greg – Page 211

Misconceptual Misappropriation

Tyler Green Twittered the following from the ICA Philadelphia panel discussion on the 20th anniversary of the Mapplethorpe NEA implosion:

[Rob] Storr coins ‘misconceptual’ art: artists who shortcut to the now via conceptual art without understanding history of conceptualism.

tight, tasty, and much-needed, I like Storr’s definition, but I’m afraid he didn’t coin the term.
Instead, he probably probably got it where I did, from Madelon Vriesendorp, the “playground surrealist” Dutch artist who co-founded OMA with her former husband, Rem Koolhaas. Art Review profiled Vriesendorp last year when her retrospective opened at London’s Architectural Association–the show is at the Swiss Architecture Museum – Basel through June 2009:

In Vriesendorp’s “city” of objects upstairs at the AA, you’re confronted, stared-down, and overwhelmed by a vast army of touristy trinkets: nuns, skeletons, plastic food, multiple iterations of the Statue of Liberty, aliens, snowglobes, robots, cowboys, hindus, buddhas (on phones and with headphones), body parts – especially feet, hands, tongues and eyeballs – monkeys, flies, lady birds, centipedes, snakes, and buildings, buildings, buildings caricatured and reduced to their essence in little cute models meant for the mantelpiece back home. Vriesendorp has said that she’s only interested in failed objects, and that in her global city she feels like a tourist who has been given the wrong directions, misheard them and ended up in the right place anyway. She calls this practice “misconceptual art”.

Misconceptual art: The World of Madelon Vriesendorp [artreview.com via things]

Justin Cooper’s Lines

Just discovered Chicago artist Justin Cooper’s work [thanks bevel & boss]. Some of his sculptures are these fantastic lines that have a life of their own, which is all the more awesome because it’s obviously impossible. It’s like he drew them in space, out of banal minimalist materials. Fred Sandback meets Calder by way of Mark Handforth.
Above: Giant Leis, 2008, made out of plastic leis on steel armature. Below: Thread, a half mile of garden hose over steel, which was installed at 400 Gallery last April-May.

The drawing connection is slightly ironic, because the lines in Cooper’s equally interesting drawings turn out not to be lines at all. Upon close inspection, they disappear and dematerialize, like Lichtenstein’s Benday dots, or more like ur-Chinese ideographs or doodles, which teeter right on the edge of symbol and meaning, but which ultimately only function as part of the larger whole.
Justin Cooper’s site [nessiecoop.com]

Foster Bananas

The Las Vegas Sun reports [via tmn] that because of faulty rebar–and, maybe just a little bit, because the real estate and financial markets collapsed–MGM Grand is lopping off the top half of Norman Foster’s still-under-construction skyscraper at CityCenter on The Strip. That’s the part that would hae contained the luxury condominiums. Construction on the bottom half, where the hotel will be, will continue.
Which reminds me of a story Alvaro Siza told at Columbia. He’d apparently been commissioned to design a building in Guangzhou or someplace, and when he went to the ribbon-cutting, he found out the developer had doubled the number of floors without telling him. Am I remembering that right? Because I can’t find any mention of it online.

All We Are Is Hope In The Wind

Google Earthworks-meets-Sforzian Backgrounds? This is Jorge Rodriguez Gerada’s Expectation, a 650-ton sand painting of Barack Obama on the beach in Barcelona.
Here’s the site, just next to the Forum de les Cultures. Not only was the mockup done in Google Map [below],

check out the project’s Technical Specifications:

d. Visibility
Google Earth visualization agreement
Documentation from adjacent buildings
Set up of a temporary viewing tower
Bridge for control of access and delivery.

The work was executed Oct. 27, 2008. So I don’t know if its not appearing in Google Maps right now is because it doesn’t exist anymore, or it was gone by the time the satellite made its latest pass, or the system just hasn’t refreshed yet.
Expectation photos and artist statement [artjammer via coudal]

Koolhaas Hothaas

Sparks from Lantern Festival fireworks apparently lit construction debris on the roof of Rem Koolhaas’ Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Beijing a few hours ago, and the whole thing went up in flames. The hotel is part of Koolhaas’ CCTV headquarters complex. [image detail from reuters/daylife]
The NY Times reports that spectators noted that the timing of the fire was “inauspicious,” to which I’d say, “No freakin’ kidding.”

