Spotlight: Mentor Huebner’s “Exterior Overpass”

Mentor Huebner, Exterior Overpass, drawing for “Blade Runner,” c. 1982
Sepia sketch on tissue
Anonymous gift

Ridley Scott’s iconic film Blade Runner pictures a dystopic vision of our global urban future, replete with environmental decay, apocalyptic population density, and the looming threat of posthumanism. One of the film’s most notable characteristics is its complex architectural environment.

In Mentor Huebner’s Exterior overpass (c. 1982), seen above, this architectural environment is hand-drawn, a sketch for an artwork ultimately authored by Scott’s art direction team. Huebner’s drawing for Blade Runner, however, is not simply disposable, a “mere [byproduct] of the artistic process.”[1] It is itself an object, both a relic of a speculative filmic future and a testament to the handmade. Huebner’s sepia ink drawing feels deeply physical, a pen the extension of the human hand, immediately challenging the bionic future Scott’s replicants allude to; the drawing is certainly distinct, too, from processes of set-dressing, architectural modeling, and photomontaging that make up the environment of the film. Though this particular drawing is unrealized in the film, it shares an insight into the visioning process, capturing elements seen briefly on the silver screen.

As Dietrich Neumann, curator of Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner at the Bell Gallery, notes:

Expansive sets, whose construction might have taken months and cost millions, often show up on screen for mere minutes or even seconds, and the spectator might indeed be distracted by the plot at this very moment. Closer examination of sets requires a certain disrespect for the technical conditions of the medium, which characteristically determine and limit the time and space for its contemplation. We have to stop the film, so to speak, in order to study frame enlargements or stills or rewind the film to see a specific scene several times. In this particular situation, sketches, drawings, blueprints, and models gain even more importance than they might possess for actual built architecture.[2]

Accordingly, a close reading of Huebner’s drawing allows film architecture to be understood as a distinct category—architecture created only for its visuality, seen through the lens of narrative fiction.

Huebner’s vision invokes a complex layering of urban species: the Louis Sullivan-era Chicago department store; the Chinoiserie of American Chinatowns; crosshatching highways reminiscent of the GM-sponsored Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair; a Monorail, not unlike the one opened by Disney in 1971; monolithic towers with a Gothic emphasis on verticality. Here, Batman’s Gotham meets a Los Angeles taken to its wildest conclusion, a dystopic, acid rain-strewn city of unthinkable density with hints of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. 2019, the year in which Blade Runner is to take place, is fast approaching, and LA looks nothing like this, nor does it look like the hyper-technological Hades depicted in the film. Both these urban visions, however, highlight deeply felt anxieties about class, placelessness, and the speed of change.

Huebner’s drawing illustrates mobility in this revisionist LA, with a distinct separation of classes—those walking the streets; the endless stream of drivers on distinct and interweaving highways; the Monorail riders; and, elsewhere, the spinners, spaceship-like vehicles that fly above the dense mess of the street (Blade Runner’s protagonist, Deckard, rides around in this mythical vessel). Cars trudge off the frame, cautioned to travel slowly, the monorail zooms forward, and pedestrians traverse the slick streets, one seemingly running toward the Chinatown gate. There is anxiety about mixing here, with the segregated highways invoking Le Corbusier’s idealized cordon sanitaire in Algeria, separating the colonized casbah from the Central Business District-to-suburb greenbelt.[3]

Huebner, about whom little is written, was but one of the designers who contributed to the eventual realization of Blade Runner’s visual environment, under the direction of “visual futurist” Syd Mead, and, ultimately, director Ridley Scott.[4] However, his sepia ink sketches clearly shaped the architectural environment of the film, enriching the complex landscape that has puzzled and enchanted sci-fi enthusiasts and architectural theorists alike for more than thirty years.

 

— Reya Sehgal, Curatorial Assistant

 

 

[1] Dietrich Neumann, Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1996), 7.

[2] Ibid, 9.

[3] Zeynep Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers Under French Rule (Berkeley: UC Press, 1997), 40.

[4] Michael Webb, “’Like Today, Only More So’: The Credible Dystopia of Blade Runner,” in Film Architecture, 45.

