Tag Archives: Nasher

Baked Art From an Upscale Solar Cooker

Posted on by Bill Chance

The Museum Tower Condominiums tower over Tony Cragg's "Lost in Thought"

I have been a huge fan of the Nasher Sculpture Center since it was built. I go there all the time. It is truly one of the most comfortable, wonderful, and amazing public spaces I’ve ever seen. Family friendly , educational, beautiful, and a marvelous host to public gatherings – it was a thoughtful and generous gift from Raymond Nasher to the people of the city.

One of the goals of creating the Dallas Arts District, of which the Nasher is a linchpin, was to attract the high-end buzz of the wealthy clientele that enjoy throwing their millions around in order to wallow in the coolness of timeless art. These folks are hard to pry away from the coasts or the ancient alleyways of Europe but a roadfull of expensive venues and billions of dollars of paintings and sculptures was the lure. And so they come. The first habitat for these rare birds is the shiny new Museum Tower, reaching skyward from an odd oval of property where a Woodall Rogers Freeway ramp arced up and around.

Now I have no problem with that. I’m not a wealthy person and will never be. I have to beg and save just to buy a pen, for example. Most of the art scene I enjoy comes on Free Thursdays and Half-Price weekend and such as that, when the upper crust retreats and allows the hoi polloi to enter and tread their hallowed halls. I depend on the charity or at least the indifference of the wealthy patrons – I exist on their scraps – like a roach under the cabinets I scurry out when they aren’t looking for any crumbs that might be left behind.

So if someone wants to build a tower and charge millions of dollars for a two bedroom apartment – so be it. I applaud their industry, toast their imagination, and do not begrudge them their profits. If they want to call their property The Museum Tower – in order to capitalize on its location right next to the Nasher, fine. If they want to charge an extra million dollars per unit simply so the residents can use the museum garden as their side yard – complete with landscaping and a billion in modern sculpture – great. There is plenty of room and if you don’t mind standing next to me, I don’t mind standing next to you.

But don’t forget what side of the bread you’re putting the butter on. Without the museum there is no Museum Tower. Without the arts, there is no Arts District. Do not roast the goose that lays the golden eggs.

It started out with Tending (blue). The high rise stuck it’s ugly head right up into the viewport of James Turrell’s skyspace sculpture, my favorite spot at the Nasher and the best place to watch the sunset in the Metroplex. But, I’ve written about that before. (go read it)

An oversight, perhaps… pretty damn sloppy, though, if you ask me. You spend that much money on a building, make that much profit, can’t you figure out ahead of time that it’s going to ruin a great work of art? Or do you realize it and simply not say anything until it’s too late. Turrell can fix it, maybe, but when? He’s got other things to do.

And now, it’s happened again. And it’s a lot more serious this time.

They have put the mirrored cladding on the building and it is reflecting so much extra sunlight into the building at the Nasher that they are having to install shades simply to allow the newest sculptures in the room. Sunlight destroys art – but is necessary for art and the Nasher has always been very proud of it’s carefully engineered sunscreen roof. The architect spent a lot of time and effort designing a structure that allowed light for viewing in while blocking the damaging direct rays of the Texas sun. It was a brilliant triumph of design and construction and made for a world-famous light and airy museum that was a strong point of pride for the entire city.

It was a brilliant triumph until a few weeks ago when someone installed a giant mirror reaching five hundred  feet into the sky right next door that shot laser beams of killer sunlight into the Nasher from an entirely unexpected direction.

Read the articles:

Nasher to Museum Tower: Watch Your Glass, It’s Frying Us

Watch Your Glass, It’s Frying Us, Continued

Museum Tower Reflected Light Study

Nasher Sculpture Center says glare from Museum Tower is causing harm

Museum Tower Begins Visual Assault on James Turrell’s Tending, (Blue)

Mayor wades into uproar over Museum Tower’s glare

Museum Tower Glare Threatens Nasher Art

Nobody ever clicks on links, so here’s the skinny from the Dallas Morning News:

Officials at the Nasher Sculpture Center say that reflective glass recently installed on the exterior of Museum Tower, its new, 42-story neighbor in the Arts District, is compromising its indoor galleries, destroying its outdoor garden and threatening its future as a Dallas landmark.

