Kitty Julian
Director of Marketing and Communications
Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2008
CURATOR TALK: Douglas Fogle, Dara Meyers-Kingsley and Heather Pesanti
3.00PM  |  Guided Tour of Inner and Outer Space at 2.00PM
FREE w/ Museum Admission (MF/CMOA members, PITT/CMU students are FREE)

Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International curators Douglas Fogle and Heather Pesanti, along with Dara Meyers-Kingsley (curator of the Mattress Factory's Inner and Outer Space) discuss their working process, the themes within their respective exhibitions and the end results of both shows.

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After the talk, we'll open up the discussion to include Q&A from the audience. Can't attend, but have a question about either show you'd like to ask? Leave your question in the comment string of this post and we'll do our best to make sure it gets answered.

Finally, just a big THANKS to the Life on Mars folks for allowing me the opportunity to guest-blog on the site. I look forward to seeing you at the talk!

Recently, we’ve been examining the visitor response to the Idea Centers that are placed strategically throughout the museum.  An educational component of the exhibition, the centers are intended to provide our guests quick access to the Life on Mars website, artists’ catalogues, gallery guides, and other informational resources while exploring the exhibition.  The Centers also serve as a place for visitors to blog on-the-spot about the Life on Mars experience.

Earlier this year, during a live webcast conversation, Douglas Fogle mentioned the importance of hiring architects to design the 2008 Carnegie International's exhibition space.   Douglas chose the innovative and experimental Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena, founders of the esteemed architectural firm Escher GuneWardena, to partition and redesign the museum spaces encompassed in Life on Mars’ sprawl.

They derived a conceptual order from the Fibonacci sequence of numbers (1,1,2,3,5,8, etc. – You read the Da Vinci Code, right?) that are rendered in neon tubing in Mario Merz’s Fibonacci 1202. Looking at occurrences of the numerical pattern in nature, the architects arrived at clouds as an appropriate metaphor.

Frank Escher is a renowned expert on the heavily influential architecture of John Lautner. It’s not a stretch to see traces of Lautner’s futurist “Googie” aesthetic in the transparent cylindrical legs of the table and the cloud shaped surface reminiscent of the Mar Brisas house in Alcopolco.  If you don’t know Lautner’s work, imagine any diner in 1950’s America, and you’ll have in your mind the vision for American modernism that he inspired.

Seating, of course, was also an issue when conceiving the Idea Centers. What does it feel like to sit on a cloud?  A number of custom-made ideas surfaced but the challenge was to straddle the conceptual integrity of the environment but still be comfortable, durable, and stylish.  In the spirit of the International, the iconic Jasper Morrison Air-Chair was the obvious solution - a chair that embodies all three components with an extra splash of humor and levity. 

Teenagers from the Pittsburgh region gathered at Carnegie Museum of Art on November 20 for “Ground Control” – a night of art- and music-making, food and fun, hosted by the museum’s Zero Gravity interns, a group of high school students who spend their Thursday evenings debating the significance of contemporary art, life, Barack Obama, and also the really important stuff, like M.I.A. versus Britney Spears versus … why does everyone feel the need to dress alike to feel accepted? (Seriously, why do they?)

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To find out more about Barry McGee, I would recommend you check out his Life on Mars page, the video segments from the award-winning documentary series Art in the Twenty-First Century, or watch the two-part Art Talk! conversation between Aaron Rose and Barry McGee from VBS.tv:

Part I:

and Part II:

Tickets for the event are $15 which includes admission to the museum prior to the event as well as one drink to the American Shorts Season Finale After Party.  Join us in the museum café for hot cider, pumpkin bars and plenty of beer and wine.
Call 412-622-8866 for tickets.

The upcoming screening of Bruce Conner films provokes a singular nostalgic Life on Mars remembrance for me: of my role in procuring the twelve glorious Angel photograms currently installed in the Hall of Sculpture.  The fact that the artist, sadly, passed away shortly after the exhibition opened makes the memory especially poignant.  Created during a limited period of time, these works were made by Conner using simply a light source, his body, and a sheet of photo sensitive paper.  The result is a series of haunting, life-size impressions of the human body, at times resembling spirit photography (a figure captured as a fleeting gesture of moving light, as in Untitled (Angel), 1976) while other times evoking a contortionists marvel (as in Teardrop Angel, 1974). 

It was my job to track down enough photograms to fill the upper level of the Hall of Sculpture.  This was no small task, given that they are rare (around 20 or so in existence), relatively fragile and light sensitive, and—though this cannot be measured—extremely beloved.  Certain photograms are located in museum collections, and so easier to find.  Others, however, were hidden gems, located through conversations with curators and former owners that traced the history of the objects through various hands and homes, in some cases leading to the discovery of photograms that we hadn’t known existed (and apparently have not been published).  Most touching to me was my conversations with the collectors or curators who own or care for the works in their collections.  In many cases, their relationships to these works seemed to be particularly precious.  One collector, who hesitated because his photogram was already promised to another museum exhibition immediately after ours, said, “It’s hard for me to imagine being without it for this long.”  He lent, however, testimony to the history of the Carnegie International and the importance of Conner’s work.  For the curatorial team, the Hall of Sculpture where these works are installed represented a moment of particular significance in the exhibition, a beating heart of the exhibition.  In the end, it’s become one of my favorite rooms, where, amidst elegant marble pillars, classical sculptures, and Mike Kelley’s fantastical Kandors, Bruce Conner’s angels are quietly watching over us.

Art:21 did a fascinating feature on Mark Bradford in the fourth season of their award-winning documentary series Art in the Twenty-First Century . Below is a web-exclusive:

 Nick Pozek
Web Initiatives Manager

Karin Campbell
Departmental Assistant, Contemporary Art
 

Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 black and white film Alphaville is a science fiction film noir in which the past is set in a future that resembles the present. Every film noir needs a hero, and in this film he is Lemmy Caution, named after a British comic book character. Caution's mission is to "liquidate" Dr. Vonbraun, the creator of the computer system Alpha 60, who maintains stability in Alphaville by controlling the minds of its residents through a strict enforcement of logic. Emotions are illogical in Alphaville, and those who express them are efficiently executed. Words that express emotion suddenly disappear from the consciousness of Alphaville's citizens, and from mysterious "bibles" owned by every citizen, containing every word and concept Alpha 60 allows. However, Lemmy is able to outsmart Alpha 60's logic by being illogical and impulsive, a human being, completing his mission and, of course, getting the girl.

Stephen Grebinski
Marketing Intern

Jacques Tati's 1967 film Playtime follows the director's famous Monsieur Hulot, played by Tati himself, as he is caught up in a modern Paris of sleek modern glass skyscrapers. Also making their way through this faceless city are a group of American tourists exploring the sterility of the "New Paris." As one of the outspoken tourists, Barbara, remarks, "I feel at home everywhere I go", a nod to the basic tenet of the International Style, a movement that aspired to create a sleek efficient, "style-less" new world devoid of any sort of regional individuality. There is, in fact very little that makes the Paris in this film Paris. There is but one lone shot of the Eiffel Tower, and even the locals are overwhelmed by the environment.  An old woman selling flowers is relegated to a street corner surrounded by stark concrete, further anachronized by her surroundings. Construction workers are forced into robotic, performative movements and the maître d’ of a chic new restaurant cannot walk without a floor tile sticking to his shoe. The architecture overwhelms everyone in this film, until the end, when the rigid order demanded by this environment collapses, almost literally, as the stylish, unfinished restaurant, where M. Hulot and the tourists find themselves, falls to pieces, and human nature and all the chaos that comes with it becomes rule of law.

Stephen Grebinski
Marketing Intern