Monthly Archive for October, 2009

When you open the homepage of photographer James Nachtwey’s website, you are confronted with a dark, grey screen, no photos, and this quote in stark, white letters:

I have been a witness, and these pictures are

not be forgotten and must not be repeated.

Running down the left side of the screen is a menu of political/social issues and locations that frame his body of work. Click onto any link, from Afghanistan, Aids, Bosnia, and famines, to Pakistan, Rwanda and 9-11. From this neutral field, you will be yanked into a world of the most disturbing and moving photographs you will ever see.

Rwanda, 1994 — Survivor of Hutu death camp.

www.jamesnachtwey.com

Nachtwey has been documenting the depravations and horrors of civilization run amok since an early assignment took him to Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1981 to cover the “troubles” between the IRA and the Ulster Loyalists. He became a contract photographer with Time magazine in 1984. After being a member of the famed photo agency Magnum for years, he became one of the founders of another photographic agency, VII, in 2001. It was while in NYC for a meeting that he bore witness on September 11, 2001 to a human tragedy in his own backyard. His apartment is very close to the World Trade Center and he was one of the first photographers to reach the scene. He narrowly avoided death when the south tower collapsed as he was taking close-in shots.

NYC, 2001 — Collapse of south tower, World Trade Center.

James Nachtwey is a winner of the Robert Capa Gold Medal (five times), Magazine Photographer of the Year (seven times), and the ICP Infinity Award (three times).

There is so much to say about Nachtwey and his work, but it all pales alongside an examination of the  images themselves. It is this intensely personal encounter which I want to make the body of this piece.

In a video clip, Nachtwey, in a nighttime interlude in a dark room, reflects on the meaning of his work. An abrupt cut brings us to a violent confrontation between Palestinian youth and unseen IDF soldiers in the West Bank city of Ramallah. You will see the scene from the POV of his 35mm. camera. A lipstick video camera mounted on the camera body records the scene as he works. Every shutter click is like a gunshot answering the Israeli troops.

These scenes are from Christian Frei’s Academy Award nominated film War Photographer, which over a period of more than two years follows Nachtwey while on international assignments. Along with Frei, Swiss photographer Peter Indergard, SCS, is the principal cameraman, with Hanna Abu Saada shooting in Palestine.

A moving YouTube tribute begins by showing some of Nachtwey’s most well known images in an emotional montage—but at 3:30, it jumps you into a video sequence of the same Ramallah encounter. But now we see the photographer so close in that we fear for his life. He is, in fact, tear gassed alongside the dissident youths and we see Abu Saada’s relentless video camera documenting Nachtwey’s agony. The scene is also from War Photographer.

Over the years Nachtwey has seen far too much fighting; it is present even in the beginning of his career. But he can only be labeled a “war”photographer if you are to consider that his engagement with so many of the human hellholes on planet Earth is one’s man’s personal “war” against injustice. A broad range of his work, much of which deals with famine and poverty, can be seen at the site below. This is not work you can wander through, like flipping the pages of a magazine:

faheykleingallery.com link

To truly see how this quiet, even reclusive man, inserts himself into an unfolding event, you need to see an early sequence of War Photographer. A village in Kosovo is in flames. Nachtwey moves slowly through rubble, recording the detritus of a once furnished home. Later on, he encounters a grieving family, moves toward it, quietly, slowly. He works close in, with a wide enough lens so that he becomes one with the action, the silent witness.

If you get only one DVD this year, make it this one. It will warrant repeated viewings. I can think of no film about an artist “at work” that has such emotional charge and empathic insight to the human condition. Find it wherever you will, but here is one portal:

Amazon.com link – War Photographer

To understand that Nachtwey is not just a great photojournalist but is an “engaged man” look at this clip, where his colleague, Des Wright, a Reuters cameraman, gives testimony to Nachtwey’s insertion of himself into a riot in Indonesia, to try to save a man’s life, a gesture normally anathema to the neutral photographer:

Some years before this event, Nachtwey was on assignment in the South African township of Thokoza during the closing violent months of the struggle against apartheid. A group of fellow photojournalists, Kevin Carter, Jaoa Silva, Greg Marinovich, and Ken Oosterbroek were daily putting their lives at risk. Other newsmen had dubbed them The Bang Bang Club. In 2000, Marinovich and Silva, the two surviving members, wrote a harrowing book about this time.

Amazon.com link – The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War

These are four tough, hard-boiled, adrenaline junkies, whose emotional distance in temperament and work could not be more removed from Nachtwey’s. In a total SNAFU confrontation, Marinovich is wounded, Oosterbroek is killed. Nachtwey rushed to help. In this video clip Hans-Hermann Clare, foreign editor of the German magazine Stern, describes Nachtwey’s action under fire:

The fourth member of the group, Kevin Carter, three months after the death of his closest friend, Ken Oosterbroek, committed suicide. He had only recently received the Pulitzer Prize.

It had seemed as if, almost in a world apart, that Jim Nachtwey had some personal writ of safe passage, that he was invulnerable. Were his signature freshly laundered shirts and creased jeans some mythic “Ghost Dance Shirt” that protected him from bullets? It was not a bullet that eventually got him on Dec. 10, 2003, but shrapnel from a tossed grenade, as he rode in an open Humvee through the nighttime streets of Baghdad’s ancient Al-Adhamiya quarter:

The New York Times article link

Nachtwey and Michael Weisskopf, a senior correspondent for Time magazine, were in the back of the vehicle when a shiny object landed on a wooden bench. Weisskopf thought it was a rock and reached to toss it out of the vehicle. When the grenade went off Weisskopf lost part of his arm; Nachtwey’s wounds were far less serious.

