Did You Know :: Anne Lindberg: Modal Lines

Did You Know :: Anne Lindberg: Modal Lines 
March 24-July 15, 2012

Adapted from an interview with Sally Deskins, Janurary 12, 2012 

Anne Lindberg grew up in Iowa City, IA where her father taught at the University of Iowa. She lived in Australia twice before she was twelve years old, and in Denmark when she was about seven years old. Lindberg grew up around artists. Her mother is an artist, her grandmother was an artist, her brother is a photographer, her sister-in-law is a poet, one of her Danish ancestors (who lived in Lindberg, Sweden) was an architect, and her husband is a lighting designer. So, Anne first encountered art with her immediate family. She recalls lovely memories of lively meals around the dinner table with her family, and a myriad of invited artists, cooks, weavers, historians, dancers, antique collectors and scientists. Anne’s father is a geologist and economic geographer, so her voice as an artist is greatly informed by art, literature and science. Anne recalls many vivid memories from her childhood of encounters with creative people. She made puppets starting at the age of 4 with a magical woman named Monica, and used to cut colorful paper shapes for hours with her aunt Wendy. Lindberg participated in a circus exhibition in a museum as a result of a family friend named Byron, and remembers listening to Byron tell about traveling with one-ring circuses in small towns of Iowa. She recalls learning to skate a perfect figure 8 on ice with an entomologist named Barbara – these people and so many others in her family showed her something of the compelling and mysterious life of a creative person. Anne started college thinking she would study anthropology or history, but after a few internships and jobs in museums realized that she wanted to make things.

ANNE LINDBERG ON HER WORK AND PROCESS 
Neurologists have determined that the old brain holds the seat of our most primal understandings of the world. Goodwill, security, fear, anxiety, self-protection, gravity, sexuality, and compulsive behaviors generate from this lower cerebral core. My sculpture and drawings inhabit a non-verbal place resonant with such primal human conditions. Systemic and non-representational, these works are subtle, rhythmic, abstract, and immersive. I find beauty and disturbance through shifts in tool, layering and material to create passages of tone, density, speed, path and frequency within a system. In recent room-sized installations like drawn pink at Bemis [Contemporary Art Center], I have discovered an optical and spatial phenomenon that excites me as the work spans the outer reaches of our peripheral vision. The work references physiological systems – such as heartbeat, respiration, neural paths, equilibrium - and psychological states. I’ve come to understand my work as a kind of self-portraiture. Within the quiet reserve and formal abstraction is a strong impulse to speak from a deep place within myself about that is private, vulnerable, fragile, and perceptive to the human condition. My work is a mirror of how I experience the world, and as I negotiate physicality, optics and ideas through drawing languages, my voice withholds, blurs, teases and veils. I frequently return to subtle distinctions between drawing as noun and verb as a long held focus in my studio practice. This blurred distinction drives my fascination with an expanded definition of drawing languages and the resurgence of drawing in contemporary art. My collective body of work is an iteration of this language.

ON TOURS 
Ask visitors their immediate responses to Anne Lindberg’s Modal Lines.
Ask visitors why they react in the ways that they have described. What about Anne’s work elicits their response(s)? Can they identify some specific characteristic or another about the work that they respond to? 
Explain that among Anne Lindberg’s interests is the purity and simplicity of drawing. Her interest is in what can be accomplished with just one tool—drawing. She uses the repetition of lines, drawn or strung, to create space—by illusion and perception, but also by the repetition of lines of string to create space.
Ask visitors what is a line? :: A form that has length and width, but the width is tiny in comparison to its length that we perceive line as having only one dimension.
Ask visitors how the repetition of one kind of gesture—a line—changes their perception of a piece like Andante Green.
Explain that geometry defines a line as an infinite number of points. How does that definition affect the understanding of Lindberg’s drawings?
Explain that one art definition of a line is a moving dot—a useful definition because it recognizes the dynamic quality of lines, like those in Lindberg’s installation. A line is created by movement. Because our eyes must move to follow a line.
Explain that a line is a minimal sort of statement by an artist, made quickly with a minimum of effort, but seemingly able to convey all sorts of thoughts, feelings, moods, and ideas.
Ask visitors what adjectives can be used to describe lines like in Lindberg’s work. Nervous? Tense? Angry? Happy? Free? Quiet? Excited? Calm? Graceful? Ask visitors about a line like:

How do we know what this line is? How does such a line compare to lines like Anne Lindberg’s?
Explain that line is capable of creating shape. We immediately recognize a drawing of an apple as a picture of an apple. However, it lacks the color and texture of an apple, and is not the size of an apple. In comparison, Anne Lindberg’s lines create different kinds of more abstract forms. How?

Views from China: Yang Yongliang and the Modern Metropolis

Did You Know? :: Views from China: Yang Yongliang and the Modern Metropolis



Yang Yongliang, Viridescence, Stock World, 2009. Inkjet print on paper, 16 x47 inches. Courtesy of the artist and LIMN Gallery, San Francisco.

Main Text
Upon first glance, Yang Yongliang’s photographs appear as dreamlike Chinese paintings, not unlike the traditional Chinese art he studied extensively as a student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Upon closer inspection, however, one finds that his works are cleverly crafted from montaged digital photographs of China’s bustling cities—and then manipulated into haunting imaginary landscapes that critique China’s rapidly developing built environment.

Born in 1980, Yongliang is a resident of Shanghai, China, who depends heavily on a camera and a laptop computer to make his art. Using only these tools—and a knowledge of traditional Chinese painting—Yongliang invents urban scenes that depict skyscrapers under construction, freeway systems, electrical power plants, and bustling urban corridors. His compositions reveal the impacts of technological progress that China has undergone over past decades.

Between the years 1966 and 1976, under the leadership of Mao Zedong, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, the nation of China experienced a period of political instability. During this time, artistic production came under strict government supervision. Yongliang is among a generation of young artists who came of age after the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and therefore embraces a level of artistic freedom that is not common among earlier generations of Chinese artists. This is Yongliang’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States.

Traditional Chinese Scroll Painting

• Handscrolls provide a continuous horizontal surface of silk or paper on which to develop a composition. Though often displayed in their entirety in museums, traditional handscrolls are meant to be viewed by only one or two people and unrolled from right to left two or three feet at a time. In this way, the viewer may "travel" through a story or landscape that conveys a progression of time. Separate papers containing titles or colophons may also be attached and the complete scroll mounted with silk boards. A wooden dowel is attached on the left end of the scroll and a semicircular rod at the other end. After viewing, the scroll is rolled up around the dowel from left to right and secured with ties.

• Hanging scrolls provide the artist with a vertical format for an image. The painting surface of paper or silk is mounted with decorative silk borders. A wooden rod is attached at the bottom to give the scroll the necessary weight to hang smoothly on a wall, as well as a means of being rolled up for storage. A thin wooden strip with a cord is attached at the top for hanging the scroll. The composition of a hanging scroll usually places the foreground at the bottom of the scroll with the middle and far distances moving upward toward the top of the scroll. Hanging scrolls are displayed only for short periods of time and are then rolled up from bottom to top and secured with ties for storage.

• Scholar Officials Chinese painters and calligraphers were often members of an educated class of men. Their formal education in classic Chinese literary, historical, and philosophical texts, as well as in the history of Chinese calligraphy, painting and music, was considered essential for a cultured man. Their knowledge was highly respected in Chinese society. An educated man's responsibility was to use his knowledge to serve his ruler, the emperor, and to improve society. By the beginning of the Song dynasty (960–1279), scholars or educated men were generally required to pass a series of difficult exams to serve in the government.

• Seals are impressions made from carved stones or other media pressed into a thick, red, oil-based paste. They are affixed to a document, painting, or calligraphy to certify authorship or ownership. Since artists and writers typically used several names throughout their lives, they had several seals inscribed with their given names, artistic names, the names of their studios, and, possibly, an identifying literary expression. Usually rectangular or round, seal designs are cut into materials such as jade, ivory, and soapstone. If the characters are incised, they will appear white in the impression; if carved in relief, they will appear red. The script often used for seals derives from an ancient script, known as "seal script," used during the late Zhou (ca. 1050–256 B.C.) and Qin (221–206 B.C.) dynasties.

• Yin and Yang constitute an ancient, fundamental concept that describes the underlying nature and order within the universe. The interaction between these two polar, yet complementary, opposites can be seen in nature: the darkness of night leads to the brightness of day. Yin is associated with darkness, softness, water, passivity, the moon, the feminine, and the earth. Yang is associated with brightness, activity, the masculine, the sun, fire, and the sky.

Robert Beckmann :: The Body of a House Tour Blueprint

Introduction
Robert Beckmann’s The Body of a House Displayed as it is in (1993) is an anchor work for the NMA’s permanent collection. the Installation Gallery, which was designed specifically to hold the works when the new building was constructed, The Body of a House invites visitors to an up-close-and-personal encounter with an emotional and highly-charged period of American—and Nevadan—history. The Body of a House is an eight-canvas series of images depicting 2.33 seconds of real time during the March 17, 1953 detonation of Annie, a 16-kiloton atomic bomb that was part of Operation Upshot Knothole at the Nevada Test Site. One of the primary objectives of the test was to determine the blast effects of an atomic bomb on the “typical suburban home,” so the test included the construction of two model homes, filled with the dummies and the stuff of contemporary life. The military built one house 7,500 feet from ground zero; the other was constructed 3,500 feet from the detonation site. An automatic motion picture camera encased in a two-inch-thick lead sheath recorded the effects of the detonation on the model home at 24 frames per second. The resulting 55-frame film was broadcast on television and then used to “educate” children in schools about nuclear fallout and air raid drills. The house closest to the detonation was completely destroyed. The impact of the film and its still frames on the artist’s psyche can be felt through his depiction of the event.
This exhibition lends itself to discussions of Nevada history, the nuclear legacy of our state, and both the impact and power and the desensitizing anesthesia of photography in American culture.

Wall Text
As a young boy during the Cold War era, Robert Beckmann remembers watching documentary film footage of the United States military testing a 16-kiloton nuclear bomb nicknamed “Annie” at the Nevada Test Site. Before the experimental explosion in 1953, the government constructed several houses—outfitted with furniture, automobiles, and human mannequins—just 7,500 feet from ground zero.

Beckmann, who now resides in Las Vegas, painted this series of large-scale, iodine-hued paintings titled The Body of a House in 1993. His imagery is based on still frames taken from the films he saw as a child, and the eight sequential scenes represent a mere 2.33 seconds of real time. Each painting focuses on a different stage of the menacing destruction, a mood that Beckmann heightened through his dramatic use of fiery orange and red coloring.

Beckmann joins a long line of artists who have depicted scenes of real and imagined apocalyptic destruction. Most notably, The Body of a House recalls the serialized imagery of Andy Warhol’s silk-screened print Atomic Bomb (1965) that featured an exploding mushroom cloud against a deep red background. The darkened skies and mysterious eerie glow in Beckmann’s paintings are a frightening reminder of the devastating effects of nuclear explosion.

Orientation
The canvases are arranged in the Installation Gallery in the order of their creation and the narrative of the event, beginning with The Body of a House, #1, to the right of the wall text.

Tour Framework

• Ask adult guests what they believe they are looking at when they look at Beckmann’s paintings. Guests of a certain age may know immediately what they are seeing; others will need some guidance to understand the significance of the paintings in terms of the Cold War, the Test Site in Nevada’s history, serialized images, photography, etc.

• Ask children what they see in the paintings. A house? A fire? A house on fire? A rising sun? A strong wind? What in the paintings makes them think these things?

• Ask guests what kinds of feelings and reactions the paintings evoke for them.

• Explain that President Harry Truman was the thirty-third President of the United States (1945-1953), having assumed the Presidency upon Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death. Following his approval of the Nevada Test Site—part of the Las Vegas Bombing and Gunnery Range—for continental nuclear weapons testing on December 18, 1950, more than 1,000 nuclear bombs were detonated on this piece of Nevada land.

• Explain that the tests ended in 1992 with the passage of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

• Ask adult guests if they know what the Cold War was, and if it’s appropriate, what they remember of the Cold War themselves. What kinds of feelings do they remember experiencing during the Cold War? What was the political climate like?

• Ask children if they have ever heard of the Cold War before, and if so, what they know about it.

• Explain that the Cold War was an extremely complicated, largely political war waged primarily by two countries, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (and their allies), from the end of World War II until the 1990s. One of the features of the Cold War was a nuclear arms race between the two countries that led to a very serious game of one-upsmanship about who had the largest, most powerful arsenal of nuclear weapons.

• Explain that as an eleven-year-old child, Beckmann had seen an American military film of a bomb called “Annie” exploding at the Nevada Test Site. The 2.33-second film (55 frames long at 24 frames per second) documented the impact of the nuclear blast on a model home constructed 3,500 feet—two-thirds of a mile—from ground zero. “Annie” was part of a series of tests called “Operation Upshot Knothole,” that occurred at the Nevada Test Site in 1953. The tests’ purposes ranged from nuclear weapon design to atomic combat training to, as in the case of “Annie,” testing the blast effect of a thermonuclear bomb on “typical” suburban homes.

• Explain that Beckmann gained access to the eight original still frame images of the “Annie” test through the Nevada State Museum and Historical Society in Las Vegas. He re-photographed the original images and then made slides of the images, projected them onto the large scale canvases, and sketched in the shapes and lines before applying the paint.

• Explain that the canvases average ten layers of paint, and some have as many as fifteen. This is how Beckmann is able to convey the brightness of the explosion in #1 and the chaos of the complete destruction of the house in #8.

• Ask guests what story the eight sequenced canvases tell. What makes them think of the story in this way? What kind of an ending does the story have? Is there a moral to the story?

• Explain to guests that the paintings are of course about nuclear bombs, their use and destructive power, the Cold War, and the Nevada Test Site.

• Explain that Beckmann is also interested the power of film and photography in American culture. The artist notes that Americans consume photographic (or film/video) images with an insatiable appetite, to the point that we become desensitized to violence, poverty, consequence, war, and so on. But even when a painting is based on a photograph, it conveys a very different sense of the material in the photograph.

As writer William L. Fox writes about Beckmann’s work, “The paintings restore our ability to respond because we take them as a primary, involved, direct witnessing of an event, something that took hours and days and weeks and months to create. They are not only images, representations of an event, but are themselves their own events.”

• Ask guests if the paintings move them in some way. Do they experience anger? Fear? Resentment? Sadness? Surprise?

• Explain that some viewers see the paintings as a more-or-less straightforward protest against nuclear bomb testing in Nevada, and the resulting health effects—cancer, skin and respiratory diseases—on the “downwinders.” However, critics also see the paintings as metaphorical: perhaps seeing the destruction of the house by the bomb is cathartic in some way, that creativity can come from such destruction in the form of the paintings, and the feelings that the paintings evoke in viewers.

Finally, another statement about the work from writer William L. Fox: “Art such as The Body of a House does not allow us a passive role; it throws us back into the emotional intensity of that moment when, cowering beneath a desk, we imagined our house and family being blown to smithereens around us. Such feelings, even when recollected in the peaceful and deliberately isolated setting of a museum or gallery, bring us back to responsibility, as do the etchings of Goya and Picasso’s great, transcendent painting-as-mural, Guernica. Art’s ability—manifested in so many different ways late this century—to pierce through the ever-so-cynical media we face every day deeps us alive to our own senses.”







Robert Beckmann, The Body of a House, #1 (1993)

The two YouTube videos embedded below contain some of the actual footage of the 1953 Annie test depicted in Robert Beckmann's The Body of a House.