As you know, we recently changed the color of a number of Flavin lamps in our galleries, thereby creating “Phase 2″ of Dan Flavin: Constructed Light. You may have noticed, however, that several of the works remained the same color, including the piece installed in our first floor corridor. This work is an impressive, staggering display of overwhelmingly green light (96 two-foot green lamps tend to dominate a space!).

Despite the fact that the color of these lamps hasn’t changed, the lamps themselves are soon to be replaced – with brand new versions of their former selves (still green!). We noted that over time, some of the lamps in this work were beginning to blacken on the ends. On certain lamps, dark spots (almost like thumbprints) began to form, and a few lamps quit working altogether. The manager of the Flavin Studio indicated that this is a phenomenon that sometimes happens with Flavin’s work, especially when you get a whole bunch of tubes together in a tight space. The massing of fluorescent light can create strange effects on the lamps themselves – in this case streaking, darkening, and black spots.

As a result, we have decided to do a mass replacement of all of the lamps in this work. New two-foot green lamps will soon be installed (look for them within the next week). We’ve been told that since this blackening phenomenon happened once, it might eventually happen with the new lamps as well. However, we are expecting that this mid-exhibition replacement will give the piece a rejuvenated look, one that will hopefully last through the extent of the show.

It’s Lisa again – with a continuation of the discussion started in my previous blog on community engagement around the arts. Please keep in mind that my forays into relational aesthetics are only just beginning, and I welcome the comments of those much better read in this particular academic area.

Point II: “What criteria should we use to evaluate socially engaged art?” (taken from an interview with Claire Bishop from July 2006).

My last post was more concerned with evaluating the impact of community engagement programs in terms of social change, e.g. civic engagement. This post is inspired by the work of Claire Bishop, an Art History lecturer at the University of Warwick. Bishop argues that socially engaged art has been evaluated more for its ethical merit rather than aesthetic, with an overwhelming focus on process rather than on product. According to Bishop, “There can be no failed, unsuccessful, unresolved, or boring works of collaborative art because all are equally essential to the task of strengthening the social bond. While I am broadly sympathetic to that ambition, I would argue that it is also crucial to discuss, analyze, and compare such work critically as art.”

I reiterate that I am just now beginning to explore Dr. Bishop’s writings and the field of relational aesthetics overall, but when I ran across this quotation, I couldn’t resist bringing it up for discussion here. I’ll be writing again soon on how this discussion factors into our upcoming activities this summer at the Pulitzer.

So it’s been awhile since my last installment, but today I thought I’d write a Work/Play version of websites I’m liking lately.

Work-related:

A List Apart. If you’re interested in the web – web design, writing for the web, usability on the web, pretty much anything related to the web – this is a perfect site for you. Over the summer, I will be relying on this website a lot for ideas and tips. More to come on why that is throughout the coming months (what a teaser!).

Play – A Two in One:

I subscribe to the email newsletter for Very Short List. It’s fantastic – you only get one email from them a day and often it’s about a site that I’ve a) never heard of before and b) now frequent. Today’s website was particularly fun to play around with — it’s called TuneGlue. Type in the name of a musician, click, and it expands into musicians with similar styles, click on one of those names, expand again, and so on and so on. While looking through this, I thought – how great would it be if someone created something similar to this, but for artists? That could be huge for art history classes! And for other interested parties, for example, those who write arts-related blogs…

Matthias returned from vacation this week, and when he arrived it made me think about all of the things that we were wrapping up in preparation for his departure late last month. I remember the Thursday before Matthias left, it became clear that there was no way we could get all the work done we needed to before he left, so Matthias and I made the decision to come in and work on a Saturday.The day’s major project was to work on the layout for the main gallery for our upcoming exhibition: The Ideal (Dis)-placement: Old Masters at the Pulitzer. Matthias hopes to realize this exhibition by borrowing old master works from two major art collections (I’m not allowed to say yet who). The main gallery will be arranged with groupings of paintings on both the east and west walls. With this decided, the next step was to figure out a way to organize the selected works into medallions. Issues of size, shape, color and theme all needed to be taken into consideration.

This is where I came in, as neither Matthias nor the two curators from the partnering collections were able to work independently with Photoshop. Using dimensions for the main gallery spaces, I created wall mockups for the different Pulitzer galleries and inserted scaled images of selected artworks. Once that was finished, we took the digital paintings and arranged them on the digital walls. This was what we spent the bulk of our time doing on Saturday. We arranged endless combinations of artworks: Check out this mockup of the east wall:

(sorry, but I can’t show you specific images yet either – are you intrigued yet or just annoyed?).

I was surprised upon talking to a couple of museum people that the idea of using digital gallery spaces for the curatorial process is still relatively new. Virtual Gallerie is a company that has developed software that creates 3-d mockups for galleries and museums. Its pretty fascinating stuff, especially considering some museums still use something similar to a doll house (they would probably call them “scaled mockups”) to create their exhibitions, with mini reproductions of artwork – something Barbie would probably love – but doesn’t seem very efficient to me.

