LARB Digital Edition: Art + Architecture
()
About this ebook
Related to LARB Digital Edition
Related ebooks
Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Walking Tour of Pensacola, Florida Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFrank's Draftsman Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFast Forward: The Future(s) of the Cinematic Arts Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOn the Horseshoe: A Guide to the Historic Campus of the University of South Carolina Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Picasso Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsProceed to Check Out Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLee Krasner: A Biography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Light and Air: The Photography of Bayard Wootten Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Midtown Sacramento: Creative Soul of the City Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThalian Hall Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHistoric Movie Theaters of Downtown Cleveland Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHistoric Milwaukee Public Schoolhouses Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLegendary Locals of Oakland Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSanta Fe Bohemia: The Art Colony 1964-1980 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLizards on the Mantel, Burros at the Door: A Big Bend Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSilver Lake Chronicles: Exploring an Urban Oasis in Los Angeles Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHistoric Genesse Country: A Guide to Its Lands and Legacies Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Season on Vancouver Island Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPlastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGene Smith's Sink: A Wide-Angle View Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How the Other Half Looks: The Lower East Side and the Afterlives of Images Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWe Lived a Life and Then Some: The Life, Death, and Life of a Mining Town Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAt Pyramid Lake Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSnowboarding in Southern Vermont: From Burton to the U.S. Open Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe San Quentin Chronicles: Inspired by a True Story Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Walking Tour of Pittsburgh's Business District Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Art For You
The Designer's Guide to Color Combinations Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Morpho: Anatomy for Artists Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Art Models 10: Photos for Figure Drawing, Painting, and Sculpting Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Designer's Dictionary of Color Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Lust Unearthed: Vintage Gay Graphics From the DuBek Collection Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Art 101: From Vincent van Gogh to Andy Warhol, Key People, Ideas, and Moments in the History of Art Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Draw and Paint Anatomy, All New 2nd Edition: Creating Lifelike Humans and Realistic Animals Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Super Graphic: A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Draw Like an Artist: 100 Flowers and Plants Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Anatomy for Fantasy Artists: An Essential Guide to Creating Action Figures & Fantastical Forms Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Complete Papyrus of Ani Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Botanical Drawing: A Step-By-Step Guide to Drawing Flowers, Vegetables, Fruit and Other Plant Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Oil and Marble: A Novel of Leonardo and Michelangelo Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Drawing School: Fundamentals for the Beginner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Drawing and Sketching Portraits: How to Draw Realistic Faces for Beginners Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Shape of Ideas: An Illustrated Exploration of Creativity Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Find Your Artistic Voice: The Essential Guide to Working Your Creative Magic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Creative, Inc.: The Ultimate Guide to Running a Successful Freelance Business Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bibliophile: An Illustrated Miscellany Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Electric State Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for LARB Digital Edition
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
LARB Digital Edition - Esther Yi
Table of Contents
Introduction by Kate Wolf
Walls Are Not Everlasting
: Preserving the East Side Gallery in Berlin by Esther Yi
Part Palace, Part Temple, Part Prison: On the Casa Malaparte by Michael Z. Wise
Levitated Mass Hysteria: Michael Heizer’s LACMA Installation by Victoria Dailey
Replicated Communities: Bianca Bosker’s Original Copies
by Evan Selinger
Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Masters of Space, Viewed Through the Rear View Mirror by Victoria Bugge Øye
Reflections on The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A.
by Joe Day
Introduction
As any historian or casual observer of urban transformation might tell you — and as the title of Esther Yi’s contribution to this selection of recent reviews and essays from the Los Angeles Review Books Art and Architecture section states — walls are not everlasting. In her piece, Yi chronicles the uncertain fate of a section of the Berlin Wall known as the East Side Gallery. The Gallery, a group of 105 murals painted by people from all over the world amid the fall of a divided Germany in 1990, was once seen as a subversive, artistic expression of liberation; now its integrity is threatened by urban and economic development, not to mention graffiti and even one of the original artists who painted it. The East Side Gallery served to further undermine the monumental structure that was the Berlin Wall, and yet, perhaps inevitably, now it is being undermined.
Indeed, it seems no wall, no matter the purpose, is everlasting, and the following collection examines different ways monuments and notions of monumentality in art and architecture exist in relation to this reality. In his essay on the Casa Malaparte in Capri, Michael Z. Wise explores how the controversial author Curzio Malaparte designed a house in his own image, an ego-driven edifice that embodied Malaparte’s visions of grandeur and internal conflicts. In her essay on land artist Michael Heizer’s 2012 installation at LACMA, Levitated Mass, Victoria Dailey notes the powerful sway of the monumental on our common sense, tracing lithic obsession back to the celebrated obelisks of post-revolutionary France and beyond, and illustrating how this tricky reverence evinces humanity’s preference for myth and fantasy over fact.
