Tag Archives: Dallas

New Book of Mountains and Seas

Posted on by Bill Chance

One of the hidden gems down in the Dallas Arts district is the Crow Collection of Asian Art.

I was working in the Cotton Exchange building in downtown Dallas (the Cotton Exchange is gone now – they blew it up a couple years after I left) while they were building the skyscraper tower of the Trammell Crow Building. The construction site was visible from the windows of our office suite. I watched the steel skeleton climbing up and up – watched the workers scrambling over the latticework of girders. I watched the granite and reflective glass being raised and affixed to the building’s outer skin.

There is always a connection with a building that I watched go up. Since I saw it stretched out in time from the inside out – I feel I know all of its secrets. I know the shortcuts the architect made to get the outer shape. I saw the ventilation, plumbing, and elevator shafts carved out of the interior.

At one time the walkway around the base of the building contained an amazing collection of European sculpture and was one of my favorite places. The sculptures have been removed – and there is the promise to replace them with Asian pieces.

Behind the office building, on a floor level below, facing Flora street across from the Nasher Museum is the Crow Collection of Asian Art. Trammell and Margaret Crow have been collecting Asian art since the 1960’s and built the museum under a pavilion in back of the office tower. It is a small but effective museum, and a welcome addition to the other museums and performance venues in the Dallas Arts District – helping the area move towards the tipping point of becoming a well-known destination. In addition to exhibiting pieces from the permanent collection – the Crow Museum has developed a reputation for hosting impressive visiting temporary exhibitions.

Oh, one more thing. Admission to the museum is free.

A free museum is viewed in a different way than one that you have to pay to get in the door. Instead of making a big deal out of it – preparation and anticipation – you tend to simply wander in and take a relaxed view of the wonders within. I like it.

I have a confession to make – this time that I walked in to the museum it wasn’t because I had heard of some revelatory amazing exhibition or even that I felt the need for peaceful contemplation of a thousand years of artistic production.

I had to pee.

There are not a lot of public restrooms in a big city downtown. The homeless tend to take over and destroy any facilities that are open to anyone. So I decided to duck into the Crow Museum to use their restroom. Since I am a person that likes to meet their obligations – even though I should be able to use the bathroom and leave, there have been many times I’ve been to the Crow to see their art and not used the bathroom – I felt obligated to at least take a quick walk through the galleries.

I walked into the big room past the gift shop and found that it had been emptied. There was a bench in the center of the room and three digital projectors were shining on a long wall. The effect was that of a widescreen film being shown in a bare wooden room – very clean and beautiful. One guy was sitting at one end of the bench – I walked over and sat down on the other.

At first the film was showing some credits and bits of poetry while the soundtrack played some electronic music. It was very peaceful, but not much too it and after a few minutes I wondered, “Is this it?” It was an interesting thought – all this space and technology used to simply throw a few words on the wall along some jangling sounds. I began to wonder if it was an elaborate joke.

It wasn’t. I had come in right at the credits at the end. Soon the presentation looped back to the beginning and the real show began.

This was a film by Qiu AnXiong, an artist from Shanghai. The exhibition was called Animated Narratives and consisted of a two-part video installation called New Book of the Mountains and Seas, along with paintings associated with it.

The video started with a hand drawn animation of waves on the sea, then moved to a pastoral landscape. Soon, a farm appeared to grow on the land like an organic thing. The farm quickly grew to a village and then a walled town. Civilization continued to grow in an organic way – with fantastic animals taking the place of oil rigs, pumps, transportation, and warcraft. Everything grew and grew, with many scenes reminiscent of recent events, but warped into a strange surreal organic landscape. The Middle East (or something resembling it) is ravaged by oil production, the terrorists strike in a version of 911 even more surreal than reality, and then the inevitable disaster and destruction obliterated everything.

The film was in black-and-white and appeared to be animated ink drawings. After walking around and looking at some of the paintings, it was clear that it is actually paint on canvas. The artist overpaints as he photographs his work and generates the animation that way.

I really enjoyed the film and its presentation. You really have to see in it in its carefully constructed widescreen format to appreciate the work, but if you can’t make it to the Crow:

Here’s an online version (wait through the ads). I’m not sure how long this will be online.