Now under construction at the corner of Olive Street and Woodall Rodgers Freeway, Museum Tower heralds its proximity to the “tranquil garden” of the Nasher as a prime selling point for its residential units, which cost between $1 million and $5.4 million.

This makes me so angry I could spit. There is a city code that says, “A person shall not conduct a use that has a visible source of illumination that produces glare of direct illumination across a property line of an intensity that creates a nuisance or detracts from the use or enjoyment of the adjacent property.” For years I have had city inspectors quote much more obscure bits of code than this and made places I work do all sorts of crazy stuff.

But then again, the places I have worked have only employed thousands of ordinary people. They haven’t been home to a handful folks that can afford five million dollar apartments. They haven’t been owned by the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System (that’s who bought the tower).

When the Nasher was built, there was an agreement with Raymond Nasher, part of the covenant that helped him agree to build the museum and give his personal collection to the people of Dallas that stated the building next door would be a maximum of 21 stories and have a maximum reflectivity of 15. Now it is 42 stories with a reflectivity of 44.

So here we have a story of corporate greed and hidden scandal. Men like Raymond Nasher are no more.  I notice that mere months after he passed away – a new LA based architect was brought in to fuck things up and the tower doubled in size and reflectivity, causing all these problems -, about the time the City Pension System decided to make its purchase. I guess they knew then the city would not put up a fight. Mary Suhm, the Dallas City Manager says, “It’s not something we have jurisdiction over.” Well, she certainly knows which side of her bread is buttered.

Meanwhile, the art continues to bake and the goose that lays the golden egg is cooked. At least they are using green solar energy to do it.

A pole-sitting sculpture in front of a new Condo Tower going up.

The condominium tower going up next to the Nasher that is ruining Tending (blue).

Savor Dallas Wine Stroll

Posted on by Bill Chance

I was really struggling to come up with a birthday present for Candy. I was going to get her a Keurig single cup coffee machine, but right before I went out and bought it she developed some stomach problems related to coffee and told me she would have to quit drinking it. So I was back at square one.

Surfing around the web and checking facebook I came across an upcoming event here in Dallas that I, frankly, had never heard of. It was called Savor Dallas – and it is a multi-day, multi-location, celebration of food and wine and stuff like that. One event was called the Arts District Wine Stroll.

The Stroll was billed as:

The popular “Arts District Stroll” sets the stage for the two-day festival on Friday, March 30th, 5-7pm, where guests can enjoy wine and food tastings in the Dallas Museum of Art, the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Meyerson Symphony Center, and the Winspear Opera House. A group of the popular new Food Trucks will be selling their goodies along Flora Street during the Stroll.

So I guess it is something like a pre-paid pub crawl, except with a little more class.

Well, it looks like we might be on to something here. Walking around the Dallas Arts District, visiting four beautiful public buildings, all designed by Pritzker Prize winning architects, while sampling food and wine along the way. Meanwhile the usual flotilla of Food Trucks waits along the route in case you don’t get enough along the way.

That sounded like a plan to me – so I logged in and bought a pair of tickets online (good thing I didn’t wait – the event sold out a few days later).

The event ran from five to seven – only two hours long. We didn’t want to waste any time, so I took a half-day of vacation from work and we decided to take the DART train down there to avoid any traffic or parking hassles. We arrived at the Winspear Opera house right at five o’clock, had our tickets scanned, received a green wristband and a wine glass, and we were off.

