Tikis in the Urban Jungle

Here's some nice found statuary. This gruesome visage temporarily haunted a yard on Garfield, between 32nd and 33rd. As I was taking this picture, the owner came out her door and told me I could have it! With deep regret, I had to turn her down - I live in a small apartment, and a royal fellow like this needs room to roam. The owner explained that she was having tiki wars with her neighbors, occasionally sneaking this eight foot giant closer to their door. The neighbor heard our conversation, however, and yelled a retort from his porch. The giant remained silent, in stoic nobility.

He's no longer in front of the house on Garfield. I like to think that the owner snuck him into someone else's yard in the dead of night.

Sidewalk Art

Hey, wet cement! Let's write something!


What do you think, wasted opportunity or brilliant social commentary?

I found this gem on the corner of Lyndale and 31st. You know, it isn't really all that often that we come across wet cement. Is it really a good use of a canvas? Maybe some off-hand juvenile sniggering is what the city really needs. The appeal of writing in cement is longevity - Ozymandias employed a stone pedastel for his famous warning to travellers, "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!". Now it's just, "LICK NUTS".

A Fellow of Infinite Jest

"a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times... Where be your gibes now, your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning?"

This is The Happy Chef, on the north side of Mankato, Minnesota, next to highway 169. When I lived nearby, about ten years ago, visitors could push a button on the base of the statue, and it would tell some really bad jokes. All I can remember now is something along the lines of "Why isn't there any ice left in your glass at the end of the meal? Because your water gets hungry and eats the ice!" The button doesn't work any more, which is too bad. There were quite a few Happy Chefs throughout the midwest at one time, but this is apparently the last Happy Chef restaurant to still have a statue. I believe the Mankato location was also the original one, also.

Size Matters: Rodin on the Plains

Did you realize that The Thinker is actually quite tiny? He’s about the size of a garden gnome, but lots less jolly. I recently traveled to see an exhibition of the works of Auguste Rodin at the Hillstrom Museum of Art in St Peter, Minnesota. The Thinker was in attendance, as well as thirty or so other of Rodin’s finest. I was struck immediately by his size. I had been given the impression that he’s a rather larger fellow, and in retrospect I wonder if my mental image had been unduly corrupted by The Thinker’s appropriation by Jesse Ventura’s gubernatorial campaign. It was immediately clear that Le Penseur, as Rodin referred to him, was not sculpted with the WWF in mind.

I’m a little embarrassed to say this, but the size had me a little disappointed, at least at first. And I’m sure that my trip to the exhibition only dramatized the contrast. I drove over an hour through the prairies of southern Minnesota: wide open spaces under a not-quite-endless-sky, hurtling past all that American bigness. Leaving behind the mini malls and office parks of the southern suburbs, the space gives way to orchards and car dealerships, train yards and fields, and, finally, not much of anything. Perhaps the journey altered my expectations – we actually drove under the shadow of an enormous Jolly Green Giant billboard cutout just outside of Le Sueur. So, walking into the museum I was really caught quite off guard.

There are actually several larger versions of The Thinker, made at various times after the appearance of the original plaster cast in 1880.[i] I was quickly made aware that The Thinker’s continued life in the popular vernacular has outgrown his scale. The image is re-invented so frequently that that it was striking to realize that’s its myth originated in such a tiny, singular, and seemingly delicate form.

I was even more surprised to find that I wasn’t looking at the original Thinker at all. Apparently there are complicated rules governing the reproduction of Rodin’s works – if I understand things correctly (which I may not), up to twelve casts can be reproduced from the original, at any point in time. So, even though Rodin died quite a few years ago, casts can still be made up until the magic number. Any reproductions beyond a dozen, however, fail to be authentic. I really think this seems a little odd. Why twelve? And wouldn’t size matter? The original Thinker is apparently 182.5 cm in height, which means that the one I saw in St Peter matched up pretty closely. But its size has nothing to do with its authenticity, which is guaranteed instead by the numerical order of its production – some of the large Thinkers are also authentic, but are closer to 2 meters in height.

Does this leave anyone else confused? The calculus of Rodin reproduction can get pretty complicated pretty quickly, and I’m not sure what it’s all indicative of anyway. At any rate, I wondered at the significance of this little thing I was looking at. Why had I traveled all this way to just to see this tiny reproduction? It wasn’t even original (but it was, perhaps, authentic, if you can keep up with the math). And would it really have been more impressive to see the original anyway? Would I have been able to tell the difference?