Here’s another link to a version of the piece.

If that link doesn’t work for you, here’s about three minutes of the film. This section is near the end, and it does not do justice to seeing it live.

I enjoyed it enough to come back a couple days later and take a look at part two. This is another widescreen video set up in the mezzanine two floors higher up in the museum. It’s another animated work, this time concerning mad cow disease, genetic programing, biowaste disposal, environmental catastrophe and man’s eventual fate among the stars.

I couldn’t find the whole thing, but here is a bit of part two.

Don’t be afraid to wander into a museum, more or less unplanned. I should do this more often. I should not be so cheap to be afraid to do this even when I have to pay for it.

Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge

Posted on by Bill Chance

(click to enlarge)

An HDR photograph of the Calatrava designed Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge across the Trinity River near downtown Dallas. I was setting up the tripod when the train came steaming along over the trestle between me and the cable-stay bridge. I had to rush the picture before the train went by and didn’t get the focus right… better luck next time. This is a tone-mapped image taken from a single RAW exposure. Since the train was moving at a pretty good clip, I couldn’t use a three-exposure HDR image – I tried it and there were too many strange effects around the train because it was in different spots in each exposure.

Unsilent Night

Posted on by Bill Chance

I was looking for something to do on a Saturday night – and through the power of this interweb-thingy here I discovered that there were going to be Food Trucks in the Arts District… and then there was going to be something called Unsilent Night.

The idea was to get a group of people all carrying boomboxes – each with one of four MP3 files boomboxing away. These were selections of electronic music – bell sounds and such. This group of people making music would march through downtown Dallas at night with the sounds bouncing off skyscrapers and such.

Sounds like a good idea to me.

But first, I had to get a boombox. I dug around and found a small white soundthrower that used to belong to Candy’s mother. It was portable enough and put out a bit of sound, but I needed batteries – plus, it didn’t play MP3 files.

So off I drove to the local everything store and bought a small pack of blank CDs (no blanks at home, only DVDs). My idea was to burn the 44 minutes MP3 I had downloaded from the Unsilent Night web page onto a CD that would play in the boombox. The thing takes six C batteries. At the store I discovered that they don’t sell six C batteries – only packages of 4, eight, or ten. The pack of ten costs less than the pack of eight – so I have four C cells left over.

At any rate I sat in my car at the DART station and burned the CD, loaded it into the boombox along with six of my ten C batteries… and I was ready to rock and roll. Well, maybe not rock and roll, but at least ring the bells a little.

When I climbed out of the train at the Pearl station I walked into a huge crowd of Santas milling around, working their way to the Arts District. I found out later that this was something called the “Santa Rampage” – a combination flash mob and pub crawl. There were about five hundred people in various versions of Santa Costumes – and I kept running into them all night. It looked like fun.

I manged to get a brisket and grilled cheese sandwich from Ruthies while the Santas were all having a pillow fight up by the Opera House. I’m glad I bought mine early because five hundred hungry Santas make for long lines at a handful of food trucks. I walked around the Arts District looking at Santas until it was time to hoof it over to the Akard DART station to meet up with the other folks for Unsilent Night.

At first I was disappointed because there were only a handful of people standing there with a half handful of boomboxes. The Cowboys were on TV, maybe people stayed home for holiday football. But as seven o’clock neared, a good number of latecomers appeared and we became a healthy little group of close to a hundred people.

We all synchronized our boom boxes, waited for the music to build a little, and then off we went. I have to admit, it was cooler than I had expected. The music was mesmerizing. It’s is interesting how it changes – both as the four different pieces of music cycle through their various peaks, valleys, and changes in instrumentation (the one I had – #1 – was mostly bells, but others sounded like voices, or drums, or other stuff) and the way the music bounced off the buildings and blended with the background noise of the city.

You could vary the sound a lot by moving back and forth in the line of people walking along the sidewalk. Not only were we playing different pieces of music, started at slightly different times (I jostled mine too much and had to start over – it didn’t matter) but everybody had different players. Most used iPhones with hand-held speakers – but some folks were prepared with more hefty weapons. On guy pulled a cart with a computer UPS – this gave him power for not only some serious speakers but flashing lights that he wired himself up with.