Installing Dave Cole’s “American Lullaby”

An adventurous day of installation here at the Bell Gallery, filled with pink fiberglass and heavy machinery. Dave Cole: American Lullaby opens May 9th.

Spotlight: Jan Groover’s “Untitled”

Jan Groover, Untitled, 2003
Ink jet print
Gift of Jeanne Press and Richard S. Press ’60, P’ 90, P’08, P’12

Jan Groover (1943-2012) began taking photographs with her 35mm camera in the 1960s. Though her early triptychs focused on the exteriority of suburban life, she gained major recognition when she turned her camera towards domestic interiors, most notably her own kitchen sink. In Groover’s kitchen sink photographs, seemingly banal, domestic objects (forks, bell peppers, vases, cake tins) are recast, in close-ups, as outlines, shadows, colors, and volumes in indeterminate space. Her photography is surprisingly surrealist and abstract, imaginative, even, despite its placement within the still life genre. And, perhaps because of her training as a painter, her images have an almost painterly quality.

Groover’s work, though often underappreciated, emerged just as photography was gaining acceptance in the art world, and, according to Times critic Andy Grundberg, her photograph on the cover of Artforum in 1978 acted as “a signal that photography had arrived.”[1] In 1987, her work was presented in a solo exhibition at MoMA—a rarity for female photographers at the time. Groover’s work has often been likened to that of Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Paul Outerbridge, and Alfred Stieglitz because of her use of light and shadow. Like those photographers, she was deeply invested in a formalist ideology. She is often cited as saying, “formalism is everything.”[2] Despite this interest in pictorial composition, her inquiries into the constructed rather than documentarian qualities of photography are more along the lines of those posed by her contemporaries Tina Barney (who produced the film Jan Groover: Tilting at Space), Cindy Sherman, and Richard Prince.

In Untitled (2003), the objects create colorful shapes that indicate volume, but proclaim no relationship to their surroundings. The black background could be a wall or a void, but its lack of depth forces a reckoning with the objects placed in the foreground of this still life. Groover pays homage to the painted still life through her use of the crushed velvet surface underneath the objects and the radiant pear, but the vivid colors seem more reminiscent of an eerie, luminous Technicolor than either a still life painting or a realistic photograph. The bright yellow felt stands in stark contrast to the velvet, placing the viewer in a world both atavistic and anachronistic, and somehow also atemporal.

Instead of documenting the world around her, Groover turned inward to forge her own world through her photographs, using distinctly domestic objects to create floating landscapes nearly bereft of feminine connotation.

 

– Reya Sehgal, Curatorial Assistant

 

[1] Andy Grundberg, “Photography View; Taming Unruly Reality,” The New York Times, March 15, 1987, http://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/15/arts/photography-view-taming-unruly-reality.html.

[2] Randy Kennedy, “Jan Groover, Postmodern Photographer, Dies at 68,” The New York Times, January 11, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/12/arts/design/jan-groover-postmodern-photographer-dies-at-68.html.

Western Art, Artists and India: A presentation by Shanay Jhaveri

Cate McQuaid Reviews the 2015 NCECA Biennial for the Boston Globe

Check out critic Cate McQuaid’s wonderful review of the 2015 NCECA Biennial at the Bell Gallery now through March 29th.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2015/02/24/ceramics-spotlight-providence-and-beyond/ITWTimLHISUeW0mqLCLbPJ/story.html?s_campaign=8315

Spotlight: Honoré Daumier’s “Voyage A Travers Les Populations Empressées”

Honoré Daumier, Voyage a travers les populations empressées, c. 1834
Lithograph
Gift of Joseph Shapiro

Given the recent Charlie Hebdo shootings and the conversations they have spurred about satire and creative freedom, it seems appropriate to turn to one of the early masters of French satire, Honoré Daumier, for our spotlight series.

Daumier’s career as a published caricaturist began after the revolution of 1830, when, under Louis-Philippe (fondly known as The Citizen King for his supposed simplicity), freedom of the press was established in France. This gave rise to Charles Philipon’s journal La Caricature, which published both social and overtly political cartoons, some of which found enemies in the monarchy.