In telling a friend of mine that I had been to see The Thinker, he suggested that sculpture-watching was perhaps not all that compelling a sport anyway. I could mark it off my checklist, but what could it offer beyond that? Actually, though, I did find more in the sculpture than I anticipated would be there. The subject of The Thinker is not just a man lost in thought, caught in a quiet moment of distraction. He’s considering very serious matters indeed. The piece was intended to be a small component of a monumental portal to the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. Rodin titled the work The Gates of Hell - and the thinking subject was originally intended to be Dante himself, considering his great poem (though in its final form The Thinker was not intended to have a specific identity). In the portal, The Thinker’s gaze doesn’t seem to be focused anywhere, except perhaps inwardly. This is indeed striking, because as he averts his eyes, immediately in front of him, a man falls hopelessly into Hell.

The image of The Thinker is often understood to be an immediately recognizable representation intellectual activity, but a close look at the sculpture reveals that this misses the point. The Thinker sits in such a terribly awkward pose – his elbow is on the wrong knee for instance – that its clear that his mental dilemma leaves him physically distraught. Surely, Ventura didn’t wish to project the image of a man thinking about the fires of damnation (but would it have changed your vote if he did?).

The Thinker sits precariously. His brief life is nigh at and end, and he well knows it. With that in mind, the tiny sculpture I saw at the Hillstrom somehow seemed more significant. What was this tiny lump of lead and bronze I was looking at? Was it really a work by the hand of Rodin? No, it wasn’t. And so it seemed all the more unlikely that this tiny figure should yet persist, encased in glass, attracting the curious from across rural southern Minnesota. Its delicateness seemed to signal all the more its unlikelihood. It managed to stave off its own oblivion, for at least a little while, and I was surprised to find that it somehow made me feel a little more cheery, wondering at this Rodin, that was hardly a Rodin at all.

[i] For a great discussion of the various casts see http://www.penseur.org/

Art as Hoax, Hoax as Art: A commentary on Aliza Shvarts and the meaning of art

Living as late in the day as we do, it is readily accepted that definitions of art have burst past the point of recognition. Most can admit that we no longer need an art “object” as a locus for discussion. “Art” may take many forms. Nevertheless, inasmuch as art can be discussed at all, one must ask what the boundaries of “art” are (even if those boundaries may not exist). The recent fiasco surrounding Yale art major Aliza Shvarts’ senior project, which involved the intentional and repeated inducement of miscarriages over a nine month period, raises such questions.


After the story broke on April 17th, it was quickly debunked as a hoax by Yale’s administrating authorities. Lest we turn away too soon, however, Shvarts quickly retorted that it wasn’t really a hoax after all, and that she had just told Yale officials what they had wanted to hear.[1] Although we may tend to believe whatever we find most settling about the whole affair, the actual truth is at least a little bit obscured. And this ambiguity, of course, is precisely the point of the whole exercise.


If we take the story as truth (which we certainly don’t need to do), then it still leaves unresolved questions about the status of a “work” of art. I certainly don’t mean to resolve any of these questions here but these questions are still pertinent to a discussion of the status of art, or the reports of its demise.[2]


While the “art” did consist of some physical material – a documentation consisting of blood, Vaseline and film – it seems that the documentation is almost irrelevant. The material display doesn’t really add anything to the central provocative claim. The real power of the exercise is that someone would induce abortion for art’s sake. If I’m correct in seeing the art in this way, then we’re left wondering what art is: can art be simply a claim, a declaration? If Schvarts had simply turned in her declaration of intentionally induced miscarriage, would she still get a passing grade (and what grade is she getting anyway)? Obviously, performance art doesn’t rely on physical material for its status as art, but its hard to see this as performance, either. The behaviors in question were not “performed” in any traditional sense, because they lacked an audience (we might judge the art as a work of film, but it seems, again, that any power the project conveys is not tied to its status as film at all). Can art be reduced to a provocative statement, which is almost (though not entirely) absent an element of craft?


If we take the whole affair as hoax, then perhaps the claim to art is a little stronger. We’re all familiar with the suggestion that art is a lie that tells the truth. But how important is truthfulness to the equation? If it is a hoax, then we have art as lie – but only that.


