Dia Art Foundation's Walter De Maria

I paid a visit to Walter De Maria's "The Lightning Field," administered by the Dia Art Foundation which I wrote about here. Per their website, Dia plays a vital role among visual-arts organizations by initiating, supporting, presenting, and preserving art projects. They also play a vital role protecting their copyright.

Yesterday I received two phone calls--at work and at home--along with an e-mail wich read:

One of our recent guests directed us to your website on which you have posted a number of photos of The Lightning Field. Our policy is not to allow photographs of the site or the cabin and we ask that you would respect that and remove the photos from your website. Please note that The Lightning Field is protected by copyright.

I would appreciate hearing back from you. Thank you in advance for your cooperation.

Cordially,

Kathleen Shields

Administrator

I wondered, "who is this recent guest?" Do they have nothing better to do than scan the internet for copyright violations? So I respomded:

Hi Irene and Kathleen~

What is Dia's policy around fair use of copyrighted material? For
example, do you prohibit the incidental capture of the lightning field
in the snapshop of a person, such as the attached example taken from
the internet?

How about a photograph used for the purpose of criticism
or non-commerical use? You state that your policy does not allow
photographs of the site or cabin. Does that mean you allow the
production of images by other means? For example, would one be allowed
to sketch their impressions of the site or cabin?

Thanks,

Michael

Less than an hour later, I got this response:

Dia does indeed prohibit any type of photography at the site. We respect the artist's wish that the work be experienced by the visitor rather than seen through photographs, which becomes difficult when images are disseminated, published, or posted online, as they are on your website.

However, we are happy to share images for academic and other non-commercial uses and would charge a nominal fee in these cases.

Best,
Irene

Irene Kopitov
Public Affairs Associate
Dia Art Foundation
535 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011
P: 212-293-5518 F: 212-989-4055

It's kind of like the TV shows where the two detectives question the suspect, but in this case it's more like "good cop-polite cop" than "good cop-bad cop."

I'm not really interested in paying to post Dia's photographs of an artwork the maker didn't want photographed. There are a few common, often used images that can be found here, here, here, and here. The images give the impression of a much lusher, greener place, and create the expectation that one will see lighting hit the poles. According to one of the caretakers of the cabin, she has only seen this happen a few times in the thirty years she's been going out there.

I would like to write more about the quality of the light and time, two important aspects of the work I believe have not been addressed in other write ups. I'll save that for a future posting.

For those interested in seeeing the work, I advise them to bring some antihistamines. Several in our party (myself included) spent a wheezy, choughy night. The cabin and it's furnishings are made of unfinished wood, and the rough surfaces seem to be a haven for dust and mold. After a few hours outside, the hardier members of our group seemed to recover just fine.

For more descriptions of the work, look at Christopher Campbell's piece on Cormac McCarthy (a .pdf file), also Todd Gibson offers a good description of his 24 hours outside of Quemado. Charles Graeber writes about his experience for Popular Science here.

Begining in March, Dia takes cabin reservations for their season from May to October. During lightning season (July and August) the cabin rents for $1500 a night. In theory, one could just drive up there in the off season, using the map found at CLUI and see it for free (AYOR).

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HUD Punked by The Yes Men

CNN reports today that a man was able to pass himself off as a HUD official. Andy Bichlbaum spoke to attendees of the Gulf Coast Reconstruction and Hurricane Preparedness Summit:

Bichlbaum said the department's mission was to ensure affordable housing is available for those who need it.

"This year, in New Orleans, I'm ashamed to say we have failed," he said.

To change that, HUD would reverse its plans to demolish 5,000 units "of perfectly good public housing," with housing in the city in tight supply, he said.

Former occupants have been "begging to move back in," he said. "We're going to help them to do that."

The government's practice had been to tear down public housing where it could, because such projects were thought to cause crime and unemployment, he said.

But crime rates in the city are at a record high and there is no evidence that people in the projects are more likely to be unemployed, he said.

The man added that it also would be essential to create conditions for prosperity.

Toward that end, he said, Wal-Mart would withdraw its stores from near low-income housing and "help nurture local businesses to replace them."

