Robin Rhode

Robert Longo

This might be a stretch but often when I look at Robert Longo’s wave drawings I can’t help but think about the various real waves these remind me of, and how much I as a trapped urban surfer wish I could be near their giant, glassy faces…A brief comparison of source and interpretation

Margaret River, Western Australia – The Box

Half Moon Bay, California – Three Views of Maverick’s

Teahupoo, Tahiti

Tasmania, Australia – Cyclops

Oahu, Hawaii – Waimea Bay

 


Oahu, Hawaii – Pipeline

Oahu, Hawaii – Waimea Shorebreak

 ”For me there are many connections between the bombs, roses, Freuds and waves… Aside from man becoming nature, the waves were about nature becoming man. They‘re so animate, so much about power, and feelings we all understand about being overpowered, somebody rising up and taking over. The bombs are the opposite. We are creating things that could make us obsolete. Which is a frightening thing.” 
-Robert Longo

Jim Dow

Working with a camera that makes 8″ x 10″ negatives, Jim Dow traveled to 25 stadiums—14 American League and 11 National League—and took three exposures of each that together give a panoramic view of the stadium. He chose to photograph empty stadiums, without players, fans, or vendors, because he was most interested in the architecture itself. Baseball fields are more or less regulated. Each has the same dimensions for the diamond and the stretch between the foul lines. Each stadium has a billboard and stands on all four sides. There is nevertheless great variety. The distance to the outfield walls and the nature and height of the walls vary. Boston´s Fenway Park has the Green Monster looming 37 feet high in left field. Chicago´s Wrigley has a bank of ivy that swallows balls missed by the outfielders. New York´s Yankee Stadium and Houston´s Astrodome had the longest distances for a ball to travel out of the park. Other variances are color of the seats (red, blue, green) and the views outside the walls, which can be a mountain range, a park city neighborhood or industrial sites.

Fenway (Boston, 1912) and Wrigley (Chicago, 1916) are the two oldest still existing fields. Ten of the 25 that Dow photographed still exist, although three of those have changed their names.

A stadium, Dow feels, “symbolizes the enduring attraction of the sport itself as opposed to the changing fortunes of the players.” He has been photographing stadiums since 1980, concentrating on the major leagues in the early ´80s, and since 1984, working almost exclusively on minor-league baseball in the United States. “To some degree,” he says, “the stadiums mirror everything from affluence to pretension, or lace of same, of each locality.” One critic wrote that Dow´s stadiums “have all the grandeur and loneliness of ancient ruins.” Dow is aware that the stadiums embody memories as well as dreams. Each player faces not only his own prior accomplishments but every prior player´s feats.

More Sports Exhibitions from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

More on Jim Dow at Janet Borden, Inc. 

Gregory Crewdson

Photographs in and around Lee, Massachusetts, from his graduate school thesis project

Matthew Barney

ART:21: How close does the filming process follow the pre-written script and storyboards for “CREMASTER 3?”

BARNEY: It depends. You’ve seen the way the storyboard is structured and in certain cases it follows how a real storyboard would be drawn. If there’s a detail of something we’re shooting that needs to tell a story itself, those tend to be drawn. Bigger, narrative situations are really just organized as written lists. They’re scheduled by camera setup in cases like this where the camera car was there for a day, so we covered everything we could from the car. A lot of these angles—aside from the moving camera car are really about trying to mimic broadcast sports angles in order to anchor the scene, to sort of normalize it before it becomes abstracted, which is something we do often, and it happens a lot with sports references that are made in all the projects.

This is a kind of anchor, a place, mimicking sports cinematography. Like NFL films. Do you know NFL films? NFL films are a real big influence of mine. It’s all 35mm material shot on all the NFL teams. It’s a fleet of cinematographers that follow the different teams and then I believe that footage is sold to the different teams. Highlight tapes are made and, as a kid, we always had to watch these highlight tapes around lunch time at football camps and stuff. We’d go to different football camps at different universities and things, and there was always a sort of film hour or something like that which would be sometime around a meal. And you’d sit there with a bunch of football players and we’d watch highlight films from different NFL teams. But it’s great… it’s really great camera work. All that stuff.

ART:21: So many of your interests are all-American in nature. How does this fit into your work?

BARNEY: Well, I think a lot of the references I make to American traditions—whether it’s athletics or a kind of car culture—I think those are things that I’ve certainly grown up with and understand. It makes those things very available to me to use, and I consider them as kinds of vessels. I don’t think that by the time they’ve been hashed through the project they’re representative of what they necessarily are in everyday life. They’re used as carriers, which is one of the reasons why the vehicles, in general, keep reappearing in the pieces in that they are carriers, literally. The concept of a vehicle draws a line between locations, such as the Isle of Mann and Budapest. If there was a structure that was greater than the “CREMASTER” structure, it would have to be something like UPS—something that’s fleet oriented, that would have air transport and a kind of local transport to really finish that line. You have a kind of consistent color in the way that UPS is brown and the logo is gold. I think that I have a need to make these sorts of connections literal sometimes, and a vehicle often helps to do that. So, in other words, that’s the way I would say I have a relationship to car culture. It isn’t really about loving cars. It’s sort of about needing them.

ART:21: You also make a lot of references to ancient myths.

BARNEY: Yes. Sometimes I take on stories quite directly, like with “DRAWING RESTRAINT 7.” That referred to Marsyas and Apollo. But it’s also about taking on a mythological structure and then imposing an internal logic on it. Like if you were inside the stomach and esophagus, you’d probably say that same thing about somebody throwing up. You’d say, “Wow, the stomach is heroic for getting that mutant material out.” In other words, it is about taking a structure that’s mythological and putting it into a frame that’s more about something doing what it’s compelled to do, there to do. So a lot of my work has to do with not allowing my characters to have an ego in a way that the stomach doesn’t have an ego when it’s wanting to throw up. It just does it. But it could also be looked at from a heroic, mythological angle for sure.

Excerpt from an interview with ART21

More Cremaster

More Drawing Restraint

Ryan McGinley

This was the published group of 2004 Olympic Swim Team in the New York Times Magazine. There is also a slideshow of B-sides photos from the shoot that did not run here.

Rineke Dijkstra

Bull Fighters from Vila Franca de Xira and Montemor o Novo in Portugal

“…Often, one group will lead the artist in another direction, bringing her to an unlikely but related subject. For example, the images of new mothers led directly to the images of bullfighters. Says the artist: The matadors came out covered in blood and exhausted – very similar to the mothers…I did not intend to do the men like that, all macho and the women as mothers – it just evolved from the experience…women make this extreme physical effort…while the men search for it as a kind of adventure. But still, both are exhausting and life-threatening actions. Recently the artist has turned her attention to video and sound installations that incorporate images of teenagers responding to popular dance music.”

From “FOCUS: Rineke Dijkstra” Art Institute of Chicago

Gabriel Orozco

Atomists: Making Strides, 1996. Computer generated print

 Oval with Pendulum

Ping Pond Table

Games: Ping Pong, Billiards, and Chess

ART:21: “Ping Pond Table”—where did the idea for that work come from?

OROZCO: The “Ping Pond Table” is connected to this idea of a new space, a new possible space. When you have a normal ping pong game you have a net which is enough space between two spaces. But when you multiply that space by four, instead of two people playing you have four people playing in four tables. You open that space so the net is also open. And what you have there is a new space because it didn’t exist before. I’m thinking in a new game when I multiply by four the knights in the chessboard or when I made the pendulum and the billiard table. In this case I opened the ping pong—the net, that space in between two spaces—I opened it up. And I have a tri-dimensional space now in-between four spaces.

That is the space that I’m interested in, the in-between space. Even in photographs I think what is interesting is in between the photographer and the space, which is the same as the in-between of the photograph and the spectator. To activate that space. To activate means to fill it with meaning and connections so that we can think about it. We can connect with it and make it happen as a space and time in between things.