Evan Selinger’s review of Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China by Bianca Bosker takes a look at the phenomena dubbed duplitecture,
the uncanny practice of building replicas of famous Western landmarks in present-day China; what Bosker sees as creating ‘the most enduring monuments’ [for] a new, post-Tiananmen Square country.
Back in the US, Victoria Bugge Øye reviews the first ever monograph on the acclaimed Postmodern architects Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro, noting the way their iconic revamp of Manhattan’s High Line stands as a testament to some of the team’s most fundamental design concerns.
In closing, we look back at architect and writer Joe Day’s own monumental undertaking — reviewing eight of nine exhibitions staged last year during the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. Here, with an insider’s perspective, Day illuminates the recent architectural history of a city often accused of a willful neglect of its past. Certainly L.A. doesn’t have the best preservation record, but what about all the projects that didn’t even find their way to completion — a master planned park system, a utopian Wilshire Boulevard? (These never-plans were explored in the fascinating exhibition and accompanying catalogue Neverbuilt Los Angeles.) In light of the impermanence of even the grandest construction, this seems a fitting place to end, looking not to the everlasting, but as Day puts it, to a more fluid measure of Los Angeles’ changing promise and constant potential.
Kate Wolf
Senior Arts Editor
Walls Are Not Everlasting
: Preserving the East Side Gallery in Berlin
By Esther Yi
EARLY ONE MORNING this past October, the German pop artist Jim Avignon began to whiten a mural he had painted on the Berlin Wall more than 20 years ago. The police arrived within minutes. Unlike the herds of tourists who walk by the East Side Gallery and discreetly scribble on its surface, Avignon’s top-to-bottom undertaking, backed by 20 assistants, was hard to miss. Prepared, he pulled out a letter inviting him to repaint his work, Doin It Cool For The East Side, as part of a major restoration at the open-air gallery. It’s unclear if the authorities noticed that the letter was several years old. They thumbed Avignon’s passport and let him proceed, deciding he looked official enough.
The police might have been less understanding, had they known that Avignon was not only working without permission, but also painting something entirely new. After the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, a motley international group that included Avignon painted over a hundred murals on a border section facing East Germany. The murals — deemed a unique snapshot of post-Mauerfall jubilation — and the concrete wall sections at the East Side Gallery were placed under monument protection, or Denkmalschutz, in 1991. Any alterations — removal, relocation, renovation — must be approved by Denkmalschutz authorities. The East Side Gallery is now the longest section of the Wall preserved in its original location, running for 1.3 kilometers parallel between the road Mühlenstrasse (painted side) and the Spree River (reverse side) in a central area of Berlin called Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. Hundreds of thousands visit every year. Restorations notwithstanding, every work from 1990 has retained its original content — except Avignon’s, after nine hours on that cold October day.
His timing could not have been worse. Despite the site’s protected status, its overseeing association, the Artists Initiative East Side Gallery, feels that the wall has been treated like a second-class citizen in a city of memorials — long put off, lied to, and abused for other interests,
as the group writes on its blog. Indignant grumbling escalated into high-pitched furor earlier this year, when a building project behind the Gallery threatened its partial destruction. The developer, Living Bauhaus, is erecting a 200-feet-tall luxury tower in the area between the wall and the river — formerly a death strip where East German border guards kept watch. (Despite popular imagination, the Berlin Wall was not a single barrier, but a multi-layered security system.) As stipulated by the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district, Living Bauhaus intended to remove about 70 feet of the wall to create street access not only to its high-rise, but also to a pedestrian bridge over the Spree planned by the district.
When construction workers removed a concrete slab in early March, hundreds — and by the weekend, thousands — of demonstrators gathered at the Gallery to prevent further destruction. Maik Uwe Hinkel, head of Living Bauhaus, postponed work on the site. Taking a stance of confused irritation, he pointed at the higher-ups who had signed off on his project. Franz Schulz, then mayor of the district, did in fact approve the building permit — and bystanders have been puzzled by his seemingly casual disregard for Denkmalschutz. (Günther Schaefer, one of the Gallery’s painters and now an active member of the Artists Initiative, puts it simply: The mayor broke the law. He is a criminal.
) But the district’s Denkmalschutz authorities approved the wall opening. Hinkel complained that he and Living Bauhaus had been the vicarious agents
of the district’s