Post 113. Concrete
NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
We are walking around the new exhibition, by Boris Tarantula at Prestige University Arts Center.
“ ‘In the Aggregate’,
New works in concrete by Boris Tarantula”
says the red banner in white letters, stretched across the façade of the building on golden cords with tassels hanging from the knotted ends.
Steve Strether has parked and joins Artie Bliemischand me at the entrance where he dropped us off to spare Artie’s injured foot. She leans on her walking stick, with lines of yellow and white stars spiraling up the deep green shaft from the bottom like a stellar barber pole.
“Look, there he is!”
“Who?”
“Seymour Van Rijn, Fred!”
“Who? That guy in the aviators?”
“No, he must be security, check his right ear. No, I mean the old man … he is over ninety and still pretty active. See him there, with Frank Vasari and the crowd around them?”
They are strolling along a sky-blue carpet that leads visitors into the gallery and around the exhibition then into the courtyard.
“Yes, isn’t that Gloriani, there too?”
“Always, Giuseppe is Boris’s shadow, agent, and fixer. He set up the sponsorship.”
“What do you mean?”
“Gloriani got Seymour to foot the bill for this whole show.”
“You mean he owns this stuff.”
“He is donating it to P.U. after this.”
Steve takes Artie’s elbow as she looks down at her foot, wrapped with a protective black ‘Orthopedic Wedge Healing Shoe’ with white socked toes protruding through the open front. She has painted it with orange and yellow paisleys.
“He is loaded, developed the Van Rijn estates out of cow pasture, back in the sixties, you know.”
“A far-sighted man, Steve!”
We enter the gallery which is dominated by a massive lump of unfinished concrete, roughly dome shaped, called “Mammon’s Pantheon.”
A helpful docent tells us,
“It weighs over fifteen-tons, made with coins from every country in the world, mixed into the cement, gravel and sand. Isn’t it a great idea?”
“Very clever.”
Steve speaks from behind a hand up at his beard. The young docent smiles at Artie.
“Hi Professor, Bliemisch.”
“Jackie, you look great in that black outfit.”
“Thanks Professor Bliemisch. Did you see the show go up?”
“No, I was long gone. So, Jackie, how much dough did he mix into this thing?”
“The total value is said to be worth over two hundred thousand dollars.”
Jackie looks over her shoulder.
“Sorry, I got to go!”
“Jackie was in my drawing class, Fred.”
“I didn’t know you were teaching here.”
“I am not. It barely lasted one semester.”
“When was that?”
“About a year or so ago, well maybe two. I don’t want to remember any of it. I think they gave the position to Daisy Briscoe.”
“They keep the students busy around here.”
We look more closely and find facets of various coins emerging from the aggregate like gifts. Steve walks around the piece and comes back.
“I think I saw tiny bit of a Krugerrand protruding back there.”
“They are solid gold, aren’t they?”
“Yup, one ounce worth, fetch around $1300 Fred, if it really is one.”
“A tempting little item Steve!”
Jacky waves to us from her podium.
“Is that kid one of your students?”
“She was a student, sort of, you might say, I was just telling Fred.”
“Any good?”
“Yeah, she’s too easily distracted, though. She is supposed to stay behind that podium and dish out programs or what-ever these things are.”
Artie waves the brochure she picked up while we waited for Steve to park.
We can see Jackie back at her station inside the entrance smiling at Sherman Shrowd, and his wife, and giving them both brochures. Artie reads from hers.
“We regret the artist’s intentions cannot be fully realized for this piece at this time.
Please take time to watch the video presentation opposite.”
A flat screen set into the wall opposite comes on as soon as Steve steps within a few feet in front of it. We can see several people wearing, protective goggles and gloves, chiseling coins out of the surface at various points. A young blond girl and a brown boy are both running around looking for more on the ground. While the crawl underneath tells us:
“The public were to be given hammers and chisels and goggles to chip out the coins, following the way the dome of the Roman Pantheon was dug out from its foundation mound by people hunting for coins. We regret the risk of injuries is too great for this activity.”
“Well, isn’t that cute!”
Turning back to the piece, Artie lifts her spiraling star stick to point at the great lump of art cementing currency into our aesthetic appreciation.
“We consumers should be destroying the thing and getting our mitts on some dough.”
“Yes Artie, consumers of art, no less!”
“Isn’t that putting us in our place!”
“Touchet! Steve.”
“Maybe Boris is an artist after all.”
“Well, look who’s president, Fred.”
“I keep looking the other way.”
Steve has walked ahead while Artie and I look for more gold on the surface of “Mammon’s Pantheon.” We catch up with him on the blue pile of our progress at, “Regimental Order”. 113 sacks of Portland cement are suspended, as if lying flat on the ground, about four feet above it. Four abreast in columns of twenty-five, led by two rows of six and one in the lead by itself. Each appears to balance on a thin black wire fixed to the center of the underside of each sack and to the floor below by a round brass fitting.
Artie is leaning hard on her star stick looking closely.
“These things are balloons!”
“There is a little cement dust on this one.”
Steve blows at the one in front of him, no dust rises but the balloon moves a little.
“Must be glued on.”
Artie eases up on her star stick.
“How about that!”
“Wait a minute Artie, those in front are all moving.”
