Lincoln Center, On the Level

Diller Scofidio + Renfro in association with Beyer Blinder Bell

This is a big year for golden anniversaries. Lincoln Center is marking its first half-century with a year-long celebration and an ambitious rebuilding program, and the Guggenheim Museum is honoring its 50th with a huge show that pays homage to its famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, who died in 1959, the same year the building was completed. Miles Davis recorded “Kind of Blue” that year, and in case you hadn’t noticed that 50 years have passed, consider the fact that the Harvard Business School now uses that jazz classic as a case history of how innovation is generated and why such acts of genius have a competitive advantage.

None of this is as disconnected as it seems. The ’50s and ’60s were an extraordinarily creative and optimistic time in all of the arts. Performing arts centers multiplied across the country, and what they lacked in content was made up in ambitious plans. The museum building boom that started then has never stopped, reaching a crescendo of high architectural drama 50 years later. No one dreamed that 50 years would make much of this construction obsolete.

With buildings, obsolescence is inevitable. Materials deteriorate and fail, technology becomes outdated, wear and tear and deferred maintenance take their toll. Uses change, requiring major revisions that deform the original design and intent. The downhill process starts the day of completion and seems to reach its peak when the portentous anniversary looms.

And more than construction becomes obsolete. Time also reveals how transient and vulnerable both ideas and their monuments are, and how deeply and insidiously styles of thought and building can shape the way we experience art and life.

Lincoln Center is the product of a lot of obsolete ideas. Its considerable success and staying power is not due to some brilliant, time-proof formula. This was a moment when the destructive misjudgments of urban renewal, the antiurbanism of a car-centric culture and a deadening kind of modernist monumentality came together in a disastrous environmental triple play. But half a century has given Lincoln Center legitimacy; it is an essential, accepted and even admired part of New York. On a summer evening, with swing dancing in the plaza, or on a gala night with all the buildings alive, it is, to borrow Robert Venturi’s famous quote about Main Street America, almost all right.

Like many performing arts centers of the time, this one began as an urban renewal site. It was one of Robert Moses’s later New York undertakings, when he had moved from great perimeter parks and beaches and the roads that reached them to the kind of inner-city expressways and slum-clearance projects that ripped out the hearts of cities in the 1950s and ’60s. Cultural centers were supposed to heal the wound.

By design, Lincoln Center was isolated from its surroundings. In accordance with one of the more faulty modernist practices of the day, it was built on a platform, or “podium” (a favorite buzz word), separating it from the city streets and dedicating it to access by car. Pedestrians have always had to dodge two barrier lanes of traffic to reach the entrance plaza. Architecturally, it is the product of a consortium, a mashup of moderate talents working at cross-purposes in an impossibly competitive and conflicted situation to house a dozen of the city’s very different cultural and educational institutions.

There are no great buildings. It is fashionable today to characterize Lincoln Center’s ersatz-classical/pseudomodernist aesthetic as a precursor of postmodernism, but that gives misplaced credit to those who had no such thing in mind. Rather than moving architecture into new territory, they were retreating into a bowdlerized soft modernism to please conservative constituents who were looking for something acceptably up to date but not too disturbingly avant garde, while secretly lusting after colonnades. In the 1960s, modernists were wedded to the in-your-face raw concrete monumentality of Brutalism, arguably one of the less people-friendly and more offputting styles of all time. That was simply never going to make it in this company. The buildings miss true monumentality by a mile.

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Ada Louise Huxtable
Wall Street Journal

Chaos and Thought

Have you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as to why you had that particular idea at that particular time? You may think that such fleeting thoughts, however random they seem, must be the product of predictable and rational processes. After all, the brain cannot be random, can it? Surely it processes information using ordered, logical operations, like a powerful computer?

Actually, no. In reality, your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Though much of the time it runs in an orderly and stable way, every now and again it suddenly and unpredictably lurches into a blizzard of noise.

Neuroscientists have long suspected as much. Only recently, however, have they come up with proof that brains work this way. Now they are trying to work out why. Some believe that near-chaotic states may be crucial to memory, and could explain why some people are smarter than others.

