“She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
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Sculpture by Jason Mehl,
The Cedars, Dallas, Texas
At some point we’ve got to stop asking ourselves what is the meaning of everything, maybe it’s not so very important what it means. It’s probably more important what the sense of it is.. they are two very basic and different things.
—-Tony Cragg
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Tony Cragg
English, born 1949
New Forms
1991-1992, Bronze
I have been a fan of the sculptor Tony Cragg for some time. During a tough time I was buoyed by visiting an exhibition of his work at the Nasher Scupture Center here in Dallas.
There is also a nice piece of his work called Stevenson in the garden at the Dallas Museum of Art.
Tony Cragg, Stevenson, Dallas Museum of Art
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One of the cool things about sculpture is finding work by familiar artists at new locations. I enjoyed finding a Tony Cragg work, New Forms, at the Cullen Sculpture Garden in Houston.
(click to enlarge)
Tony Cragg
English, born 1949
New Forms
1991-1992, Bronze
“In a lucid dream, you have a sharper sense of color and lucidity than with your eyes open. I’m interested in the point where imaginative seeing and outside seeing meet, where it becomes difficult to differentiate between seeing from the inside and seeing from the outside.”
—-James Turrell, The Other Horizon
From the Houston Museum of Fine Arts website:
In the mid-1960s James Turrell pioneered a new concern with the phenomena of space and light, often referred to as the Light & Space Movement. Turrell sought not to depict light but to use light itself as his material, and his earliest works investigated the effects of artificial light. He also developed a number of installations that heightened the relationship between light and the architectural frame.
The MFAH commissioned Turrell’s The Light Inside for the underground tunnel linking the museum’s Caroline Wiess Law Building with the Audrey Jones Beck Building when the latter opened in 2000. The Light Inside turns the walls of the tunnel into vessels for conducting light. An expanded version of his earlier explorations of light in his Shallow Space Construction series, Turrell’s The Light Inside is an all-encompassing environment.
Transcending the traditional confines of built spaces, The Light Inside acts as both a passage and a destination. The raised walkway guides visitors forward and gives them the sense of floating in space, while the changing cycle of illumination (which shifts from blue, to crimson, to magenta) further invites contemplation. The Light Inside makes the experience of moving between the Law and the Beck Buildings not only an exploration of light and space, but also a profound and awe-inspiring experience.
JAMES TURRELL
American, born 1943
The Light Inside
1999
Neon and ambient light
I have been a big fan of James Turrell for over a decade, ever since a certain day in 2004. That was the day near the opening of the Nasher Sculpture Center – when I took Lee down there to visit the sparkling spanking new museum. I wrote about it in a blog entry that was eventually published in a local magazine.
My favorite piece might have been the installation Tending (Blue) by James Turrell. We walked into a little opening lit by odd, shifting colors into the wall at the north end of the garden. The passage made a right turn and opened into a small room lined with dark stone benches. The walls on the upper half were featureless and smooth. A gray skylight lighted the whole chamber. The effect was strange and very peaceful. I liked it a lot.
Lee and I left the chamber and walked back up the garden and inside the building. We wandered downstairs and into the auditorium where a film was showing. It told the story of Raymond Nasher and his late wife, how they started out building Northpark Mall, acquired a fortune, and then became premiere collectors of modern sculpture. Mr. Nasher talked about his life, his wife, and his passion for the new sculpture center. The film then showed the construction of the center, how a handful of visionary architects and a few thousand men in hard hats converted a grimy downtown parking lot (I’ve parked there many times, put my quarters or dollar bills into a rusty numbered slot) into a thing of great value and beauty. They talked a lot of how it will be there forever. The film was fun and interesting – it really helped me appreciate the place.
On opening day Raymond Nasher said, “I put Patsy (his wife, the collector, who had passed away a couple years before) in charge of the weather today, and, as you can see, it’s beautiful.
One thing was odd, though. On the part of the film that covered opening day, Nasher and Turrell themselves went into the Tending (Blue) chamber that Lee and I had walked out of only minutes before. The benefactor and the artist sat on the benches and looked around. The skylight rectangle in the ceiling wasn’t gray like we saw it, but a deep cerulean blue.
“What’s up with that?” I asked.
“Let’s go back and check it out,” Lee said.
We hiked back down and entered the chamber again. The skylight was still gray. Something didn’t look right, though. I stood under it, looking up, trying to figure out what I was seeing and how it could change colors so dramatically. I was halfway convinced that it was a rectangle of light projected on the ceiling by some hidden apparatus (the upper walls are washed in subtle changing color from hidden computer controlled LED’s) when I was suddenly struck between the eyes with a big, cold drop of water. I wiped my face in surprise and looked down at some small pools of water at my feet.
“That’s weird, Lee,” I said, “I can’t believe it, but this roof is leaking.”
I looked back up, trying to find the telltale discoloration of a water leak, when, with a sudden shock, I realized what the hell I was actually looking at. That wasn’t a skylight, that wasn’t a projected rectangle at all, it was simply a big hole in the ceiling. I was looking directly at the sky. Once my eyes and my brain were in sync I could see the subtle variation of the clouds passing by overhead. The edges of the hole must have been cut back like razors – there was no visible frame around the opening, simply a featureless rectangle of light. It was amazing.
That’s why the rectangle looked blue in the film – it was a cloudless day. Now I want to go back. I want to go at sunset… I want to figure out how to go at dawn. The city sky at night… will it be brown? I want to sit in there during a rainstorm. I especially want to go there on that rarest of Texas days, a snowstorm.
