Monthly Archives: June 2014

Strange Fruit: Arcimboldo-style Heads at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens

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The Atlanta Botanical Gardens currently features four portrait busts representing Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter by contemporary artist Philip Haas towering 15 feet above its green lawns. These enormous  fiberglass Seasons are equally as bizarre as the Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526-93) paintings that they derive from. Although the original format of these portraits was small and intimate, it seems in tune with Arcimboldo’s Baroque style to place them as large garden ornaments.

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The busts retain the curious mix of expressiveness that teters between exuberant and menacing. The looming size no doubt adds to the menacing aspect. Of the four, hoary and regal Winter was my favorite–rather than mere fancy, he looks like a tree come alive. Should you have a chance to visit the gardens though, a second exhibition called “Imaginary Worlds” shows you even more anthropomorphic vegetation. Large animals and such have been formed out of shaped vegetation, continuing the Baroque fantasy on the grounds. Both exhibitions are up through October.

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Public Art, Bathroom Music: Mlynárčik’s Toilet Manifestation

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“In 1966, on the occasion of the international congress of AICA, which too place in Prague and Bratislava, [Slovak artist Alex] Mlynárčik created another ‘permanent manifestation,’ which he placed in a public toilet in the center of Bratislava, with mirrors bearing inscriptions that referred to famous artists: Hieronymus Bosch, Michelangelo Pistoletto, as well as his friend Stano Filko. He also included the term: ‘CO (NH2)’–the chemical formula for urea. The installation had a musical component in the form of Johann Strauss the elder’s Radetzky March and a comment book for those who visited the toilet and encountered the installation. […] Mlynárčik’s radicalism, which rejected museum-bound painting in favor of an installation in a public toilet, certainly revealed the presence of a consistently critical approach.” –Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta, 226-7.

It also revealed the Communist authorities limits: because of the unorthodox location of this public commission, they quickly seized the installation itself and subjected the artist to psychological evaluation. Mlynárčik’s participatory works in the later 1960s tended to be physical, visual and collective such as this bathroom project. Mlynárčik referred to these events as ‘permanent manifestations of joining art and life’.

Countering the traditional monument placed in the midst of a public space, such as Vito Acconci references  and Giacometti’s sculpture so well embodies in the previous post, Mlynárčik toilet installation uses the most ‘private’ utility available for public use. In doing so, he uses what David Antin calls “discard or transition” spaces, spaces that nobody had previously thought were worthy of that kind of attention. However, Antin felt squeezed out of public space by the mechanism of capitalism, while Mlynárčik was working in a totalitarian system.

Vito Acconci and David Antin On Art in Public Space

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“An open public space, like the piazza, is a vast multidirectional space. People are dots sprinkled across the floor; one dot slides into another and slips past to continue on its own. A number of dots queue up to form a a dotted line of tourists who follow a flag and crisscross another dotted line of tourists. Here and there, as if scattered through a sea, dots merge into islands. Its every person for him- or herself here, every group for itself, and the tower above all.” -Vito Acconci, “Public Space, Private Time”

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Alberto Giacometti, Piazza, 1947–48

“Nobody knows who the public is or what it wants or needs. Or whether it should be considered singular or plural. Though there are many people claiming to act on its behalf or speak in its name. And no one is quite sure what space belongs to it or to them, though that usually seems to be only what’s left over when all the other spaces have been appropriated, walled, shut, fenced, or screened off by whatever groups or individuals lay claims to them. So what we are left with are discards and transition spaces, spaces for a kind of temporary and idle occupation like lounging, strolling, and hanging around–streets, squares, parks, benches, bus stops, subways stations, railroad and airport terminals.” -David Antin, “Fine Furs”

Alvin Landon Coburn, The Octopus, 1909

Alvin Landon Coburn, The Octopus, 1909