In technical terms, systems on the edge of chaos are said to be in a state of “self-organised criticality”. These systems are right on the boundary between stable, orderly behaviour – such as a swinging pendulum – and the unpredictable world of chaos, as exemplified by turbulence.

The quintessential example of self-organised criticality is a growing sand pile. As grains build up, the pile grows in a predictable way until, suddenly and without warning, it hits a critical point and collapses. These “sand avalanches” occur spontaneously and are almost impossible to predict, so the system is said to be both critical and self-organising. Earthquakes, avalanches and wildfires are also thought to behave like this, with periods of stability followed by catastrophic periods of instability that rearrange the system into a new, temporarily stable state.

Self-organised criticality has another defining feature: even though individual sand avalanches are impossible to predict, their overall distribution is regular. The avalanches are “scale invariant”, which means that avalanches of all possible sizes occur. They also follow a “power law” distribution, which means bigger avalanches happen less often than smaller avalanches, according to a strict mathematical ratio. Earthquakes offer the best real-world example. Quakes of magnitude 5.0 on the Richter scale happen 10 times as often as quakes of magnitude 6.0, and 100 times as often as quakes of magnitude 7.0.

These are purely physical systems, but the brain has much in common with them. Networks of brain cells alternate between periods of calm and periods of instability – “avalanches” of electrical activity that cascade through the neurons. Like real avalanches, exactly how these cascades occur and the resulting state of the brain are unpredictable.

It might seem precarious to have a brain that plunges randomly into periods of instability, but the disorder is actually essential to the brain’s ability to transmit information and solve problems. “Lying at the critical point allows the brain to rapidly adapt to new circumstances,” says Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg from the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany.

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David Robson
New Scientist

Buelteman: Electric Nature

Alstroemeria, sp. Photo: Robert Buelteman

Forget the notion of a reverent nature photographer tiptoeing through the woods, camera slung over one shoulder, patiently looking for perfect light. Robert Buelteman works indoors in total darkness, forsaking cameras, lenses, and computers for jumper cables, fiber optics, and 80,000 volts of electricity. This bizarre union of Dr. Frankenstein and Georgia O’Keeffe spawns photos that seem to portray the life force of his subjects as the very process destroys them.

Buelteman’s technique is an elaborate extension of Kirlian photography (a high-voltage photogram process popular in the late 1930s) and is considered so dangerous and laborious that no one else will attempt it—even if they could get through all the steps.

Buelteman begins by painstakingly whittling down flowers, leaves, sprigs, and twigs with a scalpel until they’re translucent. He then lays each specimen on color transparency film and, for a more detailed effect, covers it with a diffusion screen. This assemblage is placed on his “easel”—a piece of sheet metal sandwiched between Plexiglas, floating in liquid silicone. Buelteman hits everything with an electric pulse and the electrons do a dance as they leap from the sheet metal, through the silicone and the plant (and hopefully not through him), while heading back out the jumper cables. In that moment, the gas surrounding the subject is ionized, leaving behind ethereal coronas. He then hand-paints the result with white light shining through an optical fiber the width of a human hair, a process so tricky each image can take up to 150 attempts.

Because there’s no lens to distort the colors, Buelteman’s work replicates natural hues far better than traditional photographs. “I’m calling into question what we see every day,” Buelteman says. “Is that really a flower? Have I been blind my entire life?”

Jason Albert
Wired Magazine

Ensor at MOMA

Menard Art Museum, Komaki City, Japan, Artists Rights Society (Ars), New York/Sabam Brussels

Urban avant-gardist or small-town loony? The Belgian painter James Ensor, who has a survey of hilarious, gruesome beauty at the Museum of Modern Art, is a puzzle to fans and strangers alike, a classic insider-outsider.

He knew all the right art-world people but hated most of them and was sure they hated him. He was an aggrieved traditionalist with a pop-culture itch, equally entertained by Rubens and tabloid cartoons. He was a sophisticated artist who helped shape early Modernism, not in a Paris studio but in an attic room over a novelty shop in a resort town on the North Sea.

