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Film still from Gustav Deutsch's "FILM IST. a girl & a gun," (2009). Courtesy of the artists.

The critically-acclaimed, but commercially-disappointing album, Paul’s Boutique (1988) by the Beastie Boys is a landmark when it comes to sampling in the music industry. While this practice of taking clips of found beats, riffs, or lyric lines from existing song recordings and then incorporating them into an entirely new recording had been commonplace at that time, the Beasties’ innovative production team, the Dust Brothers, took things to a new level. Samples from all genres, not just the more common funk drum beats and rock riffs, were fair game, and they crafted densely layered tracks packed with samples to support the give-and-take rhyme interplay of the Beasties.

But using this collage concept in cinema? I never had considered slicing and dicing up pieces of old films and assembling them to form an entirely new creation. However, Austrian director Gustav Deutsch does just that with the experimental film FILM IST. a girl & a gun (2009), playing this Thursday at the Hirshhorn. Deutsch toys with the rules of cinema, taking his work’s title from the quote, “To make film all you need is a girl and a gun,” by French New Wave film director Jean-Luc Godard.

Deutsch brings the girls, the guns and then some. With an archival footage treasure trove ranging from the 1890s to the 1940s at his disposal, he mixes and matches color-tinted clips from all sorts of genres, including naughty movies, scientific films, war documentaries and even iconic scenes from mainstream cinema. It’s not all haphazard cutting and pasting though, as everything is actually arranged in a five-act narrative montage with underlying themes of creation, love, sex, violence and death in what the New York Times calls “a vision of cinematic paradise, found and lost.”

Experience FILM IST. a girl & a gun at the Hirshhorn’s Ring Auditorium this Thursday, March 4th, at 8:00pm.

Film still from Phoebe Greenberg's "Next Floor," (2008). Courtesy of the artist.

Based on the grotesque imagery of the screen shots of strange food and even stranger characters I saw beforehand, I was hesitant to go see Phoebe Greenberg’s critically acclaimed film, Next Floor. But as soon as I sat back in the Hirshhorn’s darkened Black Box theater, I immediately realized this visually stunning piece was going to be food for thought.

Filmed in a richly desaturated color palette (think The Sopranos) and occupied by characters extreme in appearance and appetite, it is gluttony at its finest. Lavishly dressed guests at a dinner party held in an abandoned house tear at an abundance of food in a visceral and carnal frenzy. The scene takes place on the  top floor of the building and the ever-increasing weight of the diners and their feast-laden table pushes the limits of the creaking floorboards. When the floorboards can bear no more, they burst, sending table and guests crashing through to the next floor. Yet servers keep serving, and the dinner guests keep dining, gorging themselves, even as boards of the consecutive floors continue to break. Undeterred, the diners eat their way to a Dante-esque descent into damnation, eventually plummeting into an endless abyss. Is this a post-consumption era morality tale?

The short film, just twelve minutes of highly-stylized suspense, has garnered many honors, including Best Short Film at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival and is on view at the Hirshhorn through April 11.

This Thursday, February 25, from 7 to 8 PM, meet the woman behind the vision, creator and producer Phoebe Greenberg will discuss her work in the Lerner Room at the museum.

A sculpture bathing in the snow in the Hirshhorn Museum's Sculpture Garden. Photo courtesy of flickr user vpickering.

It has certainly been an unprecedented winter here in Washington, D.C., where a grand total of 54.9 inches of snow had fallen as of February 10, breaking the previous seasonal snowfall record set in 1898-99.

So how has the Smithsonian been affected? Now that the skies and the streets are clear, we here at ATM take a look.

First off, the Smithsonian’s gardens took quite a hit. Throughout the storms, the horticulture team was working to clear walkways and desperately save some of the more valuable plants. With the gardens still buried in snow, the condition of the gardens is hard to assess. But Janet Draper, horticulturalist at the Smithsonian’s Mary Livingston Ripley Garden, says that colleagues of hers all along the Mall are reporting damage to Southern magnolias, hollies and elms. Many of the trees could not handle the extra weight of the snow, and branches bent over and cracked under the pressure. “The agaves are probably toast,” she adds. “But there’s a pro and a con to everything.” The snowfall will both raise the water table and act as an insulator, protecting the plants from further damage. According to Draper, the trees, though hard hit, look to benefit from the snow. A flash flood gets the ground’s surface wet, but the slow melting of snow cover like this provides a deep soaking. Plus, says Draper, “Sometimes this kind of damage is just the nudge we need to renovate an area.”

A break in a Harry Lauder's Walking Stick in the Mary Livingston Ripley Garden. Photo by Janet Draper.