If its not a hoax, then it is art as the report of strange behavior. And we can here think of various comparable behaviors. Might I claim to my students that being drunk while lecturing is an important aesthetic experience for them? Shall they counter that a state of deep existential depression precluding an ability to turn in a final paper is an appropriate culmination to an introduction to philosophy course? Can one simply do something strange, dangerous, or immoral, and then tell people that it was art. Is that enough? If this is our guideline, there are a lot of behaviors that qualify, but that we would never ordinarily think of as art. And what does odd behavior have in common with, for instance, Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, such that they would both fall under the category “art”? Do we perhaps need a new name? Is it important that we make these distinctions at all?


As a hoax, the events have a stronger claim. And as Schvarts has made clear in her own statements, the art is about (inasmuch as a set of behaviors can be “about” anything) the resultant ambiguity: we don’t know if the blood is the result of normal menstrual cycle, or an aborted fertilized egg, or animal blood she hurriedly gathered together the night before the project was due. Throughout all of this, we’re still left with something troubling: art as ambiguous publicity stunt.


Even if everyone is famous for fifteen minutes, it doesn’t necessarily follow that each of those fifteen minutes is a work of art. Does art happen whenever the public is briefly shocked, confused, or amused (and could we then submit Larry Craig’s behavior in an airport bathroom as art)? Or, perhaps, only when the public is shocked and confused by something which turns out not to have been true? I fear there’s a central confusion here. We know that art can be shocking. Picasso’s Guernica is proof of that. But that doesn’t mean that art resides in the shock. Guernica was also a painting. Absent the painting, what is left that we can identify, and do we need to identify a “work” of art anyway?


I am certainly not in any position to resolve any of these questions, and so, for the time being, I’ll leave it all open for discussion. Bringing up a lot of irresolvable questions – that can be my “art”.


[1] Schvarts’ explanation: http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/24559
[2] Here’s a link to the original story: http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/24513

The Gehry in the Machine

I recently attended a lecture at the Minneapolis Public Library concerning Frank Gehry’s design methodology, and it sparked some questions for me concerning architectural models, paradigms, and the primacy of artistic creation. The lecture detailed the shift in Frank Gehry’s approach to construction, since discovering the architectural potential of some computer software originally designed with aerospace engineering in mind. I’ll oversimplify things here for the sake of brevity and argument, but hopefully some questions will begin to make sense. Gehry’s design process famously relies on transposing from very abstract models. Because the models are so geometrically irregular, the transposition has been extraordinarily complicated. This may have been most particularly the case with the Weisman Museum at the University of Minnesota. As it was suggested at the lecture, the Weisman was in some sense the last of hand drawn buildings. Beginning with the Guggenheim Bilbao, and more explicitly with the Experience Music Project in Seattle, Gehry and his firm realized that they could utilize new software to translate all the abstraction into hard numbers. This made the whole process tremendously more efficient, saving huge amounts of time and money. After the Weisman, the traditional paper and pencil were no longer necessary – the abstract model could be scanned directly into a virtual representation of itself, complete with the necessary numbers. So, the argument in favor of the process might go something like this: the EMP is much more structurally complicated than the Weisman, but was realized more efficiently. Leaving behind the pencil and paper provides two important benefits: a more complicated design and a cheaper price tag.

But, is it fair to ask whether any downside accompanies these benefits? My question concerns the aesthetic differences that accompany the gradual shift toward greater control. The EMP has a very different aesthetic appeal (while at the same time being very clearly a work by Gehry). It looks much more sleek, more refined, more “produced” (and, indeed, it is all of these things). With the Weisman, it is much more evident that there is a gap between the abstract model and its transposition into a built structure (though, this gap might be something desirable). The geometries are more rigid (more straight lines, less, swooping and diving curves, for instance). An analogy was made with the master builders of the Medieval cathedrals. The tradition of the master builder is one of (not quite) complete control – overseeing all facets of the building process, controlling the transition from the drawing room floor to the built walls. Gehry’s new process brings him closer to the tradition of the master builder. With the Weisman, a tremendous amount of work was left to contractors, out of a matter of necessity due to the complexity of the designs. The virtualization of the design process returns control, both to the architect and, just as importantly, to the model itself.

But does the greater control of the construction process lead to an aesthetically preferable result? To put it bluntly, is it worth it? It would be too much to characterize it as a Faustian bargain, but nevertheless, one might ask whether the greater increase of efficiency leaves something to be desired. One of the more celebrated and appealing characteristics of Medieval cathedrals is their indeterminacies – those architectural moments which fall outside of the master builder’s plan – stonemason’s signatures, unique gargoyles, and other irregularities. What do we look for in a complete building – a direct translation form a model, or perhaps an indirect one.