Although Ensor has long been a fixture in the art canon, he is also a fugitive presence. My guess is that a lot of people know his name without knowing quite who he is. Who can blame them? He’s hard to pin down. Gothic fantasist, political satirist, religious visionary: one minute he’s doing biblical scenes, the next the equivalent of biker tattoos, in a style that veers between crude and dainty.

Just consider his self-portraits. Within the span of five years in the late 1880s he depicted himself as a cross-dressed dandy, a rotting corpse, a bug, a fish, Albrecht Durer and a crucified Jesus. Clearly that attic room was a crowded, cacophonous place, and the MoMA show, though airily installed, puts us right inside it.

Ensor was born in Ostend, Belgium, in 1860, and his life began with uncertainties. His father, an Englishman, was probably an alcoholic and a bankrupt. The family’s main income came from the Ostend shop owned by his Belgian mother’s family, an antiques-and-souvenirs emporium selling china, taxidermic specimens and grotesque carnival masks.

Ensor studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, immersing himself in Bosch and Rembrandt, as well as in modern realists like Courbet and Manet. Goya and Turner, artists “obsessed with light and violence,” as he put it, became favorites. He aligned himself with a circle of painters who were politically leftist — anti-imperial, anti-clerical, pro-worker — and aesthetically progressive. In 1883 they formed a group called Les Vingt, or the 20, and organized a salon that drew contemporary artists from across Europe, including Monet and Seurat.

Ensor exhibited in the salon for a decade, but he had a bitter parting of ways when several of its members converted to neo-Impressionism, while he held firm to a dark-hued realist path. The early paintings at MoMA, crumbly still lifes and gravy-brown interiors, are in this style and get things off to a lugubrious start.

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Holland Cotter
New York Times

Westminster Crown

The corona will replace the lantern, a small, plain concrete pyramid roof above the Crossing in front of the high altar Photo: PA

The addition – an architectural feature in the shape of a large crown – will complete a section of the church that has been left unfinished for centuries.

The proposals for the corona form part of a major £23 million development of the Abbey which also includes installing a lift on the outside to allow access to a museum.

It is hoped the work will be ready in time to mark the 60th anniversary of the Queen’s Coronation at the Abbey in 2013, with the large crown a symbol of the royal milestone.

The Queen has been briefed on the project, as has the Prince of Wales, who attracted controversy after intervening in the Chelsea Barracks project and succeeded in getting developers to drop the modernist design.

The church, a world heritage site, is a Royal Peculier, meaning the head of the Abbey, the Dean of Westminster, is directly answerable to the monarch.

The Dean, the Very Rev Dr John Hall, who has been spearheading the plans, said “It’s extremely exciting. It’s the first major development here for a long time.

“There will of course be some people who say ‘Don’t change our skyline after all this time’, ‘How absurd’ and ‘How dare you tamper with this great beautiful work we know and love’.

“But what we’re hoping is to demonstrate to people how the Abbey has scarcely stood still in its long history.

“I don’t think we would go against the bulk of public opinion. If there was an adverse reaction, I expect we would drop it.”

If the plans are supported following public consultation, architects will be asked to enter a competition, overseen by the Royal Institute of British Architects, to design the corona.

It will replace the lantern, a small, plain concrete pyramid roof above the Crossing in front of the high altar where every monarch including the Queen has been crowned for the last thousand years.

The lantern was damaged during a bombing raid in the Second World War and the current stone slabs date from 1958.

The Westminster Abbey 2020 Vision plans include opening up the London Abbey’s upper gallery known as the triforium to house a museum which will display many historic treasures currently hidden away such as the 14th century Litlyngton Missal illuminated manuscript.

To do so, a lift must be built on the outside in between the north transept and the main body of the church to allow safe access and to comply with disability regulations. The only other route up is a narrow winding staircase.

A spokesman for the Abbey said: “It could be controversial. It’s a 21st century piece of engineering on a medieval building. It has to happily sit within a medieval context.”

Dan Graham at the Whitney Museum

“Triangular Solid with Circular Inserts (Variation E),” 1989-2007, at the Whitney Museum

Here’s a good art-world quiz question, one that could stump many an astute insider: What do Sol LeWitt, Sonic Youth, Dean Martin, Mel Brooks, Merle Haggard, Hudson River School painting and midcentury New Jersey tract housing have in common?