We walked down Main Street which was really hopping. I need to visit this area again – it wasn’t as dead as when I worked down there. The restaurants were open late, the bars were filling up, the street was full of cars slowly working their way through. We looped around Neiman Marcus – the Christmas Displays were awesome, past the Joule Hotel then back through some narrow alleys. These were especially cool – the music would bounce around in the enclosed spaces until it was almost deafening.

I really liked it.

We made it back to the Akard DART station after about an hour of walking and then took a break. While we were there, the five hundred Santas – most of which had been drinking quite a bit – showed up and crammed aboard a Green Line Train – off to their next stop. They seemed happy and full of… well, they were full of Christmas Spirit – along with other stuff. The Santa thing looked like fun. I’ll have to check it out next year.

Then we did a second Unsilent Night walk – this time back through the Arts District. This walk was more out in the open and the sound wasn’t as impressive – except when we paused for a while under the canopy next to the Trammel Crow Museum of Asian Art. It was shaped like a giant reflector facing down and we all stood along the stairs with the fountain bubbling in the center – that was magical.

By the way, we did walk past the Wyly Theater and the Transcendence art installation. The ice is now, of course, completely melted, and the remaining stones sit there in the gravel. There are still some white squares of gravel left where the original blocks were. Nobody payed attention – or even noticed that the raked gravel was there – it was very dark.

We walked back to the station and I was getting tired – a lot of walking. The organizer talked of next year and trying to increase the participation (the New York Unsilent Night walk has been going on for decades and has thousands of participants).

I’ll definitely do this again. It was fun to walk through downtown on a holiday evening, looking at the lights, the buildings, and the five hundred drunken Santa Clauses. The music was almost an added bonus – though it is the reason for being there.

Lots of fun. See you next year.

A few Santas check out Three Men and a Taco gourmet food truck.

Ruthie's before the Santas show up.

The organizer of Unsilent Night gave us some instructions before we set out with our boomboxes.

The usual crowd at the Akard Street train station on a Saturday Night

A train full of Santas

Grazing in the River Bottoms

Posted on by Bill Chance

(click to enlarge)

HDR photograph taken in Trammell Crow Park in the river bottoms, Dallas.

This is the spot where, years ago, Lee and I came down to do some sketching in the river bottoms. We walked to the levee in the background of this picture to draw the downtown skyline. Lee was a bit distracted, but I managed to sell my drawing to a local magazine – so all was not lost. It took me a while to get this picture – it’s not the most savory area and a young couple were drinking heavily and stumbling around between the cows and getting in the shot. Since this HDR is a three shot combination – I needed stationary subjects – like the concrete cows.

As I was leaving, I was lugging my camera and tripod back to the parking area when a group of three – an older photographer (walking with a cane), his assistant (carrying a folding reflector and a camera), and a model (wearing a long dress, but wrapped in a large thick shawl – it was cold) walked the other way. They were obviously going to get the last bit of light as the sun set. The man said Hi in a nice conspiratorial way, making me think I was actually also a photographer, instead of simply an idiot with a tripod.

I thought they were going to head to the cow sculptures, but they walked right out into the open area…. I’m not sure what sort of shot they were working on.

I sort of wanted to sit in my car and watch them work – I like watching fashion shoots – but I had things to do… so off I went.

Under a Trinity River Bridge

Posted on by Bill Chance

(click to enlarge)

 
I drove down to this little roadside observation park on the Oak Cliff side of the river to take pictures of the new Calatrava Bridge that is nearing completion. I couldn’t resist a little stroll in the river bottoms and took this 3-shot HDR image of the underside of the Commerce Street Bridge. It is amazing how quickly polite society and organized civilization disappears in places like this. 
 
The top side of the bridge.
An article and slideshow on the graffitti.
 

