Mark Lamster

I suppose it was ironic, but mainly just unpleasant, that I was kept from the opening party of Storefront’s Landscapes of Quarantine exhibition by a case of pneumonia. There was a time when that illness did in fact warrant hospitalized seclusion; in the 21st century, a few days at home and a dose of antibiotics is generally enough for recovery. Feeling better, I managed to catch the show a few days after the opening, and it’s well worth the visit, a beautifully installed and thought-provoking show that raises many intriguing and not easily resolved questions about the boundaries we raise for the purposes of security. The exhibition, curated by Bldgblog‘s Geoff Manaugh, focuses primarily on the spatial implications and costs, both physical and metaphorical, of quarantine. The show put me in mind of W. G. Sebald’s wonderful novel Austerlitz, which points to another kind of quarantine we impose on ourselves: intellectual. The titular character of the book, Jacques Austerlitz, is a child of the Holocaust and the Kindertransports, who spends most of his life suppressing the memories of his own history, to catastrophic effect. A key passage, narrated by that character:

“I did not read newspapers because, as I know now, I feared unwelcome revelations, I turned on the radio only at certain hours of the day, I was always refining my defensive reactions, creating a kind of quarantine or immune system which, as I maintained my existence in a smaller and smaller space, protected me from anything that could be connected in any way, however distant, with my own early history….If some dangerous piece of information came my way despite all my precautions, as it inevitably did, I was clearly capable of closing my ears and eyes to it, of simply forgetting it like any other unpleasantness.”

Meanwhile, I’m on a self-imposed quarantine of my own right now—a much needed beach vacation. Some quarantines are better than others.

“No man could outfight him—No woman could resist his charm.” So reads the copy on this pulp cover from 1953. I picked it up for a buck from an antique shop a few blocks from my home. The packaging suggests a historical bodice-ripper, and in fact the contents delivers on that torrid promise. It is not, however, an (entirely) fictional account. The book is actually the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, one of the great sculptors of the Renaissance. Cellini is best remembered today for the Perseus and Medusa he crafted, on order of Cosimo de Medici, for the Loggia de Lanzi in Florence. It’s a gory affair, and one senses that the artist, who claimed to have used his own sword in brutal fashion, saw himself in Perseus, a sense that is affirmed by the fact that he signed the sculpture, prominently, on a strap that crosses the hero’s chest. (He probably would not have been pleased to learn that the esteemed Renaissance scholar Frederick Hartt called his masterpiece “remarkably inert.”)

Cellini fits squarely into that long tradition of artist rogues of which Caravaggio is only the most notorious. We have rather romantic notions in these modern times about what an artist should be (a tortured genius), and we like painters who fit into that paradigm. Rubens, a most conventional UHB, was not that kind of artist, and I sometimes feel he suffers for it. His writing is a case in point. Familiar as they are with Cellini’s rather purple and lurid precedent, even the most serious of art historians tend to dismiss Rubens the author as a colorless writer of arcanely detailed diplomatic treatises. This is not only crazy ironic (art historians making accusations of boring, jargon-y writing?), but a gross mischaracterization. Beyond his almost preposterous erudition, Rubens was in fact an elegant prose stylist who wrote with great personal conviction and with a rich vocabulary, a keen sense of metaphor, and a gift for a quotable turn of phrase. If some of his correspondence is necessarily technical, it was because he was conducting complex international diplomacy. Rubens, essentially, was an intellectual writer, a writer for the high-brow, and like so many high-brow (and middle-brow) writers in our day, he is suffering for it. Today we value the sensational. Cellini would have fit right in.

The Vancouver Sun has run a long follow-up story, by Jennifer Moss, to my Los Angeles Times piece on the plagiarism charges leveled by Sze Tsung Leong against David Burdeny. I bring it up here as I find it to be a thoroughly disreputable piece of journalism, larded up with charged phrases clearly intended to frame the story in a positive manner for Burdeny. The implication is that a fancy-pants New York artist and a big city paper are somehow in cahoots against an innocent hometown boy. And so my article “coughs up” rather than “presents” evidence. And then there’s a paragraph like this, which seems almost cribbed from Sarah Palin: “Borrowed or not, there’s a little thing called freedom of expression at stake whenever an artist puts an image out there. In a corporate era, especially in a lawsuit-happy culture like that of the U.S., ownership of an image is more contentious than ever before.” So there is a tonal character to the Sun piece that I find objectionable. But far worse is its casual treatment of the facts. Continuing what is essentially a defense of Burdeny, Moss writes, “The L.A. Times points out that there are even similarities between the artists’ statements.” This subject is then dropped. Notice how the author does not see fit to examine these charges herself, or suggest that there might be some importance to the fact that Burdeny has apparently copied significantly from Leong in a second medium.

More egregiously, Moss raises an accusation—found on the Internet—that Leong’s gallery, Yossi Milo, has exhibited another artist whose work might be overly indebted to another artist. This, I suppose, is fair enough. But there is a gross imbalance given what Moss has not mentioned: that Leong is not the only artist Burdeny has been accused of copying. As I wrote in my article, Burdeny’s images also bear striking resemblance to works by Elger Esser and Andreas Gursky. And as I wrote in a follow up on this site, and as has been widely noted online, his images also closely approximate those by Michael Wesely, Michael Kenna, and David Fokos, among others. Through my own source I’ve learned that Burdeny actually took a course with Fokos, and then began copying his work so closely that Fokos’s gallerist was forced to intervene. Burdeny, as seems to be his M.O., denied the accusation. So Moss is content to impugn the character of the Milo gallery (and by association, Leong) but has withheld from the reader direct evidence that would seem to impugn Burdeny, the ostensible subject of her piece. Moss then concludes with a logical mindbender, suggesting that, somehow, Leong may have been the one copying Burdeny: “perhaps it’s the other way around, and Leong’s images are similar to Burdeny’s.”

