Director of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, Matthias Waschek, introduces Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark and describes how the exhibition fits with the Pulitzer and St. Louis.

As I’m sure all of you already know (because you follow our blog, facebook and twitter accounts faithfully) our Urban Alchemy / Gordon Matta-Clark exhibition opening took place last Friday from 5pm to 9pm. Admittedly, scheduling a 4 hour opening did seem like a long amount of time and we therefore planned to evaluate the visitor attendance flow every hour to figure out if, for future openings, we should open later or close earlier. Much to our excitement, we found that our 900 visitors came in a steady stream – showing up on their way home from work or arriving after a dinner on the town for a glass of wine on our mezzanine. It certainly didn’t hurt the event when the skies cleared just hours before we were slated to open, giving our guests an amazing view of a setting sun against a St. Louis skyline.

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Art handlers move a re-creation of Gordon Matta-Clark’s Garbage Wall from a construction space into the Pulitzer galleries, before adding the final touches of trash to its exterior.

Finally, here’s a glimpse at the Garbage Wall we’ve been blogging about for several weeks. Look closely at the video of it being moved into the building, and perhaps you’ll see a sneaker you threw out during bulk trash week.

Visit Transformation’s landing page for a video of the initial assembling of the Wall, which features Jane Crawford talking about its history.

Art handlers install Gordon Matta-Clark’s Wallspaper.

With titles such as “Pier In/Out” and “Reality Properties: Fake Estates,” Matta-Clark is known for his fondness for word play. “Wallspaper” is another example. Wallspaper consists of photographs of the interior walls of dilapidated buildings, which have been reproduced as colored prints and stapled to a wall, playing with the idea of wall paper.

Art handlers install Gordon Matta-Clark’s Bingo for Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark.

Above is a preview to one of Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark’s star pieces, Bingo. In 1974, Matta-Clark severed these hunks of facade from a condemned house along the Love Canal, a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, NY, which became environmentally infamous for 21,000 tons of toxic waste that was buried beneath it by a chemical company. Matta-Clark moved the facade to Artpark, an important space for the Land Art movement and the site of a previous industrial waste dump.

You can view Matta-Clark’s documentary video of Bingo on UbuWeb Film.

You can view Bingo in person this Friday for our exhibition’s opening reception, 5-9pm.

Yesterday, before the Pulitzer opened for regular hours, Washington University’s Portfolio Plus program came from CAMSTL through the courtyard to study Ideal (Dis-) Placements. Led by local artists and art instructors, Belinda Lee and BJ Vogt, this visit was part of the summer workshop’s aims at introducing high schoolers to art galleries, to familiarize them with the art world and prompt in-class assignments.  

Running since 2004, Portfolio Plus is geared at preparing teenagers, local and nation-wide, for art school by enhancing their portfolios and earning them 6 college credits. In the mornings, the students study Drawing and 2D/3D, and in the afternoons, they’re offered a variety of electives. Lee pointed out that many of the graduates go on to Wash U’s art college. (Why aren’t more universities offering this sort of thing?)

For their field trip yesterday, Vogt asked the teens to think about how the works in both the Contemporary and the Pulitzer were installed and how they relate to each building’s design. One student Hallie told me how she enjoyed the way the light looked in the Pulitzer’s galleries and said, ”I like how the setting is modernized but has these Old Master paintings–how they should seem out of place, but they don’t.” 

Lee asked the students to consider the difference in imagery between the Old Masters and CAMSTL’s current exhibition of Chantal Akerman and Carey Young. She particularly wanted them to observe the difference between the idealization in Old Masters as opposed to the “hyperrealism” in Chantal Akerman’s films–how convenient to have different but both excellent exhibitions next-door to highlight complementing ideas. 

Having been a gallery assistant at the Pulitzer, I can’t recall how many people I’ve seen glide their palms over the Pulitzer’s walls with a look of admiration. Yes, these walls are smooth, but knowing nothing about concrete, I’ve never been nearly as awed as some visiting architects. Still, the more I learn about the building, the more I appreciate the brainwork and assiduousness behind the “Ando concrete.”

Early last Friday, Facilities Manager Steve Morby explained to me what makes the concrete here special. He became acquainted with it when he worked on Ando’s first project in the United States, the Eychaner Residence in Chicago, completed in 1998. Steve had been working with concrete for 25 years, but in his paper “Constructing Concrete as an Art Form,” he explained that he had “never seen such exacting details, and the expectations of such high levels of wall quality were amazing.”

Although Ando is not the first to use exposed concrete in the way he does, as architect Thomas Daniell pointed out in 2007, the process for making an Ando wall is still unusual, and because Ando uses it consistently to affect a building’s overall environment, it has become his trademark. In the following video, Steve describes the procedures for making concrete and how his construction team altered them to create the Ando quality.

One of my favorite things about working at the Pulitzer is that there is often an element of the unexpected in our projects. Our current exhibition, Ideal (Dis-) Placements: Old Masters at the Pulitzer, provided just such an element in the form of Staging Old Masters. The program for Staging Old Masters called for small groups of actors to perform short theatrical pieces in front of the Old Master paintings that inspired them. 

This is not a typical activity in special exhibition galleries, and we had numerous discussions among the staff to establish parameters for the performances. Our primary aim was to ensure the safety of the paintings while providing enough space for the actors to perform effectively and the audience to view the performances easily. There was the additional twist of its being a mobile theatrical experience: the actors and the audience would be moving through the galleries to different paintings/performance sites during the program.

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As a way to generate interaction with our PFA Myspace/Facebook pages, I’ve been asking people to email me photos and drawings made from Pulitzer visits, to put in albums currently titled “Visitors’ Images.” This is so average guests can showcase their creativity and have a visual discussion of what they see at the Pulitzer.

Today is the opening at this online gallery. Here is some of what is being exhibited:

If you have something you would like to submit, you can email it to me at web@pulitzerarts.org.

From Courtney, who’s busy working on the Community Light Project:

Many things go on behind the scenes at Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. If you were to visit us on an open gallery day, you might say, “Hey, what’s behind that door? What’s at the end of that hallway?” I’m here to tell you that we are bursting at the seams in our Ando building. There is not enough concrete for the work we are doing now, so we have to take space at local schools!

Rainer and Sebastian, thinking that the lamp roof of the Spring Church was not enough to bring our community into the light, have helped us with the Community Light Project. With their artistic guidance, myself and many other artists, volunteers, and social workers proceed in compelling local students from Cole Elementary, Loyola Academy, Cardinal Ritter College Prep and Metro High Schools to build light works of their own.

The groups will not get to come together fully until the Street Festival and opening of the Community Light Project on October 3. At that time, they will get to see the full reality of all their hard work. That has been the most difficult part of all this project-for people to realize that this is all part of something much larger. It’s worth participation, because something big is brewing.

I invite everyone in the community to come and see all the efforts of these schools and countless educators, volunteers, artists and social workers. It will be big and it will be worth experiencing, and it will show you a little of what goes on behind the walls of the Pulitzer, or in this case, behind the walls of Grand Center schools.

To follow along with the development of the Community Light Project, visit the webpage here. Similar to the Light Project, we’ll be posting updates, videos, interviews, and behind-the-scenes info leading up to the October 3rd Street Festival.

This blog post is going to be a pretty random list, but sometimes, that’s just what comes out of the keyboard.  So here we go:

First off, I know we’re a little late to the game with this one (considering my teenage sister has had one for, I don’t know, her whole life) but the Pulitzer now has a MySpace page, and a Facebook page.  We’re still tweaking, still adjusting, and still adding, but in the meantime- add us!  Be our friend.  And our fan.  And tell all your friends and your fans.  Whew.

Secondly, a Must-See: there’s an interesting post on Edward Lifson’s blog about the new Ando building in the Berkshires.  He says some nice things about the Pulitzer building too, and includes great photos of other Ando projects I’d never seen before.  It’s a must-read and the Clark looks like a must-visit.