Enrico Donati. Untitled (Sketchbook). c. 1944. Ink on paper (three details shown), 10 x 8" (25.4 x 20.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art. Gift of Adele Donati. © 2009 The Museum of Modern Art

One of the little-known highlights in the collection of the Department of Drawings is our vast array of artists’ sketchbooks, which range from intimate diaristic notations and markings, to explicit studies for complete works in other mediums, to accomplished works unto themselves, rendered as carefully and thoughtfully as paintings, for example, of the same subject matter.

This past May we received, as a gift, an outstanding example of an artist’s sketchbook. Enrico Donati, who passed away last year at the age of 99, was considered to be “the last of the Surrealists.” His wife, Adele Donati, approached the Museum about donating one of his sketchbooks to the collection.

Edward Scissorhands. 1990. USA. Directed by Tim Burton. Shown: Johnny Depp (as Edward Scissorhands). Twentieth Century Fox

Needless to say, coming up with the idea that a Tim Burton exhibition might be a worthwhile endeavor was not enough in itself to make it happen. The next step was to create a project proposal.  So even before speaking to the Museum’s Exhibition Committee or to Burton himself, we set about the task of developing a thesis for the show.

With one month down and one to go, the five architecture teams presented their projects to the public for the first time at P.S.1’s Saturday Sessions last weekend. Incorporating the public dialogue of the weekend into their studio work, the teams now begin to enter production mode, transforming their ideas into models, drawings, digital animations, and mixed media for the upcoming MoMA exhibition.

Matthew Baird, Matthew Baird Architects
ZONE 2:

Matthew Baird Architects, Oil Tanks at Bayonne Shoreline

Even if talks go well at this week’s COP 15, greenhouse gases will still increase in our global atmosphere. Our think tank at P.S.1 is considering how to address energy needs and to reduce the carbon footprint in any rethinking of our New York Harbor site. Lately, we’ve been considering the six hundred oil tanks located in Bayonne, NJ. With sea level rise and storm surge, a substantial portion of this area will be regularly or periodically under water. After creating a series of natural and man-made buffers at the water’s edge to cap and contain the compromised soil at the existing tank farm, we propose continuing to use the existing massive infrastructure to create energy. In the cleaner, greener future, we would make fuel from a renewable resource: algae. Algal biodiesel is carbon neutral, and thus would not add to greenhouse gas emissions. Part of our approach is to find local solutions for global problems.

The Blue Bird. 1918. USA. Directed by Maurice Tourneur

These notes accompany the program And Yet More Competition: Walsh and Tourneur on December 16, 17, and 18 in Theater 3.

The career of Raoul Walsh (1887–1980) represents the flip side of that of Mickey Neilan (see last week’s post). Both were rakish protégés of D. W. Griffith, but Walsh found the self-discipline and instinctive artfulness to manage a fifty-year directorial career. Although he worked in all genres, Regeneration speaks to his special facility with “gangster” films and the tragic destinies of their heroes. Some of his best films, including The Roaring Twenties (1939), High Sierra (1941), and White Heat (1949), fall into this category. Happy endings were not requisite, but he could still wax lyrical over the massacre of Custer in They Died with Their Boots On (1941). His auteurist personality was not always universally appealing. He occasionally had a penchant for sophomoric humor, as in his sequels to What Price Glory (his fine 1926 film adaptation of Laurence Stallings’s Broadway hit), which continued to pair Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe. Although not so important as John Ford or Howard Hawks, Walsh has an honored place in the history of Westerns. In Old Arizona (1928) is the first talkie shot largely on location, and The Big Trail (1930) is spectacularly inventive in its use of an experimental widescreen process. He worked productively with virtually everyone, from Humphrey Bogart to Mae West, and he discovered—and named—John Wayne. Walsh was an archetypal example of a studio director (Fox in the 1920s, Warner Brothers later) who accepted divergent assignments and managed to mold them into personal statements. Hollywood filmmaking would have been much poorer without him.

Kermit and W. From premiere episode of Sesame Street, December 10, 1969. Sesame Street Unpaved

As one of our contributions to the exhibition 1969 at P.S.1, Matthew Day Jackson and I pay tribute to Sesame Street. In the show’s first episode, broadcast on November 10, 1969, Kermit the Frog tries to deliver a lecture on the letter W. He’s foiled first by Cookie Monster, who devours Kermit’s prop, then by the W itself, which comes to life and attacks him. Kermit is in 1969, gone grey to reflect other presences in the show. W lurks nearby as well.

W is a shifty sort of letter. To pronounce it we say “double-u,” but the pronunciation conspicuously lacks the /w/ sound it alleges to represent. To write it we mash two V’s together; it possesses no independent shape of its own.