Weisskopf’s account of the incident and his rehabilitation among wounded soldiers became a feature article in Time magazine:

Time magazine article link

Nothing seems ever to slow Nachtwey down. He is almost constantly on assignment. Two of his friends and fraternity brothers from their student days at Dartmouth, Roy Carlson and Denis O’Neill, even have difficulty keeping tabs on him. I met Jim Nachtwey at the opening of a show of his work at an LA photo gallery. I met Denis, who is tagged Jim’s best friend in War Photographer, through Roy Carlson who was the screenwriter on a film I directed, China Moon. Though my relationship with Jim is through others, I instantly felt kinship upon meeting him. It is this immediate sense of empathy that he radiates that must be the cloak that protects him. You can see it here in a PSA announcement he made promoting the battle to defeat TB:

His quiet mannered demeanor is consistent with the way he does his work, his intrepid witness to chaos and death.

Here is a slideshow of his photos documenting the ravages of XDR-TB. It is strong stuff. Prepare yourself:

There are a number of books of Nachtwey’s work, but one of them is unlike any photography book you have ever seen. It is called Inferno or, by some reviewers, “The Black Slab.”

A review by David Friend begins, “Last month a man left a tombstone on my doorstep.” He describes the world of suffering Inferno documents, its nine chapters echoing the descending circles in the first part of Dante’s great poem:

www.digitaljournalist.org link

In War Photographer, Denis O’Neill says of Jim’s relentless drive to work, to bear witness in the world: “The possibility of a normal life, that’s the main conflict. . . and what he’s had to sacrifice to live the life that he leads.  . .  He has given everything to the job.” And, Roy Carlson tells a story that is, even early on in their history, indicative of the intense focus of the man.

Shortly after they had graduated from Dartmouth, Roy was doing advanced studies at Boston University. He had a cramped apartment, heated only by a stove; but he had a great darkroom squirreled away there. Mornings, early, before Roy left for the day, Jim would come by to work in the darkroom. Late at night, when Roy returned, he was overpowered by the reek of chemicals. Jim was still at work, oblivious of the passage of time, oblivious of the rank, acrid, smells— no supervening chore, but doing the studied, unforgiving work that would soon be the documented witness to a most dangerous, even deadly, career.

The Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum.

When English Romantic poet John Keats saw the marble sculptures that once graced the frieze and pediments of the Parthenon in 5th century BCE Athens, this is the sonnet he wrote:

On Seeing the Elgin Marbles

My spirit is too weak—mortality

Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,

And each imagin’d pinnacle and steep

Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die

Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.

Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep

That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,

Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.

Such dim-conceived glories of the brain

Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;

So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,

That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude

Wasting of old Time—with a billowy main—

“The Elgin Marbles,” as they were known to Keats and to most of the world throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, are no longer given that designation even by the august institution that currently houses them, The British Museum. Here is its official apologia for their being in London:

www.britishmuseum.org link

It is now more politically correct to call them “The Parthenon Marbles.” Even the British Museum feels that the very mention of the name of the titled “savior” or “plunderer” of the Marbles (depending on your point of view) is like yelling “fire” in a darkened theater.

Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, received a permit of debatable validity from the then occupying Turkish government to remove the white Pentelic marble sculptures from the Parthenon, sited atop the Acropolis, while he was British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. He did so by cutting them into manageable pieces that could be transported back to his estate in Essex. The job occupied him and his workers for more than three years. The sculptures remained with Elgin until he sold them to the British government a decade later, in 1816. They have been housed as a landmark of Western Civilization in the British Museum ever since.

London is a world’s crossroads and keeping the Marbles there has constituted an ongoing argument made by and against the British government for over 150 years. In the BM page above, there is a brief history of the systematic pillaging and destruction of the Marbles over centuries (including a devastating gunpowder explosion in 1687), prior to Elgin’s mission. A special sky lit gallery to preserve and display the Marbles, named after its sponsor, Baron Joseph Duveen, was built early in the 20th century and it is here that generations of visitors have seen the Marbles in resplendent display.

The Duveen Gallery.

England truly does consider the Marbles to be part of its national (and world) heritage. The BM is its self-anointed caretaker. Had the Marbles not been “saved” and put into its custody, they aver that they would today be in ruins.

The Greek government, however, has always claimed ownership and has fought continuously since its independence for recognition of its patrimony. This argument was ratcheted up to a higher level some years ago when internationally known Greek actress Melina Mercouri made the return of the Marbles a personal crusade even until her death. Celebrity opinion on “repatriation” is not a new topic. Even shortly after they were installed in the BM, poet Lord Byron wrote in Child Harold’s Pilgrimage:

Dull is the eye that will not weep to see

And snatch’s thy shrinking gods to northern climes abhorred!

