photo by Annie Leibovitz

Louise Bourgeois, the French-born American artist who gained fame only late in a long career, when her psychologically charged abstract sculptures, drawings and prints had a galvanizing effect on younger artists, particularly women, died on Monday May 31st, 2009 at the Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan.

Ms. Bourgeois’s sculptures in wood, steel, stone and cast rubber, often organic in form and sexually explicit, emotionally aggressive yet witty, covered many stylistic bases. But from first to last they shared a set of repeated themes, centered on the human body and its need for nurture and protection in a frightening world. 

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Obituary in the New York Times June 1st , 2010

By HOLLAND COTTER

Louise Bourgeois, the French-born American artist who gained fame only late in a long career, when her psychologically charged abstract sculptures, drawings and prints had a galvanizing effect on the work of younger artists, particularly women, died on Monday in Manhattan, where she lived. She was 98.
The cause was a heart attack, said Wendy Williams, managing director of the Louise Bourgeois Studio.
Ms. Bourgeois’s sculptures in wood, steel, stone and cast rubber, often organic in form and sexually explicit, emotionally aggressive yet witty, covered many stylistic bases. But from first to last they shared a set of repeated themes centered on the human body and its need for nurture and protection in a frightening world.

Protection often translated into images of shelter or home. A gouged lump of cast bronze, for example, suggested an animal’s lair. A tablelike wooden structure with thin, stiltlike legs resembled a house ever threatening to topple. Her series of “Cells” from the early 1990s — installations of old doors, windows, steel fencing and found objects — were meant to be evocations of her childhood, which she claimed as the psychic source of her art.

But it was her images of the body itself, sensual but grotesque, fragmented, often sexually ambiguous, that proved especially memorable. In some cases the body took the abstract form of an upright wooden pole, pierced by a few holes and stuck with nails; in others it appeared as a pair of women’s hands realistically carved in marble and lying, palms open, on a massive stone base.

Among her most familiar sculptures was the much-exhibited “Nature Study” (1984), a headless sphinx with powerful claws and multiple breasts. Perhaps the most provocative was “Fillette” (1968), a large, detached latex phallus. Ms. Bourgeois can be seen carrying this object, nonchalantly tucked under one arm, in a portrait by the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, which appeared in the catalog of her 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. (In the catalog, the Mapplethorpe picture is cropped to show only the artist’s smiling face.)

That retrospective brought Ms. Bourgeois, in her early 70s, the critical and popular acclaim that had long eluded her. In 1993 she represented the United States in the Venice Biennale. In an art world where women had been treated as second-class citizens and were discouraged from dealing with overtly sexual subject matter, she quickly assumed an emblematic presence. Her work was read by many as an assertive feminist statement, her career as an example of perseverance in the face of neglect.

Ms. Bourgeois often spoke of pain as the subject of her art, and fear: fear of the grip of the past, of the uncertainty of the future, of loss in the present.

“The subject of pain is the business I am in,” she said. “To give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering.” She added: “The existence of pain cannot be denied. I propose no remedies or excuses.” Yet it was her gift for universalizing her interior life as a complex spectrum of sensations that made her art so affecting.

Louise Bourgeois was born on Dec. 25, 1911, on the Left Bank of Paris, the second of three children born to Louis and Josephine Bourgeois. Her parents, financially comfortable, owned a gallery that dealt primarily in antique tapestries. A few years after her birth the family moved out of Paris and set up a workshop for tapestry restoration in Choisy-le-Roi. Ms. Bourgeois remembered as a child drawing fragments of missing images to help in the repairs.

She often spoke of her early, emotionally conflicted family life as formative. Her practical and affectionate mother, who was an invalid, was a positive influence. Her father’s domineering disposition, as well as his marital infidelities (he had a 10-year affair with the children’s English governess), instilled a resentment and an insecurity that Ms. Bourgeois never laid to rest.

Her nightmarish tableau of 1974, “The Destruction of the Father,” for example, is a table in a stagily lighted recess, which holds an arrangement of breastlike bumps, phallic protuberances and other biomorphic shapes in soft-looking latex that suggest the sacrificial evisceration of a body, the whole surrounded by big, crude mammillary forms. Ms. Bourgeois has suggested as the tableau’s inspiration a fantasy from childhood in which a pompous father, whose presence deadens the dinner hour night after night, is pulled onto the table by other family members, dismembered and gobbled up.

Similarly, for a 1994 exhibition titled “Louise Bourgeois: Locus of Memory, Works 1982-1993,” she created a single sculpture and suite of drawings in which the central image was a spider, a creature she associated with her mother, a woman of ever-changing moods.

Drawn in orange and flesh-pink gouache, it here stalked across the page and there shrunk to the size of a pea. As an immense sculpture of soldered metal tubing, it loomed ominously over the viewer but was delicate enough to quiver and sway at a touch. Fragility and fierceness were, in fact, the twin poles of Ms. Bourgeois’s art.

Often there was a precise association in her work. After she had created a number of vertical spirals that seemed to twist in space, she evoked childhood memories of the tapestry business and her family: “When a tapestry had to be washed in the river, it took four people to hoist it out and twist it. Twisting is very important for me. When I dreamt of getting rid of the mistress, it was by twisting her neck.”

At the age of 20, she entered the Sorbonne to study mathematics and geometry, disciplines that she valued for their stability. “I got peace of mind,” she later said, “only through the study of rules nobody could change.” But she left to enroll in a succession of art schools, and counted Fernand Léger among her teachers.

In 1938 she married Robert Goldwater, an American art historian noted for his pioneering work in the field then referred to as primitive art. They moved to New York City that same year, and Ms. Bourgeois attended the Art Students League, where she studied painting with Vaclav Vytlacil and also produced sculpture and prints.

She knew many of the European surrealists then arriving as refugees in New York (she later dismissed them as “smart alecks”), but the artists to whom she felt closest were the American painters who would come to be known as Abstract Expressionists.

Ms. Bourgeois had a solo show of paintings in New York in 1945 and her first exhibition of sculpture — an installation of tall, polelike figures that she intended as abstract portraits of family members and friends — four years later at the Peridot Gallery, at which time she gave up painting for good.

She enjoyed some professional success as a sculptor thereafter (she participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual Exhibition almost yearly until 1962). But a significant shift in her career came in 1966, when she was included in an exhibition at the Fischbach Gallery in New York, “Eccentric Abstraction,” organized by the critic Lucy Lippard.

Ms. Bourgeois’s long involvement in the nascent feminist movement, about which she had passionate but ambivalent feelings, began at this time. In the following year she made her first of many trips to the marble works in Carrara and Pietrasanta, Italy, where she produced dozens of major marble pieces over several years.

After her husband’s death in 1973, she began teaching at the School of Visual Arts and elsewhere, including Columbia University, Cooper Union, New York Studio School and Yale University, which awarded her an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree in 1977. She also received an honorary doctorate from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1993.

By the mid-1970s, with shifts in art-world trends, her reputation was steadily growing. Although she had been given only four one-woman shows in 30 years after her debut as a sculptor in 1949, from 1978 to 1981 she had five in New York alone. Her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art the following year, secured her place as an influential figure. Her reputation grew stronger in the context of the body-centered art of the ’90s, with its emphasis on sexuality, vulnerability and mortality.

Ms. Bourgeois’s first European retrospective was organized by the Kunstverein in Frankfurt in 1989. In 1993 she was chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. Her exhibition, organized by Charlotta Kotik of the Brooklyn Museum of Art and titled “Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory, Works 1982-1993,” later traveled to the Brooklyn and to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington.

A second international retrospective was organized by the Tate Modern in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2007 and traveled to New York, Los Angeles and Washington the following year. The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte/Reina Sofia in Madrid and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg mounted retrospectives.

She also was in four Whitney Biennials, the first in 1973 and the most recent in 1997, and a number of major international shows, including Documenta and the Carnegie International.

A survey of her prints was organized by the Modern in 1994, and a survey of her drawings by the University Art Museum at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1995. At her death, two films about her had been completed. She was represented by the Cheim & Read Gallery in Chelsea.

Ms. Bourgeois was named Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French minister of culture in 1983. Other honors included the Grand Prix National de Sculpture from the French government in 1991; the National Medal of Arts, presented to her by President Bill Clinton in 1997; the first lifetime achievement award from the International Sculpture Center in Washington; and election as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Certainly her personal style contributed to her mystique. Petite in size, gruff of voice and manner, outspoken but suspicious of interviewers, she spent much of her time either in her home in Chelsea or in her studio in Brooklyn, where she worked with Jerry Gorovoy, her assistant since 1980.

Ms Bourgeois is survived by two sons, Jean-Louis, of Manhattan, and Alain, of Brooklyn; two grandchildren; and a great granddaughter. Her son Michel died in 1990.

A lifelong insomniac, she often stayed up drawing or writing in her journal, in the same plain, epigrammatic style in which she spoke. (Her writings and interviews were published under the title “Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father” by the MIT Press in 1998).

“I have a religious temperament,” Ms. Bourgeois, a professed atheist, said about the emotional and spiritual energy that she poured into her work. “I have not been educated to use it. I’m afraid of power. It makes me nervous. In real life, I identify with the victim. That’s why I went into art.”

Related posts:

1. Biennale of Sydney 2010 – Louise Bourgeois is 98 not out

The Midnight Amblers: David Duloy David Messer and Robert Scott

UK Artist, Richard Grayson sent an email to a bunch of country rock musicians from Erskinville, Sydney to see if they would rewrite and perform Handel’s Messiah for no money.

How could they refuse?

The resulting video work, Messiah, 2004 transforms George Fredric Handel’s 1742 Oratorio, ‘The Messiah’ for the Sydney Biennale.

In the work, Australian band “The Midnight Amblers” present a country rock interpretation with scary fundamentalist overtones, effectively recalling it from the ‘high culture’ of choirs and classical recitals into a hoe-down offering.

Richard discusses Messiah, aliens and his curiosities and observations about the way the world works.

In October 2003, Richard Grayson approached the Australian Country and Western Band The Midnight Amblers to collaborate on a project re-arranging and performing the libretto to Handel’s 1742 Oratorio ‘The Messiah’. The dual projection video work Messiah is the end result.

The text, written and assembled by Charles Jennens was created to support the idea that Jesus Christ was indeed the person anticipated by the Jewish prophets of the Old Testament, not an event that rendered such prophecy void.

The Band has written tunes around these words that only fleetingly make reference to the original melodies – ‘The Hallelujah Chorus’ for instance – and which use instead the languages of country rock.

 

Richard Grayson

Born 1958 in Morcambe, England

Lives and works in London, England

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MESSIAH – Richard Grayson with The Midnight Amblers

A dual video projection, 1 hour 10 minute loop. 2004

“IF GOD BE FOR US WHO CAN BE AGAINST US?”

In 2003, Richard Grayson approached the Australian Country and Western Band The Midnight Amblers to collaborate on re-arranging and performing the libretto of Handel’s Oratorio ‘The Messiah’. Grayson’s dual projection video MESSIAH is the outcome. Shifted from the matrix of classical music into that of country rock and blue grass, the lyrics, written by Charles Jennens in 1742, become strangely familiar, as if quoted from recent speeches by Tony Blair or George Bush. Words from the libretto caption the Amblers apparently redneck image, but any seamless match between what we see and what we hear is undermined by the artist’s editorial sleight of hand. The music is beguiling, but instead of Good Tidings, Grayson’s MESSIAH brings us doubt – about current World Leaders who cast themselves as Saviours and a belief system used to justify extreme right wing political and social policies and American and British foreign policy in Iraq and the Middle East. Jennen’s libretto for Handel’s iconic celebration of the moment of Christian Redemption – Christmas – in Grayson’s MESSIAH, becomes an ironic meditation on the destructive folly of fundamentalism.

The Messiah’ holds a central place in British culture, being listened to and performed by many in choirs and events around the country. By taking the words out of the matrix of classical music, they are made strange and magical again, rather than merely a distant component of ‘high culture’. This serves to reanimate them as an expression of a supernatural belief system: one which is now shaping significant social and political policy in the United States through the Christian Right, as well as helping directly shape certain expressions of American foreign policy in the Middle East. 42% of Americans describe themselves as ‘born again’ and 82% believe in miracles. Political ideology rooted in Enlightenment ideals of rationality is being eroded and replaced by Theology. In Australia the Christian Family First party has just helped secure the return of the conservative party of John Howard. In Tony Blair Britain has one of the most overtly ‘Christian’ prime-ministers since Gladstone.

Related posts:

1. Biennale of Sydney 2010 – 156 Paintings, 156 Signs
2. Biennale of Sydney 2010 – Jonathan Barnbrook
3. Biennale of Sydney 2010 – Tiger Lillies

Also at Cockatoo Island, Australian artist Peter Hennessey presents a vast new sculptural work, My Hubble ( The Universe turned in on itself / 2010 ).

This 1:1 life-size ‘re-enactment’ of the Hubble Space Telescope – a space-based observatory that has revolutionised astronomy by providing deep and clear views of the universe – is constructed out of plywood and steel.

Visitors are invited to play with the world the telescope depicts, to modify and create their own universes that they can then view, reflected in the ‘eye piece’ located high in the air. The aim is to give the viewer a unique, physical experience of the object, its construction is made from plywood and steel and simultaneously enacts the scale and detail of the original.

Artist Peter Hennessey makes big things – really big things. He’s made a voyager, a lunar rover, and an Neonatal Intensive Care Unit just to name a few.

In a past life Peter worked online but now he’s out to de-digitise the world, trying to answer two questions.

How big is it really ?     And can you make it yourself ?   ….   

video courtesy of COFA Sydney

Peter Hennessey was born 1968 in Sydney, Australia.
Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia

Related posts:

1. Biennale of Sydney 2010 – Jennifer Wen Ma @ Sydney Opera House
2. Biennale of Sydney 2010 – Jonathan Barnbrook
3. Biennale of Sydney 2010 – “The Messiah”

Berlin-based French artist Kader Attia fills one of the cavernous spaces in Cockatoo Island’s Turbine Hall with a 312-square-metre patchwork of corrugated iron and scrap roofing materials.  The series of shanty town roofs collected by the artist, reflecting the conditions in which the majority of the world’s population lives, are installed at different angles to make a 350-square-metre patchwork of corrugated iron, satellite dishes and other scrap materials.

A microcosm of contemporary reality, Kasbah (2010) looks at how the other half lives in a world where poverty is at such a scale that almost half the world’s population subsists on less than US$2.50 a day.*

Visitors are invited to walk across them… Walking tentatively over the work, one not only becomes part of it but also implicitly part of the economic and power matrix that creates these shanty towns.”

Born 1970 in Dugny (Seine Saint-Denis)

He lives and works in Paris

Attia’s first solo exhibition was in 1996 in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since then he has exhibited regularly in France, in institutions such as Palais de Tokyo and Lyon Contemporary Art Museum.

Attia has gained international recognition by participating in the Venice Biennale (2003), Art Basel Miami (2004) and the Lyon Biennale (2005). Attia’s most recent solo exhibitions have been at Galerie Christian Nagel, Berlin, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, Centre de Création Contemporaine, Tours, Boston ICA, US, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle, UK, le Magasin, Grenoble, France and Andréhn- Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Sweden.

Kader Attia was nominated for the Price Marcel Duchamp in 2005 and awarded the Prize of the Cairo Biennale in 2008.

As an artist, he applies a duality of thought and hybridism to his artistic process, which he entirely puts down to his background, unafraid of tackling questions of immigration, globalisation and religion in a variety of disciplines.

Installation and multi-media are often the final products of his process, characterised by exceptional attention to detail.

The allegorical minimalism of his work is frequently unsettling owing to the discord between their external sensory appeal and controversial content.

Spending his childhood between Paris and Algeria has made Attia feel akin to both an Arab and Western way of thinking. He now lives and works between Algiers and Berlin.

In Ghost, a large installation of a group of Muslim women in prayer, Attia renders their bodies as vacant shells, empty hoods devoid of personhood or spirit. Made from tin foil – a domestic, throw away material – Attia’s figures become alien and futuristic, synthesising the abject and divine. Bowing in shimmering meditation, their ritual is equally seductive and hollow, questioning modern ideologies – from religion to nationalism and consumerism – in relation to individual identity, social perception, devotion and exclusion. Attia’s Ghost evokes contemplation of the human condition as vulnerable and mortal; his impoverished materials suggest alternative histories or understandings of the world, manifest in individual and temporal experience

Related posts:

1. Biennale of Sydney, 2010 – Opening Artists party
2. Biennale of Sydney 2010 – Dale Frank
3. Biennale of Sydney 2010 – Hiroshi Sugimoto

“The Feast of Trimalchio /2009″  by AES+F , is a nine- channel animation of over 75,000 photographs. With panoramic, immersive, sumptuous colour and a loud symphonic soundtrack, it depicts a contemporary version of a famous scene from Petronius’s Satyricon.

In this neo-Brechtian twenty-first-century version, an orgy of consumerism reflects on the contemporary state of both Russia and the world.”

The group that makes up AES+F consists of four Russian-born artists: Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky, and Vladimir Fridkes.

Working in collaboration, the four create a concept, discuss the story they want to illuminate and decide the best way to proceed. This could involve photography, video, installation, mixed media works, or a combination of all of the above.

Explanation From the Artists …..

The Feast of Trimalchio

In the ‘Satyricon’, the work of the great wit and melancholic lyric poet of Nero’s reign, Gaius Petronius Arbiter, the best preserved part is ‘The Feast of Trimalchio’ (Cena Trimalchionis). Thanks to Petronius’s fantasy, Trimalchio’s name became synonymous with wealth and luxury, with gluttony and with unbridled pleasure in contrast to the brevity of human existence.

We searched for an analogue in the third millennium and Trimalchio, the former slave, the nouveau riche host of feasts lasting several days, appeared to us not so much as an individual as a collective image of a luxurious hotel, a temporary paradise which one has to pay to enter.

The hotel guests, the ‘masters’, are from the land of the Golden Billion. They’re keen to spend their time, regardless of the season, as guests of the present-day Trimalchio, who has created the most exotic and luxurious hotel possible. The hotel miraculously combines a tropical coastline with a ski resort. The ‘masters’ wear white which calls to mind the uniform of the righteous in the Garden of Eden, or traditional colonial dress, or a summer fashion collection. The ‘masters’ possess all of the characteristics of the human race – they are all ages and types and from all social backgrounds. Here is the university professor, the broker, the society beauty, the intellectual. Trimalchio’s ’servants’ are young, attractive representatives of all continents who work in the vast hospitality industry as housekeeping staff, waiters, chefs, gardeners, security guards and masseurs. They are dressed in traditional uniforms with an ethnic twist. The ’servants’ resemble the brightly-colored angels of a Garden of Eden to which the ‘masters’ are only temporarily admitted.

On one hand the atmosphere of ‘The Feast of Trimalchio’ can be seen as bringing together the hotel rituals of leisure and pleasure (massage and golf, the pool and surfing). On the other hand the ’servants’ are more than attentive service-providers. They are participants in an orgy, bringing to life any fantasy of the ‘masters’, from gastronomic to erotic. At times the ‘masters’ unexpectedly end up in the role of ’servants’. Both become participants in an orgiastic gala reception, a dinner in the style of Roman saturnalia when slaves, dressed as patricians, reclined at table and their masters, dressed in slaves’ tunics, served them.

Every so often the delights of ‘The Feast of Trimalchio’ are spoiled by catastrophes which encroach on the Global Paradise…

ARZAMASOVA, TATIANA

Was born in 1955, graduated from Moscow Architectural Institute (MARCHI) – State Academy in 1978. Lives and works in Moscow.

Was occupied in conceptual architecture. Award winner «Grand-Prix» of a jointly OISTT and UNESCO competition «Theatre of Future». Participated in conceptual architecture exhibitions in London, Paris, Venice.

EVZOVICH, LEV

Was born in 1958, graduated from Moscow Architectural Institute (MARCHI) – State Academy in 1982. Lives and works in Moscow.

