Footprints and Thumbprints: Robert Rauschenberg in DC July 7, 2008

Robert Rauschenberg's Reservoir

With the recent death of seminal artist Robert Rauschenberg, the airwaves and the blogwaves have been filled with stories of the artist, from his childhood in North Dakota to his early days at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, to the heady years in New York City. Rauschenberg also left his footprints in another city that played a significant role in his life: that's right, our very own Washington, D.C.

“I bought a combine in 1957 of Bob’s from Leo Castelli, whose gallery was in his house. The Rauschenberg was in the bathtub,” remembers Alice Denny, a fixture on the Washington, D.C. arts scene since the late 1950s. After buying that first Rauschenberg, she became friends with the artist and his partner Jasper Johns. In 1962, Denny founded the Washington Gallery of Modern Art and curated a show called The Popular Image. “Bob was in that show and Jim Dine did the cover for the catalogue. We brought the Judson dancers from New York and I listed Bob as a dancer in the catalogue, though Bob said he wasn’t a dancer. He did his wonderful work called Pelican, held at a roller skating rink. He couldn’t skate so he took lessons back in Brooklyn. The piece had him rollerskating with a parachute on his back.” You can get a glimpse of what Rauschenberg looked like with a parachute on his back if you take a look at his work Autobiography, on view in the lobby of the McEvoy Auditorium at SAAM.

Rauschenberg also performed Pelican the following year in the Pop Festival that Denny organized.  “Bob was very connected to Washington. He loved it, and felt very responsible here," Denny adds. "He wasn’t frivolous about it at all. He would do anything here and he came back to help me with the NOW Festival, and did a new piece called Linoleum." The work was inspired by the painting Miss Amelia Van Buren by Thomas Eakins that he saw when they visited the Phillips Collection. Linoleum featured a huge American flag with images of Washington on it. There were also fifteen white chickens in a cage as well as dancer Simone Forti wearing Denny's wedding dress. "All this came from Miss Van Buren," Denny remembered. "‘Oh now I know what I’m going to do,’ Bob said while looking at the Eakins at the Phillips."

In 1976, Rauschenberg had a major retrospective at SAAM, curated by Walter Hopps and designed by Val Lewton. Hopps was known for his brilliance and his slightly off-kilter behavior. "Hopps's main idea for the exhibition was that the show would be installed backwards," Lewton tells me over the phone the other day. "The reason he did this was that he didn't think the later work was as strong. He wanted to have people leave with the strongest impression of Rauschenberg's work." Hopps apparently had the habit of working at extremely odd hours, including four in the morning, leading the then-director of the museum to say in frustration, "I'd fire Walter if only I could find him."

Rauschenberg had lots of people coming in to the exhibition space while the show was still being installed, Lewton recalled, which is not how museums usually  operate. These days you have to be signed in by a guard, and only after he or she can find your name on the "approved" list. Those were the days, I guess. Apparently, a desk that had been converted into a workstation for the exhibit preparers was reconverted into a kind of portable bar. I can't imagine you'd see much of that these days, either.

Lewton recalled one other story that showed how the staff at SAAM pitched in to help Rauschenberg. "There was one piece in the exhibition that Rauschenberg had done for Merce Cunningham," Lewton said. "It was a set but also a piece of art. Cunningham needed it for a performance on TV, but it was during the exhibition, so it couldn't be in two places at once. Walter came up with the idea of our staff doing a facsimile. We produced our own Rauschenberg and that one was used for the TV show."

Thirty years after that important show at SAAM, Rauschenberg created a lithograph for the museum's reopening. Marie Elena Amatangelo, exhibition coordinator for SAAM, worked with Rauschenberg before joining the Smithsonian in 2004. She was a consultant hired by the Guggenheim to oversee Rauschenberg's  The 1/4 Mile or Two Furlong Piece. The work is indeed what it sounds like: the length of nearly five city blocks filled with all types of Rauschenberg's work in various media. "I worked with Bob and his studio," Amatangelo recalled. "I would spend my days in the gallery with Bob talking about the installation. He had a wonderful sense of humor and always told jokes. He could walk into a space and alleviate any tension and make people laugh and bring things down to earth. I found it very calming and relaxing to have a conversation with him. We brought The 1/4 Mile to New York, to Bilbao, Spain, and to Mass MOCA."