Wal-Mart was unmoved. "As evidenced by the fact that we recently reopened two stores in the New Orleans metropolitan area, there is absolutely no truth to these statements," said spokeswoman Marisa Bluestone.

In a comment that elicited applause from the contractors and builders, Bichlbaum said, "With your help, the prospects of New Orleanians will no longer depend on their birthplace, and the cycle of poverty will come to an end."

Finally, to ensure another hurricane does not inundate the city, Exxon and Shell have promised to spend $8.6 billion "to finance wetlands rebuilding from $60 billion in profits this year," he said.

Below is a picture of Bichlbaum with RTMark from the infowar symposium put on by Ars Electonica. It appears that he only owns one tie
:

Bichlbaum was interviewed on Democracy Now as part of The Yes Men. CNN reports:

Annie Chen, media coordinator for Survivors Village, a tent-city protest for the reopening of public housing in New Orleans, applauded Bichlbaum's theatrics.

"Right now, a lie is better than the truth," she said.

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22 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Joel Johnson recntly made a great find at Gotham City Art of Wally Wood's "22 Panels That Always Work." Joel wrote to Larry Hamma, who pasted the art together and did the lettering. He quotes Wally as saying, "Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up."

Joel has scanned this work so it can be used as a screensaver in vaious sizes. Go to his site to download, read about the piece's history, and tell him thanks for making this available.

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Minerva Park

In the first two years I lived on Minerva Park, thirty-six gang-related killings took place within a mile of my home. Things have calmed down a bit since then, as the local cholos have been carted off by the criminal justice system. Potholes and parking problems aside, my casita del barrio is not a bad place to live.

My past posting of my dealings with Charter seemed to be the squeek that got my wheel greased. With that in mind, I sent a letter off to Suja Lowenthal, the 2nd district Long Beach city council representative for my neighborhood. With a resounding third of the votes cast, she took over the seat abruptly vacated by Dan Baker.

I'll post an update if I hear back from Suja, one of three Lowenthals in local politics. Here's my letter:

On-going street repair work in my neighborhood has been proceeding apace: roads are being resurfaced; broken curbs and sidewalks are being repaired. Both10th Street and Anaheim are fixed, and North-South running streets on both sides of Minerva Park have been repaired. In fact, just last week the alley to the West of Minerva Park was paved for the first time, one few remaining dirt roads left in the city.

I mention all this because I expect the broken sidewalks and curbs on Minerva Park will be repaired soon. Before this will happen, I’m hoping some critical design flaws will be addressed first. When Minerva Park’s half-block long court of Spanish bungalows were first built, the size and number of cars were less of an issue than they are today. Curb to curb, Minerva Park is about twenty feet wide. With today’s oversized SUVs parked along both sides, this leaves barely enough room for one car to drive down the middle. Since there is no turn-around at the end, cars must reverse drive all the way to 11th Street, much like exiting a driveway. On a couple of occasions, cars parked on both sides prevented the passage of the city’s garbage trucks, which meant trash went uncollected for two weeks. This has not been a problem lately, because the garbage trunk has returned later in the day, during street sweeping hours, a horribly inefficient method for collecting the trash. In addition to the city’s refuse and recycling trucks, large delivery vehicles and the private trash collection for the apartment at the end of Minerva Park must also negotiate the narrow roadway. I’m concerned that if a large emergency vehicle like a fire truck or ambulance is unable to pass in an emergency, it could pose a huge liability issue for the city.

Some residents have improvised solutions by parking large vans and cars with two wheels on the curb or on the grass between the sidewalk and the street. Because the houses were built in the early 1920’s, the depths of the garages were made to accommodate Model Ts instead of today’s longer vehicles, so no cars are able to be parked inside them. Some residents have taken to leaving recycling bins or cheap plastic chairs out all week in the street to “reserve” parking spaces in front of their homes. With two cars parked between each driveway, it makes for minutes of tight back-and-forth maneuvering to remove one’s car from a driveway and onto the street. There have been a couple of occasions when someone parked in front of the driveway across the street from mine, making it impossible to leave in may car, another potential liability issue.

