At the end of last week, Jason gave me some photos that show the wrapping up of the installation of his work. There are some great views, take a look here:
Amy will be posting some videos she took of visitor feedback during the opening, and interviews with the installation crew for Jason’s work. Stay tuned!
Well, not real problems, but the kind of problems that come up when an artist tries new things on a big scale. JP’s sculpture is using more buckets than had originally been planned for, and hundreds of new ones are now on site and being screwed and strung into place. I just left the site where the word of the day is “polyps”. And apparently it’s causal Friday over there as well … watching Stephen descending that scaffold wearing only his harness, short-shorts and dainty blue apron was positively simian.
Last night, Sebastian and Rainer took photos of Jason Peter’s Untitled.
Last night I got to see JP’s piece illuminated for the first time. I had come by earlier in the day and the thing seemed to double in size in just the eight or ten hours I was gone.
Anyway- all the talk yesterday was about density. We discussed the number of remaining buckets to work which lead to some talk about how densely the buckets we’re going to occupy the grid. I think Jason and I agreed that the bucket component was going to need to have as significant a visual weight as possible to deemphasize the support structure- but I could tell he has significant interest in the matrix of the scaffold itself and it wouldn’t surprise me if it became more prominent in his thinking as the piece becomes more fully realized toward the opening. I’m not sure that’s a great idea, I think the bucket form should be primary, but I got that feeling I get when I see an artist whose methodology is pretty well established discovering a new bit of vocabulary…we’ll see.
Seeing the thing on site and lit at last quelled some of my reservations about the role of the ambient light in the neighborhood. When you first approach Untitled it doesn’t seem quite bright enough due to the incredibly bright street lamps you need to cross to get into the field, but once your eyes adjust it really takes on some life.
Needless to say JP is putting in some long hours- not just on the Light Project but on the various social opportunities an art gig in good ol’ St. Louis provides. I wasn’t a bit surprised to find him out late Saturday night amongst 200 or so cool kids at the rock n’ roll/roller skating/fashion show that had been organized by the Contemporary Art Museum’s registrar Cole Root. It was a good scene (Sebastian and Rainer had made their way there as well)- and Jason was in full effect: pulling off all kinds of funky one-legged skate moves. I didn’t skate but I did notice a weird convergence: Looking at the PFA’s Flavin show I kind of wondered again for the 50th time why and for what any of these light bulb companies make any of these colored fluorescent tubes - I never really notice them anywhere but in Flavins- Anyway, it turns out they use them in busted skating rinks, as I captured so precisely on my phone…
After there is a significant change to the shape of the artwork, Jason turns the lights on at night to see how it looks. Here’s the first night:
