As I wrote in my last post, tonight the Pulitzer will be hosting a roundtable discussion with Olafur Eliasson. I’ve heard a few of the topics that will be discussed, and thought I’d share a couple as a teaser:

Eliasson will discuss his reaction to the Pulitzer’s installation, Minimalism and Beyond, and whether he would place his work in this category of “beyond”. He will also talk about his own position (whether positive or negative) on the legacy of Minimalism.

Other topics covered by the panelists will be how visitors physically relate to artwork, and if physical interaction is a key issue for Eliasson.

If you’re interested in hearing further discussion on the above topics and more, call 314-935-9347 and come to tonight’s lecture.

Additionally, this Saturday from 4:30-6:30pm is “The Pulitzer by SLU”. I wrote about the event a few posts ago, and Amy wrote about the collaboration with Saint Louis University students here. Student docents from SLU will be throughout the galleries to discuss the exhibition with visitors. Those with a SLU ID also have a chance to win packages from local institutions. We’re hoping this will encourage further exploration, not only of the Pulitzer, but also of our neighborhood. Our next student event “After Hours at the Pulitzer” will be on Thursday, April 13th, and students from throughout the St. Louis area are invited to attend. More info to come.

This Thursday at 8pm, the Pulitzer will host a roundtable discussion called “Art, Technology and the Sublime” with the artist Olafur Eliasson. The discussion will also include Sabine Eckmann (Director of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University), Matthias Waschek (our Director), and will be moderated by Lutz Koepnick (Professor of Germanic languages, Literatures, Film and Media at Wash U).

In prep for the evening, check out Eliasson’s website (I know I’ll need to). Also, check out the subjects being discussed at the Wash U symposium this weekend, entitled “After the Digital Divide”. According to this site, the symposium will “investigate the legacy of German aesthetic and critical theory as seen against the spreading background of digital culture since the 1990s.” Each of the people involved in the Pulitzer discussion are either of a German background or live in Germany, so it will be interesting to see how their own experiences and observations play in. If you are also curious, visit the Pulitzer on Wednesday, and then come hear what he has to say on Thursday. To reserve a space you can call 314-935-9347 or email samfoxschool@wustl.edu.

Those of you who have visited the Pulitzer (or visited this blog) are probably pretty familar with what our building looks like. But have you ever wondered what lies beneath? Here are a few pictures (click to enlarge)–check out all of the ducts and pipes! Have you ever seen a basement quite like this? I’m going to follow up on this soon by interviewing our facilities manager, Steve, and ask him what exactly all of these pipes do…

You might not realize this, but I know if you have visited our website. Ok, maybe not you personally. But we are able to monitor the statistics not only on our website, but also the web catalogue, and even this blog. We do this to get a sense of who our visitors are, what interests them, and in how far our website is really efficient. Here are a few of the things I’ve recently discovered about you (our website visitor):

Our most popular page is the one on Tadao Ando. It’s visited even more than our home page! This is pretty interesting, so I thought I’d investigate further. It turns out the page where most people link to us is Ando’s website. Mystery solved! The top five languages of our web visitors are English, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. The top keyword used to search for us is “Pulitzer Foundation”. The most jumps from a “popular site” are from Google. I could go on and on.

If you have a favorite page that you visit, it’s reflected in the stats. If you live in Iceland and visit us, it’s reflected in the stats. If you search for the blog using “best blog ever”, it’s reflected in the stats. If you really want to make an impact on our stats, just visit our web catalogue! *hint, hint*

The opening of Hiroshi Sugimoto: Photographs of “Joe” is less than two months away, which means preparations are starting to pick up some steam.

This week, I have been busy working on advertisements to send to magazines before their deadlines (which are generally around 1 1/2 to 2 months prior to publication). Work has also begun on the exhibition postcards. For this I sent our graphic designer, Bruce, the pertinent information (name of the exhibition, date of the opening, etc.) and a brief description of what will be on view. It can be tricky to sum up an entire exhibition in just a few sentences. Here’s our paragraph for Sugimoto:

“During a visit to the Pulitzer in 2003, Hiroshi Sugimoto intended to take photographs of the building, designed by his fellow countryman Tadao Ando. Instead, he quickly focused on Richard Serra’s sculpture Joe, a torqued spiral sculpture that was commissioned for the Pulitzer’s courtyard. Using a photographic technique involving areas of extremely soft light and blurred darkness, Sugimoto sculpted views that seem like aspects of visual memory. Nineteen of these images will be presented.”

We also chose an image this week that will represent the exhibition on both the postcards and advertisements. With nineteen photographs to choose from, this is a tough decision. This is the one we went with…it has a beautiful combination of the sculpture’s curves, the shadows those curves create, and the clouds and sky.

Be on the lookout for this photo in magazines and around town in just a few short weeks.

While the Contemporary was having a Ball (which I’m really interested to read about in tomorrow’s post), the Pulitzer was busy with the third chamber concert in the Minimalism and Beyond series. Pascal Rophe, who was the guest conductor last week at the Symphony, was here to talk about and conduct pieces by Donatoni and Grisey. A member of SLSO told me before the concert that Vortex Temporum by Grisey was the most complicated piece performed at the Pulitzer thus far. Sitting on the steps listening, I could see what he meant. If you ever have a chance to see it performed, be sure to watch the facial expressions of the musicians–especially the pianist. You can just see how physically difficult the music must be to play.

Beforehand, Rophe described Grisey as being a part of the spectral music movement. I’d never heard of that before, but I found this description online: “a conscious effort to create new harmonies (in a departure from serialist traditions) by basing music on prescribed harmonic pitch series or spectra.” In an interview on this particular website, Grisey responds to questions about the movement by saying, “Spectralism is not a system. It’s not a system like serial music or even tonal music. It’s an attitude. It considers sounds, not as dead objects that you can easily and arbitrarily permutate in all directions, but as being like living objects with a birth, lifetime and death….try to find a better equation between concept and precept–between the concept of the score and the perception the audience might have of it.” Click on this link if you’re interested in reading the full interview.

Tomorrow night, it’s going to be hoppin’ in Grand Center. Not only does the Contemporary have their Dada Ball, but we have our next concert in the Minimalism and Beyond series. Normally, when a concert is held on a day that we are closed, the musicians can set-up and rehearse the day before. However, tomorrow we are open to the public, so the gallery space has to be clear. Musicians will arrive right after we close, set-up, and go through a dress rehearsal. Right now the piano tuner is here, and I can here him testing each note on the pianos (two pianos to be exact).

Here’s the line-up for tomorrow night:

Donatoni Etwas ruhiger im Ausdruck (1967)
Susanna Self Huppert, Flute
Scott Andrews, Clarinet
Peter Henderson, Piano
Eva Kozma, Violin
Ken Kulosa, Cello

Grisey Vortex temporum (1994-96)
Daria Binkowski, Flute
Scott Andrews, Clarinet
Jim Meyer, Bass Clarinet
Peter Henderson, Piano
Alison Harney, Violin
Kathleen Matthis, Viola
Ken Kulosa, Cello

Two points I learned from the Symphony, that I’m going to try and listen for tomorrow night:

Donatoni named his piece after the eighth bar of Schoenberg’s piano piece Op. 23 No. 2. About this, Donatoni said “One always finds it difficult…to understand what is going on at that point. There is something elusive in those few notes, something which evades what must happen and invites one to think about what can happen.” His piece is a high-speed example of what could have happened in the Schoenberg piece.

Grisey was fascinated by the notion of time, and his piece subtly plays on the idea of the duration of sound. The work swirls with repeated sounds that “metamorphose into different fields of time”.

Interesting. If you’re curious to hear what that sounds like, there are tickets still available by clicking here, or calling 314-534-1700.

What is it that makes an art institution so unapproachable to some people? Possibly the fear of being uncomfortable in a quiet situation, or maybe being faced with something they don’t understand. Whatever it is, a few students have taken the task of addressing the issue with their fellow students at Saint Louis University. The class has joined with Rachel and the Pulitzer in helping to put on a SLU event at the Pulitzer coming up on Saturday, April 1st, from 4:30pm — 6:30pm.

Being a part of both the SLU community and as a student and a piece of the Pulitzer puzzle as an intern and gallery assistant, I have noticed, as have many others, the barrier that is found at the crossing of Lindell Blvd., which separates the university from the Pulitzer. The class has been making the trek across Lindell since the start of the semester, and is now brainstorming ways in which to get the rest of the SLU community to follow in their footsteps.

With ideas ranging from an ad in the student newspaper to putting a pile of candy in the quad, these graduate and undergraduate level Pulitzer stars are looking for any way to bridge the gap between Washington Blvd. and Lindell. At the SLU event, the students and the Pulitzer hope to make the art and institution more approachable and accessible. With the students acting as docents to the visitors along side other gallery assistants, many of whom are also SLU students, the visitors are given an opportunity to discuss the art with their contemporaries.

By addressing the question of why an art institution seems unapproachable to students, these SLU students have found ways to connect the Pulitzer to their university. I hope more of the SLU community can conquer their fears and follow these students across Lindell to join us all at the event in April.

One of my favorite aspects of the Pulitzer is how different times of day, even different times of year, have a dramatic effect on the lighting in the galleries. For example, light bouncing off the watercourt can create a variety of patterns on the walls, or light coming through the skylight occasionally creates a blue halo around Blue Black.

A bonus of Minimalism and Beyond is the way some of these works of art create effects of their own depending on the time of day and the amount of light pouring in through the windows. The most dramatic is definitely Gold Mats, Paired (For Ross and Felix) the gold field by Roni Horn on our Mezzanine. Surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows, the angle of the afternoon sun hitting the gold not only creates a blinding effect on the top of the work, but also a brilliant, glowing effect between the two mats. Take a look (click on the image to enlarge):

In a post on today’s MAN, there was a link to a LA Times article about a torqued ellipse by Richard Serra that is scheduled to open this September. The article details some of the installation process, aspects of which sounded really familiar. Steel plates were fabricated in Germany, shipped to the United States, and then carried on flat-bed trucks to the work site. Afterward, the plates were lifted off the trucks and onto temporary supports, where they will then be welded into permanent supports and surrounded by gravel and decomposed granite.

It sounds familiar because this is a similar process that took place when the Serra sculpture Joe was installed in our courtyard. It was interesting to read how the process at UCLA was so similar, and I thought I would link to a past blog about this process for comparison. Click here for part one, here for part two, and here for part three.