Matilda

Posted on by Bill Chance

I was walking through downtown on my way to take pictures of a giant naked man when I walked across Akard street. Peering down the canyon between edifice walls of glittering glass I spotted an ancient little machine shaking on its set of steel rails. The sign under its cyclops eye of a light said “Matilda.” It was an M-Line trolley car I have not ridden yet. So I detoured and climbed on board right before it took off for its route down McKinney and around uptown.

Matilda was built in 1925 in Melbourne, Australia, for the Melbourne & Metropolitan Tramways Board. It operated in Australia for sixty years until it was purchased for use in Dallas. It still ran great and only needed cosmetic modifications (it looks like these were new paint and added air conditioning).

It’s a long car, with an unusual configuration. It is divided up into three sections, with longitudinal red velvet benches on each end, and ordinary wooden seats in the center. It’s a beautiful streetcar with a gorgeous interior. Matilda runs a lot smoother than the older (by only a few years), shorter car, Rosie, I rode a couple of weeks ago.

It was bitter cold outside and very few people were out and about. A couple of commuters were on the car, plus a mother and her five sons. Yes, five boys – the oldest looked about twelve. They were good kids… but… man! Five! The youngest was a toddler and he had that devilish smile. Whenever they looked away from him he would take off running down the aisle.

When we reached the end of the line I was talking to the boys about the turntable under construction (it is almost finished) when one of the boys said, “You know we’re going to have a sister,” and pointed to their mom.

Man… five boys and a girl. I don’t know if I could do that.

The M Line Trolley in Dallas

Dallas M Line Trolley

Car 636, “Petunia” coming back the other way. I’ll have to get down there and ride that one soon.

A Week and a Day

Posted on by Bill Chance

Saturday – It’s been eight days since I saw the art installation Transcendence downtown. The ice sculptures have been melting all this time.

First Night

Next Day

The Day After That

A couple days after that

I had to see what has happened in the meantime. Would the ice be completely melted? Would the installation still be there?

I drove down and parked down the street. It was still there, the gravel was still raked, and there was a lot of ice left in the two big blocks. The taller block had fallen over and broken in two, but the large horizontal block was not noticeably smaller.

The two human forms were nothing other than small irregular pieces of ice. The stone from one of them was missing. I remembered the story the woman from the Dallas Center for Architecture had told me.

She said that she had heard that one of the stones in the human forms was from the parents of a childhood friend of the artist. This friend had passed away and after the ice is melted and the artwork is closed the stone will be given back to the parents to be placed in their stone garden on their rural home as a memorial. A nice story.

Maybe that one stone is now in a garden on the Oklahoma border. I’d like to think so.

While I was taking pictures I could hear a lot of noise – a metal grinding sound with a series of loud clacks – coming from behind a wall surrounding an unfinished building next door. I realized that some kids were skateboarding over there. After a few minutes a couple boards came flying over the wall and then their owners scampered through a gap in a fence after.

“What is this?” they asked, “Is that ice?”

I explained that it was an art work, that there had been large sculptures of ice that have been melting for a week. They had never heard of a Zen rock garden, so I explained as best as I could. They seemed to think it was cool.

“I’m glad we didn’t walk around in there,” one of them said.

So am I.

The two human form sculptures, what is left of them

A reminder of what one of these looked like at the unveiling

The large upright block fell over - you can see the light-colored gravel it rested on.

What it looked like at the unveiling

A group of women walked by after leaving the Opera House.

Borg Cube

Posted on by Bill Chance

(click to enlarge)

This HDR picture of the top corner of the Wyly theater was taken from the same spot that I took yesterday’s photograph of the Winspear Opera House.

I have always been amazed at the strange appearance of the Wyly, of its clockwork like theater machine interior, and was very happy and impressed when I saw The Tempest there. It is surprising how inexpensive the productions are (if you are willing to go for the cheap seats – which are still pretty damn close) and I can’t believe that the shows aren’t selling out.

It’s probably the economy… and people simply don’t think of doing stuff like that. I’ll tell you, it’s hard to find folks that want to go to plays, live plays, even if they cost about what the newest 3D Googleplex Shopping Mall crap does.

