Kay Renner, a gallery assistant, explains how to play the pianos in stylus, and how visitors’ experiences depend a lot on what they contribute to the installation.

The founders of All Along Press talk about printing the concordance texts and demonstrate part of the process. Smudge the dog performs tricks.

When you enter stylus, one of the first things you see is a steel table, with a half-circle cut from it, where a concrete pillar shoots through it and two floors of Pulitzer building. On top of the table are what look like newspapers. You start to read one (yes, you’re allowed to touch them) and it feels like you’re doing so from inside a dream; the text consists of a column of repeating words and what, at first skim, is gobbledygook to either side of it. Here’s a short section from one of these papers:

“No one charged us a penny for our pleasure in…disconcerting. I appear to be strangely distracted and barely…bid to become an action star proper looks a fairly safe bet. Just…and deputy prime minister, has admitted that he changed his…by BBC political editor, Nick Robinson.”

“It’s kind of interesting to think about what sentence might have gone with what paper,” says Courtney Henson, our visitor services manager. Read the rest of this entry »

I knew being a gallery assistant here would be a great venture, and it hasn’t disappointed me yet. I’ve been through Old Masters, Gordon Matta-Clark and now Ann Hamilton. What fascinates me most about stylus is that all of the people that come get some kind of experience. Now you can say it’s the hands-on aspects that everyone enjoys, or you can say it’s the design of the building and the appearance of the projections on the walls. Or you can say that the jumping beans really get people excited–most visitors haven’t seen these in a long time, if ever. For me, it’s the Cube Gallery that makes me glad that I work here. That’s an important room. The piano starts playing when people sign-in at the front desk on the touch pad. Some people in the Cube while this happens get startled, while others just laugh.

As a gallery assistant in that room, I generally keep the laughter going by either singing or playing the piano–and no, I can’t play a lick–and show them the recorder that’s in the piano. It’s very different than our last exhibition, Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark, which often had sad stories associated to the art. It was much more serious. I found myself engaged in the history behind the art in Urban Alchemy and the Old Masters exhibition, as well as how the works fit with the Pulitzer building. stylus is playful and makes you aware of your surroundings – from the sound that comes out of the ground to the light that rotates around the walls, you are sure to find pleasure in this space. That makes my job enjoyable, and I’m able to get into my work and really have a good time with everyone. What a job!

I have been working as a Gallery Assistant at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts for a little over a month now, and the experience has been remarkable. My first visit to the Pulitzer was at the behest of a Tadao Ando enthusiast and part-time art historian; I spent a great deal of time marveling at the modern and elegant design that Ando so beautifully conceived. Later that month, I returned for Ideal (Dis-) Placements and was hooked.

I feel fortunate to have begun my tenure along with the wonderful stylus by Ann Hamilton. It has been fun showing visitors how to interact with the space. The touch pad at the front entrance always draws a curious smile when I ask visitors to sign their name and wait to hear what happens. Delight is often the next reaction. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re working on the full website catalogue for stylus (more to come on that!), with a big focus on translating the unique in-gallery experience onto the web.  One of the ways we’ll try to achieve this is through time-lapse videos during our open hours, showing how visitors – and the natural light – interact with the work throughout the day.  Our web designer just sent this clip from what we shot in the Cube Gallery – looks like one of our gallery assistants found the exhibition very inspirational!

As you might have noticed during stylus’s opening reception, the current exhibition transfigures as the sun goes down. The projections become brighter and the atmosphere becomes entirely different than it is in the daytime. Starting this week, the Pulitzer will offer this experience Thursday evenings from 6pm–9pm, in addition to our regular hours.

Join us this week on August 5, from 6-9pm for the first open Thursday for stylus.

Visitors walk through the Main Gallery during the opening reception for stylus.

Artist Ann Hamilton, Composer Shahrokh Yadegari and the opera singer Elizabeth Zharoff create a recording for the installation of stylus.

To add a “sense of  humanity as well as mystery,” Shahrokh Yadegari explained last week, he and Ann Hamilton chose to incorporate a human voice into stylus’s primary sound composition. They talked with the Opera Theatre of St. Louis and were introduced to the singer Elizabeth Zharoff. The three met at Jupiter Studios, a recording studio in downtown St. Louis, where Zharoff sang as Yadegari improvised using her voice and a computer music instrument he invented. The instrument is called “Lila,” a word that literally means “play” in Hinduism but implies creative freedom within a set of boundaries. Zharoff and Yadegari’s collaboration as well as Ann Hamilton’s installation seem to exemplify that concept quite nicely.

Shahrokh Yadegari, Composer/Sound Designer, and his assistant Toby Algya program player pianos for Ann Hamilton’s stylus. Yadegari describes how the instruments will be used during the exhibition.

When we think of the word “stylus,” what comes to mind nowadays is a touch pen used on a palm computer. The upcoming exhibition’s namesake has many denotations, though, such as a pillar or a tool used to engrave wax. As Matthias Waschek broached in the last “From the Director,” the meanings of “stylus” overlap and fundamentally relate to communication. My favorite image of a stylus is a record player’s needle, which magically emits music from a slab of vinyl. At Friday’s opening, you’ll be able to experience a similarly wonderful transmission of sound. Read the rest of this entry »

Bob McCabe, Morning Host for KWMU, reads during A Marathon Metamorphoses.

“…how does one communicate the experience of an ephemeral two day reading in our exhibition space?” our director, Matthias Waschek asked today in his very first blog post for the Pulitzer. He is, of course, reflecting on last year’s marathon reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which has so far been the only event of its kind in our building.

To capture the experience, a local videographer video taped the almost twenty hours of reading in the Lower Gallery. He then edited the footage down to eight minutes, which includes a shot of each of the seventy-four readers. You can now watch the video and read Matthias’ reflections on it on our A Marathon Metamorphoses blog.

Courtney Henson, our Visitor Services Manager, is an artist and particularly admires the work of Ann Hamilton, so last week, I  interviewed her via g-chat on what she’s looking forward to about stylus. She = pulitzerarts.

4:04 PM me: So how do you feel about the Ann Hamilton exhibition coming up?

pulitzerarts: pause-personally or as the visitor services manager or the combo?

me: Both.

4:05 PM pulitzerarts: Ok. 4:09 PM Well I have been interested in Ann’s work for quite a while. In graduate school, I began to appreciate the performative aspects of her work more. I also liked the ways that she was integrating a space fully in her installations. It is exciting to get an opportunity to see her approach the Ando building with her methods for involving all the senses. It will be a new experience for us as an institution as we have not worked inside the building with a living artist. Read the rest of this entry »