Author: greg

Classy Raccoon

Yo te amo, Cintra Wilson:

One $75 T-shirt bore the word ARTIST across the chest in a bold glitter font. Now, any artist I know who’s worth his salt would print the shirt himself if it cost more than $22 — and it would never say ARTIST. It might say JANITOR, or IDIOT, or possibly HOOKER. But wearing a $75 T-shirt that says ARTIST suggests that the most artistic thing about the wearer is the T-shirt itself, much as you know that anyone who actually uses the word “classy” probably isn’t. Even if they could afford it, real artists wouldn’t wear such redundancies, any more than raccoons would buy themselves $75 T-shirts that say RACCOON.

Or should I say, je t’aime? [critical shopper – nyt]

Visiting Untitled, My Bathroom

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Untitled, Tom Friedman, 1999
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Untitled ( Perth Amboy Series), Rachel Harrison, 2001 [via]
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Untitled (My Bathroom), Greg Allen, 2009
Reservations
Advance reservations for an overnight stay at Untitled (My Bathroom) are required, and are accepted beginning March 1 for the current year’s visiting season only. Visits by parties of up to six people (one night only) are available from May 1 through October 31, seven days a week. Day visits and visitors without reservations cannot be accommodated.
We recommend that you call or email us to check availability of dates, however, reservations are made through written correspondence only and are confirmed only upon receipt of your Reservation Form and payment in full at least 48 hours before your visit.

This Poeme Electronique Was Brought To You By Philips

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Hello, Earth to Le Corbusier archive!
Corbusier conceived Poeme electronique for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Expo in Brussels. It was an 8-minute immersive light, film and sound experience which told mankind’s long, hard slog towards peace.
Don’t forget the architecture. The multi-channel version of Poeme electronique, with a score by Edgard Varese, was projected on the walls of the tensile tent-like pavilion, which was designed by composer/architect Iannis Xenakis, who was working for Le Corbusier’s firm at the time. Xenakis recalled–perhaps wishfully, I don’t know–that the parabolic concrete forms came directly from his graph-based score for his 1954 composition, Metastasis. [The piece was staged last March at the Barbican as part of a Xenakis program, concurrent with the Corbusier exhibition.]
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Here’s Poeme Electronique in its single channel version:

This brief segment produced in 2000 for a virtual reality recreation of the Poeme Electronique experience also includes period footage, photos, and a couple of interesting looking models from the Philips archives:

Le Corbusier; Iannis Xenakis; Edgard Varèse
«Poème électronique: Philips Pavilion» [mediaartnet.org via things]
previously: E.A.T. and the Pepsi Pavilion, Osaka Expo 70; a lost piece of corporate-sponsored installation art?

Prayer Flag Abstraction, Also Darren Almond’s Grandmother, Also

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This gorgeous Darren Almond photograph, Infinite Betweens: Becoming Between, Phase 3, of an impossible-to-map landscape covered with Tibetan prayer flags is coming up at Philips in a couple of weeks. It reminded me how quietly strong his work is, and how his underlying interests in time, place, memory, and the human experience of them resonates with me. I just watched his Tate Talk from 2005 which, though it was a good primer on his film work, was pretty thin on insight. Almond is a pretty reticent guy on stage, and except for his discussion of his project of relocating Auschwitz bus stations into the gallery, it’s only at the end when someone in the audience asks him about memory that he kind of lights up.
While trying to track down a long, deep-sounding quote from his grandmother, I found Brad Barnes’ interview with Almond on Kultureflash, which was apparently conducted the next day:

BB: I think I know what you mean by seeking a “reassurance”. Is that the grandfather alluded to in If I had you?
DA: Yes it is. “A much loved man” as carved on his head stone. For me he supplied much of my early field of memory. The terrain of his own life’s experiences he passed on as we were very close. The whole notion of travel for instance came from him albeit that he was serving in the army during the WWII he then revisited the towns throughout Belgium, France and Germany after the war and maintained friendships with people he met through the war. During the procedure of trying to make If I had you my grandmother and I shared our feelings that we still had for him and in fact they were feelings generated by memory only so a shared local memory does provide a certain reassurance. I hoped that despite an increment of melancholia produced in If I had you I also hoped that it would provide a certain optimism. I like a statement that was produced to me last night at my talk at the Tate, “the vision for the future is not utopia it is a re-interpreted ‘telling’ of the now. Memory is not exactly the site of freedom, but the layering of identity and memory is a basis for moving forward. The limit for this is language itself.”