Critical mass in this explosive debate was achieved this past June with the long-awaited opening of the Parthenon Museum at the foot of the Acropolis. This hill and its temples is one of the cultural summits of Western Civilization for millions of annual visitors. As you walk through the glass-enclosed main gallery of the new museum, a re-creation of the frieze in a third floor gallery is sited in a way that affords a view up to the temple of the goddess Athena. The “Elgin Marbles” are mounted (in absentia) in their proper place—by high quality copies.

Additional debate on the question of “return” has been fueled by a re-issue of journalist/ provocateur Christopher Hitchens’ decade old book; The Elgin Marbles: Should They Be Returned to Greece?

Amazon.com link

Hitchens, who has never found a Kulturkampf he didn’t relish, makes an impassioned case for restitution in this July 2009 article for Vanity Fair magazine. As always, his scholarship is driven to convincing heights by his passion:

Vanity Fair article link

And taking it up to a personal level, Hitchens appears with scholar James Cano (author of Who Owns Antiquity?) on PBS News Hour:

www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog article link

Blogger Ira Artschiller concludes a piece he wrote by asking how would we feel if a US monument were re-located to a foreign country.

You probably have to go with the claims of Greece. It just feels those sculptures are of their marrow, that their removal was a sort of lobotomy, and Greece has a right of possession. The issues are loose, ambiguous: would a freestanding sculpture, say a Donatello, moved to another location, lose much of its aesthetic self? How are you to parse how connected to national origin a work of art is — how connected to the universal human spirit? Then again if they moved the Mount Rushmore monument to Nigeria, well, that would be strange.

Suddenly, despite all the academic arguments on both sides, when you can place the issue into your own cultural context, it comes alive. Imagine the Statue of Liberty being blow-torched in the middle of the night and the top half carted off—anywhere.

I clearly am not non-partisan here. But take a look at this wordless five-minute video of the construction of the Parthenon Museum with its repeated views of the Parthenon in the background—and tell me what emotion is called up for you:

And here is a video projection piece that was made for the opening night ceremony of the Parthenon Museum. It is projected on the walls of the structures:

The British Museum has long argued that keeping the Parthenon Marbles in London in an institution that can place Greek Classical art in the broader context of all of Western Civilization is the most compelling argument to maintain the status quo. Perhaps. During its heyday the British Empire was able to collect with impunity treasures from all over its far-flung colonial holdings. The BM houses the world’s cultural booty beyond any other national institution… Cultural looting is a predictable but weak argument for its continuity, it seems to me.

But, in an effort to defend its position, the BM’s official explanation, while praising the new Parthenon Museum, defends its own ownership of the Marbles as custodian for the world:

The new museum, however, does not alter the Trustees’ view that the sculptures are part of everyone’s shared heritage and transcend cultural boundaries. The Trustees remain convinced that the current division allows different and complementary stories to be told about the surviving sculptures, highlighting their significance for world culture and affirming the universal legacy of Ancient Greece.

Further, the supporters point to the centrality of London as a world destination, that only there can huge numbers of people see the Marbles. Christopher Hitchens responds that if that were a valid argument, the Marbles should be re-located to Beijing.

In this next video, after a wonderful but brief tour of the Marbles, playwright Bonnie Greer, who is also a trustee of the BM, makes her case for the historical argument of leaving the Marbles in London. She explains that only here will they be seen as part of a cultural thread from Egypt and Assyria to the Renaissance and beyond.

www.britishmuseum.org video link

From an educational point of view this is a coherent rationale. But it does not address the passionate emotions roiling just below the surface for all Greeks and for many scholars and lovers of Hellenic art. Purely from this educational perspective, would not high quality plaster reproductions be almost as useful as the real marbles?

To be blunt here, to continue to possess the Parthenon Marbles based on this weak argument strikes many critics as nothing more than the desperate gesture of a jingoistic mortmain. Several surveys within the past decade have concluded that less than one fourth of the British people want to retain custody of the Marbles.

Several years ago I photographed a film with director Ken Kwapis on the Greek island of Santorini. The island is really one side of a huge volcanic caldera. It is famous for its steepness, its several cities clustered tightly against its sides. It was almost impossible to use a dolly here or sometimes even a tripod for the dialogue scenes. I knew that much of our work would have to be done by a very stable steadicam, as we were shooting in the anamorphic format.

Santorini

In Athens, I met with a highly recommended Greek steadicam operator named Michael Tsimperopoulos. I saw his reel. It was stunning, not just in bravura terms but in its controlled choices. His work on our film was impeccable. Michael and I became quick friends and he has worked with me on other films.

When I was considering how to write this piece on the Parthenon Marbles, I asked myself “What could I possibly say as a concluding thought that is more than an outsider’s unengaged musings?” I decided to ask Michael for his perspective as a cultured Greek. Here is what he wrote:

“Asking for the marbles to come back is one thing. Refusing to return them is something else altogether, not even part of the same argument. For two hundred years, seven generations of people from all over the world, are requesting the return of the Parthenon Marbles. It is a long time for any fire to burn, for any struggle to endure, especially in our modern times….. Recently, I’ve been having this strong feeling that perhaps it is not the people who are asking for the Marbles back, but the Marbles themselves (that) have been crying out in despair all this time for their return to their homeland, their original place of energy and philosophical mysticism. At a certain point, every uprooted, every expatriated, every traveler, every Ulysses longs to return home…”

When Joe Mankiewicz engaged Bette Davis to play stage actress Margo Channing in All About Eve, her career was at a low point. At age 41 and with over 50 films to her credit, she was at a crossroads. For Hollywood, she was no longer a fresh, young face nor was she yet a proven mature character actress. It is this very tension that lies at the heart of her role in the film, and in a sense having nothing else to lose, she unleashed her demons.

Here is a section from a BBC documentary that places her at this career intersection. There is a quick montage of earlier roles. The section on All About Eve begins three minutes in.

Here is a classic moment from All About Eve, Margo’s party that is done essentially in one setup. (The famous “Bumpy Night” quip introduces the dolly shot that leads into the stairway). Remember the days when the dialogue and the caliber of acting sustained a shot for more than ten seconds? Marilyn Monroe is on George Sanders’ arm.

And here is an even more visually constrained scene that unfolds in Margo’s car, a moment of which ended the documentary clip from above. Unknown to Margo, her BFF Karen has drained the gas tank to let Margo’s understudy, Eve, go on in her place for the evening performance. The audience does not know for certain that Karen has done this, but a suspicious air lies over the scene:

When I consider a scene like this I can’t help asking if it would be possible for a director and cinematographer today to cover it so simply: one two shot, two singles, an insert of a radio. Aside from the seeming manic tics of our society and a sense of near universal ADD, do we avoid such a simple visual vocabulary because the audience won’t stand for it, or because most actors can’t sustain it, or because the writers can’t create it? I’m not proposing an answer, just asking the question.

Not only is Bette Davis’ speech about the identity of women one of the half dozen great monologues in American film, it is amazingly still relevant to many women’s dilemma of career/family. And the fact that it was written by a man is also amazing.

It reminds me of a scene that played out between an actress and the director of a film I photographed some years ago. During the rehearsal period before production began, the actress, who had grasped a strong sense of ownership of her character, began to disagree with the director about her character’s “motivation.” In utter frustration with the director’s defense of his position, she blurted out, “What the hell would you know about her? You’re a man.” The director took a deep breath and said calmly. “Well, my dear, this character that seems to be so real and true to you and with whom you so identify—was written by this man.”

I love being present in as much of the rehearsal process as I can. It gives me a window into not only how the scenes are coming to life off the written page, but often helps me to start thinking about how to photograph the film. I am of a generation that believes that camera style develops first from the actors’ staging with the director, then outwards to the camera. The camera is in a dance with the actor, yes, but the actor leads. And sometimes, I get in the rehearsal process an unexpected insight of just how the power dynamics will unfold once we begin shooting.

As for Mankiewicz, after the success of All About Eve he gravitated back to the east coast and settled in Westchester County north of New York City in a house that was the setting for almost all of the interviews in the Brian Dauth book. Paul Attanasio has the most vivid description of it:

Here, in the den of his big brick house, at the end of a hard dirt road, in the midst of a leafy, puncture-proof country quiet that he has perhaps never known in his soul, and that he certainly never put on the screen, Joseph Mankiewicz… fishes in his pocket for a biscuit he offers his black Labrador, Cassius, who beseeches him with an appropriately lean and hungry look.

The filmmaker’s den is fully book-lined and the volumes all look to have been read.

There is one other anecdote that is revealing of the character of this very civilized man, a man who did not suffer fools. This comes from the interview conducted by David Shipman in 1982, ten years after Mankiewicz has directed his last feature, Sleuth.

During the frenzy of the McCarthy period in Hollywood, while Mankiewicz was president of the DGA and when he was out of the country, fellow director C.B. DeMille had pressured the Board to pass a compulsory loyalty oath affirming that members had never been Communists. Upon his return, Mankiewicz confronted DeMille who said this was the time to stand up and be counted. Mankiewicz asked, “Who gave you the right to do the counting?”

A showdown, a very dramatic meeting of the membership, took place shortly after, a potential confrontation that promised to pit directors against each other in a world that usually avoided politics at any cost. Here is Mankiewicz’s telling of a tense evening that came to a head at two-thirty in the morning:

…my eyes were fixed on one man, wearing a cap, sneakers, puffing his pipe. That was Jack Ford, and I knew that the way he went the guild would go….

(Ford rose to his feet and said to DeMille)

‘My name is Ford and I direct westerns… Cecil, you and I go back to 1916, maybe even earlier, right? Let me tell you something, when it comes to providing the people of the world with the kind of movie they want to see, there isn’t anyone in this room who can touch you, and I respect you for that’… Then he paused, as only Ford could pause, and he said, ‘But, Cecil, I don’t like you. And I don’t like a goddamned thing you stand for. I move that we go home and start making movies because that’s our job.’ And John Huston jumped up and said, ‘I second that motion,’ and there was acclamation and that was it. Except, however, that Willy Wyler demanded that each member of the board resign individually, which they had to do.

Mankiewicz seemed to be always in the thick of controversy and was himself often the subject of it. It stalked him throughout his career, and even later. Some see his literate screenplays and his theatrical directing style as an object of scorn. The tone of the criticism is usually ambivalent, however, as it both decries his self-consciousness of gesture while extolling the intelligence behind it. As I have been reading about Mankiewicz and trying to understand his place in cinema history, I have been struck by the intensity of differing opinions. Here is an article written by Tag Gallager, a John Ford scholar, rambling in its analysis of Mankiewicz’s role as a producer, but finally settling into grudging respect.

Senses of Cinema article link

Several critics have said that the theatricality of much of Mankiewicz’s work is deliberately self-referential, a kind of post-modernist deconstruction of the very process of filmmaking. They say this is why Jean-Luc Godard so loved his work. “Godardian” cinema is hardly naturalistic, nor is, to pick a director closer to us, the guignol tropes of David Lynch. I don’t really have an opinion on this contretemps. But All About Eve is as much about filmmaking as it is about theater.

Mankiewicz, like almost all filmmakers, had one dream project that he despaired of ever being able to do. He had hoped that if he accepted Cleopatra and if it were a success, it would enable him to return to Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet an adaptation of which he was writing. It is largely the story of a woman, Justine, told from differing perspectives in each of the four novels. It embraced all the hoped for complexities of filmmaking narrative, perspective and flashback that Mankiewicz had ever dreamed of doing. In the book’s final interview with Jeff Laffel, the director says:

When I was finished with the treatment I wrote on the frontispiece, “I’m happy this treatment can’t be read by anyone who has not read all four volumes of ‘The Alexandria Quartet.’ ”

Except for the young Richard Zanuck, the screenplay went largely unread. A notable exception was Durrell himself who read it (and loved it) in a Paris hotel room with Mankiewicz at his side, while both men waded through a bottle of cognac. This description of the novel from Wikipedia can serve both as logline and headstone epitaph for Mankiewicz’s dream project:

As Durrell explains in his preface to Balthazar, the four novels are an exploration of relativity and the notions of continuum and subject-object relation, with modern love as the subject. The Quartet offers the same sequence of events to us through several points of view, allowing individual perspectives to change over time.

Sounds to me like a film all America is just waiting to see.

When I met Mankiewicz in 1987, I was aware of him only as a prestigious writer/director of several films that seemed positively fustian to my still New Wave besotted senses. But DVDs and VOD have seemed to collapse time and space and now that almost everything is instantly accessible, films such as Mankiewicz’s, Zinnemann’s, Wyler’s, and other humanistic directors who were not so long ago out of favor, take on new luster. We can look at them as signposts, even beacons, in the continuum of literate, dramatic/narrative film history.

When Daryl Zanuck, head of Fox and the producer of All About Eve accepted his Oscar for Best Picture of 1950, he just held it up and said, “Thanks, Joe.”

Columbus Circle, gateway to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, has been the subject of a decades long facelift. It began with the demolition of the old Coliseum Bldg., which in its later years was a key site for film production offices. The mammoth Time-Warner Bldg. rose in its place and became the impetus for a total makeover of the signature roundabout itself. This had been completed well before last summer when I photographed night scenes for When in Rome at its northeastern end. Above ground, the Circle has fountains and benches around the central hub—but the labyrinthine subway station below, the pinch point of several heavily trafficked lines, has remained a work in progress, and a nightmare of congestive crush for commuters.

The north entrance has recently become far less onerous. One of the last commissions of the artist Sol LeWitt, “Whirls and Twirls (MTA)” now graces the wall just beyond the entrance turnstiles. About 70,000 commuters pass it daily. In museum terms this would make it more than a blockbuster attraction.

A recent NY Times piece announced its opening. The commissioned mural is 11 feet high and 53 feet long and consists of 250 porcelain tiles. It is the first of several installations that will be placed throughout the station:

New York Times article link

Columbus Circle station is my local subway stop. I walked over there recently to take a look for myself. Here is a photo of the stairway, looking west toward Time-Warner. It is one of the larger entries:

Here’s a photo of the mural seen from above. The opening at edge of left frame leads down to the tracks:

LeWitt died in 2007. He was widely viewed as a quintessential artist of the museum, university, and galleries, not an artist of the plaza or street. The idea of his work being commissioned as “public art” takes some getting used to. A review of his artistic journey makes it all very clear:

Wikipedia link

LeWitt was one of the major artists of the 60-70s dovetailing movements known as Conceptualism and Minimalism. The latter called for artists to be reductive in their work, both in ideas and execution. Very simply put, it was a back to basics movement that emphasized elemental forms to the point of duplication and repetition. Squeezed even further into its essence, the artwork itself became optional, if not problematic. It was the “idea”, the concept that mattered. This was a perfect paradigm for museums and galleries that could display a set of printed guidelines or instructions for creating the work of art—but not the work itself. What could be more minimalist? At one point LeWitt suggested that art objects are perishable; but the ideas are not. For a few years it seemed to many viewers (who read mostly wall-text at his exhibitions) that he preferred the idea to the artifact.

This often made for a cold and impersonal look to the early works. As drawings, they consisted of elaborate grids and mazes in pencil on white walls, the seeming OCD doodles of someone locked inside a geometrician’s head. Not all work, however, was flat, 2D. Expanded into space, these “ideas” became fascinating floor displays, much like a child’s game of blocks, but all in white. MOMA has one such piece—“Serial Project (ABCD) 1966”. The description defines its impersonality “Baked enamel on steel units over baked enamel on aluminum.”

LeWitts “ideas” became ever more elaborate suggestions of how to execute an artwork. Those early works, when actually “installed” on gallery walls, were intricate mazes, site-specific, meant to last only as long as the exhibition. And, they were not (to my perhaps jaundiced eye) very exciting to look at. In principal, the art piece itself could be duplicated machine-like at another venue.

