Student earthworks projects

What do the nation's students come up with when they go out into nature and emulate environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy? A project I'd like to do in my spare time is to compile examples of such work. One Christmas five or so years ago, the Austin Art Museum paired a Goldsworthy show (photos of a project he'd done for a wealthy family in Texas) with a Goldsworthy day at a park and also invited museumgoers to create their own earthwork arts and send in photos. It was a great way to draw the community into the museum.

What would emerge if NYC artists were asked to work with their native materials, whatever they considered them to be (okay, I'm thinking of the Goldsworthy faux-project I wrote about on this site earlier, using cigarette butts, metro cards, entrance tags from the MET, etc.) and then a show was built around their works? If Goldsworthy himself would work with "urban" materials it would be even more fascinating. Here's a recent story on student work from the Dallas News:

Students create art from nature at Arboretum

11:29 PM CST on Sunday, November 12, 2006

By ELIZABETH LANGTON / The Dallas Morning News

Their gallery was a secluded, wooded area of the Dallas Arboretum. Instead of clay or metal, they sculpted with leaves, flowers, branches and rocks.

They worked all day, creating more than a dozen pieces.

NATHAN HUNSINGER/DMN

Rose Martin arranged flowers around a spiral column of mud at the Arboretum on Nov. 8.

And then they left, abandoning the art for nature to reclaim.

"I prefer it that way," said student artist Laura Hall of Carrollton. "Because I know later on I won't enjoy the piece as much as the instant I made it."

Laura and 44 other students from Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts participated Wednesday in an experiment.

Students enrolled in Advanced Placement 3-D design were tasked with creating site-specific art using only materials indigenous to the arboretum. Painters and photographers assisted with construction and then documented the work.

Their abstract creations hung from trees, balanced atop rock piles and sunk into the earth.

"I really liked it, getting out into nature," said junior Judge Rucker of Old East Dallas. "It helped me create pieces I thought I could never do."

The field trip culminated the students' study of the earthworks art form and artist Andy Goldsworthy, who is known for creating landscape-sensitive outdoor sculptures. Though some of these works are meant to be permanent, others last only as long as the weather conditions.

Judge said he felt no remorse about the eventual demise awaiting his sculpture of cornhusks, bamboo and flowers.

But he wonders how Mr. Goldsworthy can leave every piece he makes.

"If I did this every single day and all my pieces were like this, I wouldn't be able to do it," he said.

This was the first time the school attempted the project, which the Junior League of Dallas supported with an innovative teaching grant. Art teacher Paige Furr said they hope to make it an annual outing.

"It's a creative problem-solving experiment," she said. "It's an assignment that colleges do a lot. And they are doing work of a college level."

Once arboretum officials understood that the students had no plans to cut flowers in the garden, they got excited about the partnership, said Amy Winkelmeyer, who works in the arboretum's education program.

"It's fascinating," she said. "I was over there several times today. I'm just amazed at the ability and imagination they have to have to even come up with the ideas."

Senior Amber Campagna of Old East Dallas said she felt intrigued by the concept of making art from materials that surround her every day.

"It's not a piece of artwork that you can sell," she said. "It's something you just create for people to enjoy."

Leaving the art to nature makes creating it more interesting, said senior Alex Hamrick of Old East Dallas.

"It changes the sculpture but it doesn't change the quality," he said. "You can't take it out of the environment, so that makes it easier to let go. But if we hadn't gotten pictures of it, and I knew right now it was being washed away, I'd be thinking 'Oh, no.' "

Junior Suzanna Weeks of Old East Dallas, a painter, was intrigued by the idea of art abandonment.

"In a way, it must be really freeing to do a piece and leave it," she said. "When I do paintings, I come back later and say, 'I should have done this or that.' "

The students worked in an area off-limits to arboretum visitors. But they plan to exhibit the drawings and photos in the spring at school and next fall at ArtScape, the arboretum's fine arts show and sale.

Arboretum officials call the garden a living museum. ArtScape, held for the first time in September, draws on the link between nature and art, Ms. Winkelmeyer said.

The student project solidifies the connection, she said.

"It's a perfect marriage and it was an accident," she said. "They didn't even know we had an art show."

--end--

Director of "Rivers and Tides"

The Google Alert I have set for environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy sends me all sorts of stuff about stray Andy Goldsworthys around the world--have to work on that--but also provides some stray Goldworthy-related stuff that sends me off in unexpected Goldsworthian directions. A case in point is the item below that mentions a new and very different effort by Thomas Riedelsheimer, director of Goldsworthy's "Rivers and Tides." You can find the full writeup on this site (sorry, but you have to scroll down a bit to find it). Apparently there's a film festival in San Fran this weeekend, the 3rd I Film Festival, and the film mentioned below is just one of a host of interesting films, including a great-sounding one from Sri Lanka, that the site describes. The Riedelsheimer one (if I have to type that name again, and type it wrong five times again, I'm going to scream) is not the most interesting one described, in my opinion, but Riedelsheimer's work (AHHHHH! Sorry. It's been a long morning) on the Goldsworthy documentary was so amazing that it seems worth checking out other work he's done/does, Anyway, here's the writeup:

"Originally, I wasn't planning to see Between the Lines: India's Third Gender. Over the years I've seen a number of features and documentaries about the hijiras of India (most of them at the Frameline festival), and thus wondered if I really needed to see one more. Between the Lines, however, happens to be photographed and edited by Thomas Riedelsheimer, director of the exquisite Andy Goldsworthy documentary Rivers and Tides. So yes, I do need to see this one, too. Praised by Variety's Jay Weissberg as representing "the best view to date into the world of the Indian eunuch," Between the Lines casts its focus upon three of these marginalized beings as they guide renowned photographer Anita Khemka through their singular world."