The answer, Dan Graham — a Zelig of so many creative circles over the past four decades it is dizzying to keep track — sat recently sipping an iced tea and eavesdropping on conversations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where a retrospective of his work opened Thursday, finally adding him to the ranks of conceptual art’s thorny 1960s pioneers to receive a full-blown American career survey. (The show, organized with the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, began there and travels to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis after it closes in New York on Oct. 11.)

Among his conceptual peers, those who set out to wrest art from the realm of objects and move it more fully into one of ideas, Mr. Graham, 67, is someone whose work does not come easily to mind even for an informed artgoing public. In part this is because his restless intellect has never allowed him to settle into anything resembling a signature style or to be easily categorized. (Most attempts at categorization are parried by Mr. Graham himself with a professorial annoyance and fencer’s agility, and he dislikes being called a conceptual artist and says he is not a professional one in any sense, calling art his “passionate hobby.”)

If the world had nothing else for which to thank him, it might be enough that during a brief stint as a dealer he gave LeWitt his first solo gallery show, along with presenting early work by Dan Flavin and Donald Judd. Or for the part Mr. Graham played later in the formation of Sonic Youth — he helped Kim Gordon, one of the group’s founders, land her first New York apartment in his Lower East Side building and cast her in an all-girl “band” for a 1980s performance piece, jump-starting her music career. When Mr. Graham, rumpled and white-bearded with a kind of Mr. Natural aura, shows up at cutting-edge rock concerts these days, well-read 20-somethings tend to mill around him admiringly.

But it is the way his artistic DNA has seeped into the work of younger artists over such a prolonged period that underscores his importance. Chrissie Iles, a curator at the Whitney who organized the show with Bennett Simpson, a curator at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, said that prominent artists as well distributed over the years as Tony Oursler (video artist, born 1957), Rirkrit Tiravanija (known for the shows in which he cooks for gallery visitors, born 1961) and Wade Guyton (who “paints” with printers, born 1972) all showed strong traces of Mr. Graham’s influence. Their work looks and feels almost nothing like his, or like one another’s, a remarkable testament to the way Mr. Graham’s fascination with perception and with the conventions of art and mass-produced culture have become part of the contemporary art landscape.

Because so much of his work — from early pop-culture writing to performances with video cameras to his well known mirrored pavilions — is about what Mr. Simpson called “the way one experiences the space of the self,” it has also seemed more prescient as each new iteration of the Web alters the calculus of media, society and individuality.

“The pieces make sense, in a way, even more than they did 10 years ago,” Ms. Iles said, “when they had a completely different kind of reading because we hadn’t gotten to this stage yet, the stage of Twitter and Facebook and Flickr.”

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Randy Kennedy
New York Times

Parthenon and Color

Today, the Parthenon temple that watches over Athens is a pure, white building, dazzlingly bright on sunny days against the deep blue sky. But it wouldn’t have looked anything like this in ancient Greek times. Researchers at the British Museum announce today that they have detected tiny traces of blue paint on the building’s sculptures – suggesting that the temple’s statues and friezes would have been not stark white, but a riot of colour.

I’ve just written a short story on the work for New Scientist, which you can read here. Although only a few hints of a pigment called Egyptian blue have been detected so far, experts think that the original paint job would have included red as well, with the original marble showing through white in places, and highlights of gold in others (see [pic above] for one interpretation of what this might have looked like). Although we have the benefit of seeing the sculptures on display at eye level, for the ancient Greeks they were fixed around the top of the temple – 40 feet high. “Colouring would have hugely enhanced the visibility,” says senior curator Ian Jenkins, who is responsible for the Parthenon sculptures held at the British museum.

Scholars have long known that the Greeks painted their marble buildings and statues, but they’re particularly excited about this work because despite two hundred years of searching it hasn’t been seen before on the Parthenon’s sculptures (there used to be some visible traces on the mouldings just Reconstruction of sculptures on the Parthenon’s west pediment, showing some imagined colours underneath the roof, but not on the sculptures themselves). In the end, post-doc Giovanni Verri used a clever imaging technique called photo-induced luminescence to pick up microscopic specks of pigment. When red light is shone onto the molecules of Egyptian blue, they absorb it and emit infrared light. Seen through a camera sensitive to infrared, any parts of the marble that were once blue appear to glow.