Though freedom of expression had been formally established, contradictions were rife under the Citizen King’s rule. Daumier’s drawings were actually frequently censored. One particularly iconic print, Gargantua—a cartoon of Louis-Philippe as the eponymous, gold-eating character in Rabelais’ obscene novel—landed him six months in jail for treason, despite the fact that the image was not published.[1] Louis-Philippe, in fact, became a common character in Daumier’s oeuvre, often imaged as an exploitative misanthrope with a pear-shaped head. Due to Louis-Philippe’s imposition of the September Laws in 1835, which curtailed the freedom of the press to discuss the constitutional monarchy, Daumier was forced to tame his cartoons, turning to the realm of social satire. Daumier became known for his “expressive heads,” the sculptural faces of men that populated many of his prints.[2] The heads were often modeled in clay and then drawn from the model, an interesting method for an artist known as a cartoonist and, later, painter rather than a sculptor.

While his comically exaggerated faces and sculpted bodies read, to many, as charming, accessible social commentary—looking at the images now, the satire seems hardly horrifying enough to offend—Voyage a travers les populations empressées (seen above) presents no discernible human faces, only that of a malicious horse looking back at the corpses littering the landscape. This print, which was featured in La Caricature, lacks the refinement of Daumier’s crisp, detailed portraits, and feels particularly critical, and disturbing, because of this lack. Though no records exist of this print being censored, it may be one of Daumier’s most bleak and biting caricatures. The figure on the horse seems, at first glance, unidentifiable, but some contend that the figure is the infamously pear-shaped Louis-Philippe. With this reading, the inscription, “Voyage a travers les populations empressées,” suggests that the Citizen King is traveling through a once eager population, now slain. Though the scenery is not particularly indicative of place, the bodies scattered throughout the barren countryside may refer to the workers killed in the Canut revolts of 1831 and 1834—worker revolts in Lyon that were suppressed by Louis-Philippe’s anti-republican rule. In Daumier’s print, Louis-Philippe does not even look at the casualties of his rule, but continues, slumped, through this valley of death. Here, Daumier plays the “expert moralist,” condemning the brutality of the Citizen King’s rule.

 

— Reya Sehgal, Curatorial Assistant

 

[1] Elizabeth C. Childs, “Big Trouble: Daumier, Gargantua, and the Censorship of Political Caricature,” Art Journal 51, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 26-37.

[2] Bruce Laughton, “Daumier’s Expressive Heads,” RACAR: Canadian Art Review 14, no. ½ (1987): 135-142.

[3] Elisabeth Luther Cary, Honoré Daumier: a Collection of His Social and Political Caricatures, Together With an Introductory Essay On His Art (London, 1907): 25.

RE: SHE (A zine response to the Bell Gallery)

The Bell Gallery teamed up with the folks from Bluestockings Magazine to produce a zine in response to the exhibition SHE: Picturing women at the turn of the 21st century. Check out the online edition of the zine here:

Spotlight: Ando Hiroshige’s “Snowy Landscape”

Ando Hiroshige, Snowy Landscape, c. 1840
Tinted woodcut
Gift of Professor Charles W. Brown

In honor of winter storm Juno—which unleashed 19.1 inches of snow on the city of Providence—the Bell Gallery is pleased to share a beautiful, bucolic image of winter in Ando Hiroshige’s Snowy Landscape.

Ando Hiroshige (also known as Utagawa Hiroshige, 1797-1858) was a Japanese artist of the Edo period. This woodblock print, in the ukiyo-e style, is somewhat atypical of the period; instead of the scenes and portraits of kabuki actors and women of pleasure (and leisure) that ordinarily populated ukiyo-e prints, Snowy Landscape depicts a scene of romantic serenity. In fact, Hiroshige is largely known for his scenic imagery, with human figures occasionally inhabiting but not dominating the frame. Hiroshige is said to have been heavily influenced by Hokusai, an Edo artist whose bold natural scenes brought him enormous popularity in the West; both artists inspired the growing trend of Japonisme in the nineteenth century.