Opera House

Posted on by Bill Chance

(click to enlarge)

Ever since I moved to Dallas thirty years ago, I have yearned for the city to have a center, a heart, a place where people gathered. The city planners and developers, such as they are, want that too – but there are the challenges of weather, history, and the city’s car-based culture to do battle.

Now, with the emergence of the city’s Arts District with it’s line of award-winning buildings there is some hope that the vision might be completed. I have been going down there a lot lately (sometimes to simply watch ice melt) and it is a place of varied and interesting attractions.

The heart of the district may be the plaza outside of the Winspear Opera House. The huge elevated grid of aluminum louvers is surprisingly effective at suppressing the roasting summer sun while still allowing a breeze and light to penetrate.

This HDR tonemapped image shows the opera house plaza with a couple of the melting blocks from the transcendence art project.

It is depressing though – most of the times I go down there, in the midst of billions of dollars worth of buildings and artwork, carefully planned, constructed, arranged and maintained – I have the place to myself. It can be a gorgeous, lonely world.

Golden Boy

Posted on by Bill Chance

In 1914 the American Telephone and Telegraph company commissioned Evelyn Beatrice Longman to create a sculpture named The Genius of Electricity for their new headquarters at 195 Broadway in New York City. The final design was a massive winged nude male figure clutching lightning bolts in one hand and a coil of high-voltage cable wound around his body held in the other.The sculpture was completed in 1916 and hoisted to a pyramid constructed on the top of the building.

It was twenty four feet in height and was cast in bronze and covered with gold leaf. It weighed over sixteen tons. The statue towered over lower Manhattan until 1984. During the 1930’s the name of the statue was changed to The Spirit of Communications – although most people knew it by its nickname, Golden Boy. In 1984 AT&T moved up the island into the famous postmodern building designed by Philip Johnson. There was no perch on the roof, but the massive lobby contained the statue with no problem.

I visited New York about this time and remember seeking out the AT&T building as I walked the streets. Its architecture was still new and exciting. I remember the building, but I don’t think I actually entered the lobby. Now, I wish I had – I wonder if I would have remembered a huge naked gold statue standing there.

The next decades were turbulent times for the telecommunications industry and for Golden Boy. The AT&T building was sold and became the Sony Building. Golden Boy went across the Hudson and for years was displayed at two different locations in New Jersey. AT&T, of course, was carved up by the Federal Government – broken down into the baby bells.

One of these, Southwestern Bell, grew until in 2005 it swallowed its parent and became the new AT&T. Soon, the headquarters ended up in downtown Dallas, in the Whitacre Tower. Finally, in 2009, Golden Boy followed suit and was installed in the lobby of the building.

I stumbled across this history… I don’t know where. I have a book that lists notable Dallas sculptures but it was published prior to Golden Boy’s cross-country journey. Once I learned he was there, I had to go see him.

After I took at look at some melting ice (a sculptural form far more fleeting than bronze and gold leaf); I took a ride on a streetcar, then hoofed it across downtown to the AT&T headquarters.

I looked a little scruffy with my cheap jacket and bag of camera stuff – but garnered no more than a glance from the guard at the huge round desk at the entrance as I circled around taking pictures. The statue dominates the lobby – there is even a really nice curved couch behind the sculpture where you can sit down, relax and stare up at his golden ass. Yes, by the way, he is completely nude and, more or less, anatomically correct.

I had arrived near the end of the day and the lobby was dotted with serious-looking men in expensive suits shuffling on their tailored overcoats for the cold trip home at the end of the workday. The lobby is lined with cellular stores that open outward onto the street. These were full of folks looking for Christmas presents – for themselves or others.

It’s a modern, clean space – the almost-century old statue looks great but maybe a little out of place. Maybe he should be up on top of the building after all. He could spend his days staring across the street to the roof of the Magnolia Hotel down at that other Dallas iconic rooftop sculpture – the Pegasus.

Golden Boy - in all his glory

It is a beautiful statue... but somehow - he doesn't look too happy. I think he wants to be outside.

The view of the statue from AT&T Plaza through the entryway.

The statue on his perch at 195 Broadway. Photo by Lee Sandstead.

There is another famous statue in the distance. Photograph from Lee Sandstread