Tag: available light

The Alphabet of Art

The Humble Fabulist1 Comment
Lee Krasner || Primeval Resurgence, 1961 || Oil on canvas
Alberto Giacometti || Tall Figures II & III, 1960 || Bronze
Robert Rauschenberg || Coca-Cola Plan, 1958 || Pencil on paper, oil on three Coca-Cola bottles, wood newel cap, cast metal wings on wood structure
Mark Rothko || Black on Dark Sienna on Purple, 1960 || Oil on canvas
Rosemarie Trockel || Untitled, 1991 || Enameled steel and three stove plates
Robert Gober || Untitled, 1998 || Wood, steel, enamel
Senga Nengudi || R.S.V.P., 1975|| Nylon mesh and sand
Dan Flavin || ”monument” for V. Tatlin, 1969

”Flavin’s work generates ambient light that reaches into the viewer’s space. The form, resembling a skyscraper, refers to a never-realized, but nonetheless influential, monument to an organization supporting Communist revolution designed by the Russian constructivist artist Vladimir Tatlin in 1920. It was to be a spiraling steel framework thirteen hundred feet tall in which rotating glass rooms would be suspended. Though utterly impractical engineering-wise, it remains an influential symbol of the artist’s efforts to combine art and technology. Flavin’s “monument,” despite its low-tech, small-scale nature, pays homage to Tatlin’s futuristic, utopian ideals.” [source: MOCA]

Robert Smithson || Mirage No. 1, 1967 || Nine units of mirrored glass
Roy Lichtenstein || Man with Folded Arms, 1962 || Oil on canvas
Cady Noland || Basket of Nothing, 1990 || Wire basket with assortment of building tools and materials
Julia Wachtel || Landscape No. 2 (Aerobics), 1989 || Oil, flashe, lacquer ink on canvas
Manuel Ocampo || Untitled, ca. 1991 || Oil on canvas

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

May 9th, 2019

Available Light || Lincoln Center

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Available Light was a 1983 creation, a collaboration between three American icons: choreographer Lucinda Childs, composer John Adams and architect Frank Gehry, commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles.

The work was revived in 2015 and it was this updated version that we had the chance to enjoy as part of Lincoln Center’s ”Mostly Mozart Festival”, in 2018. Lucinda Childs’ interpretation of John Adams’ music that moves and unfolds like an expanding universe, was a deceivingly simple – in reality highly complex, energetic choreography, wonderfully complemented by Frank Gehry’s architectural set design.

A compilation of interviews with with John Adams, Lucinda Childs and Frank Gehry, with photographs of the original production, can be found in this 2015 article, by Julie Lazar, curator of the original work, in 1983.

Jazz @ Lincoln Center

July 13th, 2018