John Baldessari
Win a €50 Stedelijk Museum Bookshop Voucher
We have five €50 Stedelijk Museum bookshop vouchers to give away to those who register and add four other names on John Baldessari’s Your Name in Lights!
Go to yournameinlights.nl or on Facebook at http://on.fb.me/15secondsfame
Sign up your name and four of your friends or family.
Winners will be decided Thursday 23rd June 2011, so sign up now for 15 Seconds of Fame and the chance to win a €50 Stedelijk Museum bookshop voucher!
Good luck!
Rules
1) Prize is a €50 voucher from the Stedelijk Museum bookshop. There are five to be won.
2) Entrants must include four other names minimum when they register at Your Name in Lights.
3) Winner will be chosen at random
4) Winners will be contacted via the email address they provide at the registration.
5) Competition closes on Thursday 23rd June 2011 at 12:00pm
6) Information about the results will not be provided
Behind YOUR NAME IN LIGHTS – part 2
Where do you put a thirty meter long LED wall?
These are the sort of questions and issues that Project Manager Lucas Bonekamp had to answer.
Having been working on the project to bring YOUR NAME IN LIGHTS for six months, he is at the very centre of all the overlapping parts. It’s not as simple as setting it up and turning it on. Lucas took time to talk with me about what he’s working on.
It was very quickly made clear to me just how many different people and organizations Lucas is working with. I had made the incorrect assumption that the entire “object” would be picked up from the Sydney Festival and transported over to Amsterdam.
“Far too expensive,” said Lucas.
To give you some perspective, the YOUR NAME IN LIGHTS screen is 30 meters long. The Iamsterdam sign at the Museumplein by the Rijksmuseum is roughly the same height but 20 meters long. The Stedelijk Museum itself is about 100 meters wide.
Instead, the Stedelijk Museum is renting the LED wall from a Dutch company. They kept the same dimension as to when the Kaldor Public Arts Project developed YOUR NAME IN LIGHTS for the Sydney Festival, who also rented their LED wall. Lucas contacted them in order to use the same software they did. This included the website to register names, the database behind it, the ability to moderate the input, the allocation of times as well as the actual program used to run the display. Lucas is the one who controls all this information.
When meeting with the company set to build the LED wall, Lucas brought staff from the Stedelijk’s Audio/Visual department, who had the expertise but had also worked with artists before. There were many technicalities to go over, like how the LED screen will be facing the sun and how the brightness needed to be turned down during the night. The level of detail going into the running of this project is immense.
One of the first issues for the project was acquiring a permit from the Stadsdeel Zuid, the district where the museum is located. The LED wall will be on all day for the whole three weeks of the Holland Festival. Was an events permit necessary? The Museumplein has had many issues about the grass being worn down from overuse. Luckily, the Stadsdeel Zuid were very cooperative in order to help realize this project. The permit require was only for the installation of the LED wall.
The next issue was where to put it. Lucas liaised with the builders currently working on the Stedelijk extension. Two solutions were put forward. Either to put it on top of the scaffolding or to build additional scaffolding to the adjacent elevator building and put the LED wall on that. As the wind can get quite strong, a third, safer option was put forward. Lucas would talk to another company in order to strengthen the current scaffolding. The reason being that it is there for the builders to start working on the façade of the building, not to act as any kind of major support. Strengthening what is already there means that the LED wall can sit on a platform about eight meters high. The LED wall will run on its own power supply, again rented from yet another company.
An interesting issue that arose was what alphabet to use. In Sydney they used a straightforward Latin alphabet. What about the international communities in Amsterdam? The Turkish alphabet, for example, has seven characters that Latin does not. Lucas made sure these would be added.
As you can imagine, all these little details have to be run past John Baldessari’s studio and the Holland Festival are kept informed as the project progresses. Lucas is the one keeping in contact with everyone.
You can still register for your 15 seconds of fame at www.yournameinlights.nl
John Baldessari in Conversation
by Melissa Dawson, Press Intern here at the Stedelijk Museum.
John Baldessari - Photo by Margriet Schavemaker
What better way to spend a gloomy Sunday afternoon than with John Baldessari, “the most relevant artist of our time” (New York Times) and two pivotal figures from the Stedelijk Museum’s past and present? The Stedelijk Museum played host to the artist in conversation with director Ann Goldstein and previous director Rudi Fuchs.
In the art world, where events like these are rare, this was a real treat for students, artists, gallery staff the public who stopped by at the Stedelijk. It was a unique event where people could come and listen to an influential artist discuss his work, the art industry and to get the opportunity to ask John Baldessari a question.
Baldessari discussed how integral the idea of “participation” was in relation to his current installation, Your Name in Lights, which was launched by the Stedelijk Museum and Holland Festival earlier this month.
Born in California in 1931, John Baldessari’s work is mostly associated with the Conceptualist art movement prominent in the 1970s. Questions such as “What do things mean?” are a constant source of inspiration for him. For example he said the word “run” has no fewer than 23 definitions owing to the evolution of technology and programming. “Words can mean whatever you want them to mean,” he stated.
Baldessari discussed the effect that Dutch painter Piet Mondrian had on him, admitting that his Broadway Boogie Woogie reduced him to tears. “Even artists cry, you know,” he added. Ex-Stedelijk director Rudi Fuchs commented that he once expressed a theory that Jackson Pollock’s dripping paintings were influenced by Pollock’s visit to Mondrian’s studio, where he was exposed to some of Mondrian’s unfinished works.
Fuchs also spoke of the humour he found within works by Baldessari and his peers, Bruce Nauman and Sol LeWitt. The ex-director described the latter as a “comic master” referring to his technique of repetition and dissection of geometric shapes.
Baldessari’s first European exhibition was held in Dutch gallery, Art + Project. In the early ‘70s, he also exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum. It was interesting to hear that during this period Baldessari felt uncomfortable with his status as an artist in LA stating people found it “weird”. When he arrived in Holland and “everybody got it”, it raised questions for him about his work and nationality.
Fuchs also commented on LA and that its contribution to art is comparable to that of Hollywood films; “fast paced” and often like watching television or a movie. “You seen things happen and don’t know why.” Ann Goldstein, Stedelijk director and former curator at MoCA, agreed stating “Entertainment in LA can be the air that you breathe” but added that you can also ignore it all together. I found these issues extremely interesting and having two well informed directors from both the US and Holland provided a nice juxtaposition.
Goldstein raised some interesting questions, asking Baldessari what kind of advice he could offer artists today and also what, in his opinion, was the role of the artist?
“There is no niche in society for an artist as there is for a dentist or doctor―nobody says you are needed as an artist.” His advice for artists today? Being merely talented is not enough, one must be “obsessed but patient.”
Baldessari ended the talk with an anecdote. He explained that he had recently purchased a book on surfing, a gift intended for his assistant and that whilst leafing through it he read a quote from an aged Hawaiian surfer. The quote he felt was just as relevant to aspiring artists as beginner surfers; “Paddle. Paddle. Paddle. Someday, big wave will come.”
HF Launch Video
Your Name in Lights @ Holland Festival 2011 from Holland Festival on Vimeo.
The HF Jonge Gasten interviewed people at the launch of Your Name in Lights.
Your Name in Lights Launches 1st June
Wednesday 1st June marks the start of the Holland Festival and the launch of John Baldessari’s YOUR NAME IN LIGHTS.
But there’s still time! Sign up, tell your friends, add their names and share it over all your social networks. Be part of artwork that gives you 15 Seconds of Fame.
Sign up at http://www.yournameinlights.nl
Or, you can go to the Stedelijk Museum’s Facebook page and sign up through there http://on.fb.me/15secondsfame
We’ve even got the livestream up and running on these pages. Be sure to check it out tomorrow!
Behind YOUR NAME IN LIGHTS
From June 1 to 26, the Stedelijk continues its commitment to bringing international artists to Amsterdam for the Holland Festival, exploring the relationship between the visual and performance arts.
This time, it will involve a 30 meter-wide LED screen.
I spoke to Curator of Exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen, about how this project came to be. Over the past three years, he has been working closely with the Holland Festival and this year sees the Museum taking on more of the production responsibilities.
Martijn told me about how he and a Holland Festival representative saw Marina Rosenfeld’s TEENAGE LONTANO at the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Rosenfeld’s live performance involved a remix of György Ligeti’s 1967 work LONTANO with several young people taking vocal cues from iPods. Bringing this to the 2009 Holland Festival was the first formal collaboration between the two organizations. For the performance in the Westergasfabriek, Rosenfeld recruited Dutch teenagers.