Kim’s Video To Reopen In Salemi, Sicilia

The first time I finally dared go into Kim’s video, I thought I was ready, so I asked why Blade Runner wasn’t in the Ridley Scott section. [Yes, son, back when I was a boy, we had to go all the way to St Marks to rent Blade Runner. Uptown both ways.] Anyway, the clerk scoffed, “Because it’s in the Douglas Trumbull section.”
Now the Times has an awesome story about how it came to pass that Kim’s entire collection of 50,000 films, passionately collected from around the world, will become the centerpiece of an art town being organized in an abandoned hilltop village in Sicily.
I count this as a huge win. I will go to Kim’s Salemi ten times before I ever even think of heading to the Village to rent a VHS tape.
La Dolce Video [nyt]

Is NOT! Is TOO!

Explain to me how Shephard Fairey can still be a sellout if he got arrested for tagging on the way to his museum show.

Amen To All That Theanyspacewhatever

It’s not even a participatory artwork, just a single parenthetical, but Brian Sholis hits the nail on the head in his review of Nancy Spector’s theanyspacewhatever “relational aesthetics” show at the Guggenheim:

(To be clear, I myself am sympathetic to the art’s ends, skeptical of many of the means employed by the artists, largely disappointed by the art’s effects and suspicious of the ongoing credibility afforded several of them despite this gap between rhetoric and accomplishment.)

Since I couldn’t get a reservation in the hotel room, my favorite part of the show was Pierre Huyghe’s iron-on transfer book, which I plan to use to make a baby blanket.
‘theanyspacewhatever’, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, ended 7 January [afterall.org]

God Bless This Irredeemably Bloated, Crappily Built House

David Galbraith’s title is [un?]fortunately not a joke.
McMansions are Built With Paper and Staples

Georgia Republican Saying Arts Workers Aren’t “Real People” Hits Nerve

From a Boston Globe article, “Stimulus funding for arts hits nerve”:

Representative Jack Kingston, a Georgia Republican, wants to transfer the proposed NEA funding to highway construction. He failed to get the House to vote on his proposal, so he is now trying to get on the conference committee that will determine the fate of the funding. “We have real people out of work right now and putting $50 million in the NEA and pretending that’s going to save jobs as opposed to putting $50 million in a road project is disingenuous,” Kingston said in an interview yesterday, adding the time has come to examine all of NEA’s funding.

It’s funny how, a few months ago, a city’s economic viability was measured by its ability to attract and keep workers in the “creative economy,” a definition which has the arts as a core, but extends far beyond the narrowestm, NEA definition of the term. And museums and other cultural institutions always made the case for themselves by demonstrating the high ROI that every dollar spent on culture generated for the local economy.
And where is any of this analysis and advocacy now, when at least one congressman says arts workers aren’t even “real people,” and shouldn’t be subsidized by the government at all? This from a politician who defines his district by its [government-funded] military base and its relevance to cultural production? [Fourth of four points: “The First District has also a been a background for top films including Academy Award Winning Best Picture Forrest Gump…”]?
I thought the $50 million stimulus proposed for the NEA was embarrassingly low, and I expected arts institutions to be contacting their congressional delegations to explain their supposedly dire financial situations, and umbrella organizations would make the case for emergency stopgap funding to keep performing arts organizations alive until the economy improves. Where has that been?

Dana Gioia, a poet who was NEA chairman until last month, recalled that when top Roosevelt aide Harry Hopkins was asked why the government wanted to hire so many artists and writers, he replied, “Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people.”
Gioia, reflecting on that comment, said, “As far as I’ve heard, nothing has changed about the dietary needs of artists.”

Gee, with powerful, articulate advocacy like that, I guess I needn’t have worried.

Note To Self Re: Dome Projection Using Spherical Mirror

There’s nothing specific on the horizon, but the way things are going, what with all the domes and mirrored domes and Buckminster Fuller and movies and all around here…
I mean, you never really know–and by you, I obviously mean me–so I thought I’d just go ahead and put this link to Paul Bourke’s patented system for projecting onto a dome using a spherical mirror, which he developed in 2003.
Actually, it seems to use a hemispherical mirror, and there are apparently inflatable domes for all your portable indoor planetarium needs–according to the FAQ, a 3m inflatable dome is ideal for half a dozen adults or a dozen children–and seamless works better than paneled.

Another note to self: I don’t care what they call them in Wollongong, but I will not be calling them Sphemirs. And probably not Mirrordomes, though that is much better.
Dome projection using a spherical mirror
Variously referred to as “sphemir” or “mirrordome”,
Conceived by the author in 2003 [uwa.edu.au via city of sound]

Google Earthwork: JR’s Projet Women Of Kibera

Well that didn’t take long. From the always awesome Wooster Collective comes word of a new work by the underground artist JR, Projet Women of Kibera, part of his ongoing 28 millimetres series he has been working on since 2004.
JR shot portraits of women in Kibera, a poor neighborhood alongside the train tracks in Nairobi, Kenya, and printed them on roof-sized vinyl, which was installed on the womens’ roofs. The photos are visible from the train–and from Google Earth–and the vinyl also helps keep the rain out.