Previously from 2002: wow, family, travel, memory, Auschwitz bus stops. I just wanted to add a “Previous Darren Almond mentions” link, but it’s all kind of circling back.

On Dean On Ballard On Millar On Smithson

Who knew? Tacita Dean writes in the Guardian about her late friend JG Ballard’s shared interest in Robert Smithson:

My relationship to Ballard had begun a little earlier, with our mutual interest in the work of the US artist Robert Smithson. In 1997, I tried to find Smithson’s famous 1970 earthwork, Spiral Jetty, in the Great Salt Lake of Utah. I had directions faxed to me from the Utah Arts Council, which I supposed had been written by Smithson himself. I only knew what I was looking for from what I could remember of art school lectures: the iconic aerial photograph of the basalt spiral formation unfurling into a lake. In the end, I never found it; it was either submerged at the time, or I wasn’t looking in the right place. But the journey had a marked impact on me, and I made a sound work about my attempt to find it. Ballard must have read about it, because he sent me a short text he had written on Smithson, for an exhibition catalogue.
It was the writer, curator and artist Jeremy Millar who became convinced Smithson knew of Ballard’s short story, The Voices of Time, before building his jetty. All Smithson’s books had been listed after his death in a plane crash in 1973 – and The Voices of Time was among them. The story ends with the scientist Powers building a cement mandala or “gigantic cipher” in the dried-up bed of a salt lake in a place that feels, by description, to be on the very borders of civilisation: a cosmic clock counting down our human time. It is no surprise that it is a copy of The Voices of Time that lies beneath the hand of the sleeping man on the picnic rug in the opening scenes of Powers of Ten, Charles and Ray Eames’ classic 1977 film about the relative size of things in the universe.

As it happens, I’m reading Millar’s book about Fischli & Weiss right now. And Massimiliano Gioni and the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi are opening a nice retrospective of Dean’s work in Milan in a couple of weeks. As soon as my copy of Ballard’s just-published interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist arrives, the loop will be complete.
The cosmic clock with Ballard at its core [guardian, thanks stuart]

Insight Into The Advertising Mind

I’m totally with Andy on this one; you should not embed it; you should watch the new ad for the Honda Insight hybrid on the Vimeo site. The sunrise is spectacular.
Meanwhile, as with the making of videos for the Honda Accord “Cog” spot and the Sony Bravia bouncing balls, I will never cease to be amazed at the unalloyed hubris advertising people display for their own–and their paying clients’–activities.
Honda Insight ad – “Let it Shine” [vimeo via waxy]
The Making of “Let it Shine” [vimeo]

Enzo Mari X Rirkrit Tiravanija

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Untitled (Autoprojettazione, 1123 xE/1123 xR), 2004
courtesy kurimanzutto
As I’ve said before, the first Enzo Mari autoprogettazione furniture I ever saw was by Rirkrit Tiravanija. He had tables and chairs fabricated from polished stainless steel, which his gallery from Mexico City, kurimanzutto, showed at Basel and a couple of other fairs a few years ago.
They weighed a ton and cost a fortune–as furniture, anyway; as sculpture, they seemed like a bargain–but they looked spectacular.
Rirkrit hit a zone in his work then where he was re-creating various examples of modernistic furniture and architecture in mirrored stainless steel; there was a ping pong table; several corner assemblages using three Smithson-esque, non-site mirrors; and an entire chrome pavilion in Bilbao. The effect was to simultaneously aestheticize the original and dematerialize the substantial object on display, turn them into non-objects. Which is kind of ironic, since they’re among the most atypically beautiful works the supposedly non-object-oriented [heh] artist has made.
See another picture at kurimanzutto, slide 4 [kurimanzutto.com, image above, too]

“And We’re On The Street In New York”

Until they start re-enacting Metropolitan Diary anecdotes with sock puppets [OMH! BRB!], the pinnacle of NY Times multimedia achievement is Bill Cunningham’s weekly narration of his On The Street fashion photos.
Normally, he lays down the audio back in the office. But this week, he’s actually on the street. There’s ambient street sound and everything. It’s like we’re hanging out with him, hearing his subjects exclaim, “How’d you know it was Kansai Yamamoto?”
Could a live, streaming Bill Cunningham channel be far behind?