When SAAM was reopening, Amatangelo called Rauschenberg's New York curator and proposed the idea of his doing a limited edition commemorative print. "He wanted to use images from works that are in the collection that would signify the historical reference of the building," Amatangelo said, "That's why you have the image of the first telegraph, one of the first patents that was issued when the building was the U.S. Patent Office. He also wanted people who were important to the building, like Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman. We sent him over 500 images to work with. Then he had a stroke and he was not able to sign the prints. He was left handed. He used his thumbprint instead. There's an orange thumbprint on the bottom of each print."

Now that I've heard these stories I'll always think of the artist with a parachute at his back, or chickens at his side, or too frail to sign his name, but pushing a little further to leave his mark.

• Robert Rauschenberg, Alice Denning, Washington Gallery of Modern Art, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Carnaval del Corazón: It's Getting Hot Inside July 2, 2008

Patssi Valdez's The Magic Room

Upstairs at SAAM you can visit the exhibition The Honor of Your Company Is Requested: President Lincoln's Inaugural Ball and you can see how well you waltz, thanks to handy dance diagrams that are right on the floor. And when you've perfected your waltz, come downstairs and try some moves that would have turned heads during the Lincoln ball.

Summer at SAAM is bound to heat up this week as we kick off Carnaval del Corazón, or Carnival of the Heart. This Thursday evening, July 3 from 5 to 8 p.m., join us in the skylit Kogod Courtyard for salsa demonstrations and dancing, accompanied by irresistible music from Puerto Rico and Cuba.

Carnaval del Corazón is a series of programs spread out in summer and early fall. The first Thursday of the month (July 3, August 7, and September 4) is a Latin-jazz inspired event with a great Latin-jazz band as well as a featured dance with demonstrations and instruction. This month is salsa, next month it's tango, and September is flamenco and rumba. By October you'll be able to step out with the best of them.

Come and show off your moves at SAAM and make Lincoln proud! (And, while you're at it, upload some dancing pics to SAAM's flickr group!)

• Abraham Lincoln, Latin Jazz, Patssi Valdez, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Americans in Paris June 26, 2008

Louise Bourgeois' Maman. Photo by Howard Kaplan.

Greetings from Paris. I'm here for a week for the exhibition of a friend's paintings and have fallen in love all over again with this city. It's a city for the senses: everything seems a bit more alive here, a bit more full. Artists and writers (and lovers) have always been drawn to Paris. It's also an excellent place for bloggers!

Walking these streets, I began to think of the rich artistic lives of American ex-pats in Paris after the war. American artists keep coming to Paris in our time, either to live or to exhibit their work. American sculptor Richard Serra for example, who is represented by two works of art at SAAM, has created promenade, a monumental (yet temporary) piece for the Grand Palais, the glass and steel building that was built for the famous Paris Exhibition of 1900. His work, giant slabs of rusted steel, at first seems incongruous to the century-old building.  In the main exhibition space he has lined up five rectangular pieces, each approximately forty-six feet high and probably weighing several tons. They are massive, powerful, like totems to a new, harsh world. They question the relationship of art to architecture. If you stand at either end of the Palais, say on a east-west axis, you can look at all of them at once. Despite the amount of gravity these pieces possess, they bend slightly at the top, alternating between curving to the right and left. They begin to dance. It's a lovely touch; it's Richard Serra en pointe.

In contrast, artist Louise Bourgeois's Maman is a glossy black spider that beckons you from inside the Tuileries, the gardens just outside the incomparable Louvre museum. Bourgeois, who also has two works in SAAM's collection, was born in Paris in 1911 but has been an American citizen for most of her life (therefore, I'm leaving the title of this post as is!). You wouldn't want to mess with this spider, but Bourgeois's mama spider is life giving; there's even an egg sac in her belly that bears a strong resemblance to the art deco lamps that grace the entrances to the Paris metro. The sculpture is delicate and strong at the same time. There's plenty of breathing room in and around it, creating its own world while also being part of the landscape. It's a tribute to the city that shaped the artist's mother and, more importantly, to the artist's mother. As Bourgeois has said, “the Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver.  My family was in the business of tapestry restoration, and my mother was in charge of the workshop. Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.“

Bourgeois and Serra are two sculptors working on quite a large scale, at least in these two pieces. It's good to see their works out and about, in the Tuileries and in the Grand Palais. Good art should get you thinking; these works do exactly that for me.

• Richard Serra, Louise Bourgeois, Paris, Louvre, Grand Palais, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Anna Deavere Smith: The We of Me June 12, 2008

Anna Deavere Smith

Anna Deavere Smith gave the final talk in the American Pictures Distinguished Lecture Series. Smith spoke about a Ruth Orkin photo, Member of the Wedding, Opening Night, Ethel Waters, Carson McCullers, and Julie Harris, New York City, 1950. I never knew that a seemingly quiet photo could say so much.

