After a long hiatus, art road trips are back! We’ve done 20th-century painting in Iowa City and Des Moines, Old Masters in Omaha, sculpture of all kinds in Lincoln, Nebraska…and still we’re not more than six and a half hours outside St. Louis.  This time, instead of northwest, we head northeast.  Destination: The Indiana University Art Museum in Bloomington (drive time: 4hrs 5 mins).  

First of all, there’s Duchamp.  Bicycle Wheel, Bottle Dryer, Fountain…they’re all here.  In fact, the IU Art Museum has one of only two complete suites of Readymades in the world.  

They also have one of Max Beckmann’s supreme final paintings, the Hope Family Portrait (1950).  Where else can you see a painting from after 1915 in which the painter juggles eight full-length figures (yes, eight!) plus a dog and some kind of coyote-beast, for good measure?  

You can also see one of  Picasso’s most exuberant artist-and-model pictures (The Studio, 1934), a medium-sized Pollock from the classic years (Number 11, 1949)…and, keep in mind, these are only the 20th-century highlights! 

From the Pulitzer: take 70 East (165 miles), then right on IN-59 (5 miles),  and left on IN-46  (20 miles).  From there, make a right onto N. Fee Lane, and another right onto 7th Street.  The museum is 1133 East 7th Street.

Earlier this year Olafur Eliasson’s travelling retrospective, Take Your Time, prompted Modern Art Notes’ Tyler Green to offer up some really interesting posts about Eliasson and his dialogues with other artists, like Vija Celmins and Richard Serra. Now, as we’re all looking at Eliasson’s New York City Waterfalls (in real life or, alas, only in photographs), let me add two more names to the list of artists Eliasson’s work seems to be engaged with. First, Bryan Hunt. Hunt sets the absolute benchmark for waterfalls in the way I think Monet sets the benchmark for Water Lillies or Degas sets the bar for ballerinas. Since the late 1970s Hunt has been using plaster and bronze to impress notions of sculptural form onto (some) people’s experiences of real falls wherever they may be. Second, there is Roni Horn: I can hardly look at Eliasson’s waterfalls without thinking of the myriad things she has seen in and on water. Just try reflecting on Eliasson’s waterfalls with these lines of hers in mind (it makes the work a little more wonderful):

This water exists in monolithic, indivisible continuity with all other waters. No water is separate from any other water.

In the River Thames, in an Arctic iceberg, in your drinking glass, in that drop of rain, on that frosty window pane, in your eyes, in every other microscopic part of you (and me), all waters converge.

Invisible continuity is intrinsic to water. This continuity exceeds us even while being a part of us. It’s this continuity that makes our effect on water an effect on us. (Roni Horn in K.M. Campagnolo, Still Water, 2000, n.p.)

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?

The archives of the Saint Louis Art Museum have been a major resource as we’ve prepared Dan Flavin: Constructed Light, largely because they have so much material related to Flavin’s exhibition at SLAM in 1973. Soon you can find the best of the best “from the vault” on our Flavin web catalogue, notably the recording of a radio interview Flavin gave when he was promoting the St. Louis show. Most of this interview hasn’t been heard since it was broadcast on KFUO in ‘73, and some of it was never broadcast at all.

In addition to the SLAM exhibition, Flavin discusses his responsibilities as an artist, the motivation behind his use of fluorescent light, his opinion of the term “minimalist,” and the extent to which he welcomed the “religious associations” sometimes prompted by his work.

Until now, to hear the whole recording you had to have a reel-to-reel. In the web catalogue you’ll find — what else? — clear, accessible digital audio. So stay tuned. In a couple of weeks: Dan Flavin in his own words.

This week in the Village Voice R.C. Baker writes up the Flavin show at Zwirner & Wirth in New York City. His verdict: “it’s the freshest, most challenging and uplifting exhibition in town.” That’s really saying something, especially since it’s a recreation of Flavin’s exhibition at the Green Gallery in 1964.