And when Google Maps takes a higher-resolution pass over the slums of Nairobi, it’ll be visible there, too.
JR Finishes His Most Ambitious Project Yet [woostercollective]
JR’s portfolio site [jr-art.net]
See a whole slew of Kibera photos as the 28 Millimetres site [28millimetres.com]

Stop Me If You Think That You’ve Heard This One Before

Priceless.

“I have a strange and unpleasant announcement to make,” host Dave Hill, a comedian…announced. “There are too many women and not enough men. We’re not sure what to make of this, but we have to close the registration to women.”
…
“Is this for real?” our female friend wrote in a text after being denied a spot. “The girl with the Smiths tattoos got turned away from Smiths speed dating?”

– from Adam Martin’s coverage of Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now, a Smiths fan speed dating event in Greenpoint last week, for New York Magazine. [nymag via tmn]

Heads Up: Roof As nth Facade

The first place I remember hearing the idea of the roof as a “fifth facade” was Peter Eisenman talking about his Columbus Convention Center, from 1989, but completed in 1993.
With an awkward, constrained site sandwiched between downtown and a tangle of freeways, Eisenman recognized that the most important vantage points for the building were from the air–from passing motorists, conventioneers’ hotel rooms, and arriving airplanes. So he translated his program of entry lanes and loading bays sculpturally across the building.
You’d think the triumph of the rendering and virtual formmaking software and the whole, architecture as sculpture/object era would have heightened sensitivity to 360-degree design. But Google Maps makes it immediately clear that architects can be divided into those who consider the roof, and those who consider the roof an easy place to hide the air conditioner. Well, it ain’t hidden any more, folks.

I was reminded of this while surfing through pmoore66’s vast collection of aerial views of modern and contemporary architecture. While there are definitely wholly considered designs that look good on Google Maps, there are a very few–like Toyo Ito’s 2002 pavilion for the Serpentine–which seem to give special attention to the bird’s eye view.
On the one hand, it seems obvious that this vast, global audience should be factored into the creation of architecture. But on the other, it seems absolutely insane to design a structure, a space, for people who won’t be anywhere near it, but sitting in front of some screen on the other side of the world.

Maybe the next Bilbao Effect, sure to appeal to striving cities in these difficult budgetary times, will be to commission grand architectural designs purely for the benefit of the Google Maps audience. Like the rural streetscape camouflage which was applied to the roof of the Lockheed airplane factory in Burbank to thwart Japanese bombers during WWII, cheap, easy, flexible Potemkin roof structures could really put a town on the map, so to speak.

Richard Serra Sculptures On Google Maps

The whole thing about the only human construct you can see from space is the Great Wall of China will be amusing to people growing up in the Google Maps era, where you can’t hide anything from the satellite’s surveilling eye. It’s the geospatial equivalent of explaining TV before remotes and cable: it’ll just make you sound old.
So kudos to Richard Serra for being ahead of the curve [no pun intended] on making work that turns out to be well-suited for viewing from our new conveniently God-like vantage point.
I started to make a list with the Torqued Ellipse in front of Glenstone, Mitch Rales’ foundation in Potomac, and the suggestion from Guthrie of T.E.U.C.L.A., a torqued ellipse in the Murphy Sculpture Garden behind the Broad Art Center at UCLA, described at its installation in 2006 as “the first public work by sculptor Richard Serra installed in Southern California.”
And that reminded me that the Broads have had a Serra titled No Problem in their backyard for a while, which, thanks to Google Maps, is now public. Searching for that image led me to pmoore66’s collection of bird’s eye view Serras around the world at Virtual Globetrotting. If you count Robert Smithson’s Amarillo Ramp, which he helped complete after ~~Serra~~ Smithson’s death [!], pmoore66 has sighted 44 Serras around the world using either Google Maps, or Microsoft’s Bird’s Eye View, plus another four shots on Google Streetview. [Here are the search results on Virtual Globetrotting for “Richard Serra”, but that link looks a little unstable.]

With more than 1,700 entries so far, pmoore66 appears to be almost single-handedly pinning down the modernist canon for architecture and outdoor sculpture. This warrants some looking into. Stay tuned.
The more oblique angles of birds-eye-view seems to suit Serra’s sculptures better, and they remind me of a series of little desk tchotchke-sized versions of monumental sculptures called minuments that I saw in the ICA London bookshop a few years ago. As soon as I can figure out how to get Google to stop spellchecking for me, I’ll get the artist’s name.