Saturday I drove to Bard College for the opening of Olafur Eliasson’s first permanent outdoor installation in this country. Entitled The parliament of reality, the piece consists of a circular cement island in the center of a moat-like pond, accessed by a bridge enclosed by arches of steel latticework. The pond is ringed with plantings of wild grasses that will take 2-3 years to fill in, and 24 trees, whose branches, when they grow out in 5 years or so, will ultimately form a unified circle. The trees also produce blossoms which, hopefully, will coat the pond with yellow petals each May. With seating in the form of massive local rocks, the idea is that it will become a place for meeting, discussion, and performance. At the moment the constructed elements dominate, and it takes some imagination to picture what it will be like when the trees, for instance, are higher than the latticed roof of the walkway. Without the vegetation it seems like the bare bones of something yet to be realized, as did Robert Irwin’s Getty Garden when I saw it in its earliest stages.

Middle photo: Photo: Olafur Eliasson Studio

The latticework pattern mimics that of the ripples in the pond. Did he know it would do that?

The Eliasson installation is adjacent to the Frank Gehry designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, a building I love for its quality of lightness and insubstantiality, heightened on this overcast day so that the roof of the building seemed to merge with the sky.

Sadly, this lyrical dance of wing-like curves and light ends abruptly with the rear of the building, which is as square and clunky as the back of any urban theater. Although I've been to the Fisher Center several times, I'm never prepared for the nasty slap of reality that awaits me as I walk around it to my parked car. I want to believe in the fairy tale.

I’m loving Chicago! Having a home town guy in the White House seems to have caused it to shed its Second City inferiority complex (which always drove me crazy) and stand proud. The only negative is the hysteria over the swine flu “epidemic,” which has schools closing and gatherings being cancelled. I’ve always washed my hands before meals—as my mom taught me to—and carried a little bottle of Purell with me to make it easier, silently marveling at my New York friends who’d get out of a taxi or the subway and sit down to dinner (and sometimes prepare food—yuck!) without doing so. Maybe the good side of this is that it will make everyone more conscious of something they should have been doing all along. Meanwhile I use my Purell more surreptitiously, because I don’t want to add to the fear-mongering, and am frequenting Mexican restaurants (so good in Chicago!), because they probably can use the business.

I thought Art Chicago was pretty boring—only a handful of really good galleries represented—but, to my surprise, loved the Antiques Fair a few floors below. Meanwhile the Olafur Eliasson exhibition at the MCA (through September 13th) has caused a lot of excitement—as I mentioned, so much better than at MoMA and PS 1—and the the pairing with the Buckminster Fuller show (through August 9th) is genius, because you can see the lineage. As I’ve no doubt mentioned before, Einar Thorsteinn, who works with Olafur (“helps me with models and helps me to think,” as Olafur said in his artist’s talk), was a protégé of Fuller, and so here you can look at Fuller’s models and then go downstairs and see how Olafur and Einar have taken off on them in their own models, made them more fanciful, and then elaborated on them in large works. There are also interpretations of Fuller’s work by sculptor Kenneth Snelson, which are gorgeous. I wish I had images to illustrate all of this, but I was only able to photograph Eliasson’s exhibition while accompanied by a representative of the MCA, and had not made an appointment to shoot the Fuller show.

Let me go off a little bit on this policy of no photography, which is shared by the Whitney (but not by MoMA), and the reason I didn’t write about Jenny Holzer’s show here, which I loved. Yes, I could have gotten images from the museum, but if they didn’t reflect my vision, I’d just be doing P.R. I could understand it in the old days, the concern that a lousy shot taken on someone’s Brownie could end up in a magazine as representative of the artist’s work, or that people would produce coffee mugs and T-shirts with a pirated image. But today, when the influence of print is lessening and word-of-mouth rules, why would you want to insist on stopping someone from taking a picture with her iPhone and emailing her excitement to all of her friends? As for artists, photography is a way of recording what is important to them—not some commercial photographer—ideas that they may want to incorporate into their own work. As we all know, major museum exhibitions have an influence on the art that comes after, and to limit that in any way seems counter-productive.

Museums seem to be catering more and more to the casual visitor while distancing themselves from artists. First there’s the entrance fee, which limits when you can see the work (in crowds on free night). I tried to get a friend who’s a professor of art in Iowa into MoMA on my press card with me, and was told she could come in for free if she had a group of students with her. But even if she were teaching in New York, doesn’t she have to see the show first, to decide if it’s something she wants to bring her students to? I know so many artists who choose to pass on major exhibitions because of the fee, and often if you find a good show, you want to see it more than once. In Chicago, no doubt, many artists can afford to join both the MCA and the Art Institute (or “INSTITVTE” as it reads on their Web site—yikes!), but in New York, with a plethora of major museums, cost becomes prohibitive. I propose that the New York museums get together on an “artist’s card” that would allow entrance to all the museums for a yearly fee of $125 or so. Verifying that someone is an artist is easier now than it was back in the day when I had to prove my professional status to the city in order to live in SoHo—it can be anyone who has a Web site featuring their work, or is featured on a gallery Web site. Such a policy would increase not only traffic but word-of-mouth.

That said, here are some random shots from the Eliasson exhibition:

Einar and Manuela are coming to visit next week, and in their honor I’m posting the pictures of their home that I took in October. I met Einar—mathematician, architect, artist, and all round visionary—on my first visit to Olafur Eliasson’s studio in 2004 and a couple of years later he and his wife Manuela, a jewelry designer, took me on a tour of “alternative” Iceland (or so Einar called it—I thought all of Iceland was alternative). Their small house outside Berlin fairly bursts with the results of their combined creativity, and being in it you just want to make things. Now that I’m posting the Art Vent House Report #3, I’m noticing that the homes that interest me most are chock full o’ stuff, while in my own domicile I'm manically minimal. I’m also aware that although I’m a painter, I tend to write most about installation and sculpture. Hmmm. Let’s not make that mean anything.

Einar's studio:




The office:

The living room:

The dining area:

Einar at work: