The “bean” is actually a seed from a tree found in certain mountainous regions in Mexico. The seed contain the larva of the jumping bean moth. In the spring, these moths lay their eggs on the seed, which then burrow their way inside and turn into larvae. The larvae feed on the soft tender heart of the bean and remain protected inside during the course of their development into moths. The following spring, the moths hatch, and the cycle repeats itself.

The beans actually “jump” as a survival measure. The heat, which causes them to dry out, is their enemy. Thus, when the bean gets into the sun or onto a hot surface, the larva snaps its body in an effort to roll to a cooler place.

At the Pulitzer, the sound they make as they reverberate on the table is miked and amplified through speakers in the floor of the Mezzanine, giving the visitor the experience of being truly immersed in the beans. At times, this sound is also emitted throughout the main speaker system in the building. All in all, the beans provide a living, moving that literally animates the space.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

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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.

Shahrokh Yadegari explained last week that voice will be used in a few ways for the installation, including turning player pianos in the Cube and Lower galleries into “talking pianos.” When visitors in the galleries speak into an artfully placed microphone, a piano will play the voice with its keys and talk to whoever is near them. We don’t have video of that yet, so you’ll need to hear it for yourself and be amazed this weekend.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Art preparators mount bell speakers on top of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. Shahrokh Yadegari describes what sounds will be called out to the neighborhood.

If you’ve driven by the Pulitzer in last couple of weeks, you’ll notice that the neon sign is gone, and there are now five bell speakers on the roof facing Washington Boulevard. They are, of course, for the upcoming stylus, an exhibition that focuses on the notion of calling, and they’ll soon be calling to St. Louis.

The speakers in fact originally came from church bell towers, so this won’t be the first time they’ve been used to beckon a community. However, this time the community will have a chance to contribute to the sound, which Shahrokh Yadegari, a composer and sound designer working with Ann Hamilton, explained in an interview last week.

“It’s kind of the sound of the community that will be used as a gesture of calling to others,” said Yadegari. Anyone, anywhere will be able to call an account the Pulitzer is setting up and leave a message, which may then be funneled off the Pulitzer rooftop. These recordings will also be played inside the building.

“The sound system is really complex,” Shane, our Chief of Installations, explained about stylus. The audio maze so far includes light sensors, speakers throughout the building’s ventilation system and two player pianos. Hamilton worked with Yadegari to a create a system that, according to Shane, is “integrated so much into the architecture that it turns the building into some kind of giant instrument.”

Before installation began, Ann Hamilton’s studio sent Colin’s sketches to Shane Simmons, our Chief of Installations, who created a mock-up of the cubbies using foam core. He placed it in front of the window to the Water Court to see how it affected the architecture and light patterns of the Pulitzer. Here was the scene at 5pm:

Ann Hamilton’s studio designed the cubbies as a place to put the paper hands but also to be art objects in themselves, which interact with the Ando building in a harmonious way. The Pulitzer commissioned a cabinet shop in St. Louis to build modular units, which are five cubbies high and fit together to make a 6-foot-tall, 172-foot-wide structure.

As a final touch, Craig, a painter at the Pulitzer, painted the cubbies in eggshell white.

As you’ve seen on the blog over the past few days, we’re in the midst of installing stylus, a project by the artist Ann Hamilton.  But what is this exhibition all about?

If you could sum it up in one word (which you really can’t) “experience” would be high on the list.  “Immersive,”  and “interactive” would work too. Ann’s installation is structured around live acoustic elements, and like many of her installations, weaves together a range of media to produce an environment that engages your senses as you move through it.  Her work responds to the architectural presence and social history of the sites she works within, and she will be interacting with the Ando building in very distinctive ways, transforming each gallery into an engrossing audio and visual environment.  Without giving all of it away, here are a few of the elements you’ll discover in the installation:

A central focus is sound, which Ann has closely worked on with sound designer and composer Shahrokh Yadegari.  Visitors will be able to interact with the sound in a variety of ways – from using a stylus and a touch pad to “sign-in,” to a steel table in the Main Gallery with a rolling tray and a microphone.   Input from these elements will feed into either the speakers on the roof of the Pulitzer building or two player pianos situated in the Cube and Lower Galleries, which will then transmit the sounds.  There will also be record players throughout the exhibition, five rolling platform ladders with rotating projectors, jumping beans, taxidermy birds, a wall of cast paper hands that visitors can wear, concordance texts produced from the daily newspaper…. as you can see, there are many elements that will contribute to your overall experience.  The hope for these materials is to engage a relationship between the individual and the group, a single voice and a chorus, a silent book and a spoken reading, and finally, between a solitary listening and a collective hearing.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

In this day and age, everyone is looking for ways to be more environmentally responsible. Whether it’s recycling, buying locally grown foods, switching to compact fluorescent bulbs, or using mass transit, “going green” is the way to conserve energy, save money, and reduce one’s carbon footprint.

At the top of the list is investigating alternate energy sources–namely solar, wind, and thermal. The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts and EarthWays Center are offering you a low-cost opportunity to take this important step towards energy efficiency. The solar panel system that once powered Spencer Finch’s The Light Project installation, and is now in use at the Missouri Botanical Garden, could soon be yours for only $100!

Throughout the month of June, you’ll have the opportunity to purchase raffle tickets to win the entire system: eight 195 watt panels (1.56 kW), six 235 amp/hr 12V batteries, inverter, charge controller, and mounting hardware. The system is valued at over $17,000, but each raffle ticket is only $100. There’s no limit to the number of tickets each registrant may purchase, so you can increase your odds by buying multiple tickets.

This is a rare opportunity to truly invest in solar energy efficiency for your own home. In addition, all the funds raised will go to programming at either the Pulitzer or EarthWays. Thus, even if yours is not the winning ticket, you can feel good that your contribution is helping further enable green art and education projects in St. Louis.

For information on raffle tickets, please visit EarthWays’ website. Tickets are only on sale through June 28^th (with the drawing on June 30^th) so ACT NOW!

In addition, I will be guest blogging over the next two weeks for Art:21! I’m very excited about this opportunity – they have a fantastic website and the blog embodies their mission to increase knowledge and foster discussion on contemporary art. I have all sorts of blog ideas (almost too many) so I’ll mostly be focusing my posting energies over there.  But this blog won’t go forgotten, I’m asking some of the staff here to post about what they’re working on as we prep for the next exhibition.