So far Verri has found the blue in a few different places – for example on the belt of the messenger goddess Iris from the temple’s west pediment (see the pic below from the British Museum – there’s a normal photo on the left, and an infra-red image showing Iris’s glowing belt on the right). Depicted as she descends to earth, she’s famous for her life-like flapping tunic. Verri also detected blue stripes on a cloak draped over the knees of the goddess Dione, from the east pediment. It’s amazing to think that when in full colour, the Parthenon’s sculptures showed details down to the weave pattern of a figure’s clothing.

One thing that interests me, though, is why the public perception of Greek temples and sculptures is of simple white buildings, when there’s so much evidence that they were actually brightly coloured. I asked Jenkins about this and he described it as “a conspiracy of collective amnesia”.

“We don’t want to know it,” he says. “We want to believe that ancient sculpture was white and pure.” He believes that instead of paying attention to how the Greeks really lived, we’re judging them according to our own aesthetic standards – for example the idea that it would be abhorrent to cover up beautifully-carved quality marble with coloured paint. He thinks the delusion stems from the Renaissance – when artists producing sculptures inspired by those of ancient Greece left them white to dissociate them from the previous Gothic style.

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Jo Marchant
Decoding the Heavens

Critics With Wings

(AFP/File/Daniel Mihailescu)

Pigeons may sometimes appear to randomly target city sculptures with their droppings, but according to a new Japanese study they also have the potential to become discerning art critics.

Researchers at Tokyo’s Keio University say they have found that the birds have “advanced perceptive abilities” and can distinguish between “good” and “bad” paintings, recognising beauty the way humans do.

The team — which previously published research saying that pigeons can tell a Monet from a Picasso — was seeking to find out whether the animals may also be able to prefer one to the other.

For their experiment, the scientists took paintings by elementary school children and selected those that were commonly deemed to be “good” and “bad” by teachers and a control group of other adults.

The researchers then displayed the pictures on a screen to the birds and gave food rewards to those that picked at the “good” paintings while denying rewards to those pigeons that displayed poor artistic taste.

The researchers used a variety of images, including pastels and watercolours, still lives and landscapes, which were judged on their artistic merit, including how clear and discernible the images were.

Through the month-long experiment, the pigeons learnt to peck only at “good” paintings said Professor Shigeru Watanabe of Keio’s Faculty of Letters and Graduate School of Human Resources.

Crucially, they responded appropriately even to paintings they had not seen before, said Watanabe.

Keio University in a report clarified that the research “did not deal with advanced artistic judgments.”

“But it did indicate that pigeons are able to learn to distinguish ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’ paintings the way an ordinary human being can,” it said.

The findings of the government-funded study by the university’s Centre of Advanced Research on Logic and Sensibility are due to be published in the journal Animal Cognition.

AFP

Cherokee Syllabary

Characters in a Kentucky cave that may be the earliest examples of the script (Fred Coy and Andras Nagy)

The illiterate Cherokee known as Sequoyah watched in awe as white settlers made marks on paper, convinced that these “talking leaves” were the source of white power and success. This inspired the consuming ambition of his life: to create a Cherokee written language.

Born around 1770 near present-day Knoxville, Tenn., he was given the name George Gist (or Guess) by his father, an English fur trader, and his mother, a daughter of a prominent Cherokee family. But it was as Sequoyah that around 1809 he started devising a writing system for the spoken Cherokee language.

Ten years later, despite the ridicule of friends who thought him crazed, he completed the script, in which each of the 85 characters represented a distinct sound in the spoken tongue, and combinations of these syllables spelled words. Within a few years, most Cherokees had adopted this syllabary, and Sequoyah became a folk hero as the inventor of the first Native American script in North America.

It may be, as is often noted, that his achievement is the only known instance of an individual’s single-handedly creating an entirely new system of writing.