— Reya Sehgal, Curatorial Assistant

Installing the 2015 NCECA Biennial

Great day at the Bell Gallery today, as we unpacked the ceramic works that are part of the 2015 National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts Biennial that we are hosting.

The exhibition opens Saturday, January 24th. An opening reception will be held Friday, January 30th, beginning at 5:30 pm in List Art Lobby. See you there!

Spotlight: “La Main Ouverte” by Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier
La Main Ouverte, 1955
Color lithograph

 

Le Corbusier (née Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) is most commonly known as an architectural thinker and urban planner responsible for authoring seminal treatises on design. Le Corbusier was one of the founding members of CIAM (Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne), an influential organization that codified the standards of modern architecture and urban planning, most notably in the Athens Charter. His most famous architectural works include the Villa Savoye, Unité d’Habitation, and the Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp.

In addition to his life as an architect, urban planner, furniture designer, and writer, Le Corbusier was also a visual artist. His paintings and works on paper morphed in style throughout his life, many inspired, in turn, by Cubism, Surrealism, and Purism—the latter exhibiting his interest in geometric and volumetric understanding and experimentation. His later works tended to be more formally expressive, often abandoning visible relationships to objects and using bolder, more animated colors, as seen in his lithograph La Main Ouverte. Several of his later paintings and drawings served as studies for elements eventually realized in architectural projects. (His strongest works, said art critic Hilton Kramer, are those where “he was working in a pictorial realm that closely approximated the constructivist interests of his architectural designs.”[1]) La Main Ouverte is one of these pieces.

Le Corbusier developed a monumental proposal for La Main Ouverte (The Open Hand) after convening with Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first Prime Minister. In 1950, Le Corbusier was commissioned to build a new city for the state of Punjab, which had lost its capitol (Lahore) to Pakistan during the 1947 Partition. The new city of Chandigarh was meant to create a new vision for India, and a high modernist architect with egalitarian views like Le Corbusier seemed like the right man for the job. Le Corbusier created the urban plan for Chandigarh, complete with distinct sectors that included markets and green space, effectively keeping neighborhoods from merging into overwhelming shopping districts or overpopulated public spaces. As part of Chandigarh’s capitol complex—with the massive Secretariat and court buildings—Le Corbusier proposed the Open Hand Monument, which included a public assembly space and a symbol of optimism for the new nation. In his own words:

“The Open Hand is the only political act of my life,” said Le Corbusier—though many would disagree, asserting that his controversial urban plans and codified architectural systems were both utopically egalitarian and dystopically anti-urban.

The idea for La Main Ouverte may have been a part of Le Corbusier’s symbolic oeuvre since the 1930s, having originated during a “[flash] of unexpected insight” in Paris.[2] The iteration pictured above comes significantly later in Le Corbusier’s career and, given the abstracted images of sky and sun in the background as well as a platform underneath the hand symbol, is likely a sketch for Chandigarh’s Open Hand Monument.

 

Image by Design Observer

Though the Open Hand Monument was proposed in 1954, it remained unbuilt until 1972, and even then did not achieve the contemplative atmosphere Le Corbusier had envisioned. The built monument, complete with a public amphitheater was virtually unused by Chandigarh’s residents, largely due to high levels of policing which barred groups from entering the space. Recently, however, groups of Chandigarh’s citizens have been fighting to activate the space, notably Humlog, a health activism organization. In 2010, the government officially lifted the ban on gatherings at the site, giving the public access to this publicly-owned space from 10:30­­–3:30 daily.[3]

The iconic Open Hand serves as the official logo of both the Fondation Corbusier and the City of Chandigarh.

 

– Reya Sehgal, Curatorial Assistant

 

[1] Hilton Kramer, “Looking at Le Corbusier the Painter,” New York Times January 29, 1972, p. 25.

[2] Jan Birksted, Le Corbusier and the Occult (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 57.

[3] Ashish Nangia, “The Town That Corbusier Built,” Design Observer, August 16, 2010, http://designobserver.com/feature/the-town-that-corbusier-built/15028/.