Category: art

Steve Roden’s sculpture and sound installation, nothing but what is therein contained is in the previously closed off top rooms of Founder’s Hall at Girard College. It was created as part of the Hidden City Philadelphia festival, and this weekend, June 27th and 28th, is the last chance to see it. Which is really bumming me out, because we’ll be in Philadelphia for the 4th of July.

I’d emailed my compliments to Roden, praising how the “pure arbitrariness” of the system he used to construct this sculpture turned out so fantastically. When he emailed back and thanked me, he also pointed out there was “indeed there was much more specificity to the project than arbitrariness.” I felt like smacking my head, “that’s what I meant, not arbitariness, specificity!” as if they were somehow interchangeable.

And yet, it was kind of what I meant. Roden described his process on his blog. The title is a phrase from Girard’s will, instructing the architect what kind of building he should design:

I took the phrase and translated it into numbers based on the alphabetical sequence of the letters, and then cut pieces of wood accordingly.
these pieces (running from a 1 foot length for an “a” to an 8 foot plus a 12 foot for a “t”) were then painted in groups, a different color for each letter.
…
i then began to build the structure, beginning with the first letter – “n” – and drilling and wiring the consecutive parts improvisationally, essentially using the letter sequence as a score towards determining what piece of wood would come next.

The colors and painting, meanwhile were partly inspired “by the sketchbook of amish deaf mute craftsman henry lapp, who lived outside of pennsylvania just around the time the building was finished…”

So yes, highly specific, and to an outsider, seemingly purely arbitrary. And yet, they are also the deeply intuited choices of an artist who has spent two years researching and experiencing the building, the institution, the space, the history, the city, the work inhabits. And out of that experience and those choices emerges a singular, even inevitable object. [The work itself also contains sound and text elements.]

I realized while I’d remembered Roden’s explanation of how Stephen Prina’s green monochrome paintings with dimensions based on Manet’s oeuvre informed his early explorations of constraints and systems from his interview with Catherine Wagley last year, I’d forgotten the intuition, which was the objective, if not the whole point:

it opened my eyes to how process could potentially be used to generate a relatively awkward or difficult stage for an intuitive process to then take place. so i started a painting with a ridiculously stupid idea – taking an issue of art in america and building an image using the first letter of every name in an advertisement for an exhibition, in the same font and same relative scale. it was the kind of thing i would have reacted against, so i tried it. it was incredibly frustrating, even boring at times, but also freeing. i started to make works using found letter structures within books and texts to see what might happen – what was i gaining and what was i losing by following such a process? i wasn’t sure, but both the process and the finished works were more interesting to me.

Great stuff. I wish we were in town.
nothing but what is therein contained, Saturdays & Sundays through June 28 [hiddencityphila.org]
more pics and making of: nothing but what is therein contained… [airform archives]

I’d seen this installation shot of Johannes Wohnseifer’s show at Johann Koenig in Berlin, but I couldn’t track down any details of the sculptures until now. But I see from Contemporary Art Daily that Koenig has finally posted some awesome detail images.
In an exploration of representation and tranformation/distortion through production, Wohnseifer has created a series of sculptures using the same nine components as Gerrit Rietveld’s 1923 Berliner Stuhl. Rietveld originally sold this chair as a build-it-yourself kit [the all-white example of the chair’s original configuration can be seen below, and in the background of the installation shot].

In each of his shelf-like but ultimately non-functional sculptures, Wohnseifer “plays with the idea of object ‘recycling,’ a widespread practice in non industrial countries, in which discarded materials with almost no more value are transformed into practical or also humorous products.” I guess “plays with” here means “doing the opposite,” since he transforms an unconventional-looking but functional chair into a definitionally non-practical object, a sculpture of almost classical abstract form.
Wohnseifer’s show closes tomorrow in Berlin

Jen Bekman’s Art for The People gallery, 20×200 is having a sale, 20% off all prints and photos through Tuesday. [see details and promo code info here.]
There’s a bunch of interesting stuff; among my favorites are Jorge Colombo’s iSketches famously created, like his recent New Yorker cover, with the Brushes iPhone App. They’re a really nice mix of painting, drawing, digital, and street…what’s the word, photography? reportage? Whatever sketches are.

Another great series is Jason Polans’ larger-scale prints based on drawings from the American Museum of Natural History. Great stuff.

Artforum reports today that The Art Newspaper reported Tuesday that the Washington Post reported that Ukrainian mogul/collector Viktor Pinchuk is the “fourth stakeholder” in the made-up “sale” of Damien Hirst’s £50 million diamond skull.
What no one reports, though, is that the Post published this claim over a month ago in a feature story by Their Man in Ukraine, John Pancake, about a Pinchuk-backed Hirst “retrospective” in Kyiv. Pancake did not make any characterization of his source, treating it as a passing fact. [The only Pinchuk-related source Pancake’s piece is Pinchuk Art Center director Eckhard Schneider, whose appointment was announced last fall in a press conference where the collector also admitted he was a repeat buyer at Hirst’s landmark Sotheby’s auction.]
I won’t speculate why it took the art world press more than a month to find out about an art story in the Washington Post. As for the reported sale of the skull “to a group of investors” in 2007, though, it would be nice if anyone could report what actually happened: that the “investors” who supposedly bought the Hirst from Hirst, his manager, and his dealer, were Hirst, his manager, and his dealer.
The involvement of an outsider, even as a minority “investor” whose percentage of ownership is then used, venture capital-style, to calculate the valuation of the venture. But with dozens or more transactions, charity auctions, and exhibitions between Pinchuck and Hirst, Pinchuk’s would hardly be considered an arms-length transaction.
And so the skull’s sole conceptual triumph–as a manipulative value distortion field which renders art and pop journalists powerless–continues.
Previously: Damien Hirst skull how-to photos
Also: No way that thing cost $20 million to make