W’s history is similarly suspect. The Latin alphabet, which evolved from a variant of the Greek alphabet circa the seventh century BC, did not originally feature the letter. In the Middle Ages scribes began knitting two V’s together in a ligature in order to represent sounds in Germanic languages not found in medieval Latin.

After nearly a month of visiting the Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity exhibition, many of us throughout the Museum took away at least one powerful message: don’t be afraid to cross disciplines. The fearlessness, enthusiasm, and collaboration of the students and masters is apparent in the show’s work.

So, upon learning that design education legend and DIY hero Ellen Lupton would be running several workshops in the Bauhaus Lab series, our Graphic Design department decided not to make a poster for her visit, but rather to shoot and edit a video. Of course, stepping out of your area of expertise requires collaboration, so we teamed up with two of the Museum’s video experts: Beth Harris, Director of Digital Learning, and David Hart, Associate Media Producer. It was a humbling and exciting experience.

Pablo Picasso. After Rembrandt: Ecce Homo. 1970, published 1978. Etching and aquatint. The Museum of Modern Art. The Edgar Wachenheim III Fund, 2009. © 2009 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

There are lots of reasons why a work might be acquired for MoMA’s collection. Sometimes, the intense preparations for an upcoming exhibition provide a great opportunity to step back, take a careful look at what we already have, and see if there are gaps that need to be filled in our holdings of an artist’s work. This was recently the case as we researched an upcoming exhibition that, along with an accompanying catalogue and website, will explore Pablo Picasso’s creative process through the lens of printmaking. We took a close look at MoMA’s Picasso prints by theme, by technique, and by chronology, and discovered that we didn’t have a strong enough representation of Picasso’s late period (from about 1965 to his death in 1973), which has often been overlooked and underappreciated.

Machine Project's Walking Tables and Wrestling Foals

In planning the programs for MoMA’s Bauhaus Lab, we wanted to give the public the opportunity not only to experience original Bauhaus curricula, but also to meet contemporary artists with multidisciplinary practices in an experimental spirit similar to the Bauhaus. The L.A.-based collective Machine Project most definitely falls into this category. (Machine’s approach to pedagogy as performance was previously presented this year at MoMA during the symposium Transpedagogy: Contemporary Art and the Vehicles of Education.)

Carter Mull. Los Angeles Times, Monday February 23, 2009. 2009. Chromogenic process print, 49 x 37" (124.5 x 94 cm). Collection Dr. Dana Beth Ardi, New York. Courtesy Marc Foxx, Los Angeles. © 2009 Carter Mull

Carter Mull‘s work in New Photography 2009 is full of vibrant color and patterns. Beyond the surface is a body of work that explores language, our relationship to images in an image-saturated world, and the spectre of the death of print media and chemical photography. In the following Q&A, Carter talks to me in detail about his work.

Eva Respini: How did you become interested in the Los Angeles Times as the starting point for the body of work on view in New Photography 2009?

Carter Mull: Initially, I was drawn to a question about the psychological impact of an image. Journalism and the media had been in the background of my thinking for a number of years—and I was curious about the question of how one responds to an image of distant trauma, contextualized within the framework of the local newspaper. Also, the very material—the literal placement of advertising next to news—was an intriguing reality.

ER: The title for this series is Triggers for Everyday Fiction, and you refer to these photographs as “triggers” and “responses.”  I like thinking about the relationship between the pictures as a kind of call and response. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

CM: The project began about two years ago with the initial program of considering a media site, in this case the Los Angeles Times, as a point of departure. I wanted to treat the lead image of the paper as a generator of sorts—and the output of the works as a whole as somehow governed by the grammar of the idea. The terms you refer to work as a nomenclature to designate points within the body of work. At the moment, I think about the images taken together as a series of passages—and as an active cognitive process.

This Saturday, December 12 (2:00–6:00 p.m.), is the first opportunity for the public to visit the Rising Currents architect-in-residence studios at P.S.1. As part of P.S.1’s Saturday Sessions, the five teams will open their studios to the public and be available to discuss their work. Two rounds of presentations will be given. The first round of presentations will begin at 2:15 p.m. and be repeated at 4:30 p.m. Below, the teams offer a preview of their site work to date.

Eric Bunge and Mimi Hoang, nARCHITECTS
ZONE 3:

After two engineering workshops with Arup, we are pursuing four temporal strategies that unite the disparate scales of our site, and extend the domains of water and land across each other: 1) ferries and mobile programs on barges powered by methane gas collected from the Owl’s Head Wastewater Treatment Plant interconnect a network of hybrid stations/storm surge deflectors; 2) islands combine the infrastructural with the ecological, and are interconnected with inflatable storm surge barriers: “airbag urbanism”; 3) housing on stilts, off the sewage grid, is combined with floating treatment wetlands; 4) a pervious network of infiltration basins, swales, and culverts opportunistically appropriates underutilized plots of land, and when dry, functions as a decentralized network of parks.