Whether Burdeny is truly a plagiarist, or whether his work can be described as legitimately inspired by other photographers is a reasonable question on which reasonable people may disagree. Certainly the law is vague. But the idea that Leong is guilty of copying Burdeny is preposterous, and the Vancouver Sun’s article is, quite simply, a grossly irresponsible work of journalism.

It’s been a tough stretch for muscular, brooding architecture. Last week, Raimund Abraham, the uncompromising architect of New York’s Austrian Cultural Forum was killed in an automotive accident. This week, Bruce Graham, the SOM partner who collaborated with engineer Fazlur Kahn on the Sears and Hancock towers in Chicago, passed away. “Big John,” as the Hancock was called, was their best work, a tapered, hundred-story condo tower, with the X-braces of its “trussed tube” structure laid plainly bare on its facades. It is dark and imposing from the outside and comfortably modern within. (So, kind of like Chicago.) It has long been one of the city’s best addresses, considered as such from the moment it opened, advertising the “world’s highest residences.” A few years ago I edited a book on the building, with photographs by Ezra Stoller and an introduction by Kahn’s daughter, the architectural historian Yasmin Sabina Kahn. One favorite anecdote: the architect and engineer tested human response to the building’s slight sway at a Maytag “Tale of the Tub” washing machine installation at the Chicago Museum of Science. A nice story for a sad day.

Herbert Muschamp often griped that New York was allergic to “serious architecture,” a refrain frequently aped by his successor, Nicolai Ourousoff. This was and is both unfair and inaccurate, and one of the buildings that demonstrates as much is Raimund Abraham’s 2002 Austrian Cultural Forum, which opened in 2002. Only 25 feet wide, it slices down from the sky, a kind of Easter Island guillotine. It’s a great building, a building with a spine [both literal and figurative], and a series of controlled, smartly crafted spaces. Abraham was killed earlier this week in a Los Angeles car accident, awful news. He had just given a lecture at Sci-Arc. A loss for architecture.

My interview with Francesca Rheannon of NPR’s Writer’s Voice is now online. If you’ve got some free time, hear us gab about Rubens and diplomacy.

When does inspiration cross over the line into plagiarism and copyright infringement? This is the subject of my lede story for this Sunday’s Los Angeles Times Calendar/Arts section, which looks at the work of photographers Sze Tsung Leong [above, top row] and David Burdeny [above, bottom row]. Photography poses special problems in the realm of fair use, because as a medium it is predicated on reproduction, and because it is so widely and easily practiced. As I write in the story, “some form of transformation of an original work is required to avoid infringement, but just what constitutes an acceptable level of transformation is a matter of interpretation.”

[left: Leong installation; right: Burdeny installation]

The Leong-Burdeny case is especially tricky, though I think the fact that Burdeny has borrowed not just photographic subject matter but also installation style and texts from Leong is telling. As the story mentions, there are also images in Burdeny’s show at Vancouver’s Kostuik gallery that closely approximate images taken by the German photographers Elger Esser and Andreas Gursky. Although I did not have the opportunity to mention it in the short space of the article, Burdeny has in the past also produced images of similarity to other photographers:

Continue reading Double Vision: Did David Burdeny Copy Sze Tsung Leong?

There’s been no more contentious subject in the art world over the last decade than the status of the Barnes Foundation, and its decision to forsake its suburban home for a new museum on Philly’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The controversy is the subject of a new film by Don Argott, The Art of the Steal, which I review in the latest issue of the Architect’s Newspaper. I’m admittedly somewhat agnostic on the fate of the Barnes, though I think Argott is a rather poor man’s Michael Moore. (Irony, given Barnes’s wealth.) I think my attitude reflects a general feeling of my peer group in the museum world. When I asked a curator friend what she thought of the situation, her bemused response was: “Barnes was a mean old bastard and cursed the whole place for all eternity?” The cursed place will soon have a new home designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien [above]. So, as I write in the story, not exactly a tragic ending.

My stab at narrative travel journalism (mixed with a review of the new CityCenter complex in Las Vegas) is now live on DesignObserver. Check it out if you’ve got a couple of minutes, and please leave a comment if you’re of the mind to do so. Also, for those interested, there are some supplemental images here.

Back in my old life as an editor at Princeton Architectural Press, I had the great pleasure of editing (and designing) the Architecture of Diplomacy, which remains the definitive history of the American embassy building program. The high-water mark of that program came during the Cold War era, when a series of high-profile modernist buildings were commissioned around the globe, designs that spoke of America’s democratic openness and progressive ideals. One of the most prominent of those was Eero Saarinen’s London embassy building, though it took its lumps at the time. British critics thought it, alternately and paradoxically, too bombastic and too restrained. Saarinen wasn’t a critical darling at home either: the apparent diversity of his practice was derided as “style for the job” design. Saarinen’s legacy is a bit more secure these days, and deservedly so. There was no more gifted architect at integrating technological innovation with bureaucratic necessity and sharp aesthetics, and it’s that combination that made the London embassy a success.
Continue reading London Calling