Things Organized Neatly

This is a tumblr account I can't stop looking at because I love neatly organized everything. So much so, I sent in a submission. Place/Displace is found here!



Link to above.

Place/Displace wins 3rd place at the county fair!

...I mean Minnetrista's Art of the Land Show.



Actually, it is great because the prize money paid for the matboard, foam core, and glass to frame the work. We were a little disappointed that oil paintings of barns beat us but we thought long and hard about what we would concede first and second prize to and decided on this...


A partially full box of Amoré chocolates (Huckleberry, margarita, chili lime, and coconut joy truffles) = the best in the world!

Hannah and I then decided to Search for the Impossible today... It featured trying to return to summer just one more time this year with a bike ride and Stewart's sodas on the Cardinal Greenway.




We road all the way to Gaston, Indiana - 20 miles round trip. It was a lot of fun until I had a mishap riding my bike into a fence.



The Search for the Impossible was moderately successful. Next up on the horizon... more prints and the diorama. Nancy has videos in the works too!

Place/Displace with Hannah Barnes

still formulating an artist statement but at long last, one aspect of this project & collaboration is complete!








Photographing the boxes in the lighting studio.


The entry (love those green walls).


Installing the exhibition after acceptance.

Nesting Box collaboration with Hannah hereafter known as Place/Displace (ode to Smithson's Site/Nonsite)

Hannah and I have been slaving away this past week making frames for the six nesting box photographs. They will be displayed as an installation: six photographs accompanied by six boxes. We are submitting this entry to Minnetrista's Art of the Land Show this Friday. More photographs coming soon.


Lightning Field nesting box printed at 12"x18", soon to be framed at 18"x24".


Hannah and Chet in a heated discussion about measurements and math.


Queen of the Woodshop and Chet with glasses.


Transparent white stained frames after coat number 3.

The remaining nesting boxes photographed by Hannah

Two each from Double Negative, Roden Crater, Lightning Field and Amarillo Ramp.

Arrival of the Nesting Boxes in Muncie, IN

Hannah sent some photographs of the Spiral Jetty and Sun Tunnels boxes that were shipped from Wendover, Nevada earlier this week. Next time I will plan for a smaller cardboard exterior and a little more packing paper rather than what I picked off the top of the trashcan at the post office!

Nesting Boxes in their full wood burned glory...

Last's weeks wood shop activities involve researching the Field Museum's dioramas...



The American Museum of Natural History's website:



Making Peanut Butter & Spiral Honey sandwiches



Hannah and Chet working hard:



and here they are...

Wrong vs. Right

Wrong but fascinating:
Curiosa by Barton Lidice Benes:

From Publishers Weekly
A born collector-"I have always been afraid of losing things"-Benes leaves no gallstone (see page 59 for Larry Hagman's) unturned in his acquisition of odd objets. The artist's fastidious catalogue recalls crime-scene investigations and Albertus Seba's Cabinet of Natural Curiosities. Whereas the 19th-century pharmacist recorded rare flora and fauna, Benes preserves the leavings of celebrity culture-Nancy Reagan's chocolate-souffle‚ stained napkin, Bill Clinton's half-sucked throat lozenge, Roy Rogers's nasal douche. Macabre, witty and earnest, the book offers readers the guilty pleasure of supermarket tabloids and the brooding quirkiness of a modern-day Vanitas. The most mundane object-a desiccated cookie baked by Katharine Hepburn, for example-labeled and squared in its wooden cubbyhole, looks just like art, but also foretells decay. Leavening the reliquary's morbidity are anecdotes of stealthy acquisition-the artist surreptitiously pocketing Ed Koch's dinner fork, friends thieving a twig from Mao Tse-tung's broom, a postal worker retrieving a dead bird that flew into Elizabeth Taylor's window.

Wrong: Acquiring a piece of the Taj Mahal (from the book Wunderkammer: A Document).



Wrong: A rock from a Robert Smithson installation and a toothpick from one of Tara Donovan's "cubes" that were laying on the ground significantly separated from the artwork.





Right: Candy taken from two Felix Gonzalez-Torres installations.



Wrong or Right: Grass collected from Robert Morris's Untitled Reclamation Project?



Wrong or Right: Ephemera acquired near/on the earthworks to be shipped back in the nesting boxes?

These works of art are outdoors, entropic, and away from the presence of museum guards. I am not in favor of pilfering like my Uncle Bill when he carved into the Taj Mahal (architecture no less) but is collecting grass, rocks, and salt problematic when these works are exposed to the elements? I am not trying to justify my acts - just questioning them.

19 Days to Go: Boxes - Woodshop Update & Donald Judd's Chinati Foundation

Woodshop: We are plugging away at the Nesting Boxes. There are six, one for each earthwork, all made from different wood and the best part of it all - four of the six have finger notches to hold them together. We have yet to use the wood burning tool to carve the names into them (with "branding font" = just kidding) so you might see one other photo after they are completely finished.

And now for some aluminum boxes:



Donald Judd, 100 Untitled Works, 1982-6

This will be my third trip to Chinati, one of my favorite places in the world, and Nancy's first. It will also be where we end our trip after three weeks of travel. We intentionally chose to stop here for personal reflection on the whole endeavor, the most ideal location of them all.

Some facts about the Chinati Foundation:

1) Judd never forgot Western Texas when passing through this area in 1946, as a soldier on the way from Alabama to California where he was to be shipped to Korea. He settled in the town of Marfa in the early 1970s, escaping NYC.

2) Marfa originated as a water stop on the Galveston and San Antonio Railroad. The name Marfa is that of a heroine from a Russian novel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, which made a deep impression on the wife of one of the railway’s executives. When Judd rented a small house, as an initial base, it was still a prosperous cattle town. With Dia's help, he bought the former Fort D.A. Russell and formed the Chinati Foundation named after the nearby mountain range.

3) Between 1982 and 1986, Judd installed 100 identical aluminum boxes in two former military artillery sheds. Each box is unique, reflecting the changing sunlight and weather.



4) The Chinati Foundation is one of the largest visible installations of contemporary art in the world. The art is meant to be permanently installed and maintained in a space suitable to it (most of it made for the existing buildings which were slowly renovated).

Here are some photographs by Todd Eberle from Donald Judd: Architect and additional images from the Dia Foundation.


One of the barracks holding Dan Flavin's installation before renovation.


The Arena with Richard Long's Sea Lava Circles.


The Chamberlain Building


The Whyte Building (located across the street from the Chamberlain Building in downtown Marfa)


Architectural Studio, First floor, Main Hall


Pool at La Mansana de Chinati, Marfa, Texas (AKA the "Block")
Oh la la! There will be several entries on swimming pools this trip - this just happens to be the second at Judd's abode in downtown Marfa.


...and another view because you can't get enough swimming pools in West Texas.


Las Casas of Ayala de Chinati, view of the ranch to the SE


Landscape with Mesa del Mimbres de Sierra Chinati seen from Las Casas de Ayala de Chinati, Donald Judd’s Ranch


Pool with Concentric Circular Walls Built From Rock at Las Casas della Valle de Tinaja Blanca de Ayala de Chinati, Donald Judd’s Ranch

Judd’s ranch is in the mountains, 50 miles to the SW near the Mexican border, in the direction of the Rio Grande. After thirty miles the paved road ends and a rocky road leads into the mountains. The small house, twenty miles further on, is in a valley, overgrown with thorn bushes and cacti. It is the most remote of his three ranches which Judd collectively called Ayala de Chinati. It's a three hour drive in a four wheel drive vehicle. There are four buildings: the main house, the guest house, the studio, and the bunkhouse. In addition there are ranch structures like the water tank that Judd surrounded with concentric circles.