Regardless, I was thrilled to be sitting in while the exhibition was taking shape. It was very exciting to see how the curatorial concepts developed and I considered it to be a worth-while experience to give up my Saturday for more productive pursuits besides watching weekend movies on channel 6.

Before today when we walked down the green hallway, there was a yellow vertical piece at the end  situated on the corner of the wall in the Entrance Gallery.

This morning, we were met with a new color at the end of the hallway:

You’ll have to come by tomorrow night to see what else has changed…

So right now, we’re in the midst of re-installing certain works in our exhibition for phase 2 of Dan Flavin: Constructed Light.  It’ll open this Friday, during the Grand Center Gallery Walk.  The installation is on hold today because our galleries are open to the public (30 minutes left to see the phase 1 artworks!), but will resume again tomorrow.  I’ll try to sneak some photos of the process.  We’re also working on scheduling the photography for phase 2 to put in both our print and web catalogues, along with a description about the change and the precedent set by Dan Flavin for doing this.  I’ll be posting those as I get them.  Stay tuned.

The Pulitzer’s architecture comes up a lot on this blog.  It relates to pretty much everything we do -  art, programming, everything that’s planned here has to keep the very specific architecture of our building in mind.  It ranges from the logistics of a film night to the placement of art within an exhibition and everything in between.

Since it’s often on our minds here, it was nice to see a feature in the Post-Dispatch this weekend on the architecture of St. Louis as a whole.  I’ve always loved driving through the city looking at buildings, but it was interesting to learn more about the specific history of those buildings.  It also helped me connect the Pulitzer to the larger context of the history of St. Louis architecture.   Take a look – there’s also an interactive timeline (which includes the Pulitzer!).

I’m currently in a self-diagnosed professional existential crisis, which is not surprising given the phase of program we’re currently in…sort of like being on a plane in-line to take off after waiting on the tarmac for hours. In the back of my mind, I know that the hands-on work will begin in earnest, but in the meantime, that means I have too much time to think and continue to plan for the next exhibition. A wise man once told me, sometimes, the best thing you can do is sit back and wait, and this is definitely one of those times.So, back to the too much time thinking and the professional existential crisis…I find myself reflecting on the past six months and am realizing that I’m feeling somewhat removed from what originally brought me to this unique position. In a sense, I feel as if I’ve lost the social work side of the community engagement, so in the next few blogs, I plan to address this point by point in hopes that you might have thoughts, advice, and reflections that will ultimately help me find my way back to my core mission.

Point One: Evaluation.  Are we making an impact with what we do, and how do we measure that impact? One of the primary reasons for the merging of the applied social sciences and the arts is to further develop and refine the use of evaluation in community programs implemented by cultural institutions. There are a few sources out there that provide a framework for the discussion, one of which being Gifts of the Muse, a report released by the Rand Corporation in 2004 that proposes approaching the discussion about the benefits of the arts from a different perspective. The same tools, methods, and challenges are faced by social service providers, as they seek to justify the relevance and effectiveness of their work. While there are easily quantifiable measures of success, the qualitative effects of programs are more difficult to firmly grasp. Add to that the difficulty of proving causality, bias, and other perils of human subjects-based research, it becomes all too easy to lose yourself in a land of meaningless data collected through ineffective measures. I’m sure this won’t be the last time I blog about this, and the issues of effective evaluation are weighing heavily upon my mind at the moment. Do you have any ideas on what a good measure of impact of the arts might look like? If so, I’d love to hear them. Then we can get down to a discussion about methodology, instrumentation, and implementation.

Last Thursday – since it was the first Thursday of the month – the Pulitzer was open from 6-9pm so visitors could view the Flavin works at night.  My parents and grandmother came out for dinner (at Hodaks! Another St. Louis must-visit, if you’re unfamiliar) and to see the exhibition.

It was really nice outside, so we went out on the watercourt patio to enjoy it for a little bit.  The colors bouncing off the water were so incredible, I had to run to my office and grab the camera and take a picture.  As with most photographs of Flavin, the picture doesn’t do it justice – but I wanted to post it anyway:

It seems like the “re-creation” of Dan Flavin’s 1964 Green Gallery show now at Zwirner & Wirth is on the mind of half the critics in New York. In the weeks since the Village Voice reviewed the exhibition, it has been written up in the New York Times and New York Magazine.

The Zwirner & Wirth show was also a major topic at the Pulitzer’s recent Flavin symposium for graduate students and their professors. Most of the participants felt, like Jerry Saltz, that Z&W should be thanked for allowing Flavin enthusiasts a chance to step back in time. I agreed. But this discussion also brought us to a key fact, which reviewers seems to keep overlooking:

the show only follows the original checklist, not the original installation!

Just compare the installation photos of a primary picture at the top of Saltz’s article. By departing from the original installation plan, Zwirner implicitly denies one of the most radical, if latent, innovations of the Green Gallery show (Flavin’s first show using only fluorescent light): “situational” art — the dissolution of discrete objects into an experiential field.

Of course, by straying from the particulars of the Green Gallery installation Zwirner also prevents the show from being one giant representation. And what ’s more in the spirit of Dan Flavin than keeping works like a primary picture obstinately, ironically abstract?