In the fall of 2009, SMU inaugurated the Meadows Prize, sponsored by the Meadows School and the Meadows Foundation and selected by a committee of 12 international arts professionals. These awards were given to individuals or groups that “share the Meadows School’s commitment to creating art or scholarship that has had a transformative impact on both local and global society.” Creative Time, a New York-based organization that has commissioned and produced works of public art that are experimental and socially engaged since 1974, was awarded the prize and began a series of research trips to learn about the cultural landscape of Dallas and the wider metropolitan area and to propose a project that would be sensitive to its site specificity and leave a cultural legacy to the city. On these trips Creative Time met with artists, curators, collectors, educators, writers, civic leaders, and architects to learn about the urban fabric of a city that, through the Arts District, had recently made a huge investment in the arts. This process was primarily about looking and listening, but it took part in a wider dialog that had already started in Dallas about building and maintaining a viable and sustainable artistic community.
Noah Simblist
Articles by Noah Simblist
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Dates
May 22 thru Aug 15Whiteread’s is a post-minimal approach, drawing on abstract histories but eliminating the binary opposition of representation and abstraction. This freedom is what disassociates Whiteread’s work from the dogma of modernism. It is her ability to be impure, combining the abstract and the real, the abject with the refined and fine art with design that make this work progressive and refreshing. But this progress is stifled when the piety of modernism creeps in. When these objects are treated as relics to be housed in the reliquary of the museum it robs them of their openness.
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Dates
Apr 11 thru Jun 6Donkey Kong is for my generation what the madeleine was for Proust. The bright colors, jumpy video, and pixilation of 1980’s video games are so specific that one glimpse can provoke waves of nostalgia. Today of course this aesthetic is quaint and even primitive compared to the fine line that exists between the real and the virtual with Halo and Avatar.
But just as modernist artists like Picasso and Dubuffet looked to the “primitive” for greater purities of expression, a generation of artists have been mining the aesthetics of retro-technology to step out of the mad rush to the future.
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Dates
Feb 21 thru Apr 4In the context of Gabriel Acavedo Velarde’s exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the critic’s encounter with a museum guard becomes part of the artwork. The artwork frames the gallery space as the set for a performance – in this case one that opens more questions than it answers.
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Location
Former WaMu Bank Building 5030 Greenville Ave. Dallas, TX 75206Dates
Feb 20 thru Feb 21Ed. note: The following roundtable was held February 14 to discuss the show “Modern Ruin,” which will exhibit work by 15 artists in a never-used Washington Mutual bank building over two days. On Monday, February 22, the building will be demolished.
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Dates
Jan 23 thru Feb 21Taking architecture as a starting point, Christina Rees and Thomas Fuelmer have curated a stunning show of work from a Dallas collection that is usually seen in the sleek white confines of a home designed by Richard Meier. The exhibition, entitled Floor Corner Wall: Selected Work from the Rachofsky Collection at Fort Worth Contemporary Arts includes sculpture by Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, Tom Claassen, Tom Friedman, Jim Hodges, Siobhan Liddell, Giullio Paolini, Charles Ray, Richard Serra, and Rachel Whiteread. But by virtue of their combination, both the architecture and sculpture have been redefined.
Some artists in this exhibition like Carl Andre, Richard Serra or Mel Bochner were part of a vanguard of artists in the 1960’s that redefined sculpture’s relationship to space. They stripped away the pedestal, allowing the formal and conceptual structures of the work itself to prop them up. Serra’s Clothes Pin Prop, 1969-76 takes this quite literally as two pieces of heavy lead are held up by nothing more than the floor and wall of the gallery and the resultant pressures of mass and gravity.
Bochner’s Theorem of Pythagoras, 1972/2006, made up of three sets of blue glass fragments on the floor, is divided in relation to the famous mathematical theorem. One set is laid out in a square with five pieces in either direction. The second set is four by four and the third set is three by three, for a total of forty-seven nodules that look like uncut gems, creating a triangle at the center of these three squares. This kind of measurement, which links physical form and the abstractions of mathematics acts as a bridge between sculpture and architecture.
Other artists engage the architecture in a way that is more playful. Reflecting Another, 2000 by Jim Hodges is made up of four panels of mismatched colorful light bulbs, two on each wall of a corner, that face each other. Given as a wedding gift to Cindy and Howard Rachofsky, the purple bulbs are a stand in for Howard and the blue for Cindy. As they meet their colors unify to a shining band of silver. Across the room, Sioban Liddell’s Untitled (light strips), 1995, offers a subtle echo to the Hodges piece with two strips of white paper whose brightly colored backs reflect off of the wall.
Sharing the back room with the Lidell are two small pieces that are equally restrained in their subversion. Tom Friedman’s Untitled, 1990, a ball of bubblegum measuring about 5 inches in diameter and chewed completely by the artist sits in another corner high above Rachel Whiteread’s 2002 aluminum casting of her studio floor like a beautifully bizarre icon. Barely visible, Charles Ray’s Rotating Circle, 1988 is a motorized nine-inch white circle inset in a white wall that spins so fast that it would shave off the skin of any finger that touches it.
All of this work looks strikingly different in a quasi-industrial white cube than its usual setting in Meyer’s neo-modernist purity. The stains and cracks on the floor are more like the spaces that these objects were originally conceived in and as a result the work looks very much at home. In this sense, the work engages not only the floors, corners and walls of the gallery’s architectural space. It also reframes the historical trajectories of architectural relationships between studios, galleries and museums.
I have seen many of these pieces in both spaces and they look great in both. But it’s nice to see that beyond the obvious possibility that architecture can provide a framework and context for sculpture, sculpture can also reframe, affect and even subvert the architecture that it inhabits.