So in this case it’s the net, the limit and the border between two spaces. I opened that border and it became tri-dimensional, a space in itself. And that’s why I decided to make the pond. I could decide to make anything I wanted. It could be a rug or sand or nothing. But then I liked the idea because the shape of the table has to be round. It’s round because you have to move waiting for the bounce from three different tables, you have to move much more than in a normal ping pong table. I liked the idea of the pond and the lotus. If you want to think in a metaphorical sense of the lotus flower as the beginning of the universe, I think you can do that because it’s a new game. It’s a new space for a new way of playing with the universe, which is this game. I think every game is a universe in a way, or every game is an expression of how the universe works for different cultures. Ping pong is a game about the universe playing or is a game about how the universe is so arbitrary and how it’s constant.

ART:21: Is the lotus a symbol in this work, or is it wrong to think of it that way—of it having a specific cultural meaning?

OROZCO: It’s not that it’s wrong, it’s just that…games, because they have this reference, are expressions of how we believe the universe works in different cultures. We know that chess has that and billiards has that. Ping pong has that too. Every game has a connection to how we conceive nature and landscape. How we order and we structure reality. In the case of the ping pong table I decided to use the shape of the lotus flower and the pond and to have this reference to Buddhism or Indian culture in terms of the lotus flower as the beginning of the universe. Just because I found it interesting. I am not religious at all, but I like philosophy and science fiction and fiction. I like these ideas in which we all try to explain with metaphors and with numbers how the universe works.

And I think it’s fascinating to know all this, but also it’s fascinating to prove it in reality, to see it in reality. You can prove and test and witness all these theories, all these fictions, all these metaphors—very, really ancient—in reality everyday. You can understand why a pond could be the beginning of the universe or the center of the universe. I think it’s quite easy to understand if you look at a pond with so many things happening there. Why it’s the origin of life. It’s just like another way of playing around with the explanation of the universe and how it works. Like in the billiard table with a pendulum, which is how planets move, how the planet Earth moves. And the same in chess. So I think that it’s not just a game.

Probably they are more like philosophical games. I believe that philosophy has to be a practice. Practical philosophy. It’s like the way the Greeks used to solve philosophical and mathematical problems, by walking. Not sitting. It’s easier to solve problems moving—when you walk and you talk—probably because you have better irrigation in the brain or just because you are breathing better. Because you are moving you have better chances to solve complex problems. And also I think in a way it’s an action thing. So I think philosophy is an action, it should be. And to play the games are part of it.

ART:21: Do you ever use the word ‘metaphysical’ to describe your interests?

OROZCO: I never use that word so much, metaphysical. It’s too metaphysical for me. [LAUGHS] I avoid two words: poetic and metaphysic. I avoid those two words because I think it’s a belief problem. I think the poetic happens, what we call the poetic. It happens because of the spectator, not because it is poetic. And the metaphysic is similar. So it is an act, an act of belief or an act of illusion on the part of the spectator. For someone to say, “Yes, I’m gonna do something metaphysical,” or “Yes, I’m gonna do something poetic”—it’s a mistake. So I think if it happens, if there is something that happens that we can call poetic and then somebody is touched and says, “Wow, this is really poetic,” it’s because this person is open for this to happen. And the word metaphysical, I don’t really even know what it means. [LAUGHS] I believe in reality and I don’t know what the metaphysical is. And I don’t claim that I understand what reality is…

ART:21: Can you talk about the billiards table some more? How does the billiards table connect to your belief in reality?

OROZCO: I concentrate on reality in terms of what is happening to me and I try to revolutionize that and try to rethink it and transform it. I try to transform reality with it’s own rules, with the things I found there. So like the market in Brazil, I found the oranges there. Or the “Island in an Island”—it was a bottle with pieces of wood that was there, and I rearranged that. I never carry anything with me.

What I like about games is that a game is a thing on it’s own. You have a little world in this board or in this table, designed to perfection so you can play in a landscape. When it is a good game it’s so passionate that you can really get into this world and just live in it for a moment. When it is a good game, it’s an intelligent thing and that’s why it’s so passionate. Billiards is very intelligent. I mean it’s a landscape, it’s mathematics, it’s geometry, it’s physicality, it’s physics…it’s many things. My favorite is with three balls and no pockets, and you’re trying to make a triangular connection between the two other balls. I played a lot with that when I was a kid. It was more popular in Mexico than pool.