The thing was great. There were over fifty spots pouring out samples of wine spread among the four locations and a healthy handful of food spots. We hit the Winspear Opera house first (an excellent sake there, in addition to the wine), then moved next door to the Meyerson Symphony Hall. These were crowded, but the lines moved quickly and we were able to sample a good selection of wine and some excellent food.

I carried my camera and a small Moleskine Notebook with a matching fountain pen. I tried not to take too many pictures – it was really hard to hold a wine glass, little tray of food, and steady the camera enough to take decent photographs. I was going to take notes on particularly good wines – wines that Candy liked – I’m not a good judge, I like everything,… but it wasn’t really necessary, we simply picked up brochures and business cards from stuff we liked.

After the Meyerson we walked down to the Dallas Museum of Art. I liked it the best. Because it was down on the end and a longer stroll than the others, it was by far the least crowded and there weren’t any lines at all.

Best of all, though, they had a Tequila Sampling station. There were two attractive young girls in white skintight spandex minidresses mixing various tequilla concoctions and pouring out trayfulls of shot glasses for us to snatch up and sample. Some of the mixes (coconut and grapefruit juice) were a little off – I much preferred the straight, smooth tequila – but it was all pretty damn good. I could have parked myself in front of the tequilla sampling place, while waiters kept coming by with strange little hors d’ oeuvres – like lamb on plantain chips or oysters in tiny ice cream cones – all night long.

But it was time to move on and we walked next door to the Nasher for the final half-hour of the festivities. The Nasher garden is a perfect spot for something like this – a healthy crowd milling about the grass lawn of the garden, sheltered by the groves of perfectly groomed trees, sipping wine and eating food while about a billion dollars of modern sculpture looks on.

I slowed down on my alcohol consumption there – only trying a couple of wines – but there was some really good food. I had never had tuna tartare tacos before – and they were very good. I hate to say it, but with all the fancy top-shelf restaurants demonstrating their wares, I think the best thing I had was the tomato basil soup with mini croissant from La Madeleine. It was exactly what I wanted right then.

Everybody seemed to be having a blast. It hit just the right note – fancy enough to enjoy a special night out, but not too upper crust to be unpleasant or stressful. Candy made some new friends and I enjoyed the very diverse and interesting crowd. I even liked the fact that at two hours it was fairly short. It seemed to end right at the right time, we had all had our fill but didn’t get too worn out yet.

I’m definitely going to give this a shot next year. I’ll have to remember to get tickets early again – I’m sure it’ll sell out. It would be nasty if the weather was bad – you wouldn’t want to stroll around in the rain or a storm…. but if that happens I could simply find the tequila place and stay right there.

The crowd milling around in the Winspear Opera House, sipping their wine

In the Winspear Opera House - the wine folks would only pour a taste, but the beer people, like these Stella Artois reps, would give you a whole bottle poured into a big cup. Yeah!

In the Meyerson Symphony Hall.

At the Meyerson

Wine at the Meyerson

The light pouring into the Dallas Museum of Art

The Tequila girls at the Museum of Art

Tequila

One of the nice things at the Museum of Art is they had some semi-live music - a guitar player using some pre-recorded backing. It was very relaxing and everyone hung around and talked.

Pouring wine while the folks from Rush Hour, by George Segal, look on.

George Segal, Rush Hour

The happy crowd in the Garden at the Nasher Sculpture Center.

The Nasher Sculpture Garden

Hanging out at the Nasher on the stone wall in front of The Bronze Crowd, by Magdalena Abakanowicz.

Bronze Crowd, by Magdalena Abakanowicz

Folks at the Nasher

Making Tuna Tartare Tacos

I can’t say we tried everything they had on the Stroll – but I know we tried most of it.