“There must be a fan somewhere, Steve.”
Steve wets his finger with spit and holds it up to find the breeze.
“Nothing here.”
He moves toward the front of the regiment. Artie moves toward the back.
“No, here Steve, back here.”
“Fred, it is coming out of these vents, look.”
“Yeah, I think they turn the fans on and off to keep it interesting.”
We can see a small vent low on the wall behind them and another in the floorTowards the front. Artie moves over to the plaque on the wall opposite.
“Why no video on this one?”
We read the plaque:
Each of these sack-shape Mylar inflatables is printed with unique photographs of a sack of Portland cement just before it was opened and emptied into the mixer at the Dordrechts, Rout One bridge construction site, between 11:25 AM and 11:47AM on September 23, 2014, in Alexandria, Virginia.
“The artist expresses the orderly intentionality of our impact on the environment with an irony characteristic of his new work.” E. Montana Berg, Mark It Art, Blog, Dec. 2014.
Artie looks up from the plaque.
“Well Fred, does Berg’s remark mean anything to you?”
“Seems to me that our impact on the environment is disorderly and unintended.”
“What about bridge building?”
“Artie, these things seem more like Dadaist gestures really.”
Steve is stroking his beard.
“Echoes from around 1916, I think.”
“Still making money too!”
“No one will ever do it better than Meret Oppenhiem’s fur teacup!”
“That was well after 1916, Artie.”
“I would like to have seen some video of the action at the Dordrechts building site”
“Fred, someone must have had a phone handy at the time.”
“Funny idea, a phone for taking videos.”
“Cement that one Fred!”
We move on along the river of our blue carpeted intentions to a smaller space, where, “Rising Piece”, is arranged in sequence against the wall. Seven white pedestals support rounded gray chunks of concrete, only about a couple of pounds each. They are exhibited in a row of uniform, 2 ft. open top, plexiglass cubes, partially filled with water. Each box is filled a little higher than the next in succession. The seventh with water apparently oozing out of hidden holes in the concrete, overflows into a shallow mettle pan on the floor under the pedestal. The paisleys on Artie’s Orthopedic Wedge Healing Shoe shine with drops of water splashing out. The pan overflows, draining into a shallow rounded channel across the gallery floor and disappearing through a jagged hole where the wall meets the terrazzo floor. One can follow a faint sound around the corner of the gallery into a dark room filled with the roar of a heavy waterfall.
“Can’t see a damn thing in here!”
“I think that’s the idea Steve.”
“There’s the wall on your left and a railing on your right.”
“Yeah, got it, Fred.”
“Check the LEDs on the floor.”
“Just like being at the movies.”
“Not quite Fred.”
“Well, it is a ‘sound screen’, you see.”
“Not at all Fred.”
“Okay, Artie….”
“Why do I feel I might fall off into the void?”
“Are you afraid of heights Fred?”
“Don’t do well at all, on high.”
“There you are, we don’t have enough visual clues in here. I’ll bet the opposite wall is closer than you might think.”
“I can’t touch anything beyond the line of lights with this stick.”
A voice comes out of the void.
“For your safety. Please stay within the path indicated.”
The room lights up red, like a dark room safety light. A uniformed security guard comes to Artie, who is leaning over the rail, still pocking with her stick.
“Are you alright Ma’am?”
“Yes, sorry, lost my balance a little.”
The guard escorts her out of the room and the red light goes off. We could see the room is painted black and isn’t more than a few yards wide with lots of wire and huge black cabinets.
Around another corner we come up outside on an escalator, beneath a massive lump of cement, called “Complementary Eye Piece. It is the biggest yet, by far, with yellow and purple pebbles said to made by the artist out of tumbled glass. It balances on a narrow base and towers out ward with a smooth side and a jagged side, like a rock that was torn out of a stream bed.
“Artie!”
“Well, if it isn’t Frank Vasari!”
“What happened to your foot?”
“Slipped and busted it up in the studio last week.”
The group around Seymour Van Rijn has gathered in the shade of “Complementry Eye Piece”, with wine coloring plastic glasses in various shades of grape.
“Artie, let me get you a drink?”
Frank Vasari walks off, before she can answer.
“Hi, Artie, Giuseppe Gloriani…”
He holds out a hand with the fingers of the other crowded around a paper plate, wine glass and napkin.
“Frank told me you are a sculptor.”
“Yeah, I do some 3D work.”
Frank Vasari breezes back with a glass of wine for Artie. She introduces Steve and me to Frank, who then introduces Gloriani, or tries to.
“Sorry, you’ll have to excuse me folks.”
Guseppe, strides off to tend to Seymore who has turned from the serving table talking to Mrs. Shrowd.
Artie swigs from her wine and gestures to Steve who has a plate full of Teriyaki chicken on skewers and a glass of cider. Boris is yelling across the crowd to Frank, who excuses himself to walk over.
“Listen to that!”
“Boris yells, that’s one of his things.”
“Let’s make a move, guys.”
“Gloriani is a pretty good agent you know.”
“No, no, no, Gentileschi takes care of that for me, Steve.”
“Don’t you want to mix and mingle?”
“No, I don’t know what to say to people at these things. It all gets too pretentious for me … Finish your chicken Steve, let’s go.”