Was occupied in conceptual architecture. The prizewinner of the OISTT competition «The Tour Theatre» in Stockholm. Participated in conceptual architecture exhibitions in Milan, Frankfurt-on-Main, Paris. Worked as art director in animation film (6 films), as director in puppet animation film. Also worked as art director in film «Sunset» (live action, «Mosfilm» studio).

SVYATSKY, EVGENY

Was born in 1957, graduated from Moscow University of Printing Arts (department of the book graphic arts) in 1980. Lives and works in Moscow.

Was occupied with book and advertising design, poster and graphic art. Participated in international poster competitions, exhibitions of book illustration and design, graphic art.

Worked as creative director in few publishing houses in Moscow («Otkryty Mir» and «Intersignal»).

Artists united as AES group in 1987.

FRIDKES, VLADIMIR

Born in Moscow in 1956, lives and works in Moscow.

Works as a photographer of fashion. Published in magazines: VOGUE, Harper»s Bazaar, ELLE, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Sunday Times Style and others.

Since 1995 collaborates with AES group.

Related posts:

1. Biennale of Sydney 2010 – Hiroshi Sugimoto
2. Biennale of Sydney 2010 – Kasbah
3. Biennale of Sydney 2010 – 156 Paintings, 156 Signs

Laurie Anderson was born June 5, 1947, in Glen Ellyn, Illinois

She graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, in Art History from Barnard College in 1969. In 1972 she received an M.F.A. in sculpture from Columbia University. During the mid 1970s she toured extensively, presenting her work in alternative performance spaces throughout the United States and building a dedicated following.

Laurie Anderson is one of today’s premier performance artists. Known primarily for her multimedia presentations she has cast herself in roles as varied as visual artist, composer, poet, photographer, filmmaker, electronics whiz, vocalist, and instrumentalist.

She is an American experimental performance artist and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in a variety of experimental music and art rock styles.

Click on this photo to view the opening night media video Q&A at the Sydney Opera House

As well as co-curating the Vivid Festival 2010,  Anderson ( the legendary rocker Lou Reed’s performance-artist wife ) , will play a ”greatest hits style show” at the Vivid Festival called Transitory Life.

Transitory Life is a solo retrospective performance by Laurie Anderson drawing on her life’s work. The collection of songs and stories includes pieces from Anderson’s acclaimed solo shows The Speed of Darkness, Happiness, The End of the Moon and Homeland.

In an intimate evening of voice, electronics and violin, Anderson spins offbeat adventure stories with her characteristic wit and poignancy. The evening also features her solo violin pieces, which have become increasingly complex and symphonic. It promises to be a uniquely personal and compelling opportunity to experience Anderson’s world-renowned performance work.

click on the photo to view the Fenway Bergamot video clip

To mark next month’s release of  Homeland, Anderson’s first studio album in nearly a decade, she’s releasing short clips of her butch character Fenway Bergamot each week on the NoneSuch website.

Complete with suit jacket, tie, waistcoat, drawn-on moustache and voice-altering microphone, the first ‘Bergamot’ clip shows him remembering the early days of the 2008 US financial meltdown. Here, he invokes a classic film trope to warn listeners of the impending doom, exclaiming: “There’s trouble out at the mine!”

Wednesday 2nd June @ S.O.H

Laurie Anderson is Fenway Bergamot – a Q & A session

Fenway Bergamot is Laurie Anderson’s male alter-ego. He is a historian and social commentator who has been working in the fields of film and live performance since 1979. He has been featured on numerous recordings and appeared in several of Laurie Anderson’s performances. His personal interests are social issues and Marcel Proust.

Be part of a Q&A with Fenway on Wednesday and ask away!

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Throughout the 1970s, Anderson did a variety of different performance-art activities. She became widely known outside the art world in 1981 when her single “O Superman” reached number two on the UK pop charts.

Superman launched Anderson’s recording career in 1980, rising to number two on the British pop charts and subsequently appearing on Big Science, the first of her seven albums on the Warner Brothers label.

Other record releases include Mister Heartbreak, United States Live, Strange Angels, Bright Red, and the soundtrack to her feature film Home of the Brave.

 

In 2001, Anderson released her first record for Nonesuch Records, entitled Life on a String, which was followed by Live in New York, recorded at Town Hall in New York City in September 2001, and released in May 2002.

Anderson has toured the United States and internationally numerous times with shows ranging from simple spoken word performances to elaborate multimedia events.

Major works include United States I-V (1983), Empty Places (1990), The Nerve Bible (1995), and Songs and Stories for Moby Dick, a multimedia stage performance based on the novel by Herman Melville. Songs and Stories for Moby Dick toured internationally throughout 1999 and 2000.

In the fall of 2001, Anderson toured the United States and Europe with a band, performing music from Life on a String. She has also presented many solo works, including Happiness, which premiered in 2001 and toured internationally through Spring 2003.

Anderson has published six books. Text from Anderson’s solo performances appears in the book Extreme Exposure, edited by Jo Bonney. She has also written the entry for New York for the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

Laurie Anderson’s visual work has been presented in major museums throughout the United States and Europe. In 2003, The Musée Art Contemporain of Lyon in France produced a touring retrospective of her work, entitled The Record of the Time: Sound in the Work of Laurie Anderson. This retrospective included installation, audio, instruments, video and art objects and spans Anderson’s career from the 1970’s to her most current works. It continued to tour internationally from 2003 to 2005. As a visual artist, Anderson is represented by the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York where her exhibition, The Waters Reglitterized, opened in September 2005.

As a composer, Anderson has contributed music to films by Wim Wenders and Jonathan Demme; dance pieces by Bill T. Jones, Trisha Brown, Molissa Fenley, and a score for Robert LePage’s theater production, Far Side of the Moon. She has created pieces for National Public Radio, The BBC, and Expo ‘92 in Seville.

In 1997 she curated the two-week Meltdown Festival at Royal Festival Hall in London. Her most recent orchestra work Songs for A.E. premiered at Carnegie Hall in February 2000 performed by the American Composers Orchestra and later toured Europe with the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra conducted by Dennis Russell Davies.

It is difficult to write about a performance artist and portray exactly what she does. Her medium is experimentation, and it is not meant to be easily categorized. For example, in one of her most memorable of performances, Laurie Anderson stood on a block of ice, playing her violin while wearing her ice skates. When the ice melted, the performance ended. That gives you a clue…but still doesn’t cover it.

Recognized worldwide as a groundbreaking leader in the use of technology in the arts, Anderson collaborated with Interval Research Corporation, a research and development laboratory founded by Paul Allen and David Liddle, in the exploration of new creative tools, including the Talking Stick. She created the introduction sequence for the first segment of the PBS special Art 21, a series about Art in the 21st century.

Her awards include the 2001 Tenco Prize for Songwriting in San Remo, Italy and the 2001 Deutsche Schallplatten prize for Life On A String as well as grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2002, Anderson was appointed the first artist-in-residence of NASA out of which she developed her solo performance “The End of the Moon” which premiered in 2004 and toured internationally through 2006. Other recent projects include a commission to create a series of audio-visual installations and a high definition film,

Hidden Inside Mountains, for the World Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan and a series of programs for French radio called “Rien dans les Poches/Nothing in my Pockets”. Her score for Trisha Brown’s acclaimed piece “O Composite” premiered at the Opera Garnier in Paris in December 2004. Anderson was also part of the team that created the opening ceremony for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. Currently she is working on a series of documented walks, a new album for Nonesuch Records, “Homeland”, and an accompanying touring performance.

Laurie Anderson’s latest extravaganza at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The End of the Moon, was the result of her year as NASA’s first artist-in-residence. Nothing this post-punk counterculture sibyl has dreamed up has been more whimsically lyrical, friendly, or wise. We’re still pondering her observations on the nesting habits of gay penguins.

No wonder NASA chose Laurie Anderson as its first artist-in-residence. An intrepid multimedia pioneer long obsessed with our ever-changing romance with technology and how we think about ourselves in relation to the rest of the planet, Anderson weaves stories, music, songs, and words into epic portraits of American culture. The End of the Moon, the second in a series of intentionally low-tech solo works featuring her remarkable music for violin and electronics, marks Anderson’s fifth BAM production. A decidedly more contemplative sister to her first solo effort, the extraordinary, sharply observed Happiness, The End of the Moon turns to the incisive power of words to convey how we feel about ourselves at this complex juncture. Drawing from her NASA-inspired travels and research, impression-packed journals, dreams, and theories, Anderson takes us on a music-theater journey that examines, among many other compelling themes, 21st-century perceptions of beauty and time, and the stories we exchange to help us along the way 

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Called “America’s multi-mediatrix” by Wired magazine and a “modern renaissance artist and agent provocateur” by Philadelphia Daily News, Laurie Anderson (born 1947 in Chicago, Illinois) is—in her work as a performance artist as well as musician, poet, writer, and visual artist—one of the most important artists of the later 20th century.

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“And there was a beautiful view / But nobody could see.  / Cause everybody on the island / Was saying: Look at me! Look at me! ….  Laurie Anderson…. Language Is A Virus

Laurie Anderson was awarded the 2007 Gish Prize for her “outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life.”

Anderson lives in New York City.

Related posts:

1. Vivid Sydney Festival 2010 – Lou Reed & Laurie Anderson @ SOH
2. Vivid Festival Sydney 2010 – Music for Dogs @ Sydney Opera House
3. Vivid Sydney Festival 2010 – “Lighting the Sails”

Warren Fahey is a cultural historian, author, performer and musical Jack-of All- trades specialising in Australian folklore and history. He claims to be a graduate of the School of Hard Knocks and the Dingo University.

He was born in Sydney, 1946

He has built a distinguished career as a record producer and broadcaster and has been honoured with many awards including Member of the Order of Australia in 1996, Australian Music Industry Person of the Year in 2000 and the Bush Laureate Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004.

Damned Souls and Turning Wheels (biennale concert series)

The Biennale of Sydney presents a series of daytime concerts that relate to his multi-media installation work, Damned Souls and Turning Wheels, produced in collaboration with Mic Gruchy and located in the Convict Precinct on Cockatoo Island.

Experience Australian folk song married to archival film, photographs and illustrations to create a total immersive journey through the unique history of Cockatoo Island.

Housed in the convict barracks on Cockatoo Island the six projector installation uses field recordings of traditional singers and musicians as a soundtrack to a multi-screen 28 minute experience showing the fascinating historical signposts of the island from convict prison, gaol for three notorious bushrangers, colonial dock, Biloela wayward girl’s prison, Vernon nautical training institution, naval dockyard and engineering works.

Live  2pm. on Sunday 23rd and 30th May ( cancelled due to bad weather ) and 6th June and 1st August.

Why I sing what I sing..

I have always loved story songs, especially those that tell of the Australian story. In many ways I am a storyteller who sings – rather than a real singer. It’s an unusual place to be and I know I am fortunate to be able to share my songs with so many people. Of course, they are not really my songs – I am more of a custodian, a caretaker as the songs travel around. Sure, I often change them or create tunes, but that is the real essence of the folk process.

A typical performance by Warren Fahey & The Larrikins takes audiences through an entertaining and enlightened potted history of Australia – its ups and downs from convict prisons to colonial homesteads; gold-rush camps to riding high on the sheep’s back; boundary riding with drovers; down coal mines; some cadging with ‘road’s scholars’ of the lean Depression times; songs from Australia at war; followed by a salute to Federation and the twentieth century when the bulk of our population became ‘cityslickers’. Concerts are performed with a healthy dash of Australia’s laconic sense of humour through songs, poems, toasts, curious history and yarns.

“As genuine as the smell of gum leaves burning on an outback campfire.” /  Philip Adams, ABC Radio National

Don Banks Music Award

Last month the Minister for Arts, Peter Garrett, presented me with this great honour – the highest recognition for music in Australia. The Music Board of the Australia Council organised a cracker presentation event and, of course, delivered the fantastic cheque that goes with the award!

Australia’s richest individual music prize has been won by Warren Fahey, founder of the folk music label Larrikin and legendary record store Folkways.  It is the first time the Australia Council of Arts has awarded the $60,000 Don Banks Music Award to a folk artist.

Fahey started Larrikin in 1974 and went on to release the music of Eric Bogle, Redgum and The Bushwackers.

He says folk music has been a lifelong passion and he is thrilled the genre is experiencing a comeback in the digital age.

“We’ve moved from a nation of people who used to entertain each other, primarily around the piano, to a nation of people who get entertained,” Fahey said. “The more we get obsessed by sitting and watching screens, the more our bodies will be screaming at us to get up and get involved.”

He added: “Folk music tends to be an umbrella for all those musical expressions that nobody can pigeonhole, so I am happy to be there.”

Denis Greer (Folkways long-term shop manager) on banjo, famed Aboriginal actor and fine didge player, David Gulpilil and Warren Fahey with his English Concertina

THE LARRIKINS

I formed The Larrikins was back in 1971 with the expressed intention of having a group of singers and musicians who could perform Australian traditional material that I wanted to introduce back to the community. It was never intended to be a ’super group’ in the style of The Bushwackers and I was determined it wasn’t going to be a bush band.

My close association with ABC radio and the arts touring organisation, Musica Viva Australia, played important roles in the groups’ development. Without specialist programming or the incentive of national touring, the band would have found it difficult to expand its repertoire. The history of the band is fascinating. I am the remaining constant with Dave de Hugard, Cathie O’Sullivan, Bob McInnes and Jack Kevans being the longest-surviving members.

The first members of the band were three Irishmen who were interested in learning Australian songs.

Usually it is the locals who want to learn Irish songs.

Jack Fallis - played guitar and had a fine tenor voice / Paddy McLaughlin - played banjo and sang /  Ned Alexander -played a beautifully flowing fiddle / Liora Claff  joined the group when a likely arts council tour was promising / Tony Sutton - concertina and accordion player and singer

It was this first group that recorded one of my early ABC series, a three half hour program titled Navvy On The Line, and showcasing Australia’s railway folk heritage. The series was successful and the Larrikin label eventually released the songs as an album of the same name.

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From Warren Fahey’s  website  www.warrenfahey.com 

DAMNED SOULS & TURNING WHEELS

Surprisingly few people know of the fascinating stories associated with Cockatoo Island and its place in Sydney’s maritime, social and labour history. It is a somewhat dark history, commencing its life as an isolated convict prison and later becoming a place of confinement and training for orphaned and wayward young boys whilst, at the same time, a female ‘industrial school’ and reformatory for female prisoners. Cockatoo was also a place of industry, and in particular, shipbuilding. Colonial warships, clipper ships and smaller service ships were repaired and maintained on the island’s original Fitzroy dock and, in the early twentieth century, it became the site for major shipbuilding projects for the newly established Australian Navy. It was also a vital engineering hub where thousands of tradesmen and women worked around the clock, especially during the First and Second World Wars. The history of Cockatoo is best seen through the [records/eyes/stories? of] people who were incarcerated or worked on the island over the past 170 years. It is indeed a history of damned souls and turning wheels.

One of the ways early Australian settlers documented their stories was through story and song. In the twenty-first century most of our entertainment is delivered by technology and we have been conditioned to expect slick, often unnecessarily over-produced music devoid of story. In many ways we have become a people who get entertained rather than entertain each other. Music, of course, plays many roles in our lives and in many ways we have devalued it by having it played in lifts, shopping centres, theatre foyers, cafes and everywhere else imaginable (and unimaginable). Folk songs are unique in being story songs that have stood the test of time. They are emotional capsules of everyday people and their stories, often expressing frustration, remorse, humour and aspiration. They commemorate public events, honour real people, sneer at political leaders and authority, call for social change, mourn unnecessary loss of life, and celebrate the Australian spirit.

Many of the ballads from the convict transportation era, for example, are understandably plaintive as they tell of the dreadful separation from family and lovers, the fear of being sent so far away from their homeland, deprivation and mistreatment by their carers and the system and, finally, heartfelt warnings to others ‘lest they too be transported’.

How hard is my place of confinement,

That keeps me from my heart’s delight,

Cold irons and chains all abound round me,

And a plank for my pillow at night.

(Broadside ‘Here’s Adieu To all Judges and Juries’, Anon, c. 1812)

Songs were also used as vehicles for sarcasm and, in their own simplistic way, captured the essence of the times. One song, simply known as ‘Botany Bay: A New Song’ points to why convicts were transported and reinforces Governor Macquarie’s later remark: ‘Australia was settled by people sentenced here, and those that should have been!’

The hulks and the jails had some thousands in store,

But out of the jails are ten thousand times more,

Who live by fraud, cheating, vile tricks and foul play,

And should all be sent over to Botany Bay.

(Broadside, Mitchell Library Collection undated)

The songs associated with our maritime history, including Cockatoo Island, come from many sources: rare broadside ballads, early songsters, nineteenth-century sheet music, early newspapers, union bulletins, the vaudeville and music hall stage, wartime singalong collections and, most importantly, from songs and poems taken down from people who nurtured them in their repertoire, often passing them down through the years from family to family, friends to friends. In their own way, these songs and poems are signposts to our history and national identity.

Cockatoo Island’s story started in 1839 when it was chosen by the Governor of the Colony of New South Wales, Sir George Gipps, as the site of a new penal establishment. Sixty convicts were relocated from Norfolk Island penitentiary in February that year. At first accommodated in tents and portable lock-ups borrowed from Goat Island, the convicts were soon housed in prisoner’s barracks as construction across the island progressed. Their numbers grew as did their workload – cutting sandstone blocks for Circular Quay and building the island’s underground silos to hold the colony’s grain supply.

Now the soldiers, they stand with their whips in their hands,

They drive us, like horses, to plough up the land.

You should see us poor young fellows, working in the jail yard;

How hard is our fate in Australia.

(Broadside ballad ‘Australia’)

Three of Australia’s most notorious bushrangers were incarcerated on Cockatoo: Thunderbolt (Fred Ward), ‘Jacky-Jackie’ (William Westwood) and ‘The Darkie’ (Frank Gardiner). Ward had the distinction of escaping in 1863 by swimming ashore. By all accounts, Cockatoo was a grim and brutal place – a hell on earth for its inhabitants.

I’ve been hunted like a panther into my mountain lair,

Anxiety and misery my grim companions there,

I’ve planted in the scrub, my boys, and fed on kangaroo,

And wound up my avocations by ten years on Cockatoo.

(‘The Murrumbidgee Shearer’, The Old Bush Songs, A.B. Paterson, A&R, Sydney, 1905 edition.)

In 1869, the Cockatoo Island prison closed and the inmates were moved to Darlinghurst Gaol – only to reopen in 1888 as an ‘overflow’ prison for both male and female criminals.

After the prison closed in 1869, the abandoned prison buildings became a semi-prison for delinquent and orphaned girls and boys. The famous clipper passenger ships Vernon and, from 1891, Sobraon were anchored at the island as training vessels. Up to 500 boys under the age of seven lived on the Vernon. The juvenile goal was renamed ‘Biloela’, reflecting its Aboriginal name, and eventually closed in 1908 when Long Bay Gaol was opened.

(Vernon ‘boys’ farewell their ship in Moreton Bay 1890s. QSL.)

The island, surrounded by deep waterways, was a natural port and from the 1840s serviced visiting and stationed British Navy and allied ships, including clippers and steamships. The island dockyards operated in one form or another for 83 years and repaired and built Australian barges, war ships and ferries. In 1913 it became the Royal Australian Navy Dockyard where our most famous warships and submarines were built – Sydney, Kookaburra, Warrego, Tobruk etc.

Oh, it’s lonesome away, from Australia and all,
In the mess decks at night, where the action bells call,
But there’s nothing as lonesome, morbid or drear,
Than to sit on the deck of a ship with no beer.

(Anonymous parody of ‘The Pub With No Beer’ from the HMAS Yarra [Diggers’ Songs, W. Fahey, AMHP, 1996])

Cockatoo’s massive worksheds also housed major engineering programs including the repair of Charles Kingsford Smith’s Southern Cross through to the manufacturing of giant turbo engines for the Snowy Mountain Scheme. The island also claimed a turbulent labour history with mass strikes, walkouts and sit-ins as its labour force and unions dealt with workplace relations, safety and, on several occasions, the threat of closure.

In 1991, working life ceased at Cockatoo Island however the shadows of its past still survive today. The history of the island continues to be told through folk song and stories, saluting the numerous souls who broke the stone, carved the rocks, built the docks and made the giant wheels turn on Cockatoo Island.

It’s wet and bleak, the morning, as you squeeze in through the gate
As you clock on, your bell will ring, eight hours is your fate
Off comes your coat all wet and cold and ‘Right, lads’ is the cry
With an eye on the clock and the other on your lathe,
you’ll wish that time could fly.

Turning steel how do you feel
As in the chuck you spin?
If you felt like me you’d roll right out
And never roll back in.

The gaffer’s walking down the shop and so it`s work you must
The grinding, groaning, spinning metal hotter than the dust
And I’m often dreaming of me girl as we’re walking through the park
Whilst I’m gazing on that blueing steel and a million flying sparks.

(‘Factory Lad’, written by Colin Dryden, c. 1966 )        

Background to project.

The project was born over a dinner at Sydney art curator, Amanda Love’s, home in 2009. Amanda, taken by David Elliott’s inspiration for his Biennale, had suggested he should meet me – and arranged the introduction. The project was sealed at a subsequent dinner at my place where it became obvious that David shared my passion (and knowledge) of traditional music. He matched me – song-for-song – when we discussed the works of A. L. Lloyd, Ewan MacColl, Harry Smith and dozens of traditional singers long gone.

(Biennale Artistic Director David Elliott)

I had been to the previous Biennale on Cockatoo Island in 2008 and taken by the island’s industrial and social history. My mind immediately snapped the project into action: a sound and image installation telling the island’s story. Over the next few months I rolled ideas around and embarked on researching what archival images, both film and picture, were available to illustrate the six ‘signposts’ I indentified as the island’s historical markers: convicts/bushrangers, colonial dock, colonial institutions (Biloela/Vernon), WW1 engineering/shipyards, WW2 and post-war industry, closure/parkland.

The next stage was to go door-knocking to see what images I could secure without cost.
Letters were written, telephone calls and emails made and many favours called upon.

By October 2009 I was confident enough to sign an agreement with the Biennale and signal that the project was to proceed.

Budget.

The Biennale of Sydney is a not-for-profit initiative and artists are not ‘paid’ as such to participate and I am no exception. I did, however, need a budget to pay for ‘actual’ costs and especially projection equipment, rigging, computers and for the image and sound designers. At one stage it was touch and go whether we would proceed because of our budget estimates. Thankfully, the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust agreed to become the Biennale’s co-sponsor of my work.

Technical.

The technical requirements of the exhibition call for 6 short throw projectors.
Operating off two MacIntosh computers.
There are 4 sound speakers.
The images are screened directly on to the sandstone wall offering a long panorama.
The room, rectangle in shape, has been blackened out to allow maximum impact.
Some seating will be available.

Timeframe.

The project was developed and researched between May-September 2009.
Footage, sound and images were requested for delivery by November 2009.
Assembly began March 2010 with delivery and installation planned for w/c May 3.
The installation trial period will also be during this period and, if necessary, the sound will be final mixed and projectors located.
The installation is open to the media on 11 May
Official launch opening is 12 May
Installation will run on a loop 7 days a week during exhibition times.

The Soundtrack

The soundtrack to the installation has been designed to provide the viewer with snippets of songs they would not necessarily have heard, before but relate to the image. They have been taken from archival recordings in the National Library and from recordings either produced or released by Warren Fahey featuring a variety of artists.

Jim Jones music intro played by Warren Fahey (concertina), Marcus Holden, Garry Steel and Clare O’Meara.
Land of Pests  spoken by Warren Fahey with sound effects mix by Marcus Holden.
Botany bay Scoundrels – film –  featuring peter O’Shaughnessy
Australia, Australia – sung by Warren Fahey with The Larrikins
Repeat Jim Jones instrumental
Jim Jones – film – featuring Declan Affley from The Restless Years
Bound For Botany Bay – sung by Warren Fahey with The Larrikins
Wild Rover – Tom Newbold/Meredith Archive.
The Dodger – sung by Warren Fahey with The Larrikins
Jack’s The Lad part 1 – fiddle tune played by Simon McDonald/O’Coonor: Officer Archive
Morning of the Fray – sung by Warren Fahey
Jack’s the Lad part 2 – Simon McDonald
Frank Gardiner Is Caught – Sung by Warren Fahey with The Larrikins
Harmonica: Cuckoo Waltz – Sprouse/Fahey:Rouseabout
Woolloomooloo – Susan Colley/Fahey Archive
Mandolin sting – Marcus Holden
Rambling Sailor – Sally Sloane/Fahey Archive
Sailor’s Grave: Simon McDonald: O’Coonor:Officer Archive
Lost Sailor: Simon McDonald: O’Coonor:Officer Archive
Curs’d Isle verse 1 & 2 – sung by Clare O’Meara
Naughty Little Twinkle tune – Sally Sloane/Meredith Archive
Naughty Little Twinkle song – ditto
Curs’d Isle verses 3 – sung by Clare O’Meara
Haul on the Bowline – sung by Ewan MacColl/Riverside
My Boy Tommy – Susan Colley/Fahey Archive
Polka – Susan Colley/Fahey archive
According to the Act – Captain Watson/Shiplover’s Society/O’Connor Archive
Harmonica: Hornpipes – Sprouse/Fahey/Rouseabout
Leave Her Jollies – Captain Watson/O’Connor Archive
Austerity Blues music – Abe Romain/Barbara James/Fahey?Rouseabout
Bugle Call – Fx
Why Can’t We Have a Navy – Warren Fahey from Diggers’ Songs/Rouseabout
Harmonica: waltz -  Spouse/Fahey/Rouseabout
In the Army Now – Warren Fahey/Mic Conway/Rouseabout
Goodbyee – Florrie Forde/Fahey/Rouseabout
Fighting the Kaiser – Warren Fahey/Mic Conway
Colonel Kicks the Major – Warren Fahey
Little Billy Hughes – Warren Fahey & The Larrikins
Film: Cinesound intro into Wanganella
20th Century Blues music – Barbara James/Fahey/Rouseabout
Bugle Call – FX
Film: Spring Cleaning in the Navy – film
I’ll Take the Tripod – Warren Fahey
Goodbye Uncle Adolph -
Take Me Up the Harbour – instrumental The Larrikins
Film: The War is over…. film
Take me Up the Harbour – two – Ina Popplewell/Meredith
Film: depression banjo clip – film
Shut the doors – Bob Dyer/Fahey/Rouseabout
Lou From Cockatoo Verse 1 – Warren Fahey/Dengate
Nails – Warren Fahey & The Larrikins
Factory Lad – Andy Saunders/Lobl
The Voyager – Gary Shearston/Rouseabout
Down Went the Captain – Susan Colley/Fahey Archive
Old Sydney Town  – Phyl Lobl/Bronzewing

Partnerships. 

A project of this nature and scale would not have been possible without the cooperation and collaboration of many institutions and people.
Mic Gruchy who readily agreed to work on the project as image designer.
Basil Hogios who came on board as sound designer.
National Film & Sound Archive – in particular Darryl McIntrye, David Boden, Simon Drake, Matthew Davis and Catherine Secombe.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation and in particular Beth Shepherd and Cyrus Irani.
Australian Goverment Department of Defence.
Maritime Union of Australia.
The Estate of Charles Chauvel (by arrangement with the licensor Curtis Brown (Aust) Pty Ltd).
Cinesound/Movietone Productions/Thought Equity Motion and Cinesound/Movietone Productions.
National Library of Australia and in particular Margie Burn, Robyn Holmes, Shelly Grant and Kev Bradley. The Folklore & Oral History section generously provided archive recordings from their Collection.
State Library of New South Wales and in particular Richard Neville.
State Library of Victoria; State Library of Queensland.
State Records New South Wales and in particular Alan Ventress and Christine Yeats.
William A. Raymond Film Collection (with permission of Libby Forrest and Renn Wortley).
Gary Shearston and Roustabout Records.
Naomi Hood (on behalf on the late Colin Dryden)
John Dengate who allowed me to take liberties with his song’Bill From Erskinville’.
Phyl Lobl for her song ‘Old Sydney Town’.
Andy Saunders for his version of ‘Factory Lad’ from Phyl Lobl’s album.
Marcus Holden who went beyond the call of duty to record some incidental music for the soundtrack.
Clare O’Meara for singing my song ‘The Curs’d Isle’.

This project was made possible through the support of Sydney Harbour Federation Trust.

Film.

Rebel Penfold-Russell, Pat Fiske and Adam Bayliss of Rebel Films are producing a documentary film on my work including a strong focus on the Biennale project. They have been filming various stages of the project’s development..

Related posts:

1. Biennale of Sydney 2010 – “The Messiah”

In this captivating presentation at the Art Gallery of NSW, Gormley talked about the themes and processes behind his remarkable body of work.

Gormley has revitalised the human form in sculpture through a radical investigation of the body as a place of memory and transformation. In his lecture ( on May 9th , 2010 ) he reflected on his 25 years of work using his own body as subject, tool and material

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31 life-size statues of Antony Gormley’s public art exhibition “Event Horizon” in New York City. From March 26th to  August 15, 2010-  all of the body forms, made of iron and fiberglass, will populate the surroundings and rooftops of historic Madison Square Park and the Flatiron District.

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Antony Gormley, born in London 1950, came to prominence in the early 1980s with his body case sculptures. For 15 years he has been working in various regions around the world on what he calls the Field project. Using local clay he allows local people to form surrogate populations, small figures that become a kind of self-portraiture.

asian field biennale 2003

Asian Field, his installation at Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay, for the 2006 Biennale of Sydney, was made by 500 assistants out of 125 tonnes of gritty brick clay in Xianxian village, Guangzhou in 2003

I think it is a communication, but it is a meeting of two lives. It’s a meeting of the expressiveness of me, the artist, and the expressiveness of you, the viewer. And for me the charge comes from that confrontation. It can be a confrontation between the movement of the viewer and the stillness of the object, which in some way is an irreconcilable difference, but also an invitation for the viewer to sense his own body through his moment of stillness.

Iron Man Birmingham , 2005

Another Place, UK

Antony Gormley made 100 cast-iron sculptures from a mould of himself, then planted them firmly in the shoreline at Crosby Beach, Merseyside, gazing out across the sea. How much you can see depends on whether the tide is in or out.

Another Place Crosby Beach

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Angel of the North

The Angel’s silhouette at the head of the Team Valley now rivals that of the famous Tyne Bridge.

A panoramic hilltop site was chosen where the sculpture would be clearly seen by more than 90,000 drivers a day on the A1 – more than one person every second – and by passengers on the East Coast main line from London to Edinburgh.

The site, a former colliery pithead baths synonymous with Gateshead mining history, was re-claimed as a green landscape during the early 1990s.

“People are always asking, why an angel? The only response I can give is that no-one has ever seen one and we need to keep imagining them. The angel has three functions – firstly a historic one to remind us that below this site coal miners worked in the dark for two hundred years, secondly to grasp hold of the future, expressing our transition from the industrial to the information age, and lastly to be a focus for our hopes and fears – a sculpture is an evolving thing.”

Gormley said of the Angel: “The hilltop site is important and has the feeling of being a megalithic mound. When you think of the mining that was done underneath the site, there is a poetic resonance. Men worked beneath the surface in the dark. Now in the light, there is a celebration of this industry. The face will not have individual features. The effect of the piece is in the alertness, the awareness of space and the gesture of the wings – they are not flat, they’re about 3.5 degrees forward and give a sense of embrace. The most important thing is that this is a collaborative venture. We are evolving a collective work from the firms of the North East and the best engineers in the world.

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Related posts:

1. Biennale of Sydney 2010 – Wang Quinsong @ AGNSW

The Art Gallery of NSW

Wang Qingsong, the enfant terrible of contemporary Chinese art photography, stages grand, kitschy tableaux that call to mind traditional Chinese scrolls, allegorical Renaissance paintings, Socialist public sculptures and more.

Commenting on the massive changes and the effects of globalization happening in China, his works hover provocatively between Fiction and Reality. Parodying the Chinese miracle, the artist interprets the feeling of  the Silent Majority who mainly suffer from the side-effects in a Society that has changed too quickly.

Wang Qingsong’s elaborate, often parodic staged photographs riff on everything from art history to corporate logos to Communist propaganda. Sexy, ironic and always over-the-top, the photographs critique China’s new consumer culture, its growing materialism and wastefulness, while simultaneously revelling in its newfound decadence.

Many of Qingsong’s best works are amusing self-portraits, in which the artist positions himself in such a way as to force the viewer to question the direction in which our collective culture is turning.

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His face is animated, with piercing eyes, high cheekbones, and a haircut designed to draw attention. 2 years ago he  combed his thick, gray-flecked hair upward in imitation of the flame-shaped heads of the cartoon mascots for the Summer Olympics, while last year he shaved his head with an electric razor, leaving random strands to sprout from the top. “I’ve experimented with different hairstyles ever since I became an artist,” says Wang, as if it were just another outlet for his creativity.

Competition

In this work, a huge wall, that stands about 14 meters high and 40 meters across, was created. Wang fixed over 600 pieces of paper (110×90cm each) writing characters in traditional Chinese ink brush style and felt tip pen and magic marker, a random selection of slogans and phrases from the advertisements that bombard us here every day.

These ads included both domestic and international information about companies and famous brands, such as the lease of houses, education programs, restaurants, foot massage, etc. Altogether, around 2000 varieties of products and services appeared on this huge wall to show off the allure of this mass advertising campaign that surrounds us.

“Competition” focuses on the power of ads and the misconceptions that ads can create. For this photo work, Wang constructed a chaotic backdrop where over 20 people are depicted in a frenzy of competition with some even fist fighting while jostling for ad positioning on a huge billboard advertisement; this struggle for the most optimal outdoor ad placement is perceived as inevitably bringing power and influence.

The struggle for ad placement in public space in China is not unlike a battlefield strewn with casualties after a pitched battle for power. Today one brand wins. The next day, its competitor will replace it with better positioning on public spaces. Every day, new ads go up, and old ones fall down, scattered in pieces, and discarded on the ground under newly erected billboard advertisements.

Without even being able to understand English, the inundation of advertising these famous brands in China give people the impression that they can easily follow what the words say, despite their lack of English skills!

Red Red Wall of China @ Art Gallery Qld 2008 / photo by Jeff Hulme

billboard 2004

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Iron Man” is a term that exists in the Chinese lexicon and is used to describe a particular life attitude. An “Iron Man” can confront and overcome life’s obstacles, without fear or trepidation, and continue forward. An “Iron Man” is someone unafraid to face and to bear life’s vicissitudes. Of course I am using this attitude and this “Iron Man” title with much irony and skepticism

Born in 1966 in Daqing in Heilongjiang Province, he moved in 1969 with his family to Jingzhou in Hubei Province, where his father found work in the oil fields. “My family lived here and there, so I never had a feeling of location,” he says. After his father was killed in an accident, in 1981, Wang worked for eight years drilling in the fields, all the while trying to gain admission to one of China’s prestigious art academies. His decision to become an artist was almost accidental. One day, walking home from the oil fields, he found a drawing of an old man who reminded him of his father. He copied the work repeatedly, impressed by its realism. Finally, after five attempts, he was admitted to the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, known for its oil-painting program.

He moved to Beijing in 1993. “I thought of Beijing as such a cultured city, with people visiting museums and being really interested in what they saw,” he says. But it turned out his meager savings would last him only two months. So he settled in a village at the edge of town, unable to afford even a mattress. After a year, with assistance from his brothers and sisters, he moved into the Yuanmingyuan artist’s colony, a collection of rundown neighborhoods near the old Summer Palace where many of the leading artists of the post-Tiananmen Square era had set up shop.

In the city’s mid-’90s experimental atmosphere, Wang struggled to establish himself as a painter. His first series, “Dysphasia” (1996), portrayed people flailing to get out of plastic wrapping, and then “Competition” (2004) depicted naked bodies wrestling on the ground. These works communicated Wang’s frustration with society at a time when there was little hope for change.

Wang participated in his first exhibition, organized by the prominent Beijing critic Li Xianting, in 1996. As a result, the dealer Ludovic Bois of the Chinese Contemporary gallery in London visited his studio and offered him his first solo show. Bois paid him a few thousand dollars up front for all the paintings in the exhibition, but sold only one. “My mother doubted that I was a good artist, and where I came from it was impossible for anyone to believe that you could travel to a foreign city,” says Wang. At this time his mother was dying in a hospital back home. “So I took a photograph of myself with scenery behind me,” he recalls, “so my mother could finally see that her son had become a good artist who had shown overseas, and she told all the other patients in her ward.”

Already Wang was exploring the power of photography, and he soon gave up painting. “There were so many changes taking place all across China, and you couldn’t paint anything that could match this reality,” he says. His first photographs were colorful self-portraits created with Photoshop, showing the artist brandishing both Chinese emblems and logos from international companies that had by then invaded his country.

Over the Past Few Years, His Productions Have Become Ambitious increasingly, the field of composition has enlarged to more people envelops, assistants and technicians, an array of lights, make-up and wardrobe and more a sophisticated props. In a context WHERE Everything Is Hurried and fast, in Wang Qingsong engagés That projects require time and interaction. By creating microcosms, It Seems That the artist invites spectators to stop and decode the multiple small Stories Told in the whole epic. Time is important for everybody. These works and Making Them Requires viewing time. His portraits are animated with narratives, stories and people in the fixed photographic poses. In a photograph Every little detail matters and Wang Qingsong’s large, scale pictures Have The Rare quality to hold the gaze of viewers Inviting Them to gradually explore the scenes to catch the manifold poses, the single episodes.

“I have been working with photography for over ten years. My photo-works talk about a lot of interaction between native/national traditions with modern tastes, development and new innovations which break through our old frame of mind of cultures. My works sometime challenge the issue of modern versus traditional provoking people to keep concentrating on memories and new occurrences of stories in this modern world”

Wang attributes his interest in staged photography to the propaganda he grew up with during the Cultural Revolution. “When I was about 17 years old—it was 1983, long after the Cultural Revolution, so people began to speak the truth—a journalist admitted that the photograph he shot on the occasion of China getting the atom bomb was staged,” he recalls. “That was totally a big surprise for me.” Realizing that the images he had seen in the newspapers during his childhood were fabricated, Wang decided to take a different approach to his photography. “It is staged,” he explains, “but it has some truth.”

Follow Me , 2003

"Follow Me”, 20x300cm, 2003

“Follow Me” is the first English language-teaching program introduced by CCTV in 1982.

This English-training series had sixty units, which were repeatedly shown for twelve years. It had 10 million viewers and sold over 30 million textbooks, setting a Guinness record for foreigners learning English. Many Chinese people got a glimpse of the western lifestyle from “Follow Me.” Farmers, workers, soldiers and students, even monks at Lama Temple, enjoyed the program as a window to learn what foreigners eat and wear and how they live. Many people consider “Follow Me” as the Bible for learning oral English. , photograph, 180×90cm, 1998

On a huge four-meter wide and eight-meter long blackboard that I set up in Beijing Film Studio in 2003, many Chinese and English terms and sentences about changes in Chinese history and culture selected from English-training textbooks were scribbled in chalk.

Dream of Migrants, 2005

“from one place to another, mostly from countryside to big cities to look for jobs. This group of people is called unauthorized flow of population. They are referred to as elements of social instability. They are of special identity and marked with demean features as dirty, unstable and dangerous.

Dream of Migrants, 170x400cm, 2005

In Beijing, there are nearly 3 million such people. They all hold a dream and look for opportunities when they flow from their hometown to big cities. They bring stimulus for urban development but also bring forth a lot of unstable factors, such as their children have no nice schooling and the families have no stable housing. They used to be driven here and there due to lack of money and honor. Many people take them as vibrant force but most people regard them as social virus. This derogatory terms sometimes is mixed up with “Tramp, loafers, gangsters, rascals…”

Skyscraper video, 2008

This short video piece was created from January 1, 2008 to February 4, 2008. The installation for this work took about 20 days, employing over 30 scaffolding workers per day to build the structure. During these 35 constructing days, I had to ask for the departure of all workers from the scenario when the shooting took place. Therefore it took much longer time though this video is only five minutes long.

The installation is about 35 meters tall, with a diameter of 40 meters. The scaffolds bars are painted with gold colors so that they look shiny under the sunshine.

In this work “Skyscraper”, I hope to express the feeling of a very strange and sad feeling for this monster-looking building, representing the dramatic developing stage in China. China has been growing at breakneck speed but what is not always noticed, like Wang’s process behind his photos, is the immediate effect and sacrifices of millions of displaced and anonymous people.

The end of the film shows fireworks exploding from the top of the skyscraper in a jubilant but dark celebration as we listen to three women sing a Chinese version of “Silent Night, Holy Night.”

Dormitory, 2009

Dormitory, shown at the architecture biennale, by Chinese photographer Wang Qingsong, is a huge picture showing dozens of people trying to find intimacy while they are living on top of each other in cage like minimal spaces

Temporary Ward, 2008

During His stay in England, he got inspiration from The Notion of theater as a cathartic experience for audiences. The location was the starting point to explore the subject of pain and healing (an Investigation he HAD Already in mind) juxtaposing the physical That people receive treatment in hospitals to the Associated emotional healing to theater, art and culture. Were invited 300 local volunteers to take part in a photographic shoot at Northern Stage and Transmitted live onto screens Throughout the theater.

The image Took Several days to setup and a full day to shoot. The making process included finding Hundreds of doctor and nurse outfits, qualified make up artists, recruiting volunteers and plenty more to be arranged from the big logistics down to tiny details. When Confronting with Wang Qingsong’s works, That We May Argue creating large-scale productions in China is cheaper Easier and But in this piece-produced collaboration from abroad-more Significant is the answer of enthusiastic volunteers. As documented on the Theatre’s blog, Almost 600 people from Edinburgh to London, “Some as young as 3 months, others as 76, applied to take part in the project.

Here it is delineated in more complex relationship Between the spectacle and the spectator. The human group participates to a theatralization of Pain Where the audience is Transformed into a live crowd waiting to be healed, or Perhaps in an auditorium waiting for a performance to begin. Within the picture the artist living in the center seats reading a paper, waiting just like the others do. During the years, Wang Qingsong’s role in His photographs has shifted from observer to participant and Between Different scenarios. His appearance here Seems to allude to a sort of director signature (reminding us of Alfred Hitchcock cameos) claiming the author / subject liaison.

Nevertheless there are risks in China in staging photographs on this scale. Though government censorship has relaxed in recent years, nude photographs can still be denounced as pornography, which is illegal. More important, simply gathering together a large group of people requires governmental clearance, to ensure that no political agendas are being promoted. Wang tends to circumvent this rule by setting up shoots in out-of-the-way locations.

In the fall of 2006, however, Wang ran into trouble with the authorities as he was setting up his mammoth production The Blood of the World. For this photograph he created an epic battle scene involving 200 actors, 4 horses, 1 tank, and 2 jeeps. The set, built inside a huge hangar on the outskirts of Beijing normally used for agricultural hydroponics, was more than 3,000 feet long and included 35-foot-tall hills, deep holes, and smoldering fires. The final work was a medley of war scenes from famous paintings, such as Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, and well-known news photographs, like Eddie Adams’s 1968 photo of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Vietcong prisoner in Saigon. Many of the scores of actors were naked and draped across the landscape as dead bodies. It was a particularly cold day in November when the shoot took place.

The next morning, much to Wang’s dismay, a news item appeared in a Beijing paper accusing him of staging a pornographic event. Former president Jiang Zemin saw the report and ordered the mayor of Beijing to investigate. Wang, who was called in for questioning, was released after three days, but his negatives were seized and have not been returned to him. The Blood of the World was never printed.

“I want to forget about this incident,” Wang says now, three years later, “but sometimes it still looms large in my life and my dreams.” He continues, “If I hadn’t given them the negatives, they would have found more excuses to detain me, and I would have had much more trouble.” Since then he has not used nudity in his photographs, but he has not backed down from offering visual commentary on his society.

In The Glory of Hope (2007) the artist and his family stand facing a bleak horizon. Behind them, interlocking rings, the symbol of the Olympic games, are carved deeply in the mud, filled with dirty water

In the diptych U.N. Party (2007) he provided a humorous before-and-after look at an international soirée. The first image shows more than 1,300 partying diplomats circulating around two tables in the shape of the letters U and N. The second focuses on the debris they left behind.

Everyone appears full of aspiration and seems satisfied with the achievements of reform and rapid development, which are expressed in the Chinese slogan, “One change a year, one big change in three years, and one unidentifiable transformation in five years.” Capitalism has “modernized” our formerly agricultural country. .. This rich contemporary China provides me with a huge resource for artistic inspiration. To sing highly of this new, sweeter-than-honey life of glory, I use theatrical techniques and let the camera narrate true and understandable contemporary stories.

China has been open to the outside world for the last two decades and enthusiastic about inviting foreign experts in economy, technology, architecture and culture to give support and guidance in Chinese open-up program. These foreign specialists help create many opportunities and bring many advanced thoughts for China. However, they manufacture many uncertain and disturbing ideas. Due to such a quick inflow and outflow of advanced concepts, Chinese people are confused about what are right and what are wrong sometimes.

China Mansion, 2003

“China Mansion”, is a scroll photograph that situates the scene in a Chinese styled home. I put my “China Mansion” in a much wider sense, like an old Chinese saying, “Without home, without nation”.

In this five-scene photograph, I invite foreign guests in art, including honorable figures in paintings by Ingre, Courbet, Monet, Gauguin, Yves Klein, Jones, Bouchee, Rembrandt, Rubens, Renoir, Man Ray and etc. They are specially invited guests in my “China Mansion”, a private night club.

I want to make them communicate with each other across centuries and cultures and create certain relationships between themselves as well as communicate with China. Such relationships portend uncertain, humorous and confusing hues.

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Roxy Paine's "Neuron" at the MCA - photo by Bill Hatcher

During the Biennale, visitors to the MCA entrance are greeted by New York artist Roxy Paine’s large-scale structure. Roxy Paine’s work examines systems of growth and decay by setting them against processes of organic evolution and industrial construction.

installation

Entropy – the inevitable and steady running down of energy – man-made and natural – is counterbalanced by possibilities for regeneration. His work is nearly always based on a creation of tension between organic and man-made environments.

This has been expressed, at different times, in vitrines of meticulously replicated mushroom and plant life (often poisonous or hallucinogenic) in varying states of decay and in a series of large structures based on the forms of trees with their roots exposed that have been handmade out of industrial stainless steel pipe.

Such works are generically called Dendroids. Neuron (2010), the vast new work shown for the first time continues this idea, focusing even more on the idea of dendrites and synapses, the means by which information, knowledge and experience are eerily and electrically transmitted through a body.

Born 1966 in New York, USA

Lives and works in New York

Roxy Paine’s work examines systems of growth and decay by setting them against processes of organic evolution and industrial construction. Entropy – the inevitable and steady running down of energy (man-made and natural) is counterbalanced by possibilities for regeneration. His work is nearly always based on a creation of tension between organic and manmade environments. This has been expressed, at different times, in vitrines of meticulously replicated mushroom and plant life (often poisonous or hallucinogenic) in varying states of decay. He has also made a series of large structures based on the forms of trees with their roots exposed, handmade out of industrial stainless steel pipe.

Paine created a site-specific installation for the 2009 season of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, the most dramatic outdoor space for sculpture in New York City.

Maelstrom features a 130-foot-long by 45-foot-wide stainless-steel sculpture, that encompasses the nearly 8,000-square-foot Roof Garden, and is the largest sculpture to have been installed on the roof of the Metropolitan. Set against, and in dialogue with, the greensward of Central Park and its architectural backdrop, this swirling entanglement of stainless- steel pipe showcases the work of an artist keenly interested in the interplay between the natural world and the built environment, as well as the human desire for order amid nature’s inherently chaotic processes.

model for maelstrom

These works are generically called Dendroids. Neuron (2010), the vast new work shown for the first time in front of  the MCA, continues this idea, focusing even more on the idea of dendrites and synapses, the means by which information, knowledge and experience are eerily and electrically transmitted through a body.”

To create a Dendroid, Paine starts with an ink drawing and then makes a stainless-steel scale model that serves as a constant reference point. Shaping each pipe into a branch takes hours of reforming the steel with a metal-shop machine called a hydraulic bender, and then there is the welding, fitting and finishing.

Tall and lean, with shaggy brown hair and a beard, the 42-year-old Paine has a disarming mellowness that belies the drive revealed when the discussion turns to his art. “My life right now is this work. I live, breathe, eat, drink and piss it,” he says. “When it’s done, I’ll collapse for a while.” This intensity is no surprise, given the intellectual rigor and laboriousness of his endeavors over the years. He studies a work’s subject, such as fungus or trees, for months before embarking on it, and uses materials — epoxy, electrical wiring, stainless steel — for which tremendous skill and persistence are required to yield the precision he demands. “It’s a process of generating an idea and being propelled forward by it — a long process of intensive research and absorbing everything I can about that particular realm and then expanding on it,” he says.

cojoined installation

Roxy Paine Interview by Sarah Rosenbaum-Kranson @ Museo Magazine

Roxy Paine’s work examines processes of growth and decay, creation and entropy, on both manmade and natural scales. From the artist’s best known dendroid sculptures to works based on weeds and rot to his automated painting and sculpture machines, Paine continues to return to questions of environment as related to the viewer. Encountering his work, often in public settings, not only results in a distinct sense of place, but also generates connections between human bodies and those bodies and their shared space. Paine’s work is represented in major museum collections worldwide, and his recent large-scale installation, Maelstrom, is currently on view in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

SRK: Congratulations on Maelstrom. The installation looks incredible, and it’s a hard space to deal with in the sense that there’s so much to contend with on the rooftop.

RP: When you go up there with this installation, you might not have a memory of the previous installations, and things tend to be diminutized up there by the surroundings, so that was definitely one of the challenges that I saw coming into the project—how to deal with the scale. It’s not just the square footage you’re dealing with, it’s the vastness or expansiveness of that space—it just feels open to the heavens, and there aren’t any other trees nearby like you would have in a park, which would give you a sense of scale. The trees are 500 feet away, and you’re looking down on them.

SRK: I’d seen your previous works in New York, and I thought it was interesting that you’re obviously still working in a similar language, but it translates differently, depending on street level versus rooftop, where you have a sort of horizon line.

RP: I think it’s a combination of things that are happening: the language that I’m working with is changing. The earlier work was really characterized by the word “restraint.” I was constricting myself inside a very finite number of elements and possibilities, seeing what I could do within those very tight restraints, and I think in these more recent works, of which Maelstrom is an example, I’m really throwing those restraints away; I’m pushing outward on those boundaries and this language that’s set up, and I’m just less interested in restraint right now.

SRK: Building off of that, one of the things that I love about the work and that a number of people have commented on is that in contrast to restraint, there are so many allusions, there’s such a large range of visual imagery that comes up with Maelstrom—you’ve got downed trees, industrial plumbing, power lines, human limbs, cardiovascular systems. I was wondering if you could elaborate a little on all of those suggestions and the importance of transformation and metamorphosis. Something that’s also very important to the work is the idea of simultaneity, and that’s increasingly important to me—that something be existing in these multiple states at once. It’s been present in the work to some degree all along, but I think it’s becoming much more prominent. Depending on the physical location in relation to the work and also the location of your mind—where your mind is when you come to it—the work can shift tremendously. The idea of transformation is really critical because it’s taking this banal material, industrial metal piping, which is very specific and with limited functionality—it’s used to transfer material from one location to another in a factory or a pharmaceutical facility or an oil refinery or chemical refinery—and transforming that very stiff [material] into something very subtle, organic, and shifting. And a crucial thing is that it’s simultaneously transformative as well as still being the material that it is, and I’ve left many markers and remnants of its original function. When the stainless-type stock comes to us from the factory, it has all of these markings saying what weight it is, what size it is, what alloy, and so forth, and in many cases, I’ve just let that be.

SRK: When you’re walking through the sculpture, at certain points, you forget what the material actually is, and then at others, you’re drawn right back to knowing where it comes from. Can you discuss a little bit how the commission developed in the first place and physically how it was constructed and installed on the roof?

RP: Anne Strauss has been a fan of my work for a while, and about three and a half years ago, she proposed something. Originally they wanted me to do something for 2008, but having done Conjoined in Madison Square Park, that really just sapped my energy for a while, and I knew the enormity of the task at hand for doing something on the Met roof, but fortunately they were willing to wait. There was an original proposal with more discrete pieces on the roof, which they rejected. I had proposed that, knowing that I was doing the installation at Madison Square Park, and I knew that I wouldn’t have the energy to do something really massive up there, but luckily it was a good thing that they rejected the proposal and that they were willing to wait because I think that it came out for the better. So, then about a year and a half ago, I had the drawing done and presented it to them and they got quite excited, so I started working on the model and finished it in about January 2008. One of the challenges of this project has been the massive bureaucracy of the Met, and in a way, it’s a kind of miracle that a piece like this has managed to exist at the Met. There were about twelve people who came over to look at the model—I can’t even recall all of the different departments that they represented, but it was like seven different departments at the Met, and all of them had to give a go-ahead on this. It really is a testament to Anne that she managed to navigate amongst all of these separate [departments]; each one is its own fiefdom in a way with absolute control over its faction. It was interesting, from that perspective, seeing the way a huge institution runs.

SRK: So, once you started the installation, how much of the work was constructed in pieces off-site, and how much had to be done on the roof itself?

RP: Pretty much all of the elements we built in my studio. The piece itself is composed of about 10,000 individual parts. Then, basically, if you divide the length of the Met roof into thirds, it’s about 150 feet, so each third is about 50 feet in length. So, we would put together everything that we could in a third, and then we would have to dismantle it and put together the next third. It’s quite an elaborate undertaking; all of these elements are extremely heavy, as you can probably imagine. So then we would have all these elements, and the next stage would be to make all these elements fit onto trucks, which have definite restrictions on weight and height, so the elements had to be made transportable. We cut the segments into the components that would fit on the trucks, and we ended up with about 80 different sections that were actually the parts that were loaded onto the flatbeds and then lifted up off of the flatbeds. We had two phases: we brought down five flatbed trucks worth of elements on the first morning of installation, bringing them in the middle of the night, and they were lifted up by a massive crane situated behind the museum that has to lift not only up, but it also has to lift out, because the roof space is not a straight line down to the ground level. There are a couple of buildings between there and the ground, so that requires quite a massive crane to have that cantilever. The first morning [involved] bringing up all the first truckloads’ worth of elements, which [included] probably about 50 of the elements. You couldn’t bring all of the elements up at once or else we would have had no room to move or operate up there. So then we had Italian-made mini-cranes, which also fulfilled all of the requirements that the Met imposed on us, like we couldn’t have anything gas- or diesel-operated on the roof because of their fire regulations, and it had to be under a certain weight, and it also had to be something that would fit into the freight elevators. We found these mini-cranes that compact into a very tight space, and then once they’re on the roof, they open up and have these outriggers. With those, we were able to put all the elements together when they were on the roof itself. So the first week was spent putting as many of those elements together as we could, and that opened up the floor space, so we were able to bring up the second load of elements at the beginning of week number two. You [can] have all of these theories about how it’s going to go together, how it’s going to work, plan[ning] and worry[ing], try[ing] to think about every little detail, but you don’t really know until you’re there that morning whether it’s actually going to work.

SRK: There’s a certain leap of faith.

RP: Yeah, and luckily we were well prepared for every contingency, and it worked out.

SRK: One of the questions that the space itself brought up for me, and especially thinking about some of the other places that your work has been sited, had to do with the considerations of public and private space. Does that come into play when you start to approach a project? The Met roof is in a sort of weird limbo—it’s obviously private, but since the Met is a pay-as-you-wish museum, there is an aspect of the public as well.

RP: There are certain limitations that you have to deal with when something is truly public, 24 hours a day. The litigious nature of this country has also unfortunately resulted in a kind of lowest common denominator for a great deal of public sculpture in the last 30 years. That’s always been one of the additional challenges for me: how to deal with those limitations and not dumb it down, not let it become lowest common denominator and still really engage with the complexity of form, complexity of metaphor, complexity of meaning. The Met roof has some constraints in that regard, but it did allow me a bit more freedom in what kinds of forms I could work with and how accessible those forms could be.

SRK: I was also wondering whose work, or which artists, you consider influential on your development, and whose work you’re currently interested in, either your peers, contemporaries, or looking backwards?|

RP: I’ve always been a huge Robert Gober fan, I’ve always been a huge Bruegel fan, and Sigmar Polke. I think they’ve been very inspirational to me, but I don’t think there’s a direct lineage. I’ve always kind of tried to establish my own logic, and I guess that’s what’s inspirational to me about those [artists] is that they’ve been very effective at establishing their own spheres of logic and then working within them.

SRK: Picking up on that idea of establishing your own sphere of logic, at this point you’re obviously best known for the metal trees, but looking through your past work, it’s obviously an incredibly varied practice, from the weed and fungus sculptures to the painting and sculpture machines. Not to specifically connect the dots between these parts of your practice, but do you think you’ll be returning to some of those other lines of work?

RP: Well, I am still always working with those different practices. I have a new fungus piece I’ve been working on, and there are some different machine ideas that I’ve been thinking about. It’s kind of like an overlapping series of wavelengths; I didn’t switch to making dendroids to the exclusion of the other works. It’s kind of a continuum amongst all the works.

SRK: And in terms of, Maelstrom specifically, it was obviously conceived with the site in mind. Will it have a life after the Met installation?

RP: I certainly hope it will. “Site-specific” is a subject that I have a little bit of trouble with because I believe that if the piece establishes its own logic and its own structure and its own world of ideas, then it should be able to function anywhere. It may have a different set of resonances on the roof versus another location, and I wouldn’t necessarily say yes to any location, but I really believe that a piece should not be dependent on its site. So I hope that it will go to another site, and I may modify it to deal with the architecture of that site or the non-architecture of that site, but it would be largely the same.

SRK: To me, one of the interesting things that has developed in the past few decades as a response to site specificity is site sensitivity. The “if you move it, you kill it” ethos is something that artists have to respond to in some way or another.

RP: Yeah, there are some very specific elements of this piece—the parts where it goes into the edge of the wall, for instance, or the way it sweeps out over the borders of the space, which are very important aspects of the piece. But if it were to be re-sited, I would have to see what kind of space it’s going into and see if I could maintain some of those ideas, maybe not in the same exact manner.

SRK: And a related site question: in general, with the dendroid sculptures, can you talk a little bit about the difference between working in an urban environment versus a more natural landscape? The original one was in a forest, right?

RP: That’s right. For me, it’s more interesting when they’re in an urban environment or a disturbed natural environment. I think that people mistake a certain romanticism when it’s in a natural environment, and that was something I fought with early on because the first one was done in the middle of a forest. Many people looked at it and thought, “Oh, ok, this has to be in this kind of idyllic situation.” Their imaginations couldn’t allow them to see how the piece would be different in an urban situation, or an architectural situation. So that’s something I’ve had to fight over the years. For me, there is an examination of romanticism in the work, but it’s not romantic. And there’s just as much of romanticism’s opposite, which is a very analytical way of looking at the world. It’s equally present in the work. At this point, I’m much more interested in them being in urban situations because I think that the tension between those two is more vivid and more robust, in an urban situation.

SRK: So my last question, obviously you’re just coming off of a major project at the Met, but I was wondering what you’re planning on working on next.

RP: Well, actually there’s no rest for the wicked because I immediately threw myself into a project I’m doing for the National Gallery in D.C., and that’s a very large piece that’s going to be a permanent part of the Sculpture Garden there. It’s a piece called Graft, and it’s a grafting of two very different dendritic entities onto the same central trunk. It’s dealing with dualities and dichotomies; it’s not necessarily only political but also about the dualities that exist in each of our minds.

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