Enzo Mari x Ikea Mashup, Ch. 4: Finish Fetish

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For the 2002 reissue of his 1974 catalogue, PROPOSTA PER UN’AUTOPROGETTAZIONE , Enzo Mari added “a few technical hints.” I love them, especially the quotation marks, even as I prepare to ignore them a little and end up with something less “belle” than it could be:

…Then, from a purely formal (symbolic) and “instructive” point of view, table tops are “attractive” [“belle”] if they are made by putting several small planks together. From a strictly utilitarian point of view you can use plywood or chipboard.
For the same reasons the constructions are “attractive” if they are left rough, with the saw marks, neither planed nor varnished.

I found this slightly obsessive discussion of finishing solid pine furniture to be quite helpful, if a little daunting. But already, it saved me from myself and helped me lift my wood finishing sights beyond the lying corporate shelves of Ace Hardware:

First, however, a warning is needed: there is zero ‘truth in advertising’ in the finish industry. Absolutely anything can contain absolutely anything, no matter what the label says. There are products out there labelled tung oil that don’t have any tung oil whatsoever in them. Many ‘tung oil’ products depend mostly on phenolic resins. You have to buy from a source that is expert enough to know precisely what is in their products and trustworthy enough to tell you. In Canada, that’s Lee Valley, in the USA, Sutherland Welles.

Sounds good to me.
Sure enough, the extremely helpful folks at Sutherland and Welles guided me toward the right product for the project, a table with a top that will see regular use. I expect I’ll have enough polymerized tung oil varnish and sealer to give the table a good five coats, if not the 10-12 that Sankey prefers.
Meanwhile, I mapped out each piece to be cut onto the Ivar shelf components with blue tape. I plan to cut everything to length, finish the parts while I can reach all the corners, and then assemble the table. And then give it a last coat or two for good measure.
The wood cost $120, the tung oil, $82.

“Tasteful In A Lily Tomlin Sense”? Also, John Cage

In its first iteration in 1984-5, The Territory of Art I was described as “a sixteen part series of half-hour radio programs that explored issues of contemporary art and design through commentary, interviews, original drama, and new music from more than 140 artists, designers, performers, composers, and critical thinkers.” It was produced by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and curator Julie Lazar was the managing editor.
The first two episodes were hosted by Whoopi Goldberg. The third, titled “The Collectors,” contained an interview with Benjamin Buchloh, alas, not by Whoopi Goldberg. Also, Gene Schwartz, Leo Castelli, Count Panza, John Weber, Barbara Rose, some corporate art consultant I don’t remember, and David Salle, who didn’t say much. Someone, I think it was Weber, contrasted art that collectors buy to challenge themselves with people who just want something “tasteful in the Lily Tomlin sense.” Except for that lost-on-me reference–and the implausibility of the idea that anyone might actually want a Schnabel–the discussion could have taken place last year.
Several episodes, including No. 3, are available as mp3 files.
By 1994, when she was on a Pew Fellowships in the Arts panel, Lazar’s bio was calling The Territory of Art, by then in its fourth and final iteration, “an ongoing program of commissioned works for radio.”
I’m inclined to accept this transformation from program to work, and not just because Lazar curated what is I still consider one of the best museum exhibitions I’ve ever seen or heard of with the greatest exhibition catalogue I’ve ever seen, John Cage’s “Rolywholyover.”
The fifth program of Territory of Art IV was “just to rolywholyover: John Cage in memoriam,” written by Klaus Schöning. Though it’s nominally an interview with Cage, the program is also a remarkable and entrancing work of art. I bought the CD ten or more years ago, but just unwrapped it this morning to rip into my new iPod. Fortunately for everyone who is not me–which is most of you–MOCA offers the mp3.

