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February 16, 2009
Hot Spots of the 50s and 60s
The Kunsthaus in Zürich mounted a big and quite good show: Hot Spots. Rio de Janeiro / Milano - Torino / Los Angeles 1956 - 1969. They had lots of good things in the American section; I liked the Ruscha picture (one of the giant gas stations) and the art books best in the Los Angeles section. I want a copy of Every Building on Sunset Strip, if anyone's starting his Christmas shopping. It's a linear piece - a long fold out with an absence running down the center to represent the street, houses and businesses flopped out on either side. You can see a version here - click and scroll (it's an interesting article). I myself am reminded much less of "art" than a piece of real cartography I blogged about some time ago, a fold out map of the Hudson River for mid-19th C steamer passagers to Albany from New York City. The engraver set views of both banks of the Hudson on either side of the long page - the east side pointing down, the west side pointing up (if that makes sense). I can't find an image of it, but I saw it mounted on a long wall at the Museum of the New-York Historical Society.
The museum also had a brilliant touch-screen version of three other artist books from Ruscha - flippable! On the other hand, Sam Francis should sue over the hanging of his painting.
The objects I liked best over all were some great hanging sculptures by a Brazilian artist, Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980). Of course there were no photographs allowed and of course I can't find any on the web - they were angular objects - some X-shaped, some, some simpler, with thickness produced in interesting ways by layering wood and pulling apart the layers. They don't photograph well, but you can see some here. You really have to be able to move around them to see what's going on. This photo of one at the Tate gives an idea of what he's up to, but it's not monochrome (or as close to monochrome) as the ones in Zürich. I liked them a lot - and I don't like minimalist things much.
The Italian section was long on Arte Povera, which I never like much. There were a lot of Lucio Fontana cut canvases - enough of them that the schtick of "cutting through the picture plane to see what's beyond" got really old. On the other hand, there was a spatial installation created originally for Documenta 4 in 1968 - it was a white maze of walls with a cut canvas at its heart. That worked as more than just an idea. I also liked seeing something I'd read about, some Giovanni Colombo kinetic pieces playing with the idea of gridding in paintings and sculpture - the grids literally shifted (they were made of elastic bands or metal rods and moved). That was fun, but pretty gimmicky.
All in all a show worth seeing.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at February 16, 2009 5:34 PM