Tagged — Jamie Lyons
The Cantor sits there like some beneficent mistake, this low slung temple to somebody's idea of civilization dropped onto a campus that thinks it invented the future. Rodin's sculptures scattered across the lawn like chess pieces abandoned mid game, bronze figures frozen in their eternal whatever the fuck, while undergrads in hoodies skateboard past on their way to disrupt another industry.
You walk in and there's that hush, that museum quiet that's supposed to mean something profound but mostly just makes you aware of your own footsteps, your own breathing, your own fundamental unseriousness in the face of Art with a capital A. But here's the thing: the Cantor doesn't take itself quite as seriously as it should. There's something almost apologetic about it, the way it sits there among the palm trees and Spanish tile, trying to reconcile Rodin with Silicon Valley, trying to make the case that beauty still matters when the real action is happening in computer science buildings.
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Chocolate Heads Fashion Fable, Cantor Arts Center, 2024[/caption]
The collection sprawls like an acid dream through history. You've got ancient Buddhist sculptures next to contemporary installations, Old Masters sharing wall space with California modernists who probably got high in Big Sur and thought they saw God. It's a collision, a beautiful mess of contexts and intentions. Some Stanford heir's idea of what culture should look like, assembled with more money than taste and somehow ending up more interesting for it.
And those Rodins: there are more Rodins here than you'd expect outside Paris, which tells you something about early 20th century American ambition and insecurity. The Gates of Hell dominating that entrance like a dare, like Rodin saying "you think you're building the future? I already showed you what humans are." The Burghers of Calais standing their ground over by the quad, noble and doomed and completely indifferent to whatever app is about to get funded.
The students drift through like they're half asleep, which maybe they are. They've got problem sets, they've got startup ideas, they've got optimizations to run. Art is something you appreciate between algorithms. But Stanford's Museum keeps insisting, keeps offering up its strange hospitality, this insistence that the examined life still includes looking at things that exist purely to be looked at, purely to remind you that humans have always tried to make meaning from bronze and paint and stone.
The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, formerly the Stanford University Museum of Art, and commonly known as the Cantor Arts Center.
Collusion 2022
Don’t go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. They are ecstasy machines. Jerry Saltz The Cantor sits there on Stanford’s campus like every other institutional temple to dead things under glass, all that marble and hush and carefully calibrated light designed to make you whisper and feel appropriately small. […]
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Individualism 2019
The man built a wall that refuses to be a wall. It doesn’t keep anything in or out. It just exists, this undulating spine of sandstone crawling through grass and under trees, going nowhere in particular, and that’s exactly the fucking point. It’s not trying to be profound. It’s not begging for your approval. It […]
ReadCollusion 2018
Figures in a California Landscape: a dance performance by movement troupe Chocolate Heads inspired by Manuel Neri’s sculptures in The Anderson Collection at Stanford University. This piece is part of a year long Aleta Hayes/Chocolate Heads project exploring the idea of California. Native Californian, Manuel Neri with his interest in the human figure, provoked this deepened […]
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FalseArt 2016
“Notes to myself on beginning a painting” by Richard Diebenkorn 1. Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion. 2. The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued – except as a stimulus for further moves. 3. DO […]
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Industries 2014
So here we are in the Cantor, Stanford’s marble temple to the idea that culture can be contained, catalogued, made safe for the children of tech money and inherited privilege. And into this pristine space comes Aleta Hayes with her Chocolate Heads, turning off the goddamn lights and switching on the black lights like some […]
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Individualism 2013
Gsell: What astonishes me, is that your way is so different from that of other sculptors. They prose the model. Instead of that, you wait till a model has instinctively or accidentally taken an Interesting pose, and thon you reproduce It. Instead of your giving orders to the model, the model gives orders to you. […]
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