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In the process of publishing my last piece on Juan Muñoz’s Tate Modern retrospective, I came across a photo of one of the artist’s last works that took me aback. Treze a rir uns dos outros (roughly translated from Portuguese as Thirteen Laugh at Each Other) was originally installed in the Jardim da Cordoaria in Porto Portugal in 2001 in association with Porto2001, a citywide cultural celebration.

It was startling to see the piece, bronze surface originally spotless and gleaming, now ghoulish and roughed-up with street grime of a criminal sort. In April 2006, when the photo above was taken, vandals had recently sprayed the public art piece with bright blue paint. All three figures wore a coat of this on their faces. On the third figure, supine at the base of the composition, white paint was added to the figure’s chest and crotch. There was also a marking on the sculpture’s forehead, a signature or tag from the decorator who wanted to mark their handiwork I suppose.

Don’t get me wrong. My umbrage isn’t due to the fact that the piece hasn’t remained untouched. Public art is built for immediate and outside-the stuffy-museum interaction.

It should be affected by its location, exposed to the elements and all passersby. Because the hope is that the converse becomes true as well: the location and the people walking past are also affected by the work.

But that interaction can be taken in a creative direction. Take the recent sculptures that were created by members of the community, anonymously and under the cover of night so to speak, to interact with the pieces already in place at the Olympic Sculpture Park outside the Seattle Art Museum. A nest with three baby sculptures was left at the base of Alexander Calder’s Eagle. The triplets emerged from their shells, literally, as miniatures of their mama—bright red and prickly-edged.

Roxy Paine’s 50-ft. chrome tree, Split, was duplicated on a tiny scale by an anonymous person or group as well. The note left near the work only said that the little sapling’s title was Splinter.

Preying on the vulnerability of the work is such an easy, lazy and small-minded course of action. If you are going to take a swing at a public artwork, at least make it sharp-witted or quirky or thoughtful. Not the typical mindset of a vandal, I know. But at least if you are going to go through the effort of leaving your mark, make something with a message that will live longer than the 15 minutes it will take the city clean-up crew to wipe away the lame stain of your intellectual and creative turpitude.

Photo credit: David Alfonso (http://odoloeventual.blogspot.com), 2006.

Many budding artists labor under the dictum, “Draw what you see.” Yet many practicing artists have followed a complementary belief, “Draw what you don’t see,” as illustrated by Albrecht Durer, the Early Northern Renaissance master, and his print Rhinoceros. Durer depicts the African beast and its pleated armor with uncanny precision. He had only second-hand accounts as reference. Durer reconstructed a contemporary news item: a fabled, exotic exemplar was captured and destined for Papal Rome before its ship sank in a storm.

Rhinos aren’t native to Europe; tigers, meanwhile, aren’t native to Japan. The closest tigers prowl Russia’s Siberian woodlands, the northeastern part of China, and Korea. Yet curiously, tawny tigers have slinked through the silk scrolls of traditional Japanese art for centuries, as seen in a current exhibition, Patterned Feathers, Piercing Eyes at the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery. A few tigers had visited Japan before its cultural isolation ended in the late nineteenth century, full-grown cats and mewling kittens given as gifts to warlords and shoguns. But most artists seem to have depicted tigers using imported pelts as reference. Many artists also liked to depict leopards in the mistaken belief they were female tigers, a family of spots and stripes.

On a closer look, it appears some artists used house cats as models. Take Maruyama Okyo’s Sitting Tiger, enchantingly painted in 1777 . His inked tiger glares with green almond eyes and slitted pupils—an ocular feature common to house cats on sunny days, but not to tigers.
Without tigers to draw upon from life, Japanese artists depicted the fearsome kitties for cosmic reasons unknown to artists such as Durer. They drew upon Taoism, a mystical Chinese philosophy that grew from studying nature. In free-flowing Taoism, Chinese philosophers saw the universe in terms of a symbiotic yin and yang: yang, active and masculine, takes the form of a mythological dragon; yin, passive and feminine, the tiger common to some Chinese forests.

Japanese Zen Buddhism shares some beliefs with Chinese Taoism. In Japan, artists depicted twinned dragons and tigers on the sliding doors of Zen Buddhist temples. And like the Christian story of Saint Jerome and his lion, Buddhists believed that tigers accompanied long-ago holy men. In the Zen Buddhist imagination, a tiger grooms itself with monkish discipline, its sunlit nap a lasting metaphor for enlightenment.

Looking at the sculptures of Juan Muñoz (1953-2001), I always feel that I’ve gone suddenly deaf. The figures in the works are involved in such intense and preoccupying dramas that their chattering and murmurs should ring out, but I never hear them. The details of the conversations are forever out of earshot.

The ongoing retrospective of Muñoz’s work at the Tate Modern does an admirable job of giving voice to the late artist’s oeuvre. Hailed by many as the first significant artist to rise up in post-Franco Spain, Muñoz was an incredibly learned and observant artist. A Renaissance appreciator, he incorporated tenets of humanism in his work and often established subtle layers of meaning by referencing well-known artistic and literary precedents such as Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, Degas’ dancers, or T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland.

He also established his individuality by working figuratively in the 1980s, a time when conceptual and abstracted asceticism held sway. He molded humble, scaled-down figures and established situational uncertainty and tension in a way that easily draws viewers in, because the field of vision is akin to the one in which we exist every day. Contrast that to the planar mammoths of Richard Serra, who Muñoz worked with at one time during his career. The works of both are engaging, but Muñoz responded to and respected the power of the human scale, no matter how complex the setting might be.

Photo credit: Juan Muñoz, Treze a rir uns dos outros, Garden of Cordoaria, Porto Portugal, 2001 (Wikipedia)

The fanfare of this year’s Venice Biennale has barely faded and yet there is already word of what to expect in the 2009 extravaganza. The work of Bruce Nauman has been selected to represent the United States in the American Pavilion. The exhibition, which will be organized by curators from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will encompasses works from the artist’s entire career and may include new projects as well. It will survey themes that have a particularly strong presence in the artist’s work, such as fountains, and may see that works are installed throughout the city, and not just in the show tent.

Nauman got his start as a mathematics and physics student, but soon immersed himself in studio art. He studied with Wayne Thiebaud and William Wiley, who encouraged his freewheeling and undefined approach to film and performance, conceptual installation, sculpture, printmaking, drawing and photography. If Nauman has a trademark, it would be how he engages language with an innovative use of neon sculpture. He subverts as well as amplifies the communicative abilities of the written word, oftentimes masking his philosophical concerns about the role of the artist or the power of language behind banter and quips.

His famous neon sculpture from 1967, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths, is an example of this. Employing a medium more appropriate to slogans and cheeky advertising, he conflates a highbrow “Confucius says” kind of thought with a lowbrow display in the form of a swirling blue and pink neon spiral. Taking into consideration how the phrase is displayed, the viewer cannot help but question its seriousness. At the same time, however, he or she legitimizes the message by standing in front of the sculpture, reading and pondering what this “true artist” has to say.

Photo credit: The True Artist helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths, Bruce Nauman (American, born 1941), 1967, Neon. Collection Philadelphia Museum of Art. Image Copyright Bruce Nauman, the Artists Rights Society (ARS, NY).

I was stunned to learn that Utah’s Great Salt Lake, which has sustained Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty since it was built in 1970, was being surveyed for oil drilling. The artist’s widow (Smithson died in a plane crash a few years after the project was completed) sent up a flare about this encroachment about a week ago.

For the Spiral Jetty to disintegrate on its own would be one thing. After all, it has already changed drastically since it was first constructed because of exposure to the elements. The rocks have changed color and shifted over time. Even seeing it has always been subject to how high the water levels of the lake rise. For most of the past thirty years it has been submerged—Smithson built the sculpture during a severe drought, but when the water levels rose to their normal levels, the artwork was hidden under the surface of the lake. This kind of organic decay is not only in keeping with the artist’s original intentions for the work, but is a crucial characteristic of an earthwork. Its fragility makes it vulnerable to mutation, but considering the nature of evolution, it is exactly this ability to change that keeps the work alive.

But it would be something altogether different—make that sinister and unacceptable—if the Spiral Jetty were destroyed because the natural environment of the lake was mucked up with deep drilling.

The hue and cry has had some effect. The Utah Public Lands Office has received hundreds of letters and emails protesting the drilling.

Photo credit: Spiral Jetty from Rozel Point (Wikipedia)