In the twelve years that I have owned my home on Minerva Park, I have never seen a police patrol vehicle drive down the street, other than the times the Long Beach Police were called out due to a disturbance or in response to a reported crime. I have seen LBPD patrol cars drive down 11th Street on numerous occasions. They usually pause in front of Minerva Park, look down the street, and then drive on. Frankly, I don’t blame them, as it would be too much trouble to maneuver down the street, and then back all the way out. Unfortunately this allows neighborhood youth to drink beer and smoke pot in their front yard with impunity.

I don’t have any solutions to the problems on Minerva Park. I have visited a friend who owns a home on Betty Way, a similar-sized historic street in West Hollywood. There, no parking is allowed on the street at all, which greatly improves the streets look and safety, and adds value and class to the neighborhood. Another change that might help would be to paint parking spaces—for one car parking between each driveway—or allow parking only on one side of the street. Another idea would be to widen the street by removing the narrow grass strip beside the sidewalk on one or both sides. Not one of these ideas is a solution, though they might mitigate the problems. The only permanent solution can come from higher gas prices that subsidize more frequent and efficient public transportation, like the red car system, when our homes were first built. In the meantime, regular consistent parking code enforcement would help, as would having Long Beach Police officers park and walk down the half-block long street once a month. The sixteen houses on Minerva Park all pay taxes. I think we should receive at least some of the city services we subsidize.

At times I have two different opinions of my little street, Minerva Park. It has the potential to be a charming and quaint cluster of historic homes, an aesthetic asset to the city. I also realize that most of us homeowners here have limited resources. There are several retired people on our street, living on a fixed income. One neighbor collects cardboard and bottles for recycling, letting them pile up in the yard for a couple of days before carting them off. More often than not there has been at least one abandoned home on the street, remaining unoccupied and boarded up for a year or longer. I don’t see this as an eyesore or evidence of decline, but examples of lower-income individuals attempting to gain their first foothold onto the American dream of home ownership, and through hard luck or circumstance, failing. Perhaps a little financial help might have made the difference. Mr. Mock, a typesetter for the Long Beach Press Telegram was the first owner of my house when it was new. Back in the day of decent working class wages, Mr. Mock’s home ownership was not a dream. As Boeing factories are torn out and replaced with more retail stores, the workers who find employment on that same plot of land will be in the same precarious financial situation my former neighbors faced.

When I bought my home twelve years ago, I made a little over ten dollars an hour, and with my first mortgage and a roommate, I barely made ends meet. Wealthier friends who lived in Bluff Park, with a household income of $250,000 a year (and a mortgage payment of $600 after their tenant pays rent) told me that like them, I should apply to the city’s historic preservation officer for a reduction in property tax through the Mills Act. When I called Ruthann Lehrer, she told me the Mills Act was only for “nice” homes in good neighborhoods, and unless there was some unusual circumstance, the homes on Minerva Park would not qualify. My thinking is that those of us who could most use the financial leverage of the Mills Act to improve our property are denied, while wealthy owners of multi-million dollar properties pay amounts in property taxes similar to ours in the barrio.

We only hope for fairness, and a little safety. It might be helpful if you or one of your staff members took a look at our street in the evening when most everyone is home and parking is at its worst.

Thank you for your attention,

Michael

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Quemado

I received e-mail today from Dia Art Foundation asking about my trip to Walter De Maria's Lightning Field. Coincidentally, the e-mail came as I was scanning photographs from that trip. It made we wonder if someone was looking over my shoulder, as they have an incredibly restrictive photography policy you can read about here. What caught my eye was the update at the bottom of the Boing Boing posting:

Many have written to point out that the Lightning Fields grounds comprise an art installation, which *is* copyrightable. But the point is still sound -- installing art in a field doesn't make the field copyrighted. What's more, copyright doesn't prohibit noncommercial personal photography of a work, nor photography for the purpose of criticism, nor the incidental capture of art in a photograph of, for example, lightning (or a photo of your pal standing on a particular patch of dirt making a funny face).

So in light of that bit of information, here is a critique along with some incidental captures of non-commercial personal photography from my trip to New Mexico. In addition to the image above, I've posted some more to my Flickr page here.

