Tag Archives: art installations

art

unbearably cute

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The piece, with a truck added for scale
The piece, with a truck added for scale

Here’s a fun artwork from the Stuart Collection at UCSD, Tim Hawkinson’s Bear. At almost 24 feet tall and 180 tons it’s a little bigger and heavier than your average Steiff bear, but it’s gotta be at least as cute.

It’s a pretty simple idea: take eight big to really big boulders and pile them together, just so. There’s a fair amount of engineering that keeps the piece from falling apart, but all the tech stays in the background. Nothing intrudes into the piece’s overscaled cuteness and child-like sense that anyone could assemble a few rocks together like this.

A portrait from closer up. Awwwww......Cuuuuuuuute.....
A portrait from closer up. Awwwww……Cuuuuuuuute…..

In our stats-obsessed world people will compare the piece’s “mere” 180 tons to the 340 ton mass of the monster rock that achieved superstar status as it got transported into downtown Los Angeles to become the central element in Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass at the LA County Museum of Art. (You can read about the piece–and the rock–lots of places, including [ here ] on fellow blogger Ryan’s Dry Stone Gardening.) But, hey, 180 tons is already double the weight of a space shuttle, so I’ll allow myself to be impressed.

Actually this, the back, is my favorite angle on the Bear
Actually this, the back, is my favorite angle on the Bear

The stone comes from a quarry up in Pala, in the foothills about an hour to the northwest. It looks a lot like the boulders of our backcountry: smooth-surfaced, light-colored, with a warm rosy orange glow. A geologist once told me that at least some of the stone that makes up some of the adjacent formations is quartz monzonite, a felspar-rich mineral adjacent to granite on a family tree of plutonic rocks. But whatever it’s made out of, granite, quartz monzonite, it’s cool to have a big pile of big rocks from East County, remixed into a giant bear.

But one thing keeps bugging me about the work. The campus mascot of UC Berkeley, Cal, is the bear, and I keep wondering whether the artist got it wrong and thought that all the UC campuses had the same mascot. (San Diego’s is–lamentably–the tritons. Lame, but at least not insulting to many members of the population.) If this piece were transported to that northern campus I think it’d be an instant pet artwork and a big hit. So I keep wondering whether this site-specific artwork ended up at the wrong site. Very cute, but also very lost.

art, landscape, places

there be dragons

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Mt Laguna snowIt had snowed in the local mountains late last month. By the time I got up there you could still find big patches of snow on the ground.

Snow over the desert

At the crest of the Laguna Mountains you can look down down down over the edge of the escarpment of the Elsinore Fault to the Vallecito Valley immediately below. It’s a quick vertical mile of dropoff, a height comparable to many vistas along the Grand Canyon. The change in elevation is impressive, but so is the radical change in landscape. A fairly well-watered green-and-brown mountain plant community–think pines, ceanothus, mountain mahogany–careens into a sere desert landscape, all of it in muted brown and purple and pink and gray tones. Down below the colors of geology quickly overpower those of biology. Someone who doesn’t love deserts might liken the descent into Anza Borreo Desert State Park as a descent into Hell.

On this early January day Hell was pleasant, in the low 70s, sunny and dry. Something I hadn’t visited before was a big installation of sculptures by Ricardo Breceda. Installed on a flat expanse on the edge of Borrego Springs you’ll find a rusty steel menagerie of various creatures. I recognized the camels and horses, including this horse with an unfortunately-placed support column.

Camel scuptures in the desert

Horse with rectal probe

Archduke Charles sculpture
(Note to artist: It is possible to model rearing horses without rectal probes, as this sculpture of Archduke Charles in Vienna’s Heldenplatz shows. (Photo by Peter Gerstbach and used here by the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.))

I recognized some of the creatures but a few started to get pretty fanciful, like they’d escaped from a Maurice Sendak picturebook.

Beheaded beast

This one had either just lost its head or was still in the process of being installed.

Horse escaping creature

Headless or not, it was scaring the horses…

Ricardo Breceda sculpture creature

And what the heck is this creature supposed to be? Whatever it was, it appeared to be mom with a little one on her back.

Dragon head

Dragon with mountains

And now we come to the dragon, a big and fancy and fearsome number with five different segments that go from one side of the road to the other. (Edit January 20: Ricki points out that it’s probably a sea serpent and not a dragon, and I agree with her.)

Dragon segment as gate

Here one of the segments functioned as a really lovely little garden portal.

Dragaon vs cholla

But in the end the most fearsome thing of all out in the desert that day wasn’t the dragon, but this “jumping” cholla cactus, one of the local Cylindropuntia species (maybe C. ganderi?). I’ve never been hurt by a dragon, but this bit of botanical evil is a different story. Be afraid, be very afraid.

art, gardening

from the art fair

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I just popped over to the Art San Diego 2012 contemporary art fair, which runs through Sunday. In addition to art, there was a lot of interesting design. A couple of the pieces or installations employed live plants and I thought I’d share them here.

The first photos are of a wall piece. I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea of planting a staghorn fern in the head of a stag trophy has been done already, but I thought this was fun. Unfortunately the presentation was short on labels or further information, so the exhibitor missed out on an opportunity to get free publicity on a garden blog that must get readers by the millions.

The other was this art installation by local artist Keenan Hartsten, who works with various natural materials. Making up this piece are plants, pots, the horizontal shelves–whatever they’re made of–and white and colored pebbles that have been glued to the wall to form horizontal lines. In this gallery-like context the plants look extremely strange, even though many of them are fairly common houseplants. If I were uncharitable I might say that the plants looked more artistic and wildly strange than much of the art in the rest of the fair. But being a plant person quite frankly I find that’s generally the case: Most plants are far more interesting than most art.

You can see some of Keenan Hartsten’s other works at his website [ here ]. I Especially like the driftwood piece he did for a local surf shop.

art, gardening, landscape design, places

visiting the fallen star

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Last year I showed you some of the construction leading up to the installation of Fallen Star, this art installation by Korean artist Do Ho Suh. Basically it’s a tiny Providence, Rhode Island-style house and garden that has improbably landed on the edge of one of the engineering buildings at UCSD. The “landing” was a little rough, as you can see, so that the floor of the house is a few degrees off of level. The walls of the little house aren’t quite plumb, either–and don’t quite match the angle of the floor. The whole effect is pretty disorienting.

(You can click [ here ] to see all the other post I’ve done on this installation.)

Aside from creating an intriguing object set helplessly among the brutish concrete structures around, the artist is using the sense of disorientation to conjure up the sense of disorientation he felt when he came to this country to study at RISD. But in addition to the disorientation, he’s also interested in creating an oddly sheltering space. We find community wherever we can, even in the most unlikely places, in this case seven stories off the ground, jutting out alarmingly over the quad below.


I tried to visit on the first day the piece was open to the public. The crowd was way crazy, and it was like trying to view art at a gallery opening. Definitely not the best time.

So, when I got a chance to see it under much more civilized circumstances I jumped–no, let’s use a different verb: I went for it.

So…we approach the house from the adjacent building. The safety railing is perpendicular to gravity. As I’ve mentioned already, the house is not.

This is me, stepping into the slightly under-scaled, seriously slanted interior of the little house.

Most visitors’ first reactions will be to the off-kilter feeling of seeing the positions of house and furnishings not quite lining up with what your inner ear is telling you you should be seeing. The little chandelier in this photo is pretty much the only thing acknowledging gravity.

Looking out the door towards the house’s perch, you can get a really good sense of the crookedness.

Here’s the rest of my little group inside, next to the fireplace. After a few minutes you really start to feel queasy.

Once you get over the shock of the fun-house aspects of the piece you start to notice little touches: family photos, tchotchkes, lucid details that inhabit everyday life and memory. The inhabitant of the house is fictional, but you think that your Aunt Edith or Gramma Olive might have been models for her.

I thought the little views out the windows were especially poignant.

Just outside the house you sense that whoever lives here might just be a gardener. Who else would leave a concrete frog and Corona clippers right at the front door?

If the clippers weren’t enough of a clue, how about a bright green garden hose? Some people do their best to hide away their hose, but the kind of gardener who lives here would have nothing to do with all that silly fakery.

Outside gravity reigns. The plants know which way is up, and by this point you might need to sit down and remind yourself.


There are lots of ornamentals outside. The gentle yellow of this sunflowers looks great against the house’s clapboard exterior.

Morning glories were clearly enjoying their full sun exposure, even though this is about as exposed a spot for garden that you’ll find anywhere. In case you’re dying for the name of this variety–like I was–it’s the heirloom Carnevale di Venezia.

Grandma’s Olive’s fictional double also enjoys her summer vegetables. This is a brown pumpkin…

…and here’s a perfect Persian cucumber, a gift to me from the garden of the Fallen Star.

A perfect conclusion to an amazing tour.

art, places

the big install

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I’ve been posting on the progress on the Fallen Star piece that Do ho Suh has designed for the Stuart Collection at UC San Diego. November 15 was the big day for it to get hoisted from the ground, where it was being built, to the rooftop, where it’ll spend the next many decades. Here are some pictures from before, during and after. Unfortunately life intruded and I was having to attend a meeting during the most dramatic part of the process, when the house first left the ground. But I at least got a few shots of the house dangling over its eventual perch.

The morning of the hoist: The exterior has just been complete, the clapboarding nailed, the chimney set.
The worksite around the Fallen Star. Yes, those are trees with autumn-colored leaves.
The house and the big hydraulic crane that will launch it.
One of the film crews settles into place
The worksite with the extended crane
The audience
The house 80+ feet in the air, being lowered onto its finale perch
And we have contact...

A closer view of the landed house

And here’s a Youtube video of the big hoist from the Jacobs School of Engineering, the school that is housed in the structure that the house landed on:

And another from a different viewpoint, more dramatic than the first. The first two minutes are the best:

And for you total junkies, yet another vantage point. Once again the first part is the most dramatic.
http://youtu.be/EeIyUUgPz3c

The piece a couple mornings later, after the removal of the cranes…

There’s still more work to do before the grand unveiling, a TV and fireplace to install inside, a garden to plant outside. But this was definitely a big milestone. I’ll post more once I get up on the roof and have some closeup views.

art, gardening

there was a crooked house

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The house being built on the ground, with its eventual perch being readied high on the roof of the building behind it.

Here a few random construction photos that show the development of part of Do Ho Suh’s Fallen Star installation that I posted on a few weeks ago [ here ]. I’m sure there are practical reasons for building the little house on the ground before hoisting it seven stories into the air to its perch on the side. But having it take shape at eye level has been interesting and exciting, and it’s a great way to involve future viewers of the artwork in the piece as it evolves from yards of concrete and stacks of steel beams.

As I view the piece come into being I can’t help but imagine being the construction firm approached to construct this little one-room building: “We want you to build us a house. Only much of it’s going to cantilevered over the edge of a tall building. And the house itself has to be built with a strong rake to the foundation, making the whole house slant at a serious angle…” A project like this doesn’t come along every day, and I’m sure somebody had some serious fun getting to work on it.

The steel fram takes shape. Here you can see there's lots more engineering in this project than most houses that nest on the ground.
Framing for windows being installed...
Sheathing going on...
The sheathed house, crooked on the horizon, at sunrise...
After the building wrap...
Foggy morning with the wrapped house, still crooked on the horizon...
Sheathing going up on the roof...
Shingles now in place...


 

At this point the project has progressed to where stuff is happening on the inside, but it’s a mystery to outside viewers. The next big milestone will be when the exterior sheathing with its bouncy blue color shows up. Stay tuned.

Aerial rendering of the project location showing the rooftop with the crooked house and garden.

I touched base with the Stuart Collection folks about the “garden” around the house. Yes, it’s going to be live plants. The intent is to make the garden look a bit like the house, as if house and garden are little slice of Provincetown that have flown and and been wedged into the California fabric.

There are probably thousands of Southern California houses with clapboard siding and gardens with hydrangeas and roses that would be good models for what the artist is trying to achieve. As much as these gardens require lots of added water and attention to get them to thrive, the real stunt will be to try to pull off the effect when the house and garden will be elevated seven stories into the air. The collection is working with a landscape architect to come up with a mix of plants that will represent the botanical displacement but also be plants that will survive life on the edge, exposed to the elements.

It shouldn’t be that much longer before this house gets lifted into place. I suspect they’ll be using cranes and not a giant flock of balloons, even though several of you have commented on how much the plans for the house make it out to be a dead-ringer for the flying house in Up. More pictures to follow…

art, gardening, places

garden on the edge

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Here’s the artist’s rendering for a new project that’s going up on the way to my weekday office. In this view things look pretty normal: a clapboard house, lawn, shrubberies, foundation plantings, patio furniture, shade umbrella–nostalgic Americana, tidy, idyllic.

But here’s an alternate view of the entire project. In this piece, “Fallen Star,” by artist Do Ho Suh, this little blue house hangs over the edge of one of the campus buildings, seven stories above the quad below.

The project description on the Stuart Collection’s page for the project provides some background, including this:

For the Stuart Collection, Suh has proposed Fallen Star, a small house that has been picked up by some mysterious force, (perhaps a tornado) and “landed” on a building, seven stories up. A roof garden is part of Suh’s design and will be a place with panoramic views for small groups to gather. This can be seen as a “home” for the vast numbers of students who have left their homes to come to this huge institution, the university, which has nothing even resembling a home. It is an unforgettable image and will be a truly amazing experience sure to stay in the minds and memory of students and visitors for years to come.”


Do Ho Suh Fallen Star rendering and view of the piece's eventual perch.

Some projects you can look at and tell immediately that they’re going to be popular. This is one of them.

Count me in to stand in line to get a chance to visit the installation after it’s completed and open, currently projected to be January 2012. It should be a cool mix of fun and unnerving, looking for home on the edge in a fading empire.