One day I was in France and I saw the Foucault’s Pendulum, and as you know it’s the way that it was proved that the earth moves. You have this pendulum hanging from very high which is constantly moving because the earth is rotating, and I found that fascinating. It’s a permanent motion sculpture. It’s a science too, but at the same time you can consider it as beautiful as…now okay, I don’t want to say a beautiful sculpture because I think it’s much better as an instrument for science, but anyway…I am an artist and I look at it as a possible sculpture. So then I decided why don’t we transform a billiard? What happens if one of the balls in the billiard is a pendulum? I also decided instead of having a rectangular table to have an elliptical table or an oval table. So then we will play closer to laws of the universe. And then when we put this hanging ball with the oval billiard table which is called “Oval Billiard Table with Pendulum,” you can play a game, but you add complexity because now you have time involved. And you have an element which is the elliptical bands. You cannot count on them anymore.

In billiards, because it’s rectangular, you can calculate how the ball is going to bounce. And if you know a little bit about geometry, or just about billiards, you know how it’s going to bounce so you can get these triangular connections. But in this case, because it’s an elliptical space, you are talking about the borders of the universe and it’s always expanding. So when the ball starts to touch the ellipses, these oval curves—it just starts to bounce around and around and then just gets lost totally. So you cannot count so much on the two or three times it can bounce back. It starts to just rotate around. If you were so strong that you can make this ball rotate, I mean have the force to keep it moving, it will be just around the band of the table. On the other hand, the pendulum is moving so you have to calculate when you hit the ball. To hit the ball that is the pendulum, you have to calculate exactly the point of connection, but also the time of this pendulum coming back. So you have to wait and you have to breath and see when the ball maybe is outside of the table and then comes back. And in that specific time you have to hit it. It’s not just that it’s in a specific point in space, but it’s also in time in that point that you have to hit the ball. Anyway, it’s a totally different game and it’s more complex in many ways.

It’s also much more boring than a normal billiard game [LAUGHS] and also I didn’t put any rules except the basic rules of hitting two balls with your own ball. But nevertheless I think it can be interesting and I think also what is important is that you can actually play. It’s built with everything so that you can play and people play it. I play it sometimes and the rules have to be invented because it’s a new system, it’s a new world and with new laws. Then you have to invent the rules. Of course, I don’t like to invent rules, but somebody will do it if they want to make some competition in that game. For the moment it’s just a game to watch, I think, or to play and you watch. But I think it’s nice to watch because it’s a different kind of magic.

ART:21: Maria, your wife said that you like to make rules for games. That you’re always inventing new games to play.

OROZCO: Well I like to make new games. I like to improvise games in situations and then I like the rule just because the rule makes the game grow. I like to make a game grow by trying to understand the geometry of the situation. And then you have to make some rules and times and scores and points and bounces, how many bounces and things like that. So I like to do that. It’s quite silly, but normal.

ART:21: Can you talk about rules as they relate to your chessboard piece “Horses Running Endlessly”?

OROZCO: Well, the knight in chess is very, very interesting. It’s fascinating because of how it moves. It moves two squares and one, but in reality it’s moving between squares. What it’s doing, that knight, is it’s jumping and it’s virtually crossing between squares to get to the other squares. That, as a notion of space, is beautiful. Because a board is a very bi-dimensional field, black and white. And all the other pieces, they move diagonal, up and down, et cetera. But when you conceive of the piece that is jumping between squares—it’s a very beautiful notion.

This is thinking in the game as a landscape, a micro-landscape. And you know again chess is a product of a culture that has a notion of nature. Those notions of nature—in terms of how it works, how it’s controlled—are expressed in the games that people invent in their time. And that civilization that invented chess, it has a very precise notion of landscape nature and control and production and production of the space and production of a country. It’s a battle but it’s also a science.

I play a lot and I wanted to make a chess game that was about the knight—the horse—and then I multiply it by four. They’re all horses so there are no queens and kings, towers and bishops, just horses. And they’re running endlessly because they are all together running in this open field. You have a game that I didn’t put any rules. If you want you can invent a game in which the horse eats another horse and then somebody wins, but it’s very boring to see horses eating each other. So I suppose nobody is going to invent that game. How the colors in the board are placed and multiplied by four is the logic of the game itself. It’s transforming into something else but it’s still a game.