You might say the Pulitzer takes the opposite tack with Flavin. Instead of recreating a historic installation, we’re presenting a totally new one. The difficulty (and necessity) of installing thoroughly situational art in the absence of the artist is an issue at the heart of both the print and web publications we’re preparing to release early in April. Keep an eye out for them. And if you can, go see Flavin in New York!

What does it mean to really love a work of art?  Perhaps nothing less than to infuse your life with its image for all time with a tattoo.  I used to a know a guy who had Michelangelo’s famous hands of God and Adam tattooed across his shoulder blades.  I thought that was devotion.  But today I have discovered a tattoo that puts those hands in perspective.  Look at this tatoo of Max Beckmann’s “Fisherwomen” on the arm of Sal, one of the guys who helped install the Pulitzer’s current exhibition (which includes “Fisherwomen”). Not only is it huge, it’s personalized: the two figures on the right have been made to look like him and his girlfriend!  That is some serious devotion.  Wow.

Here’s a little activity for you: go to the website of the Poetry Foundation and do a search for poems that include the word “water”. Or better yet, just click this link. The archive turns up an incredible 839 poems. There’s “Home-Thoughts from the Sea” by Robert Browning, “The River of Bees” by W.S. Merwin, “Humidifier” by Louis Gluck…and on and on. The results make for an interesting electronic anthology. How real are the affinities? That’s the kind of question some writers will be taking on at the Pulitzer on December 6. Along with the Poetry Foundation, we’re presenting an event at which writers Andrew Joron, Arthur Sze, Cole Swenson, and John Yau will discuss just what water might have to do with poetry. Talk could go from Homer to who knows…maybe, from the 839, Robert Creeley’s “The Pool” (take a look).

The archive of events on our website, under “Events and Programs,” is expanding all the time.  In the next few weeks we’ll add material related to two symposia for Portrait/Homage/Embodiment.  Expect pictures, written reflections by the participants, and – for the first time – some audio clips.  (Actually I’m sifting through the recordings right now.)  Of course, there is a lot to see under “Events and Programs” already.  If you haven’t been recently, check out Raphael Rubinstein’s response to the Pulitzer’s last poetry panel and Harvard grad students’ reactions to last year’s Sugimoto symposium.

P.S.  Holiday on Monday; next update on Tuesday!

A Nelson-Atkins post?  I spoke too soon.  Two friends I wanted to meet up with in Kansas City couldn’t make it, so the trip is temporarily postponed.  Instead, over the weekend, I checked out an old favorite that’s getting better all the time: Washington University’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, aka “The Milly.”  (Officially the university always calls it “The Kemper,” but it’s “The Milly” to all the students and art lovers I know.) 

The permanent collection galleries start with a serious 1-2-3 punch: Pollock’s late Sleeping Effort #3; a juicy abstract Guston; and  de Kooning’s Saturday Night (from the same moment as The Met’s Easter Monday).  There’s also a nice selection of cubism from various moments – a Gris from 1916, Braques from the 1930s, and an exceptionally good Picasso from the 1950s - Women of Algiers (Variation N).  The last – a double homage to Delacroix and Matisse – was a major crowd magnet when it was shown in MoMA’s MatissePicasso show.  (Plus it is one of the few versions not in a private collection.)

A visit to the Milly also allows you to survey the work of Pritzker Prize-winning architect Fumihiko Maki.  The museum, one of Maki’s most recent designs, is situated in an Art & Architecture School complex that he renovated, which includes his very first commission (Steinberg Hall).  That’s pretty much Maki A to Z…so much to explore in our own backyard!

In our Cube Gallery right now you can get a little taste of the Nelson-Atkins Museum.  Half the room is covered in constructed paintings by Richard Tuttle, including the Nelson Atkins’ pinkish, wavy Wave of 1964-5.  If it whets your appetite for more, well, Kansas City is only a three-and-a-half-hour drive from St. Louis.   This weekend I’m going for the very first time.  I’ve heard nothing but good things about the museum’s new Bloch Building.  Check back next week for a report!