-years-in-academia-bobby-watson-will-travel-jazz-world-again/

Goldsworthy's wall project rocks the Kansas City art scene

As Andy Goldsworthy launched his nine-month project to build a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t “Walking Wall:” at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, I began to drop by from time to time to watch its progress. The grounds of the Nelson’s sculpture park, now including a green space to the east, across Rockhill Road, became a laboratory for Goldsworthy’s hand-made experiments in landscape, natural phenomena, and conceptual art. I wrote about the project early on for KC Studio magazine (find that one here). After the wall’s completion, I wrote another piece for the Art Newspaper, the global journal. The gallery above includes some of my favorite photos from the site visits.

Landmark KC Sculpture by Kenneth Snelson is Scheduled for Repairs.

“Triple Crown” at rest, lowered to the grown this summer and awaiting repairs to connection joints. Photo by Steve Paul.

Here’s another recent piece for KC Studio magazine. We posted it online in early September because it seemed to have some newsworthiness. The article will also appear in the November-December issue in print. I’ve long been entertained by this landmark sculpture. Of course, I just noticed that the trolls came out in force when a lousy local web site ridiculed it when linking to the piece:

http://kcstudio.org/after-nearly-30-years-kcs-floating-sculpture-needs-a-fix-kenneth-snelson/

Early Photos Cast New Light on the U.S. Gold Rush

I’ve been a bit negligent lately and forgotten to post a few additions to this space. I seem to have been writing up a storm in recent months, working on a biography, on poetry, on a wedding ceremony for friends. And some freelance pieces for KC Studio magazine on art and culture. Here’s one of those, a preview of an exhibit on daguerreotypes and the gold rush:

http://kcstudio.org/small-vibrant-windows-on-an-american-dream-defined-by-gold/

Kansas City Will Long Remember the Enduring Spirit of Henry Bloch

Although I’m out of the daily newspaper business, I hear from editors from time to time. So I turned out this tribute to a man who left a mark on the world.

http://kcstudio.org/entrepreneur-civic-leader-philanthropist-mensch-the-enduring-spirit-of-henry-bloch/