How closely should a work of architecture resemble its paradigm? To the extent that a work becomes a more repeatable duplicate of its model, then we might look at the building itself as a “duplicate’, a copy. In just this sense I’ve used the word transpose to refer to the process of proceeding from the model to the building. But a transposition, of course, means that two things shift places. Is there not normally a shift in primacy from the model to the building, once construction is complete? If for Gehry, the primary work is the model, then by all means it makes sense to try to duplicate that model as precisely as possible. But then what can we say about the building? Is it secondary to the model (and we might here be reminded of the trend of museums paying millions for architects’ collections of renderings, models, and other artifacts once thought to be mere secondary ephemera).

In other forms of art, we ridicule anything judged to be over-produced. Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, and Ashley Simpson are just a few of the obvious musical examples. Lucas basically ruined his Star Wars franchise with an overreliance on CGI, i.e. Jar-Jar Binks. Likewise, we might scoff at Thomas Kincade’s art empire or even a fast food meal for not just being generally bad, but for being produced too closely to a formula. I admit that I’m being at least a little unfair here – any of Gehry’s works are of far greater aesthetic significance than a McDonald’s burger, and I don’t mean to put the two on the same level. Frankly, Seattle’s EMP really is pretty cool, even if something was lost in the transposition. But we might still ask about the virtue of live performance, even in architecture.

Strip Mall of the Ancients

In July 2006, I attended the SOBO Summerfest in Boulder, Colorado. This was a pretty forgettable affair – some uninteresting jam bands and some merchants giving away sports bottles and power bars-- but certainly nothing to write home about. What caught my attention, though, were the staging grounds themselves. The revelers gathered in a strip mall parking lot, backing up against a row of shops: used sporting goods, knickknacks, a diner, classroom space for knitters, mountaineering equipment repair, and the now empty Social Security Administration office. It is a commonplace that America is losing public space – town squares are abandoned in favor of strip malls on the edge of town. The first strip mall is thought to have appeared in Kansas City early in the last century, and we’ve continually moved further out along the road ever since. This de-centering has left an indelible mark on virtually all American cities; even Boulder, which in many ways is a beacon for the success of central town planning. So placing the Summerfest in a parking lot was an obvious choice, logistically. SOBO refers to South Boulder, not really a neighborhood proper, but simply that part of Boulder south of the rest of town (duh). The out-sized strip mall here (actually several interlocking strips) is the hub of activity in South Boulder, and I’m writing in a coffee shop in the strip mall right now. The structure does actually have a name, the Table Mesa Shopping Center (not the Table Mesa Strip Mall, a more accurate, but rather less grandiose title), though no one actually refers to it as such. I’ve heard it referred to as ‘the shops’, ‘the hood’, ‘the café’, ‘the strip mall’, and only very occasionally as SOBO (always said with a snicker of derision). These monikers reveal a certain familiarity – a speaker would only ever refer to ‘the shops’ if the listener was certain to know what was being referred to, otherwise it would be hopelessly vague. Furthermore, it is precisely this familiarity that goes against the expectation of pessimistic critics, historians, and preservationists.

Conventional wisdom has long said that as a community moves away from its center, its cohesive identity will evaporate. However, the millennial predictions of the city’s disappearance have not come to pass – or, rather, the outcome is just a little more complicated than predicted. For instance, sitting here as I am, looking through the coffee shop window, I see many familiar faces: Pyramid-Head Guy[1] just walked past, the women from the cooking school next door are taking their break, the banjo hippie has made an appearance, and I’m always hopeful that Camo-Man[2] will show up again after a long absence. So, that sense of community once engendered by the town square has not really been lost, it has just moved to the outskirts of town. Despite the rather dismal state of this strip mall, I find that I’ve become quite attached to it. It is my cultural and communal center, even in spite of its shortcomings. Things are not the same as they were before, however, in that pre-strip mall state of urban bliss. Indeed, in important ways our relationship to the city has changed, though this change is complicated. But there are several threads here, so let me slow down and try to pry them apart.