Wines at the Savor Dallas Wine Stroll:
14 Hands Winery
Abbazia
Alexjandro Fernández
Apothic
Becker Vineyards
Black Oak
Bridlewood
Cambria
Carmel Road
Chateau Ste. Michelle
Columbia Crest
Comenge
Concannon Vineyard
Condado de Haza
Cupcake
Darcie Kent
Dow’s
Edmeades
Edna Valley
Emilio Moro
Fall Creek Vineyards
Farrier
Flip Flop Wines
Frei Brothers
García Figuero
Ghost Pines
J. Lohr Vineyards
J Vineyards
Lapostolle Winery
LeBaron Ranch
Les Cadrans de Lassegue
Louis M. Martini
MacMurray Ranch
Matarromera
Montecastro
Murphy Goode
Neige
Ortega Fournier
Prats + Symington
Protos
Red Diamond
Ritual
Santa Cristina
Selección de Torres
Sequoia Grove
Twin Springs
Veramonte
Viña Arnáiz
Vizcarra

Water Supplied by:
FIJI Water

The Tequila
1800 Tequila

Sake:
TY-KU Sake

Beer:
GreatBrewers.com
Hoegaarden Beer
Leffe Blonde
Shock Top
Stella Artois Beer

Food:

Meso Maya
La Madeleine
Texas Spice
Jorges Tex-Mex Cafe
Garlic Expressions
Pho Colonial

Available Light

Posted on by Bill Chance

Friday… there was going to be a lot going on down in the Dallas Arts District. It was the end of spring break week, the streets would be blocked off and all the venues would have events scheduled. I decided to take some pictures. My plan was to get out of work and take the train down before the sun set – taking advantage of Daylight Savings Time to get some shots off during the magic hour.

Unfortunately, everything wrapped around the spindle and I didn’t get out of work on time. When I reached the Arts District it was dark as pitch. I wandered around – there was a band playing in the garden of the Nasher, and they were going to show Hugo in 3D on a giant portable screen, but every square inch of space was already spoken for by blanket-toting families and groups of partiers that had invaded while I was still in my cubicle. Their multi-colored quilts marked off the territory of every clan like patchwork Balkans that no tardy invader could penetrate.

I retreated from the Nasher Museum and wandered the streets. A short time ago only a handful of food trucks would show up down in the Arts District for these events but the phenomenon has rapidly grown and well over a dozen lined both sides of Harwood street. There was music and food and a huge crowd surging in the darkness. Folks poured in and out of the Nasher, Dallas Museum of Art, and the Crow Collection of Asian Art.

Despite the lack of available light I experimented snapping some shots. Some day I want to learn how to use a flash properly, but, still, I have a strong desire to use available light only. I want to steal the stories of the people I’m shooting and a flash warns them of the upcoming thievery. Forget about a tripod in a crowd like this.

The problem is when there isn’t enough available light. I set ISO all the way up (grainy photographs), Aperture Wide Open (no depth of field, everything out of focus) and Speed as Slow as Possible (anything moving is extra fuzzy). There was no way to avoid blurriness, so I tried my best to minimize and control it. I’d prop my camera on a pillar or lean against a light pole, trying to gather in all the photons I could before it all goes to crap.

I don’t know if the blur is artistic or simply poor technique. I like it though… I guess that’s something.

Waiting to order at the Ssahm Korean BBQ truck.

Sharing a foam plate and a quiet moment in the surging crowd.

The colorful blur in the left is a guy walking around selling light sticks from a bag - ten dollars a piece.

(Click to Enlarge)

(Click to Enlarge)

I didn’t stay long. Shooting all these people in the dark filled me with a terrible loneliness – the kind you can only get inside of a festive crowd. So I packed in all in and headed back to the train station. When I got off in my neighborhood I still had about six hours left on my train pass so I stuck it into the money slot of the ticket vending kiosk. Hopefully somebody else could use it, out for a night on the town.

Three shot from one spot, resting my feet by the Henry Moore

Posted on by Bill Chance

Working Model for Three Piece No. 3: Vertebrae, by Henry Moore

My Curves Are Not Mad, by Richard Serra

Eve, by Auguste Rodin

There’s a nice stone bench behind the Henry Moore sculpture in the Nasher Sculpture Garden, where you can take a load off of your feet and look out at all the folks wandering around. It’s one of my favorite spots.