ART:21: Does this piece in any way have a reference to Marcel Duchamp—who was an expert chess player?

OROZCO: Not really. I don’t think it has a reference to Duchamp. I think it has reference to chess. It’s stronger—the reference to chess and to landscape and to my own work—in terms of playing with reality as a board. Like “Crazy Tourist,” like “Island to an Island.” In terms of the scale, landscape, and the construction of reality to make it that field of perception. And I think it’s connected with reality, but reality in terms of culture.

When we speak of reality it’s not nature. It’s not like a concrete outside. It’s always talking about cultures and specific objects. It’s not like metal is natural thing or stone is a natural thing. Stone is so charged with culture that we cannot claim that there is such a thing as a pure stone or metal or clay or water. I think for water and all the elements it depends on the culture they are in. They have a cultural charge and for me to use a chessboard or a stone, it’s the same. It has the same cultural charge. It depends on the culture that you are working in. So to claim that there is a thing, a pure thing call iron, it’s not true. Iron means a lot of things and the artist who is using iron, he’s aware of what it means to use iron, to use marble, to use diamonds. Because those materials, they have this meaning and they have this charge. It’s the same if the material is a little bit more physically elaborate like a chess board. But in terms of culture and in terms of meaning, they have the same complexity and specificity.

When I’m using a chessboard as the work, I am aware of the complexity and the specificity of this game. But it’s interesting when—if I will be using stone or marble—I don’t think people will say, “Oh, he’s influenced by Michelangelo.” And when I use a chessboard they think of Duchamp, but it’s a bit ridiculous because the marble and the chessboard, culturally, they are as complex, as charged. They have so many meanings that to claim that connection can be very superficial at the end. If I use an orange or a billiard table, both are complex and they are cultural and they are social and they have meanings and it depends on the context and depends in my connection with that. So I think my influence is more in connection with everyday cultural objects that I am encountering and that are part of my life.

From ART21 Interview

Richard Fauguet

Douglas Gordon & Philippe Parreno, ‘Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait’

A well-written, critical post about the film

Short Cuts
Paul Myerscough

The average maximum temperature in Madrid in mid to late April is 18°C. It would have been somewhat cooler than that in the Bernabéu Stadium, at 9 p.m. on 23 April 2005, when Zinédine Zidane walked onto the pitch with Real Madrid to face Villarreal, even under the floodlights and swathed in the body-heat of 72,485 restless spectators. But by the time Darius Khondji’s high-definition cameras find him, four minutes into Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s film Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait, ‘Zizou’ is already sweating. Every few seconds, he blows the droplets away from his mouth; they collect and drip from his earlobes and his chin. There is no impression of effort – there is never any impression of effort – but Zidane’s adrenaline is up, his concentration complete. Even standing still, he is working hard.

The film is 90 minutes long, a real-time record of a single football match made with 17 cameras placed at different vantage points in the Bernabéu, all of them trained exclusively on Zidane. We see the kick-off on a television monitor; but the film camera immediately draws nearer to pick out Zidane, who blurs and dissolves as the frame narrows still further; his gait and monk-pattern baldness are easy to recognise even as he fragments into countless green, red and blue pixels. The point is made: the galáctico, like any modern celebrity, is available to us only through his mediation, and the more pervasive his image, the more frustratedly we recognise that he remains finally opaque, unreachable. The film begins and ends with a neat ideogram, a superimposition of the letters of Zidane’s name: the effect of his total presence is to obscure him completely.

This may be the idea the film starts out with; it is not what makes it compelling. Watching Zidane at work in this way is an extraordinary experience. He is in possession of the ball for only a tiny fraction of the game, a total of perhaps two minutes or less. Much of what he does in those two minutes is exhilarating. In one moment, he leaps and curves his body in the air to catch a long, high ball at his midriff, killing its speed so that it drops to the turf at his feet; in another, he feints to cross the ball with his left foot and in the same motion releases it in the opposite direction with his right; again and again, he carries the ball at speed into the heart of Villarreal’s defence, guarding and propelling it with delicate touches as the defenders back-pedal before him. These sudden bursts of movement – in which Zidane, however frantic the activity around him, retains an absolute poise – are the only moments when the action of the game coincides with what we see. Between times, we watch him as he stalks the field, tracking the ball and waiting.