Smith, whom many people know from her recurring role on the NBC show The West Wing is a playwright as well as an actress. It's these two distinctive roles tied together that gave her such an interesting perspective on the Orkin image. Waters and Harris are the actresses; McCullers the astounding author who wrote Member of the Wedding.

As way of background, Smith brought us back to the 1980s and her early days in New York City when she performed at Joe Papp's Public Theater. That's when I first saw her performance piece, Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities. At the time we were both working on projects with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Artistic director Judith Jamison and she were creating "Hymn: For Alvin Ailey." Smith interviewed the dancers and captured the rhythm and cadences of their voices, then spoke them onstage while each dancer performed. Jamison choreographed the homage to Ailey.

During these heady days in New York, Smith wandered into the Rizzoli bookstore on Fifth Avenue, and saw a show of Ruth Orkin's work that made an indelible impression on her. When Smith was able to afford it, she bought a print of the Orkin photo of opening night of Member of the Wedding.

In the play, the Julie Harris character, Frankie, is a girl turning into a woman, or perhaps a tomboy turning into a girl. Her life choices seem limited; her imagination is not. She lives with her younger brother and their caretaker Bernice, played by Ethel Waters. Life for the three of them is stifling; Frankie wants more. Frankie is searching for herself and refers to her older brother and his fiance as "the we of me." She had been looking for a "we" to belong to, and thinks she has found it.  If only she can run away with them...

Smith took us on a journey from the text of the play to the Orkin photo where it's Carson McCullers who is nestled into Ethel Waters, and seems to be searching for a sense of belonging. It's as if the playwright has turned into her own lead character. On the other hand, Julie Harris is pictured smoking a cigarette and drinking both a glass of champagne and what looks like an espresso. She's hit the opening night trifecta. According to Smith, the photo is an image of "the we of me," of people finding a connection. On opening night in the Orkin photo, it looks as if McCullers has found her "we of me."

• Anna Deavere Smith, Ruth Orkin, Carson McCullers, Ethel Waters, Julie Harris, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Scan the Man: Scanimation Book Event on June 14 June 10, 2008

Gallop! A Scanimation Picture Book by Rufus Butler Seder

Gallop! A Scanimation Picture Book is one of those books I bought for a child in my life, but was reluctant to hand it over when the fateful day came. The book mesmerized me from the start. The minute I picked it up in the museum shop, I was hooked. When I brought it back to the office, a few people gathered around to watch me turn the pages, and in turn, watch the animals move, glide, hop, and gallop across the pages of this imaginative book. The author, Rufus Butler Seder, will be making a presentation he's calling Adventures in Optical Motion at SAAM on Saturday, June 14. Eye Level had a chance to speak to the author, who lives in the Boston area.

Eye Level: How did you come up with the idea for Gallop? What inspired you?

Rufus Butler Seder: I've been doing stuff related to this for almost eighteen years. Gallop is my first book. Previously, I created three thirty-foot glass and hand-cast murals for Union Station. The book was my attempt to do something a bit more affordable. I realized that I could go back a step to an earlier stage and create animation using a field of black stripes on acetate. A simple pull tab reveals the horse in one position, then the next.

EL: Eadweard Muybridge, known for his "stop action" images, seems to play a role in your work.

RBS: Yes, that is his horse, based on his famous studies in Palo Alto in 1886. There's not a person working in moving images today who has not drawn on Muybridge. The images repeat themselves over and over. The cat is Muybridge's as well.

EL: I'm looking forward to Saturday's program. Can you tell us a little about what you have planned?

RBS: I'm going to briefly discuss the history of motion and optical toys going all the way back to zoetropes, from around 1850. Some of these are still around. Artists are breaking new ground in this--there are subway zoetropes. Nobody has really abandoned these. My presentation will take us from zoetropes all the way to the present. Even though my book is in some ways primitive as compared to video, people are still finding it new.

Animal Locomotion (plate 319) (Man Throwing a Ball) by  Eadweard Muybridge

EL: How do you work?

RBS: I go out in the field and I'll videotape the dog running. Then I'll go home and store the animation frames in my computer, then select those frames that look best. I'll rework it then test the animation until I really get something that has the look I want. I then scramble it up . . . and lo and behold!

EL: Can you give us a scoop and tell us what's next?

RBS: Waddle is volume two, and it will come out this October. I can't say too much about it. One animal is an ant; that's all I can say at this point.

EL: We'll take it. Thank you!

• Rufus Butler Seder, Eadweard Muybridge, Smithsonian American Art Museum