Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [139]
DANGER ZONE
California performance artist/sculptor Chris Burden, called “the Evel Knievel of the avant-garde,” makes his displays a life-or-death affair to take art out of elitism into the real world of looming danger. To “explore” violence, he had a friend shoot him in the arm while guests at a Los Angeles gallery watched. In “Doorway to Heaven” (1973), Burden grounded two live electric wires on his bare chest, recording the aura of sparks in a striking photograph. A Viennese group went too far when they smeared sheep blood and entrails on participants and crucified them upside down in a gallery. One died from self-mutilation.
PROCESS NOT PRODUCT
Haacke, “Condensation Cube,” 1963-65, John Weber Gallery, NY. Hans Haacke (b. 1936), a left-wing artist who works in the United States, concentrates on the act of making a work rather than the work itself. In “Poll of MoMA Visitors” (1970), he gathered museum-goers’ opinions on the Vietnam War. From 1963 he constructed transparent boxes containing fluids that fluctuate with temperature and air pressure. Incorporating the behavior of wind, air, and water into his work, Haacke’s “collaborator” became the surrounding “climate,” which varied from hour to hour.
CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE
In the 1970s and ’80s designers traded in Miesian-inspired Barcelona benches and Breuer chairs (honestly, they were never very comfortable) for Adirondack benches and Shaker rockers. A consensus formed that Bauhaus-inspired Modernism was, as one critic said, “polished death.” International Style buildings based on the grid and glass skin had multiplied so widely, they were the House Style of corporate headquarters throughout the world. Critics denounced their anonymity and hungered for passion and personality.
Modernism seemed like a dead end, and Post-Modernism arose as its alternative. In place of T-square-straight, antiseptic forms, the new architecture used curvilinear, complex shapes. Post-Modernism resurrected color, ornament, and historical touches like the dome, arch, and vault. While one particular style has not yet jelled, architects today experiment with a variety of novel forms with an almost Baroque flair. What is clear about Post-Modern architecture is its pluralism.
PEI: THE LAST MODERNIST. I. M. Pei (pronounced PAY; b. 1917) became the International Style’s leading exponent in the postwar period. Pei’s buildings declare their identity as abstract objects first, then as refined monuments. Frequently triangular in shape with an oversized Henry Moore sculpture out front, they are monochromatic and severe like Minimalist sculpture.
Pei, Entrance to the Louvre, 1989, Paris. Pei’s buildings use simple, uncluttered, geometric forms.
JOHNSON: THE TURNING POINT. For the first half of his career, American architect Philip Johnson (b. 1906) was apprentice to his master Mies van der Rohe’s International Style. In 1956, they collaborated on the landmark Park Avenue Seagram Building (at 53rd Street). In 1949, Johnson built the penultimate glass box, Glass House, in New Canaan, Connecticut, where sheets of glass comprise the whole exterior. He had reached the maximum of minimum: pure, clean, abstract — all qualities of “The International Style” that he also championed in an influential book of the same title.
In the mid-’70s, Johnson sniffed a change in the air and seized the Post-Modern banner. Pennzoil Place in Houston (1976) looks like a gigantic Minimalist sculpture but diverges from the bland, rectangular anonymity of the International Style in its daring shape and dark color. It consists of two towers separated by a ten-foot slot, joined at the bottom by a glass wedge housing a lobby. Johnson tapered the roof to a rakish 45-degree angle. Johnson’s PPG. Place in Pittsburgh is a Post-Modern masterpiece with its Gothic tower and turrets — like the Houses of Parliament executed in sleek, mirrored glass. The “Chippendale