LAS VEGAS, May 22, 2001/ FW/ --- The May 2001 issue of Talk magazine mentions a meeting in January 2000 between Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim; Mikhail Piotrovski, head of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia; and Rob Goldstein, president of the Venetian. They decided to go over to the Bellagio Hotel to see Steve Wynn’s gallery of fine art, they were pleased to find that they had to wait to get in. By June 2000 the Guggenheim Hermitage project had a green light.

Steve Wynn had opened a door for a cultural revolution in Las Vegas; The Venetian, The Guggenheim and The Hermitage made the major leap to join in.

Pablo Picasso’s Seated Woman, 1938 is compared by Martin to the three concentric waves of the city of Barcelona; the oldest inner city, surrounded by the middle city, which is surrounded by the Modern city. This colorful puzzle of a cubist painting reminds me of the warmth of Barcelona, with a dash of Jean Paul Gaultier and vintage Norma Kamali.

This takes me back to all the times, and all the cities in which I have spent hours and days tracking down obscure Picasso Museums; Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, and Lucerne... Each museum has its own niche. One wonders all the worlds this painting Seated Woman has seen.

A parallel painting in boldness of color to Seated Woman is Cubist Head, c. 1916 by Stanton MacDonald-Wright. It too is bold in color, but it is much more abstract. Is this male or female? Whichever, as the catalogue mentions, “This MacDonald-Wright hides a tender human face, built only with triangles of color.”

The pencil drawing on vellum, Eyes Astray (Pystis Sophia), 1955 by John Graham of a female head that is beautiful in ways, yet is off-putting in its calculated irony, or ‘serious comedy’. Despite the elfin ear, and the one eye askew, she has serenity.

This picture of Graham’s reminds me of how a plastic surgeon prepares for surgery, drawing on his patient’s faces with his marks-a-lot, only her hair would also be twisted into funny little pony tails. I write from recent experience, as between paragraphs and pages of this article my plastic surgeon Neil Klein, MD drew on my face and put my hair in little ponytails. However, he didn’t use any astrological signs, or obscure Latin words. I did find out though that he had studied art before switching to Medical school, a blessing. So far I don’t look like Picasso’s Seated Woman.

Hopefully, just as Steven Martin’s Eyes Astray (Pystis Sophia), “still maintains an unaltered seriousness” so will my new face, yet with the laugh lines around the eyes still readable and enjoying life.

Cindy Sherman is her own theatre unto herself. Her self-portrait, Untitled Film Still, 1979, is a black and white photo that takes you back to the B movies of the late 50’s and early 60’s. Over the years she has reinvented the characters in her self-portraits, some mysterious, some jolting, some playful.

In my mannequin archives there is only one folder dealing with Cindy Sherman, it is a very poor Xerox of an article written by David Goldsmith. She veers into overt sexuality in the mannequin photos. Her photo in the exhibit has a softer contemplative edge. Martin speaks of Sherman, “It took us awhile to realize that all the diverse characters in her photos were her. She created a moody body of work that was at once sultry, conceptual, and girly.”

I am a contemporary of Sherman’s, in that I was experimenting with my first self-portraits in photography at UCLA in the late 70’s. In one class we had an assignment for a self-portrait. My first attempt was ordinary, dressed in a Norma Kamli bathing suit cum leotard. I was thin as a twig, 99 lbs, 5’6”, sounds a bit like Mirabelle in Shop Girl.

My former brother-in-law used to call me the ‘red toothpick’ when I was dressed in my bright red Norma Kamali sweatpants outfit and four inch platform shoes. I went to the photo lab on Westwood Blvd. to make prints and while the prints were drying someone stole them. I guess they liked twigs.

The next day I conferred with the teacher’s assistant of my class, I was disheartened. He offered to allow me the use of some unique light sensitive photo paper, which was three foot wide on a huge roll housed at his studio (said the spider to the fly…just kidding). That afternoon I drove to his studio. With all lights turned out we cut an eight-foot length of photo paper and laid it on the floor. I quickly undressed, laid down naked, front side flat, on the paper; he flashed a flashlight around me.

In the dark, faster than the speed of light I dressed, we then put the paper through a huge custom size pan of developer, and then cleared it through fresh water. We then hung it up on a line to dry. We did this twice. Needless to say I got an A on the assignment.

My self-portrait body-print stayed in storage for fourteen years. While I was working as a consultant at DreamWorks SKG in 1995, helping set up the animation archives, it was announced that there would be an art show at the Animation Campus featuring the artwork of employees, not just the animation artists. I hadn’t felt like an artist in years, I had founded my corporation, which coordinated film and fine art archives in 1986.

I was always organizing other people’s creativity. This gave me a boost; I decided to have the 8’ tall body print framed. On the opening day of the in-house, courtyard exhibit I ran into Jeffrey Katzenburg. Without thinking about appropriate word selection I asked him if he had seen me, to which he replied with a laugh, “All of you.”

Hmmm, sounds like a movie title, All of Me – All of You.

For six months the 8-foot tall body print resided at the end of the hall on the third floor of the animation building. I went to collect it when they were ready to move to their new animation campus, whose architect, Steven Erhlich is a friend and someone I had wanted to be involved in the design of my Mannequin Museum someday.

Perhaps Las Vegas will allow that project to come out of mothballs as I develop the Virtual Mannequin Museum on a website. As I sit here at my computer I look up to a pen and ink with watercolor rendering of my Mannequin Museum, designed by Deborah Richmond for her Master’s Thesis in Architecture.

[1]  [2]  [3]  [4]  [5]  [6]   Next:  [7]  [8]  [9]  [10]