I made a comment to my fellow travelers while we were there. It dawned on me that money--in addition to buying privacy--buys personal space. The apartments of wealthy people in Manhattan are bigger than the apartments of the merely rich. People who live in gated communities not only get security, but they don't get distractions from riff raff walking by, dropping off junk mail, or selling religion. For the fifteen hundred dollars the six of us paid for the cabin, we got something quite rare indeed: privacy without fences. On the mesa where the Lightning Fields is located we were the only people. Other than our cabin, a water windmill and a shed, there were no signs of civilization: no paved roads, no telephone poles, no fences, and no signs.

That being said, the 24 hours we spent there gave us pause. There was time to slow down, watch the clouds, and witness the subtle changes in light reflecting off several hundred stainless steel poles. It also gave time to six busy people to talk, eat, watch, and wander without the distractions that come from today's communication devices.

Having been to a few other earthworks, and to the Lightning Fields before, I would say that the isolation is a considerable portion of the work. A few years back I visited Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels on the Winter Solstice, and I had that same type of experience, with nothing as far as the eye could see, alone for the entire day.

From what I've heard from the caretakers, it's rare for anyone to actually see lightning hitting a pole. The woman who's been driving people up to the mesa daily for thirty years said that she's seen it happen only three times. Visually the poles will melt into the surrounding landscape with the sun overhead. During sunrise and sunset, an orange glow hits the poles from the side, making them stand out. The site is quite beautiful, the enchilada casserole quite tasty.

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Guilty Pleasure

A couple of months back I wrote Sam Durant for a summer reading list, which extends about two feet on a bookshelf. In addition, I made a few book purchases on a recent trip to Santa Fe, New York, and Washington, DC. So far I've made it a few inches into my required reading, with brief forays into some eye candy.

My current guilty pleasure is Katherine Harmon's "You Are Here," a collection of maps by various artists.

One of my favorites is Jo Mora who made maps in the 30's and 40's.

The Library of Congress has an on line exhibition of Los Angeles maps that includes a work by Mora. The exhibition includes a link to the map above that allows you to zoom in and read the detail. As he says in the legend, "I render my message in the humorous manner as I'd rather find you with a smile of understanding than a frown of research."

Now back to my research.

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We Eat and Drink while Tomorrow They Die

Reading Edward_Winkleman's recent post on pontential future trends in art, he creates this metaphor:

The metaphor I've found helpful in discussing my opinion on Pluralism is to imagine that the widespread efforts in Deconstruction resulted in a vast landscape scattered with very small pieces of artstuff (imagine little building blocks as far as the eye can see).

(...broken bottles under children's feet? -M)

Some artists entered that landscape and got busy trying to breaking down the artstuff further, into smaller and smaller pieces, but some artists, because this is the inclination of artists, couldn't help themselves and began taking the small blocks and constructing things out of them. This new construction was informed by the previous deconstruction (i.e., they could see what each block signified once broken down), but as daunting as building some new "thing" from that landscape might seem, some artists simply had to. The result was an army of highly individualistic, often highly private, efforts...their own, often very elaborate, universes.

The problem I see with this metaphor is that the small pieces are all still loaded with cultural meaning. over the past few years musical mashups have made for popular nights at local clubs and my current favorite re-edit of Bush's state-of-the-union address on Google Video:



Which could be dedescribed as the mashup of capitalism, activism, and popmusic. Perhaps the last few years of amalgamism is the new ism Edward is searching for.

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L.A. Art trashed at Beaubourg

Remember seeing this Craig Kauffman piece of eye candy at LACMA? Well, you won't be seeing it again since it fell off the wall at the Pompidou's "Los Angeles 1955 - 1985" show in Paris.

The LAT's Christopher Reynolds reports on the loss of this piece, a destroyed Peter Alexander, and a damaged Robert Irwin.

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More Vagina Inturrupted

Jason Rhoades, 41, a Los Angeles-based artist known for sprawling installations that in recent years featuring neon signs spelling out a multitude of synonyms for female genitalia, died of heart failure on Aug. 1 in Los Angeles.

At the time of his death, Rhoades was preparing for one of his bacchanalian "Black Pussy" performances, scheduled for Aug. 12 in Portland, including a kind of "jello wrestling" event billed as a commentary on the oppression of women in the Middle East. Since 1993 he has exhibited in New York at David Zwirner Gallery, where a show was scheduled for fall.

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