Now, of course, Tending (Blue) is no more, destroyed in a paroxysm of greed and corruption.
JAMES TURRELL
American, born 1943
The Light Inside
1999
Neon and ambient light
When I went to Houston over the holidays to visit my family there I wanted to visit the Turrell work at the Museum of Fine Arts, The Light Inside. It’s a tunnel under the street between two buildings, festooned with Turrell’s signature unreal lighting and surreal experience.
A really cool thing, though the experience is a little lessened by the museum guard constantly barking out, “Stay on the walkway! Don’t touch the sides!” It’s beautiful and memorable, though it does lack the pure esthetic simplicity and connection with nature that the late Tending (Blue) offered.
JAMES TURRELL
American, born 1943
The Light Inside
1999
Neon and ambient light
I can’t write about Turrell without mentioning Roden Crater. Since the 1970’s he has been hollowing out an extinct volcano in a desolate and isolated stretch of Arizona – converting it into a giant gallery for his manipulations of light, space, and expectations. Visiting this place in at the top of my bucket list.
I only hope I’m able to live long enough.
“I live my life in growing orbits which move out over this wondrous world, I am circling around God, around ancient towers and i have been circling for a thousand years. And I still dont know if I am an eagle or a storm or a great song.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
Lee Bontecou
American, Born 1931
Untitled
1962
Welded steel, epoxy, canvas, fabric, saw blade, wire
Museum of Fine Arts
Houston, Texas
“The power of the machine imposes itself upon us and we can scarcely conceive living bodies without it.”
—-Raymond Duchamp-Villon
Large Horse by Raymond Duchamp-Villon
My favorite sculpture – one I have gazed upon many times in the Nasher Sculpture Center, here in Dallas, is Large Horse by Raymond Duchamp-Villon. I wrote about it more than three years ago.
At the time I said:
I like to stare at it, walk around it. I’ve taken some pictures of it. I would like to take some more.
To me, it’s clear that it is a statue of a horse – but that horse has been morphed into a complex machine, full of pushrods, pistons, and gears. It has an impressive, solid bulk, but feels like it is about to propel itself out through the glass and speed down the street in a blur, smelling of ozone and oil.
It is cast in very dark bronze – almost black. It swallows a lot of the light, but what does escape is subdued by the power and mass of the horse. It shines with dark energy.
The sculptor was a cavalry doctor in World War I and must have had a close relationship, knowledge, and a deep connection with his horses. He chose this animal to convert into a cubist bronze. He was able to preserve the essential horseness of the shape while implying the obsolescence of the animal – overtaken by the more powerful, rugged, and easily controlled energy of machines.
Duchamp-Villon died too young. He contracted typhoid fever during the war. He died before he finished this sculpture. All he left was the finished small scale model. After his death, his famous brother, Marcel Duchamp (Nude Descending a Staircase) finished the job and had the sculpture cast in full-sized bronze.
Thanks.
Large Horse, by Raymond Duchamp-Villon
Over the holidays, I was in Houston to visit my mother and my sister and her family and was pleased to discover another Duchamp-Villon’s Large Horse in the Cullen Sculpture Garden at the Houston Museum of Fine Art.
It was like running into an old friend unexpectedly.
Large Horse, by Raymond Duchamp-Villon, in the Cullen Sculpture Garden, Houston, Texas
“Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave.”
― Henry David Thoreau
The Founders’ Statue, Texas State Fair Grounds, Dallas, Texas
The Founders’ Statue, Texas State Fair Grounds, Dallas, Texas
The Founders’ Statue, Texas State Fair Grounds, Dallas, Texas
From The Historic Heart Tour – Founders’ Statue & Frank P. Holland Court
At the statue’s base is an iron crypt. Made of ore mined in Cherokee County, Texas, it once contained the front pages of three-hundred Texas newspapers for October 8, 1938, the date of the dedication. At the ceremonies, attended by some three-hundred descendants of the founders, the statue was unveiled by the Fair’s 1912 president, Mr. J. J. Eckford. Senator Tom Connally was the guest speaker. The key to the crypt was handed over to the Texas Press Association for safe-keeping until the crypt’s scheduled re-opening, fifty years from the date it was sealed. Unfortunately, when officials took a “sneak peek” inside the crypt, just before the 1988 State Fair, it was discovered that the vault had not been well-sealed and had leaked. When the bundle of deteriorating newspapers was touched, they crumbled into dust. As a result, ceremonies for the opening of the crypt were cancelled.
“Think before you speak. Read before you think.”
― Fran Lebowitz, The Fran Lebowitz Reader
Mural on column at Deep Ellum Dog Park, Dallas, Texas
“Leaving New Orleans also frightened me considerably. Outside of the city limits the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
waiting for a parade
Nola Brewing
New Orleans, Louisiana
“there was something about
that city, though
it didn’t let me feel guilty
that I had no feeling for the
things so many others
needed.
it let me alone.”
― Charles Bukowski
waiting for a parade
Nola Brewing
New Orleans, Louisiana
“Yes, a dark time passed over this land, but now there is something like light.”
― Dave Eggers, Zeitoun
waiting for a parade
Nola Brewing
New Orleans, Louisiana
“Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become a study for archaeologists…but it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.”
― Lafcadio Hearn, Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn
“Oh, I’m not a percussionist, I just like to hit things.”
― Tom Waits
New Orleans
French Quarter on Halloween
Bill Chance 