dogtown commons

If you haven’t seen this piece of art (or is it theater?) filmed at Grand Central yet, it’s great stuff:

I happened to stumble upon the photos of a Flickr user called hey mr glen, and they are so good that I feel compelled to re-post some of them here (as permitted by his creative commons license at Flickr). His sensitivities to color, geometry and serendipity are wonderful. His photographs cause viewers to see the world afresh, which is one hallmark of a good artist:

Some of hey mr glen’s photos are candid street shots that show an exceptional alertness to fleeting moments in the life of a city. Here are two taken in San Francisco:

Other photos are nicely-framed shots of architecture that offer a new perspective on buildings that have been photographed a million times before, like this shot of the Transamerica pyramid:

(More photos below) (more…)

That’s not a photo of Bob Dylan — it’s a photo of Cate Blanchett playing Bob Dylan in a new Todd Haynes / Harvey Weinstein movie. It’s all explained in this NYTimes article.

Like a lot of people, I think Blanchett is one of the best actresses around. She steals movies even when her role is pretty minor (The Talented Mr. Ripley, for example). And I admire actors who challenge themselves instead of resting on their laurels or playing the same sort of character over and over. There’s always a danger, though, that the urge to challenge oneself, and to show one’s virtuosity, will come to overshadow the underlying talent. Let’s hope that’s not the case here — playing Dylan seems very hard for any man to do well, never mind a woman.

Three architectural designs for the Transbay Terminal site in San Francisco were unveiled last week. The Chronicle’s John King weighed in with his preference on the front page of Sunday’s Chronicle:

The competition to build a new transit center and skyscraper on Mission Street isn’t a beauty contest. It’s a gamble in city-making that could redefine San Francisco in the sky and on the ground.

How fitting, then, that the tower best suited to replace the Transamerica Pyramid as the Bay Area’s tallest building is every bit as startling as that 35-year-old icon once was - and, at first glance to many eyes, every bit as harsh.

The design comes from the firm of England’s Lord Richard Rogers, and it hums with surprising life. Scaffold-like braces of brightly colored steel reach 1,225 feet into the air, the space inside the braces stuffed with glassy stacks of offices and condominiums and a hotel. Brightly colored elevator cabs race up and down the outer walls; next door, a three-block-long bus platform is perched atop a lean open-air frame with ceilings cloaked in tent-like billows of thin bamboo.

The very first sentence of the article dismisses beauty as if it is merely a concern of the shallow masses. We all scoff at “beauty contests,” right? King then proceeds to turn the building’s vices into virtues. While most people might see this building and think they’re looking at an unfinished construction project, or a glorified radio tower (the top seems to echo Sutro Tower, already a prominent feature of the San Francisco skyline), for King it “hums with surprising life” and “could have a kinetic appeal.”

Later in the article, King acknowledges that the Rogers proposal is the least popular among readers who have submitted votes on the Chronicle’s website:

The Rogers tower places third - and no wonder. Not only is the brash, machine-like look jarring to many eyes, the tower is topped by a single 125-foot-high wind turbine held in place by tweezer-like red columns.

The idea was to create a skyline accent as memorable as Transamerica’s peak: “an icon on top of an icon,” according to the entry package. Instead, it looks like the world’s largest eggbeater.

So why does he prefer a large eggbeater to the less hideous designs of the other two proposals? Mostly because of what is going on at ground level — he thinks the bus terminal portion is better designed than the other two, and also better integrated with the city around it. That’s a fair point, and a building certainly needs to be a usable space as well as a beautiful sculpture. But he also says of Rogers, “His approach is more about ideas than icons.”

Please — I’m all for innovative design, but if we think we need a skyscraper that dwarfs even the Transamerica pyramid, let’s at least make it an icon, not a 1200-foot set of ideas.

(For more pictures, including the other two proposals, see the Chronicle’s image galley here.)

Madonna degli Alberetti by Giovanni Bellini, at the Gallerie Dell’Accademia in Venice

One aspect of the war in Iraq that has been hard to grasp, for Americans trying to follow events from across an ocean, is how the war has affected the day-to-day culture of the place. We do hear occasionally that Iraqis have stopped frequenting markets due to the violence, or have returned to the markets due to a lull in violence, or that restaurants and barbershops in certain areas have closed, or perhaps reopened, but the vast majority of the coverage — understandably — is focused on hard news like the jockeying among political blocs and the ongoing violence.

Thursday’s LA Times has a nicely done story providing a glimpse into the Baghdad art scene, and how it has fared in the past four years. Most of what we learn is as unencouraging as most other news out of Iraq:

Like other segments of Iraqi society, the art community is withering under a daily assault of car bombs, kidnappings, gunfights and mortar blasts. Dictatorship has given way to the suffocating strictures of religious extremists, who frown on most forms of artistic expression, consider sculpture idolatrous and a painting of a nude an insult to Islam.

Many of Iraq’s artists have joined the flight that has decimated the country’s intellectual reserves. For those who remain, it is a constant struggle to keep producing work that few will ever see and most cannot afford.

The article focuses on Nebil Anwar, who had high hopes for an artistic career after the fall of Saddam, but found himself painting portraits of foreigners to make a living, copying the paintings from photographs because it was too risky to meet face to face. The money was good, but he lived in constant fear that he would be discovered, and finally he decided to move to Jordan, where he now lives. He is pessimistic about the future of art in Iraq:

“Art will die in Iraq,” he predicted gloomily. “Art comes from the artists, and if the artists go, then art will go with them.”

While most of Baghdad’s once-plentiful galleries have had to close, and many artists feel compelled to work in secret, there is a brighter note at the very end of the article. A new gallery opened last year, and it is busy with art shows, poetry readings, and lectures:

For Nasar, the gallery embodies his belief in the power of art to open the eyes of those who follow blindly; it restores sanity amid the bloodshed and creates new heroes for a generation growing up under the sway of gunmen.

“Art is part of life here in Iraq,” he said. “Without it, people would become like monsters.”

The BBC posted a little slideshow on their website in 2005, showing the art that was appearing on the large concrete blast walls that had been erected around Baghdad to protect embassies and other buildings. In an act of defiance against the violence and strife, the artists had covered the drab and imposing concrete with striking murals of pastoral scenes, peace doves, mosques and churches coexisting, and quiet cityscapes.

It would be foolish, of course, to see the persistence of art as a sign that things are better than they seem in Iraq — despite Anwar’s dire prediction, art probably never dies entirely — but nevertheless it’s heartening to get this reminder that art does persist, against reason and against despair.

(”The Vulture” by Esam Pasha, from “Ashes to Art: The Iraqi Phoenix” at the Pomegranate Gallery in New York City, 2006)

More at:

Post-Saddam Art, Newsweek online, January 20, 2006

The Art of Kareem Risan and the Uranium Civilization, Electronic Iraq, July 23, 2007

Concrete: Canvas of Resistance, Subtopia, May 1, 2007

That’s probably true for all of us, but extreme cases can really clarify matters. First there was Phineas Gage, now there is Tommy McHugh:

There are several labyrinths in Sibley Volcanic Preserve in the Oakland hills, all created by local residents but tolerated by the park authorities. Here is the largest, at the bottom of a former quarry (you can see another small labyrinth off to the left side of the photo):

Labyrinths seem to play two very different roles in our culture: there are the labyrinths like those at Sibley, providing a place for contemplation, meditation, prayer, mindful walking. Then there are the walled labyrinths of mythology, dark, disorienting places where the unknown lurks around every corner, and mysteries await deep inside. The stone maze in the beautiful film Pan’s Labyrinth is a prime example of the latter.

While the Sibley labyrinths are the site of occasional rituals, they are more often used informally by passing walkers or hikers who may leave notes or mementos in the center: offerings to the earth, or the community, or to no one in particular. Here is one of the smaller labyrinths in the Sibley preserve:

The urge to create labyrinths appears to be almost universal in human beings. In addition to the European labyrinths of Crete, Chartres cathedral, and elsewhere, labyrinths have been found from pre-Columbian America to ancient India, suggesting that labyrinths carry a deep resonance for us, independent of a particular culture or time.

That resonance is evident in some of Richard Serra’s work. The sculptor, currently the subject of widely lauded MoMA retrospective, has been evoking labyrinths for at least a decade, notably in works like the Torqued Spiral series:

The steel walls of the spirals are about 12 feet tall, and one is free to walk through them. The already disconcerting effect of walking through a narrow passage, not being able to see more than 10 feet ahead or behind, is heightened by the “torque” Serra has built into his sculptures. The walls are rarely vertical, and even then only incidentally. Instead they lean, sometimes inwards, sometimes outwards, so the very dimensions of the passages are constantly changing. One might have a wide view of sky (or ceiling), then a few steps ahead the walls have closed in claustrophobically, with only a narrow sliver between the tops of the inner and outer walls.

We are drawn irresistibly into these spirals, and at their best, they change our perception of space itself — it expands and contracts even as we move through it, and the effect can be simultaneously exhilarating and disconcerting (exhilarating precisely because it is disconcerting.)

For his current MoMA retrospective, Serra has gone even further in this direction, continuing to work with twisting walls of steel, but in a kind of figure eight pattern of two interlocking circles. The new sculpture, Sequence, departs from the circular shape of a classic labyrinth, but it still consists of a single path, from outer to inner and then back. The long, winding, shapeshifting path twists and turns so much that one can no longer correlate one’s immediate surrounding with the overall shape of the work.

Unlike many other labyrinths, these sculptures seem determinedly secular. The massive walls of unpainted steel impose a brute physicality and materialism, leaving little room for any kind of ethereal spirituality, and the undulating passageways heighten one’s sense of the body’s relationship to the surrounding space, rather than suggesting the presence of anything supernatural. But they do call MoMA the high church of modern art, don’t they?

(For more on the Serra show, see MoMA, Michael Kimmelman’s NYTimes review and Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker.)