Belated D.U.M.B.O. Arts Festival photos

This bit of art consisted of a number of faux half crows (you know, you're rummaging through your junk drawer, finding old pennies, bent nails, old photo frames, and, oh!, there's one of those half crows I forgot about! How fortuitous!) glued onto a window so it looked as though they'd flown smack into it. Interesting, yes. The point? Don't quite know. And while the lady in pink wasn't my favorite bit of sculpture, you cannot deny that she has presence. Are you going to mess with her?!? She's pink, and she's proud!

Reviews of art reviews

Every week, I get The Week, which describes itself as an aggregation of "The Best of the U.S. and International Media." It's basically a cheat sheet to what's been going on in the world in the past week. Their Arts page highlights three exhibits, two of which sound enticing. There's Courbet and the Modern Landscape at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MD (through Jan. 7); Yayoi Kusama at Robert Miller Gallery in New York (through Nov. 25; warning: you have to click through a couple of screens to get to see images of Kusama's work); and Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005, at the Brooklyn Art Museum, NY (through Jan. 21).

The Kusama show sounds intriguing. Here's the writeup: "Lines, dots and circles have long fascinated Yayoi Kusama, says R.C. Baker in The Village Voice. The Japanese artist made her mark and people with networks of dots and dashes. Later, mental illness limited her output. But her latest works explore old preoccupations in novel ways, fusing fiber-optic cables, reflective orbs, and silk-screened canvases into 'a river of graphic energy.' The Passing of Winter, for instance, reflects the influence of her friend Joseph Cornell--literally. Look into this mirrored box and 'your reflection is bounced around a dizzying matrix of suspended and fallen reflective balls.' Geometry has rarely seemed so appealing." For some truly out-there color photos of dotted assemblages of people and things, check out some other Kusama work here.

As a less-than-stellar student of math, and I'm being kind to myself here, geometry and appealing are two words I have never before used in the same sentence. But I'm planning to take a look at this exhibit. The link in the graf above goes to the wikipedia entry on Kusama, which notes that she left Japan "at age 27 for New York City, after years of correspondence with Georgia O'Keefe" and that "she has experienced hallucations and severe obsessive thoughts since childhood, often of a suicidal nature." It also shows a photo of her work painting trees with polka dots, which looks very striking.

The other interesting exhibit noted is the Courbet one. To quote from the review of the review by New York Times critic Roberta Smith [what's next? A review of the review of reviews?]: "By taking his palette and paints outdoors, Gustave Courbet revolutionized his art form, opening the door for everyone from Claude Monet to Jackson Pollock...The secret to his lasting influence? An 'uncanny fusion of realism and absraction that derived from the muscular way he dispached paint onto canvas." Often, Courbet disposed with brushes entirely, slathering on colors with his palette knife, fingers, or scraps of fabric."

Great art-related read

Who knew that, in Rembrandt's day, steaming piles of manure were used by the Dutch to make lead for white paint? Or that Egyptian corpses were a main ingredient in a brown pigment called mommia, or "mummy"?

Anyone interested in such fascinating factoids will enjoy Color, A Natural History of the Palette, an elegant and entertaining book by Victoria Finlay. The book came out in 2003; Finlay has also come out with a book about precious gems that is in this same travelogue style.

The writer’s fascination with color began when she was a girl standing in Chartres Cathedral, when her father told her, as she watched “the blue and red lights dancing on the white stones….that the stained glass had been created nearly eight hundred years ago, and ‘today we don’t know how to make that blue.’”

Later in life, Finlay’s interest was rekindled when she picked up a book and opened it at random to read “INDIAN YELLOW: an obsolete lake of euxanthic acid made in India by heating the urine of cows fed on mango leaves” and “EMERALD GREEN: the most brilliant of greens, now universally rejected because it is a dangerous poison…Sold as an insecticide.”

That is just a small hint of the discoveries to come as Finlay travels the world to track down the origin of pigments. It’s a travel narrative, a history of paint, an education about colors and how we see them, a glimpse into the mind of artists throughout history. It will make you look at paintings with a new appreciation for the colors.

To learn more about Finlay's travels and what she missed being able to include in the book ("Had I had more time I should have loved to have met the Twareg nomads of the Sahara, (whose skin is blue with indigo dye)," read the author interview here. And for some excerpts, you can go here.