Sculpture conservator Gwynne Ryan was relieved to find that none of the downed trees landed on sculptures in the Hirshhorn Museum’s Sculpture Garden. Every summer, conservators identify and address any structural weaknesses in the sculptures that may be especially vulnerable to the harsher conditions of winter. At this point, they clean the sculptures and apply a protective coating to them that reduces the amount of contact the sculptures have with moisture and pollutants. “The types of treatments that are in place are the same, pretty much, that are used in sculpture gardens around the globe,” says Ryan. Snowier places, included. Although no measures short of bringing the sculptures indoors can provide perfect protection against the elements, she is not expecting to see any unusual damages from the snowfall.

Many on staff at the National Zoo stayed overnight during the storms, working around the clock to make sure that the animals were fed and paths for both keepers and animals were clear. The commissary team managed to deliver meals to the animals on time every day, and some Friends of the National Zoo (FONZ) came in and opened a restaurant so that staff staying on site could have a place to eat. “It was an enormous team effort,” says Don Moore, the zoo’s Associate Director of Animal Care.

For any pending storm, be it a thunderstorm, hurricane, ice or snowstorm, explains Moore, they consider the animals’ well-being in the weather and possible containment issues. Luckily, many of the animals were taken indoors, because there were a bunch of downed trees and collapsed enclosures. (Two birds flew the coop!)

Pandas playing in the snow at the National Zoo. Photo by Ann Batdorf/NZP.

It must have been fun watching some of the animals react to the snow though. According to Moore, a particularly snowphobic Sumatran tiger had to be moved from one holding area to another. Keepers cut a path through the snow, and he “went out, looked at the snow, did one of those cat shake-your-paw-off-because-it’s-wet-kind-of-things and ran across to the other side to get back in.” Meanwhile, the pandas playfully tumbled around in the snow. After the storms, keepers dug paths in the outdoor exhibit spaces for the animals, just like many dog owners in the D.C.-area did.

As you probably heard reported, part of the roof and wall of one of the metal buildings of the Garber Preservation, Restoration and Storage Facility in Suitland, Maryland, collapsed under the weight of the snow. About 1,500 artifacts from the National Air and Space Museum, including 800 pieces of air and space-themed artwork, are stored in the building, though reportedly none are thought to be damaged. “The priority is to stabilize the building, take the artifacts out and relocate them to other places,” says National Air and Space Museum’s spokeswoman Claire Brown. Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough and others inspected the affected building and those around it, but nobody can enter and attempt to remove the artifacts until engineers assess the site.

Just Squares? Very similar color schemes give very different impressions in two works from Albers' series, Homage to the Square. Left: "Study for 'Homage to the Square: From the Soil'" (1954); Right:"Study for 'Homage to the Square: Last Century'" (1956), Images courtesy of the museum

I was introduced to the teachings of Josef Albers in a color theory course my senior year of art school at Boston University.  My professor Richard Raiselis had studied under Albers during his time at Yale and I can almost hear his voice now telling of how the artist had forever changed the way the professor looked at painting and the world around him.

I can also vividly recall my first experience with Albers’ works, seeing his Homage to the Square series on display at the Hirshhorn when I was about 10-years-old. Both my dad and I were not above that timeless cliché and head-scratching confusion that contemporary art often evokes in the uninitiated.  “Jamie,” he said, “you could paint something like that!”

Josef Albers is historically a controversial art celebrity. Though the Bauhaus school is now worshiped as a place of artistic and architectural inventiveness, in 1933 the school’s modernist aesthetic was considered laughable.  Likewise, Albers’ most recognized works, Homage to the Square, were mocked when he first began producing them in 1950.  So, Dad and I were in good company then.

In my class, however, working through Albers’ book, Interaction of Color, was transforming.  The artist illustrates how a skillful colorist can use the way we perceive tone and hues to transform a series of flat shapes into something more then the sum of their parts.  By exploiting the eye’s shortcomings, any color can be seen as dark or light, warm or cool, saturated or dull, simply by surrounding it with the right environment.  A square of 50 percent gray, for example, will appear closer to white on a black surface while appearing closer to black on a white surface.  In a less academic context, most have had the experiencing of  focusing on any small section of the famous painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by George Seurat and have seen the collection of quite separate, bright dots that when viewed at a distance combine into one tone.  Likewise, the small section of blue surf in J.M.W Turner’s Slave Ship can balance out the more saturated white of the sun because it is a section of cool color in a mostly warm painting.  It is the science of tricking the eye using a master knowledge of color theory, and Albers, experts now agree, captures it perfectly in his art.

“Josef Albers: Innovation and Inspiration” recently opened at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.  The show  includes over 60 of Albers’ works, including pieces on loan from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.