Over time, more and more of these “instructions” were actually executed as artworks by students and acolytes. A perhaps unintended consequence was that ascetic pieces of simple grids in pencil became ever more ambitious and expansive, also more flowing and colorful—as they came into actual being. While the instructions LeWitt dictated never became as aleatory as the music of John Cage, improvisation and spontaneity were introduced. This was partly to break down the rigid specificity of earlier directives but also to give the artists who actually created the work on site a sense of creative joy.

Early in LeWitt’s career a friend left a book in his apartment. It was a volume of the animal motion studies of photographer Edward Muybridge. This work became a defining impetus for LeWitt. Muybridge’s ambitious mission was to document human and animal locomotion through sequential still photographs from multiple angles. A background grid was deployed to graph the motion in a scientific way. The idea of the exterior “set” that Muybridge had constructed spurred LeWitt to consider how to define space and sequence in his own work. Muybridge required a crew of dedicated workers to execute an intricate motion study; LeWitt’s site-specific wall pieces also require intricate collaborative effort.

Over years, the teams that made LeWitt’s pieces became larger as the instructions became more complex. The scale also increased, making normal galleries often inadequate in size. Finally, a perfect venue was found to realize the work—and to preserve it as more than intellectual idea or temporal ephemera. That place was the new MASS MoCA.

This museum of contemporary art is a huge complex of buildings, a renovated textile factory located in North Adams, Mass. Before his death in 2007 LeWitt agreed to the execution of a number of his pieces in Bldg. 7. A history of the project is explained in this article:

MassMOCA.org link

A time-lapse video at the head of the site shows the construction of one wall drawing (LeWitt called them “drawings” though most are painted in acrylic). LeWitt created the “idea” or instructions for thousands of such wall drawings. Over one hundred of them have been created by artists and students at MASS MoCa.

Will Reynolds made a video between April and September of 2008 documenting the drawings as they fill the blank walls with a riot of color, shapes and pencil squiggles. The very appropriate music is by “Minimalist” composer Steve Reich. You will see brown paper appear only to be torn away after painting to reveal the overlapping and intersecting color layers:

The history of western art has pretty much elevated the singular artist, working in isolation, to demigod status. In The Agony and the Ecstasy Charlton Heston as Michelangelo seems to work alone, his studio assistants mere shadow figures. One of the fascinating things about LeWitt’s work as seen in this video is how much it relies on the concept of team— or what we in film call “crew”. The scroll of artists at the end of the video is not unlike—well, the end credit crawl of a feature film.

MOMA does have one of the wall drawings. The location is appropriate— opposite the escalator leading down to the Titus 1 and 2, the main theaters for MOMA film screenings. After the museum’s closing, you pass this wall entering and exiting. Here is a picture of “Wall Drawing #1144-Broken Bands of Color in Four Directions, 2004”.

In video terms, the finished piece looks a bit like a maquette for a very blown-up pixel array. I think LeWitt would have enjoyed that metaphor.

MASS MoCa and the DIA in Beacon, NY seem like perfect repositories for LeWitt’s larger scale late work. It’s a bit hard to take in a wall mural while racing to catch the “A” train at Columbus Circle.

The entire question of “public art” has ever been a contentious one in America. The WPA sponsored murals in public buildings during the Great Depression. Many were by regional artists in the Thomas Hart Benton or Grant Wood mode, extolling the virtues of the “common man”. Others were by artists such as Philip Guston, who a decade later became a leading Abstract Expressionist before returning to figurative work late in life. (I will look at his work in a future piece) Many of these murals were painted over by a subsequent generation of bureaucrats during the McCarthy period—too “socialist” in theme. And in case you think we live now in a more enlightened age—try this.

Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc,” 120 feet of cor-ten steel, 12 feet high, was removed in the dead of night from Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan in 1989 as an impediment to pedestrian flow. This PBS account of its rendering to scrap steel is jaw-dropping.

PBS.org/wgbh/cultureshock article link

The photo is of Serra posed, looks to me defiantly, in front of the arc, in the midst of the controversy.

You can evaluate the value of public officials having a say in acquiring (or destroying) public art by simply driving past the derivative mediocrity lining the median of Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood.

As for the longevity of “public art” today, here is a photo of the LeWitt Columbus Circle mural two weeks after it’s “unveiling”. So much for “ars longa, vita brevis.”

Now finished, the installation of Sol LeWitt at MASS MoCA fills a three-story building, 105 “drawings” covering more than 27,000 sq. ft. of wall space. And it won’t close in a few weeks like a film. You don’t have to hurry to see it this weekend. Sol LeWitt will be “hanging” until 2033. Or so we can hope.

“Each half of the wall is 246.75 feet long, combined length of 493.50 feet. Each segment is made of 70 panels. At their intersection, the highest point, they are 10.1 feet high; they taper to a width of 8 inches at their extremities. Granite for the wall came from southern India.

“The wall contains 58,175 names (as of October 1990). The largest panels have 137 lines of names; the smallest panels have but one line. There are five names on each line. The names (and other words) on the wall are 0.53 inches high and 0.015 inches deep.”