I Salone Mio: Everyday Life Objects Shop

If you’re in Milano–and after all, why wouldn’t you be this time of year? It’s Il Salone del Mobile, after all–definitely check out Everyday Life Objects Shop, an experimental retail exhibition of sorts organized by Apartamento Magazine and master curator/shopkeep Andy Beach of Reference Library. It opened tonight and runs through the 28th.
As it happens, I have an object in the Shop, an edition, actually, which I will discuss later after Andy sees fit to unveil it. Suffice it to say that I owe my mom Ann Orton and her sewing guru friend Pauline Richards a tremendous debt of gratitude. And when I need to get them to fabricate the rest of the edition, I’ll owe them even more.
Stay tuned.
OK, fine, here’s a picture.
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Everyday Life Objects Shop
April 20-28, 2009
Via Arena 19
20123 Milano, Italy

First Time As Farce, Second As Tragedy

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“Somebody wants to buy your apartment building!” Oh, how developers long to hear those words again.
Who could know how or when a work of art transmutes into an icon? Andy Warhol may have had some ideas on the topic, but could even he have foreseen how this large, stark painting, made in 1985-6, would spring from his massive oeuvre twenty years after his own death, to become an emblem of an era?
In the year or two before his death, Warhol created the Black & White Series, large- and small-format silkscreen paintings based on vintage ads which he had accumulated in scrapbooks. In a simultaneous exhibition in London and New York in 2002, Larry Gagosian showed the series in full for the first time, just as the Warhol juggernaut was taking off. I remember seeing that market-making show of works so austere and different from “classic” Warhol and feeling like I was on the edge of an art ocean. “What else do they have stored in those warehouses? Are there just entire bodies of unseen work waiting to appear over the horizon when prices are right?”
Somebody Wants To Buy Your Apartment Building! did not come through Gagosian, though. It bears a Leo Castelli inventory sticker, but it didn’t come through Castelli, either. Its provenance says it was purchased directly from the Estate by a New York collector. Which means the collector had either gotten there after Leo and before Larry, or that the painting didn’t sell in the 2002 show, and it was later bought out of storage.
Either way, in the intervening five years, the Warhol market–and the apartment building market–soared. Somebody Wants To Buy Your Apartment Building! was featured on the cover of the catalogue for Sotheby’s contemporary day sale on Feb. 28, 2007. It was the star of a large [387 lots], motley mid-market sale. It had an extensive writeup detailing its significance and history. Its estimate of $750,000-$950,000 was several times higher than the 2nd most expensive lot of the day. Several somebodies wanted to buy Somebody Wants To Buy Your Apartment Building!, and it sold for $964,000.
How times change. Two years and three popped bubbles later [art real estate, finance], the buyer of Somebody Wants To Buy Your Apartment Building! has brought it back at Sotheby’s. It will be sold on May 13. The estimate this time around: $400,000-$650,000. Unlike similarly price-chopped apartment buildings, though, at least the painting will sell. The desperate seller has placed no reserve price on it. So it’ll go for what it goes for. And we can only hope it’s enough to pay off the mortgage.
May 13, 2009, LOT 221: SOLD WITHOUT RESERVE/ ANDY WARHOL/ 1928 – 1987/ SOMEBODY WANTS TO BUY YOUR APARTMENT BUILDING!/ 400,000–600,000 USD UPDATE: SOLD! for $458,500 [sothebys]
Feb. 22, 2007, LOT 22/ ANDY WARHOL 1928-1987/ SOMEBODY WANTS TO BUY YOUR APARTMENT BUILDING!/ 750,000–950,000 USD/ Lot Sold. Hammer Price with Buyer’s Premium: 964,000 USD [sothebys.com]
Meanwhile, here’s the price floor: Glicee posters of Somebody Wants to Buy Your Apartment Building! are $99-349 on amazon [amazon]

Little Big Cremaster


Awesome. YouTube user fluxlaser has created levels in Little Big Planet based on The Cremaster Cycle. So far, there’s Cremaster 4 [above] and Cremaster 1 [below], which is tighter. I can’t wait to see the mirrored salt flat rodeo in Little Big Cremaster 2. [via waxy]

There’s also this level, based on The Order, the commercial release DVD created from Cremaster 3:

way back in 2003: Matthew Bremsen called it in his article, “Matthew Barney vs Donkey Kong

Enzo Mari x Ikea Mashup, Ch. 3: Decisions, Decisions

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So I’m finally going to make my Enzo Mari autoprogettazione table from Ikea components. A publicist from Ford had offered a Flex station wagon for a road trip, and last weekend, I took them up on it. Which meant I could bring back the 89-in pieces of wood I’d scoped out. So I did. Next I will cut and finish the pieces. Then I will assemble the table.

Continue reading “Enzo Mari x Ikea Mashup, Ch. 3: Decisions, Decisions”