Peek a Boo

Posted on by Bill Chance

(click to enlarge)

“My Curves Are Not Mad” by Richard Serra

“Squares with Two Circles (Monolith)” by Barbara Hepworth

“Eve” by Auguste Rodin

“Little Johnny the Troublemaker” by Mrs. Smith

Symmetry

Posted on by Bill Chance

Night (La Nuit)by Aristide Maillol

On the free family days at the Nasher, it’s tough to get people not to touch the sculptures. Also, a lot of folk like to pose by the statues in mocking or strange positions. It’s a little aggravating, though I have to admit, I’m guilty of that myself.

From Heidi’s Do-All Blog – Strange Day at the Nasher

Quantum Cloud XX (tornado)

Posted on by Bill Chance

“There is also the story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to be present as his own assembly–perhaps heavily paranoid voices whisper, ‘his time’s assembly’–and there ought to be a punchline to it, but there isn’t. The plan went wrong. He is being broken down instead and being scattered. His cards have been laid down, Celtic style, in the order suggested by Mr. A.E. Waite, laid out and read, but they are the cards of a tanker and feeb: they point only to a long and scuffling future, to mediocrity…-to no clear happiness or redeeming cataclysm.”

― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

PAGE 738

The Bacchae

Posted on by Bill Chance

eyes that run like leaping fire - Elliott Hundley

You have a glib tongue, as though in your right mind, Yet in your words there is no real sense.

Wretched man, how ignorant you are of what you are saying! Before you were out of your mind-but now you are raving mad.
—-Euripides, The Bacchae

A while back, this guy, Euripides, wrote this play, The Bacchae.

It’s a story of Dionysus, a vain, jealous and vengeful god and the horrible revenge he exacts on mere mortals that refuse to worship him. It’s a story of Pentheus, the vain, stuck-up, and arrogant king who wants order, lawfulness, and absolute attention to his iron rule. It’s a story of women running wild in the woods, ecstatic with passion, blinded by lust and wine. It’s a tale of voyeurism, with the victims pulling the spy down and tearing him limb from limb. It’s the story of a mother returning triumphantly home carrying the disembodied head of her own son under her arm thinking it to be a hunting trophy.

The play was considered too grotesque to be seriously studied until Nietzsche wrote in praise of the genre. Now, of course, the flamboyant themes, aberrant scenes, and bizarre excesses are the cat’s meow, and the play has become fashionable, especially as an opera, where the outlandish aspects fit in well with the dramatic chorus.

The great theme of The Bacchae is a fascinating and important one. It is the constant, eternal struggle between freedom and control. Can an organized, rational society survive if it allows the irrational passions of the human heart to exist and express themselves? How can it survive if it does not? Where is the line to be drawn? What is the healthy limits to ecstatic pleasure? Are there any? The two forces: authority and freedom, rational and irrational, the head and the heart, duty and joy, moderation and excess, wisdom and instinct, self-control and human passion, restraint and release – are forever locked together wrestling in a death-grip struggle, each unable to defeat the other because, without its opposite, neither can survive.

Recently, the Nasher Museum in the Dallas Arts District crated up the Tony Cragg exhibition and sent it back to where it came from. I really enjoyed this one and was sad to see it go. It was replaced by a group of sculptures called The Bacchae by Elliott Hundley, a young Los Angeles based sculptor. I saw some photographs of the work and was disappointed. It looked junky, simple, and nothing special.

I was wrong.

Photographs can not do justice.

I took the DART train down to the Nasher on a Target First Saturday event, where I could stroll in and out and take it all in at my leisure. I was stunned. The stars of the show are the large flat assemblages that take up huge swaths of museum wall space. These are incredibly complex masses of kaleidoscopic images, from found objects to cut out photographs, from comic-book word balloons to paragraphs of newspaper-ransom-note-cut-outs – all suspended in various ways in front of giant billboard-like images. The closer you look, the more detail jumps out. You could spend a year in front of a single one of these and not be able to tease out all the passion and information contained within.

