Tristan Perch is currently on his second large wall drawing at the Georgia Museum of Art. Three drawings will stretch across one long white hallway on the second floor of the museum. When the third, final drawing is finished on September 3, 2014, the wall will be painted over. In the meantime, the wall is being drawn on not by Perch’s hand, but by a machine holding a pen. Perch programmed the machine to move around the wall to create this drawing as the pen in weighted down by a clip and gravity from a long wire. The artist, who also works in electronic sound art, is interested in the balance and interaction between the code (his program for the pen’s path on the wall) and physics (how it actually manifests in the environment). It certainly takes automatic drawing to the next level, although rather than stemming from the unconscious this stems from a programmed computer chip.
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.
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.
“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.