This kind of thing has been attempted before. In 1970, Hellmuth Costard filmed George Best playing for Manchester United against Coventry City. Costard was forced to shoot Best with fewer cameras and from a greater distance, so that he most often appears full-length and as part of the game going on around him. The resulting film, Fussball wie noch nie (‘Football Like Never Before’), is very different from Zidane partly because of these aesthetic choices and technological constraints, but also because of the differences between the two subjects. Best was as exuberant on the pitch as he was off it; his gifts were extravagant, and he liked to show them off. His charismatic style, and his fallibility as a player were continuous with his media persona, so that we both recognise him and imagine we get to know him better by watching Costard’s film.

This is not the experience of watching Zidane. His cropped hair, his leanness, give an impression of asceticism. His features are still, his eyes shadowed under heavy brows. There are flickers of consternation, of irritation, of concern, impatience and contempt; he smiles only once, sharing a joke with Roberto Carlos. But for the most part he is impassive. Even after his finest moment, in the 70th minute of the game, when he glides through the Villarreal defence, spins on his right foot and loops a perfect cross with his left for Ronaldo to score at the far post, his expression barely changes. It has always been the convention in Hollywood cinematography that the close-up guarantees intimacy with its subject; in this, it shares with one important tradition of portraiture the notion that the image should express interiority. In Zidane, the relentless scrutiny of his face yields little in the way of an inner self, still less anything that would help us to account for his sublime skill. We feel for him, but do not identify with him; he is alone, lonely even, and distant, other.

Gordon’s film wouldn’t have been given a cinema release – his work is normally shown in galleries – if it hadn’t been for the way Zidane ended the last game of his career in July. Captaining France in the final of the World Cup, he was sent off for violent conduct: in what must immediately have become one of the most widely seen sporting images of all time, he drives his head – forcefully and, it must be said, with considerable grace – into Marco Materazzi’s chest. He was, he claimed later, responding to the Italian defender’s ‘very hard words’ about his mother and his sister. In the final moments of Zidane – it is stoppage time at the end of the game, and Real have all but won, having come back from a goal down to lead 2-1 – a mêlée begins off-screen. Zidane, who is thirty yards away at the time, suddenly breaks from the frame. Another camera, further away, finds him again as he jogs, then sprints towards the arguing players. He catches one of them with a glancing blow, and is protectively wrestled away by David Beckham. He stands alone again, as he has for much of the film, but awkward now and a little wretched. The referee dismisses him, and the film ends as he leaves the field, shrugging off the attentions of his team-mates.

More than anything, in this moment, it feels as though we should have been able to see the explosion coming, that having watched him so closely for so long, the signs should have been there. They weren’t, of course. Watching Zidane at work is different from interpreting an actor’s simulations in a Hollywood movie, different from examining a painter’s attempt to express his subject’s essence. Searching his face for 90 minutes brings us no closer to understanding his actions at the end of this game, just as no account of his interaction with Materazzi can account for his final self-immolation. If that’s what it was. Unlike any other player on the pitch that night in July, Zidane was the only one with nothing left to prove. He had won everything there was to win, every trophy, every personal honour, many of them several times over; and eight years earlier, he had scored two goals in France’s 3-0 World Cup Final victory over Brazil. How do you end a career like this? In this year’s final, Zidane missed his chance at the perfect climax – a winning goal in extra time to regain the cup for France – when Buffon, the Italian goalkeeper, tipped his powerful header over the bar. He was sent off minutes later. You couldn’t explain why by reading Materazzi’s lips, or by watching Zidane, or by studying the biography of this son of Algerian immigrants, the story of his rise from the poor northern suburbs of Marseille to become the greatest footballer in the world. There are, though, more economical forms of explanation, sometimes from unexpected sources. At a party the day after the game, a friend of mine overheard a psychoanalyst, asked why she thought he’d done it, reply: ‘You know, I think he’d just had enough.’

From The LRB