What art have I seen?
In pursuit of the Question Mark – a retrospective exhibition at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow. A really packed exhibition of the work of George Wyllie.
Collaboration
Billy Klüver again,
The “expertise” that artists bring to the collaboration comes directly from their experience in making art. The artist deals with materials and physical situations in a straightforward manner without the limits of generally accepted functions of an object or situation, and without assigning a value hierarchy to any material. The audacity of Picasso’s collages in his time, Meret Oppenheim’s surrealist objects, and Rauschenberg’s combines and cardboard pieces all illustrate this quality. The artist makes the most efficient use of materials, and achieves the maximum effect with minimum means. Surplus of material leads to decorative work. The artist is sensitive to scale and how it affects the human being. From cave drawings to Persian miniatures, cathedral frescoes, or Christo’s Running Fence, scale has been a consistent concern of the artist. The artist is sensitive to generally unexpressed aesthetic assupltions, which are based on subjective preference masquerading as “objective,” practical, economic, or social factors. The artist assumes total responsibility for the artwork. The artist knows that a work is the result of personal choices: this sense of commitment and responsibility gives the artist and the work a unique quality.
Artists, Engineers, and Collaboration (published in Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology, A Manifesto for Cyborgs. Bender, G. and Druckrey, T. (Eds) Dia Center for the Arts, Discussions in Contemporary Culture Number 9. Seattle: Bay Press, 1994).
Collapse
Billy Klüver reminds us of Jean Tinguely’s work on collapse in Artists, Engineers, and Collaboration Klüver-Billy-Artists-Engineers-and-Collaboration (published in Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology, A Manifesto for Cyborgs. Bender, G. and Druckrey, T. (Eds) Dia Center for the Arts, Discussions in Contemporary Culture Number 9. Seattle: Bay Press, 1994).
Jean Tinguely came to New York City in early 1960. On seeing the city for the first time, he decided to build a large machine that would violently destroy itself in front of an audience in a theater, throwing off parts in all directions. A protective netting would save the audience. When the Museum of Modern Art invited Jean to build his machine in the garden of the museum, he asked me for help. I took him to the New Jersey dumps, which in those days were not covered with dirt. He found bicycle wheels, parts of old appliances, tubs, and other junk, which we hauled to the museum and threw over the fence into the garden.
Enlisting the help of Harold Hodges at Bell Laboratories, we built a timer that controlled eight electrical circuits that closed successively as the machine progressed towards its ultimate fate. Motors started; smoke, generated by mixing titanium tetrachloride and ammonia, bellowed out of a bassinet; a piano began to play and was later set on fire; smaller machines shot out from the sculpture and ran into the audience. In order to make the main structure collapse, Harold had devised a scheme of using supporting sections of Wood’s metal, which would melt from the head of overheated resistors. The whole thing was over in twenty-seven minutes. The audience applauded, and then descended on the wreckage for souvenirs. Jean called the event Homage to New York. During those three or four weeks of the construction of the machine I learned how to listen to the artist, and to give him as many technical choices as I could – as quickly as possible. And as Jean has said repeatedly since, it couldn’t have happened without our collaboration.
For information see http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=33838
Body Pods podcast
Each podcast in this series, co-produced by Fuel and Roundhouse, has been made by an artist in collaboration with a scientist, exploring a different part of the human body.
CHRIS FREMANTLE 
leave a comment