The centerpiece of ancient Greek architecture was the agora – this was, in fact, hardly a piece of architecture at all, it was a plaza. It was largely an empty space, but one in which the most important social events occurred. Surrounding the agora, however, was the stoa. The stoa should seem to us strikingly familiar; it did not differ substantially from a strip mall. It consisted of a long, low roof, supported by columns, backing against a wall. Most were one story, though several were two-leveled (like much of the Table Mesa strip mall). In terms of its actual structure, the strip mall differs from the stoa most substantially in that the wall which originally backed the Greek stoa now has shops behind it (the stoa held vendors selling wares, but not shops, proper). So it is not without a certain amount of irony that the strip mall, perhaps most denigrated of modern structures, should be essentially the same as a Greek structure, whose culture is still often heralded as the architectural high-water mark. The historian R.E. Wycherly called the stoa a work of peculiar genius, but I think that is really overstating the case. Quite the contrary, the stoa seems to me to be an obvious development: a wall and a roof. Clearly, similar structures have appeared in many cultures at many times, and are probably close to automatic.

It is likely one of the oldest architectural designs; there may be genius in the first moment of architectural awareness, but that it should take the form of a stoa is no big surprise. Visiting the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, I was struck that artisans selling their wares outside the monument at Wounded Knee had aligned their handmade awnings in perfect strip formation, parallel to the highway. The stoa/strip mall may be the architectural vernacular supreme. So what’s the difference? The difference is that relationship between the stoa and the agora that existed for the Greeks. This does not properly exist any more. The agora was shared public space – Socrates engaged in dialogues here. Now we have parking lots (though I think philosophy still proceeds here[3]). Is this a bad development? Not necessarily. As heir-apparent to the Greek civilizations, widespread appearance of the strip malls is nicely nostalgic but the transformation of the agora into a parking lot is peculiarly American. The strip mall, in dispensing with the agora, becomes an architecture peculiarly suited to the road. It is an architecture of movement. Think of the word itself: strip implies an elongated strand, itself already directional. It also implies the removal of something, in this case a center. The strip, once denuded of its agora, is reduced to only direction, an arrow pointed onward. Movement; travel, but without a destination. So, the SOBO Summerfest had to make use of a parking lot. But the parking lot is only a momentary agora. Most of the time it’s a temporary resting place for cars. And this is telling, too. Not-quite-dead space, a repository for our stuff before we are back on the road again.

Parking lots, and not just those in front of strip malls, are the frequent centers of public events now: concerts, farmer’s markets, pottery shows, dog shows, roller hockey. And this is very clever, in a certain way. Public space has broadened its use. But really, it’s just a response to a lack. We need public space, and we’ll invent it if its not readily provided. The parking lot provides this opportunity, but in a somewhat sadder way. The parking lot is public, but it's also tenuous – sadder, wiser. We might buy our organic vegetables here in the morning, but we also come here to fight and smoke cigarettes at night. This after-the–flood attitude has been amply shown in movies from Heavy Metal Parking Lot to Say Anything, where the kids without dates hang out aimlessly behind the gas station. The strip mall as such, though, is well overdue for a more serious study. A glossy photographic coffee-table volume just depicting strip malls would be welcome, indeed. So, even if goaded by a lack of options, we still come to the strip mall for various revelations – I, myself, once performed with a band at a strip mall (as Jonathan Richman put it, “Couldn’t stay inside talkin’, had to get outside rockin’”). We come here to celebrate, but we know we soon will have to move on (to another strip mall?). So, it is with that sense of existential whimsy, but wistfulness that I walk past these shops. The strip mall is in constant change – here the book store has closed down, and the homebrewer’s supply has relocated. But now we have an Indian grocery and a dollar store – so I can cheaply buy out-of-date Chocolate Lucky Charms. It's human nature to grow attached to certain features of our environment, but at the strip mall our attachments are continually unsettled. With the Greek stoa/agora, this must have been much less the case. On the strip all bets are off. I am always hoping that Camo- Man will reappear – clad only in camouflage trousers, constantly playing hacky sack, blasting Tom Waits from his camouflage truck. For a season he literally lived here, and could be seen every time I passed, bringing a weird constancy to the strip. But, of course, he eventually moved on, presumably to another strip mall, kicking hacky sacks off another roof.

This article originally ran in AmericanNerdMag.com on July 3, 2006.

[1] Pyramid-Head guy is a bookish, genial young man who appears to be wearing a medium sized pyramid on his head, under a blue windbreaker. In addition, he is always wearing sunglasses over duct tape – the duct tape is directly applied to his nose. My wife once observed him looking up transdimensional harmonics in the dictionary at the library.
[2] Camo-Man, obviously, wears camo pants and, not obviously, nothing else. I once saw him leap from the strip mall roof, terrifying soccer moms strolling past with their soy chais. He may summer in the mountains. More on Camo-Man later
[3] Transdimensional harmonics anyone?