More traditional 3-D sculptural works occupy the center of the space and I found these interesting and well-done, but I, like everyone else in the crowded room was drawn back, again and again, to stand right against the little foot-ropes holding the mob back, and stare at the square inch of work that was right in front of my eyes until I could look at each little paper figure impaled on a wire pin or read the little quotes or try to decipher the galaxy of little objects that are presented sticking out from the wall.

The artist calls these “bulletin boards” and I can see why. They are enormous collections of a universe of detail and, like a lot of art, change tremendously with perspective and distance. Standing away (or looking at a photograph) you can see a landscape of large images partially obscured by clouds of smaller details. Once you approach, these details become apparent and you stare at them. If you want to get even closer, on certain works the artist provides magnifying glasses attached to a matrix of wooden sticks and you can peer through into an even smaller, almost microscopic world, of printers dots splayed across the mounted magazine advertisements and ink-jet printed paper objects.

As I looked I could listen to the comments of the other patrons around me – especially the children. This was a free admission with family activities day so there were a lot of kids. They were, of course, instantly drawn to the collages and it was a struggle for their parents to keep them from touching anything. The little ones would comment constantly. “Oh, that’s gross!” was a common reaction, said in that kid way that doesn’t necessarily mean that they didn’t think it was cool. A few parents would try to explain, in that condescending “I have brought my spawn to the art museum now I must get them to understand how important this is and how great a parent I am” tone and attitude but their voices would trail off, overwhelmed by the sheer mass of stuff that was stuck up on the wall in front of them.

Now, writing this, I want to go back and look at it all again. I want to try and break some of it down and see if I can relate it to the Euripides play now that I know a little more about it. I know I will. I can see a few hours stolen here and there to waste standing against that low rope staring at all that stuff stuck to all those pins.

detail from the LIghtning's Bride - Elliott Hundley

Elliott Hundley: The Bacchae

Review: ‘Elliott Hundley: The Bacchae’ at the Nasher

Art Review: Is Elliott Hundley’s Work More Suited For A Tim Burton Film Than the Nasher?

Sparknotes: The Bacchae

Elliott Hundley The Bacchae Exhibit at Nasher Sculpture Center

Contemporary Art (1) – Elliot Hundley

elliott hundley

Lost in Thought and luxury living

Posted on by Bill Chance

The Museum Tower Condominiums tower over Tony Cragg's "Lost in Thought"

The Tony Cragg exhibit is about to end down at the Nasher. The Museum Tower outside continues to stretch its mirrored mass skyward, now plainly visible through Renzo Piano’s semitransparent roof. I still haven’t heard what they are going to do about the fact that the tower is intruding on the skyspace of Tending(Blue)… if anything.

The tower will have 122 condominiums priced from 1.2 to 4.1 million dollars a pop – plus a custom priced full floor residence. I’ll never set foot in the place, that’s for sure.

Take a look at their advertising. The Nasher Sculpture Center features in every scene of fine bred humans smiling their way through their artistic day. They are using the Sculpture Center to hawk their condominiums. At the same time their tower has already destroyed what was, to many, the crown jewel of the museum experience.

I have nothing against rich people, and I applaud their luxury. But if you are going to spend that much for an apartment… can’t you throw out a dime or so and figure something out… give us back our art installation? Why did they not think of this beforehand? Tending(Blue) was the coolest place in the city. It was the best place for the ordinary citizen to watch a sunset. You can have your multi-million dollar views, but let us have our own little piece of the sky.

Please?

Cameras, Cameras, and More Cameras

Posted on by Bill Chance

A couple more photographs I took at the Nasher at the Tony Cragg exhibition.

If you wonder what she is taking a picture of… it is this: