Vitro Nasu

Levitated Mass documentary film Michael Heizer

In 2012, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art debuted Levitated Mass by Michael Heizer. How it got there was a work of art in itself, and the topic of a documentary by Doug Pray. Derek Blasberg caught up with Pray to talk about his film.

Michael Heizer The City in the Nevada Desert (Previous Post) (See a photo of Michael Heizer with a short bio)

Isolated Mass / Circumflex (#2)
Artist: Michael Heizer
1968/1978
Mayari-R steel
146 × 1461 × 8 in. (370.8 × 3710.9 × 20.3 cm)
Place Created: United States, North America

De Menil
Michael Heizer Isolated Mass./Cucumflex 2 1968
https://www.menil.org/exhibitions/260-outdoor-sculpture-at-the-menil

Alfred Leslie, a second-generation Abstract Expressionist and filmmaker who turned his back on nonrepresentational art in the early 1960s to lead a revival of figurative painting, died on Friday in Brooklyn. He was 95. His son Anthony said the cause of his death, at a hospital, was complications of a Covid infection. (New York times).

The World is Charged with the Grandeur of God

Alfred Leslie – Artnet

Alfred Leslie wiki

(Delphine Seyrig from Pull My Daisy)

Pull My Daisy Robert Frank, Albert Leslie, USA, 1959, V’08, Tribute to Bob Dylan

Pull My Daisy is a 1959 American short film directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, and adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, Beat Generation. Kerouac also provided improvised narration

Photo via Michael Snow Objects of Vision at the art gallery of Ontario

Michael Snow the Canadian artist who was behind the iconic “Flightstop” art installation in the Eaton Centre, has passed away.

Michael Snow wiki

Michael Snow worked in a range of media including film, installation, sculpture, photography, and music. His best-known films are Wavelength (1967) and La Région Centrale (1971), with the former regarded as a milestone in avant-garde cinema.
Contents

Michael Snow Seen or Unseen – Criterion

Toward Snow

From the archive: Annette Michelson on Michael Snow.

The working of his thought is thus concerned with that slow transformation of the notion of space which, beginning as a vacuum chamber, as an isotropic volume, gradually became a system inseparable from the matter it contains and from time.
—Paul Valery, Introduction To The Method Of Leonardo Da Vinci

My eye, tuning towards the imaginary, will go to any wavelengths for its sights.
—Stan Brakhage, Metaphors On Vision

Photo via

Artforum Obit Philip Perlstein

f

Highliths friendship art of Pearlstein, Warhol & Cantor

Philip Pearlstein, whose planar arctic nudes of the 1960s revitalized realistic figure painting for a new generation, died December 17 in New York at the age of ninety-eight. An accomplished illustrator by his teens, Pearlstein flirted with the emotional hues and geometric shapes of Abstract Expressionism before diving fully into figuration with his disaffected, antisexual nudes and paving the way for such twentieth-century notables as Jack Beal, Alex Katz, and Alfred Leslie. “A typical Pearlstein nude, in which the genitals are rarely as obvious as in any of [Larry] Rivers’ earlier nudes, establishes so corporeal a presence that, despite its seeming somnambulant apathy, it bursts through the limits of style,” wrote Sidney Tillim in a 1966 issue of Artforum, attempting to explain the controversy then surrounding the artist’s work. “The nude, in other words, regains its existential dignity.” (Artforum obit)

(Tacita Dean )
Marian Goodman celebrated her birthday on Nov 12, 2022.

Tacita Dean “Russian Ending” ICA Boston org.

Rodney Graham Life Scenarios

Rodney Graham
Artforum obit

Rodney Graham That’s Not Me

Lisson Gallery Rodney Graham
Inverted Drip Painting #57

With a practice spanning five decades, Canadian artist Rodney Graham (1949 – 2022) operated through systems of quotation, reference and adaptation. From the 1980s, Graham expanded his diverse oeuvre to encompass photography, painting, sculpture, film, video and music. As actor, performer, producer, historian, writer, poet, sound engineer and musician, Graham’s art examined the complexities of Western culture through strategies of disguise, as he shifted seamlessly into different roles and characters. Casting himself as a succession of motley characters, Graham inhabited different personae, genres and art forms for the duration of his career. ‘It may be a burden to reinvent oneself every time,’ Graham said, ‘but it makes things more interesting.’- Hauser & Wirth

Pierre Soulages Painter of Black Dies at 102 (Hyperallergic.com)

(Johan Coltrane – thanks to Pascal Blanchard for this photo)

Pierre Soulages Wiki

Collections
Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris)[19]
Honolulu Museum of Art
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
Musée Soulages (Rodez)
Museum of Modern Art (New York)[20]
Museum of Modern Art (Rio de Janeiro)
National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.)
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York)[21]
Tate Gallery (London)

Museum Dedicated to Pierre Soulages

Art News Obit

Art critic Peter Schjeldahl who wrote with unparalleled Elegance dies at 80.

<> <>

Looking back at Peter Schjeldahls Visionary Criticism – New Yorker

(Racing Thoughts,” from 1983. Johns has often been burdened with overinterpretation. His silence must be our guide.Art work © 2021 Jasper Johns / VAGA at ARS)

Jasper Johns Remains Contemporary arts philosopher KIng

My father, Peter Schjeldahl, passed away today at 3pm in the Catskills of lung cancer. He was not in pain and he was not alone. My mother Brooke, his sister Ann, and I were with him. He will be buried privately. In March there will be a service honoring his life and work. We’re grateful for all the messages and will be in touch when we can.

(Ada Calhoun posted this morning on FB -Oct 21, 2022)

Ada Calhoun “Also a Poet – Frank O’Hara, Her Father and Her.

Billy Al Bengston- art in motion

Art News obit – Billy Al Bengston dead

(Honolulu, Water color)

See more here – Artnet

2019 – Interview Ed Ruscha and Billy Al Bengston

Ed Rucha answered here.

ER: I was very impressed with Billy painting something he seemingly loved to do, which was motorcycling. I thought, What a perfect combination, that is, making art out of something you’re really in tune with. Later on Billy got me into motorcycling, which diverted my attention away from making art. We went to Baja, all points north and south, a lot on motorcycles.

SF Gate Obit

His DNA was in San Francisco’: Prolific photographer Fred Lyon dies at 97

Fred Lyon Portfolio

Michael Heizer the City to open following half century wait

The City, a colossal sculpture by Michael Heizer on which the Land artist has labored for more than fifty years in the Nevada Desert, will welcome visitors September 2.

Visit New York times (Spectacular)

New Yorker

Michael Heizer – Gagosian

When Heizer was twelve years old, his parents permitted him to take a year off school to accompany his father, a renowned field archeologist, on a dig in Mexico. As his father researched the rock sources of ancient monuments, Heizer made site drawings, an exercise that he has continued to expand upon throughout his career. In the mid-1960s he left his studies at the San Francisco Art Institute and headed to New York, where he supported himself by painting apartments, including the loft of Walter De Maria, with whom he developed a close, lasting friendship. During this time Heizer began to work on shaped canvases that he called “negative paintings.”
In the winter of 1967 Heizer made a trip to the Sierra Nevada mountains, where he dug two large pits in the woods, lining one with plywood and the other with sheet metal. He declared this work to be “ultra-modern art,” and it was a turning point in his practice. Heizer further manipulated the landscape in Double Negative (1969), a pair of cuts fifty feet deep in facing cliff edges of Mormon Mesa in Nevada, made by removing 240,000 tons of sandstone and rhyolite.

Marta Palau Bosch (See more art here)

Art News Obit

Marta Palau, Mexican Sculptor Who Found Empowerment in Textiles, Has Died at 88

Marta Palau Bosch wiki

Marta Palau Bosch (17 July 1934 – 13 August 2022)[1] was a Spanish-Mexican artist who resided in Mexico. She worked in engraving, painting, sculpture, and most prominently in tapestries, defining herself by her profound artistic use and arrangement of native Mexican natural materials.[2] She was one of the first Mexican artists to focus on themes around women’s and immigrants’ experiences during the 1970s, especially in her Ilerda series of tapestries[3] and later with her Nahual sculptures.