An archaeologist and explorer of caves has now found what he thinks are the earliest known examples of the Sequoyah syllabary. The characters are cut into the wall of a cave in southeastern Kentucky, a place sacred to the Cherokee as the traditional burial site of a revered chief. The archaeologist, Kenneth B. Tankersley of the University of Cincinnati, said in an interview recently that this was “one of the most fascinating and important finds in my career,” yielding likely insights into “the genius of Sequoyah.”

Roughly inscribed on the limestone wall, Dr. Tankersley said, were 15 identifiable characters from the syllabary. They are accompanied by a date, apparently carved by the same hand. Part of the date is hard to read, but it appears to be either 1818 or 1808, at least a year earlier than any previously known records of the script.

Dr. Tankersley discovered the cave writing in 2001 and in years of subsequent research established that Sequoyah often visited caves for inspiration while working on the syllabary and made several visits to the region, close to the Tennessee border in what is now Clay County. He had relatives there, the archaeologist said, and could have left the marks there himself.

Dr. Tankersley referred to the discovery in a paper on Cherokee rock art presented last year at a meeting of the Society of American Archaeology. Further details and interpretation were reported in an article in the current issue of Archaeology, the magazine of the Archaeological Institute of America.

If the date proves to be 1808, Dr. Tankersley said, Sequoyah was probably the only one then with knowledge of the writing and so must have carved the characters himself. If it was 1818, he said, it was possible that someone he taught had made the characters.

Specialists in Cherokee writing have yet to analyze the findings. William D. Welge, director of research at the Oklahoma Historical Society, who oversees an extensive archive of Cherokee records, said it “was reasonable to think that Sequoyah or one of his students carved these writing symbols.”

Any new findings about Sequoyah, Mr. Welge said, are important because his invention of Cherokee writing promoted rapid strides in education and the culture of one of the largest Native American populations. Some crucial early steps in his development of the script had been lost, the archivist said, because Sequoyah’s wife had destroyed examples of his early efforts, thinking this “the devil’s work.”

Dr. Tankersley was especially intrigued by some petroglyphs carved on the wall alongside the Cherokee characters. He said the glyphs appeared to include ancient Cherokee symbols as well as drawings representing bears, deer and birds.

Dr. Tankersley is a member of the Cherokee Nation who traces his ancestry to Red Bird, the murdered chief once buried in the cave. He said that he was investigating possible links between the traditional glyphs and a few of the symbols in Sequoyah’s script. If a link can be established, he added, the inscription may be “our Rosetta stone, enabling us to see where prehistory meets history.”

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John Noble Wilford
New York Times

The Marbles

Thanassis Stavrakis/Associated Press

Not long before the new Acropolis Museum opened last weekend, the writer Christopher Hitchens hailed in this newspaper what he called the death of an argument.

Britain used to say that Athens had no adequate place to put the Elgin Marbles, the more than half of the Parthenon frieze, metopes and pediments that Lord Elgin spirited off when he was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire two centuries ago. Since 1816 they have been prizes of the British Museum. Meanwhile, Greeks had to make do with the leftovers, housed in a ramshackle museum built in 1874.

So the new museum that Bernard Tschumi, the Swiss-born architect, has devised near the base of the Acropolis is a $200 million, 226,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art rebuttal to Britain’s argument.

From certain angles it has all the charm and discretion of the Port Authority terminal in Manhattan. Neighbors have been complaining all the way to the bank, housing values having shot up because of it.

Inside, however, it is light and airy, and the collection is a miracle. Weathered originals from the Parthenon frieze, the ones Elgin left behind, are combined with plaster casts of what’s in London to fill the sun-drenched top floor of the museum, angled to mirror the Parthenon, which gleams through wraparound windows. The clash between originals and copies makes a not-subtle pitch for the return of the marbles. Greece’s culture minister, Antonis Samaras, on the occasion of the opening last week, said what Greek officials have been saying for decades: that the Parthenon sculptures, broken up, are like a family portrait with “loved ones missing.” Mr. Samaras’s boss, Greece’s president, Karolos Papoulias, spoke less metaphorically: “It’s time to heal the wounds of the monument with the return of the marbles which belong to it.”

Don’t bet the British will agree.

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New York Times
Michael Kimmelman