Trunk Show The architect Antoine Predock has described the Dallas house he designed for Deedie and Rusty Rose as a ‘‘theater of trees.’’ The house is about ‘‘viewing nature in different ways,’’ confirms Deedie, who could also be talking about the couple’s collection of contemporary art, which includes works like Rivane Neuenschwander’s video of ants collecting confetti and Tony Cragg’s wall sculpture of a tree reconstructed from discarded planks. Now, with the addition of Jennifer Steinkamp’s video piece ‘‘Eye Catching’’ (2003), the 1915 Pump House (shown here) — which sits adjacent to their property, and which the Roses bought in 2001 and had renovated by the architect Gary Cunningham — has become a theater of trees all its own. The industrial building was once a source of water for the entire township of Highland Park; it still contains all of its pump equipment and can be flooded with some four inches of water for special occasions like barefoot black-tie parties. ‘‘I don’t look for a piece to go in a specific spot,’’ says Deedie, who has never been timid in her tastes. ‘‘I fall in love with a piece and then say to myself, Whatever am I going to do with this one?’’ The life-size computeranimated tree, whose branches undulate hypnotically, as if blown by a constant imaginary wind, seems practically made for its new location in a former water tank. One of three trees in a work created by Steinkamp for the Istanbul Biennial, it was originally installed in the sixth-century Yerebatan cistern.
Photo: Dwight Eschliman
Great Halls of Fire When looking for just the place to install her new Bill Viola video piece, ‘‘Fire Woman’’ (2005), Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis had about 500 different rooms to choose from. The Thurn und Taxis castle in Regensburg, Germany, is still the family home, though some of the rooms are now open to the public. The palace’s ornate décor has long served as a backdrop for the princess’s art collection, which has at various times contained works ranging from the medieval and sacred to the contemporary and profane. For the Viola, which is a segment from ‘‘The Tristan Project,’’ a production of the Wagner opera ‘‘Tristan und Isolde’’ (a collaboration between the artist, the director Peter Sellars and the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen), it was not just a question of finding a room big enough and dim enough to properly view the roughly 10-by- 20-foot piece — certainly the castle has plenty of those — but rather finding a room with the right karma. ‘‘I like very much the spiritual aspect of the work,’’ the princess says. ‘‘I have the association of a rising Christ. And as I am a Catholic — and it is very difficult to find contemporary sacred art — I felt for this piece.’’ The princess and Graham Southern, one of the founding directors of the European gallery Haunch of Venison, ultimately chose a wood-paneled reception room; the position in front of a grand fireplace hardly seems accidental. The princess has also invited the artist Candice Breitz to wander through the palace and select a site. Her piece ‘‘King’’ will no doubt feel entitled to go just about anywhere.
Photo: Dwight Eschliman
Off the Wall Take away the artwork and you take away the architecture. This is true of Terence Riley and John Bennett’s Miami house — in theory, at least. Riley, who is the director of the Miami Art Museum (and the former chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York), and Bennett, who is an architect, designed their house on Miesian principles. They were particularly inspired by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe drawings of unrealized ‘‘court houses,’’ which indicated where an entire wall would become, say, a Georges Braque painting. ‘‘Certainly the use of digital technology to turn the wall into art was something Mies could not have guessed,’’ Riley says. Their approach may sound rigorously academic, but the video setup, like the house itself, is actually an informal one: a projector mounted on the terrace ceiling beams images across the interior courtyard onto a stuccoed wall painted bright white. While film is heading to the minute screen — miniaturizing itself onto iPods and cellphones — advances in technology are allowing video installations to assume a scale not seen since the days of the drive-in. (Riley recently oversaw the MAM’s acquisition of Doug Aitken’s video piece ‘‘Sleepwalkers,’’ originally projected, to awesome effect, on the exterior walls of MoMA.) ‘‘We have artist friends who are very excited,’’ Riley says of the possibility of creating site-specific work. In this photo, the protagonist of the artist Matthew Weinstein’s ‘‘Three Love Songs From the Bottom of the Ocean’’ is coyly reflected in the swimming pool. ‘‘But when video art is not there, it’s a great place to watch movies,’’ Riley adds.
Photo: Dwight Eschliman
Night Light When designing this Santa Fe, N.M., house for Jeanne and Michael Klein, the architect Mark DuBois had two main issues to contend with: light and art. The light often was the art. The Kleins’ substantial collection includes a fluorescent light piece by Dan Flavin, a large Jim Hodges piece made up of different colored light bulbs, a James Turrell skyspace and video works like Kota Ezawa’s ‘‘The Simpson Verdict’’ (2002). ‘‘We didn’t want any space to be just about the art,’’ says DuBois, whose plan included lots of glass in a variety of transparencies. Instead of annexing the Turrell skyspace to its own free-standing building, which tends to be the norm among collectors of his work, they decided to embed it in the middle of the house. And as anyone who has recently been to a museum knows, video art, too, is often relegated to its own windowless, occasionally airless, pitch-dark room, which makes watching it more of a chore than a pleasure. To accommodate — and ultimately integrate — video into the overall landscape, DuBois turned the front courtyard into an outdoor viewing area, with a projection screen stretched behind a sheet of glass (essentially a giant window). ‘‘Each part of the house comes alive at a different time of day,’’ he says. ‘‘Late afternoon everyone moves west to watch the sunset. The Turrell skyspace comes alive when the sun comes down. Third stop, after it’s dark, is the courtyard to watch videos on the outdoor screen.’’ But as DuBois points out, the screen also has a life — and a light — of its own: ‘‘At night, without art, it acts like a giant lantern.’’
Photo: Dwight Eschliman