This is a description of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial site in a corner of The Mall in Washington, D.C. The clinical statistics above do not reveal the powerful underlying feelings its very existence unleashes still. The design was by a young Chinese-American woman named Maya Lin. At the time she made her proposal (one of 1420 submissions) she was a 20-year-old undergraduate student at Yale University. Born of Chinese artist parents in Athens, Ohio, she defended her design amid swirling controversy, even into the halls of Congress. Completed in late October of 1982, “The Wall” has remained a place of fractious discourse and intense emotion.

The Wall

The Wikipedia entry makes as dispassionate a case as possible, describing both the work and the surrounding debate.

Wikipedia entry link

Businessman Ross Perot, years later a Presidential candidate, hearing that a young Asian woman had been given the commission, is said to have called her an “egg roll”. A prominent conservative political pundit accused her of being (you guessed it) a “Communist.” A powerful Veterans organization continued to attack her ethnicity and motives years after the memorial had received hundreds of thousands of visitors. Claiming she had a hidden Confucian agenda in the design, some groups continue to demand that flags be flown above the site, as if only this gesture would make it “American.”

www.usvetdsp.com article link

Here writer Ted Sampley says:

Many complained, understandably, that the Maya Lin design, which she had described as an “unexpected black rift in the earth,” actually appeared to them “a black hole of shame” into which they would be required to descend to “cleanse themselves of the sin” of participating in the “evil war.” To some vets, the design represented the war protesters “V” peace symbol, which the vets felt was used during the war in favor of the North Vietnamese war effort.

It is well worth reading the link above, as it gives a window into the unresolved issues of patriotism, race and ethnicity that roil our democracy today, even in the first year of the Obama administration.

Another, but opposing, position is taken by “Tom” on the My Hero website:

www.myhero.com article link

And here is how Maya Lin describes the work herself in a Smithsonian article from August of 1996:

“I saw the Vietnam Veterans Memorial not as an object placed into the earth but as a cut in the earth that has then been polished, like a geode. Interest in the land and concern about how we are polluting the air and water of the planet are what make me want to travel back in geologic time-to witness the shaping of the earth before man.”

Lin has insistently eschewed any political agenda. Her original proposal was done as a Yale undergraduate class project on funerary design. Many of her subsequent commissions give credence to her claim that she is an artist who is interested in the intersection of man’s artworks and nature. My friend, Frieda Lee Mock, made a feature documentary on “The Wall” and Lin’s subsequent work called A Strong Clear Vision. It won an Oscar for best feature documentary in 1995.

Amazon.com link

In her notes to the film Ms. Mock says, “It was my hope that audiences would be moved by a story of how a very young person of vision and character. . .  could create works that resonate deeply for the millions who have touched and have been touched by the work. I realize now that this is a story of the American Dream.”

The art movement of the 60s and 70s called Earthworks or Land Art was largely male and white-centric. One of the key artists was Robert Smithson who died in a plane crash on July 20, 1973 while scouting locations for a new work in Texas. He created “Spiral Jetty” in 1970.

Spiral Jetty

Here is part of the Wikipedia description:

The Spiral Jetty, considered to be the central work of American sculptor Robert Smithson, is an earthwork sculpture constructed in 1970.

Built of mud, salt crystals, basalt rocks, earth, and water on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah[1], it forms a 1500-foot long,[2] 15-foot wide counterclockwise coil jutting from the shore of the lake which is only visible when the level of the Great Salt Lake falls below an elevation of 4,197.8 feet[3].

At the time of its construction, the water level of the lake was unusually low because of a drought. Within a few years, the water level returned to normal and submerged the jetty for the next three decades. Due to a drought, the jetty re-emerged in 2004 and was completely exposed for almost a year. The lake level rose again during the spring of 2005 due to a near record-setting snowpack in the mountains and partially submerged the Jetty again.

Originally black basalt rock against ruddy water, it is now largely white against pink due to salt encrustation and lower water levels.

You can find more on Smithson at his website:

www.robertsmithson.com link

Three of the main surviving proponents of Earthwork art are:

Walter de Maria who designed “Lightning Field” on a desolate New Mexico plateau at 7,200 feet altitude. It consists of 400 stainless steel rods embedded in the ground, the tips reaching a uniform height despite the shifting contours of the terrain.

Lightning Field

Michael Heizer, who for more than 30 years has been transforming a large swath of Nevadan desert with bulldozers into an ambitious work he calls simply “City”.

City

A NY Times Sunday magazine profile from Feb. 2005 reveals a deeply obsessive man, a classic American maverick. It is a wonderful read of the American artist as tough-guy-loner, subduing nature to his relentless will. The writer of the profile, Michael Kimmelmann, has also narrated a slide show here that will give you quick insight into Heizer’s work even if you choose not to read the full article:

New York Times article link

And to the south, in Northern Arizona, James Turrell bought Roden Crater and its environs. He is also using enormous earth moving machines to reshape the land. But he is not trying to wrench it into an unnatural geometry; his intention is to create a labyrinth of internal passages and rooms inside the crater that each open to the sky, a window into the ever-shifting light of nature. Though Turrell is often categorized as an earth artist, his true milieu, like Dan Flavin’s, is nothing more or less than “light”.

Roden Crater

Here is a shorter profile on Turrell written by Jori Finkel also for the NY Times, Nov.25, 2007:

New York Times article link

I won’t say more at this time about Flavin or Turrell because I think their work is of such compelling interest to cinematographers and filmmakers that I want to discuss them separately in future pieces.

A very humorous exploration of these remote places is the subject of Spiral Jetta a diary of sorts, a travel (mis)adventure by Erin Hogan, a “recovering art historian” at the Art Institute of Chicago. She sets out from her comfortable urban grid, solo in her VW Jetta, to explore the major earth-art sites of the Southwest. She has no conception of the scale of the land or the rigors of auto travel, well off even the backcountry two-lane blacktops. What she doesn’t find is all too predictable. The book is a hilarious read of the city/country mouse dichotomy.

Amazon.com link

I know this began as a piece about Maya Lin. But aside from the fact that I have warned you before that my mind works in a synthetic, pile-it-on way, there is a point to this long and aggressive-male focused aside. Most of the Earth Art movement has been insistent and disruptive in its redefinition of the land, indifferent, some would say, to nature and ecology. It has been consistent with what a feminist critic might call the “phallocentric urgency.” To look at the timeline of Maya Lin’s work is to belie any notion of this large-scale aggression.

Here is a YouTube video of her discussing a show she did for the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle.

A search for her recent work led me to one of my favorite art places in the world: The Storm King Art Center, upstate New York, and just across the Hudson River from that cathedral to Minimalism, DIA Beacon.

The homepage of Storm King gives a brief video history and orientation by its director, John Stern. I visited the center a few years ago. Since then, I have been fascinated by its core concept of showing sculpture in nature rather than within the oft-alienating white walls of a museum. The site’s repository of 13 works by sculptor David Smith was the incentive for me to rent a car in Manhattan and drive north the one-hour plus trek. In the video below, after establishing a sense of setting, Stern brings us to—yes, Maya Lin, who has just created the third of her “Wave Field” trilogy here in a 13-acre site that previously had been a gravel pit. She gives us a brief tour of what the commission means to her as a key part in the evolution of her work.

Storm King Art Center link

A separate NY Times video follows her analysis in more detail and even takes us into her Soho studio.

New York Times video link

And this month her design for the renovated Museum of the Chinese in America opens in downtown Manhattan:

New York Times article link

Each spring, summer and autumn when Storm King is open to the public, a single artist is given a featured place. This year it is Maya Lin with both the “Wave Field” installation and newer work called “Bodies of Water.” In addition to exhibiting the usual drawings and models, Lin directly addresses issues of ecology and pollution.

And this brings us back full circle to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and what almost 30 years ago Lin was trying to do. There was not much of a Green movement at that time, certainly not in the flush of the early Reagan years. But somehow this young, inexperienced Asian-American woman had an instinct about what kind of memorial we should have for this most divisive war.

The Vietnam War was a trauma, an ultimately futile venture into Cold War geo-politics that cost almost 60,000 American lives and more than a million Vietnamese ones. A country had been ravaged and polluted by napalm and defoliants. The rice fields had yielded a rich harvest of unexploded ordnance for years. Lin did not believe that another massive object in metal or concrete on The Mall would eulogize the dead but, rather, would possibly profane the memory of the men, women and children who had died on that soil, foreign to Americans, home to the Vietnamese.

Nor would a grand-scaled memorial visually serve the landscape of The Mall itself, already awash in outsized temples and obelisks. What Lin did choose to do is to create an experience, not merely an edifice. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is an emotional descent into the earth itself, a visceral metaphor of the grave, and the names of each American dead inscribed as a running headstone, all of them equal in death. And yet, if you stand at the ends of the 120 degree angled wall and continue the sightline out—at one end you will see the Lincoln Memorial and at the other end the Washington Monument.

There is to my mind continuity from “The Wall” to the Storm King “Wave Form”. Yes, Maya Lin means (as she explains in the video) for it to be an embodiment of a force of nature, the flow and ebb of water. But, to me, it also resembles the slight hillocks of not yet settled earth, of recently shoveled-in graves. We have seen this image even in the 21st century as low-level satellites have revealed the hidden mass graves of the atrocities in the Balkans and East Africa. You may well take exception with me about this reading. Fine.

But consider this. Michael Heizer’s “City” has been compared to the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids, totemic monuments to the dead. In the Pre-Columbian United States, many Native American tribes buried their dead in more modest ways: earth mounds rising gently above the surrounding plain, this in keeping with their reverence for the land. Around these sites ceremonial cities evolved. I have visited several: the Hopewell and Serpent Mounds in Ohio, Spiro in Oklahoma and Criel in W. Virginia.

Burial Mounds Wikipedia link

Spiro Mounds Wikipedia link

Criel Mound

Serpent Mound

As an artist, Lin’s singular focus on her commission at Storm King was to complete her “Wave Form” trilogy. But a great lesson we learn in art is that there are many aspects of the unconscious that are operative in our creations. It is an examination of these sometimes-elusive impulses that enriches the art that survives.

There is no question that “The Wall” will continue to evoke powerful emotions in us as one of our national memorials; generations will stand at this place long after most earthwork sites have cycled back to nature.

As for Maya Lin, her work continues to expand outward. But, I wonder if the psychic pentimento of a work as powerful as “The Wall”, once it inhabits you, will ever abandon you.