Monday, November 25, 2019
Thursday, November 21, 2019
Wednesday, November 20, 2019
MARCO MAGI @ HOSFELT GALLERY
Top: Complete Coverage on Norman Foster, 2014, cuts on 500 paper sheet in plexi box 11.5 x 9 x 2.25" Middle: Tablet, 2014, pencil on clayboard, 14 x 11"Bottom: Motherboard, 2014, pencil on aluminum; Flat Pencil, 2014
Full article here
There’s a delicious irony in finding barely readable drawings in a room whose sheer scale often holds out the promise of something lapel-grabbing. Credit the “code switch,” if you will, to the Uruguayan artist Marco Maggi. In West vs. East, a title suggestive of dueling philosophical systems, Maggi, in his sixth show here, defies the expectations raised by the environment in which his work appears.
At a distance, you could mistake a couple of his drawings for framed vapor. Which is to say nothing at all. But, when you move in close you see aerial views of imaginary cities drawn in a hand so small and precise you’ll wish for a magnifying glass and wonder what kind of savant created this work. Maggi seeks nothing less than to concretize the ever-widening gap between knowledge and knowingness.
The two are easily and often confused. Knowledge is what you acquire from experience. It’s something you own. Knowingness is the pretense of ownership. It’s what you get from Twitter or TV news or Facebook. Maggi, who now resides in upstate New York, calls out the difference and questions the ever-increasing conflation of the two. He does it by drawing on unusual substrates (aluminum foil) and by treating conventional media (paper, glass and plexiglas) in novel ways. The results are objects that call into question their own objecthood and force us to ask: What do we know and how we know it?.... Full article here
Monday, November 18, 2019
Sunday, November 17, 2019
MARK WAGNER
To many the idea of cutting up money for artistic purposes seems insane. But Mark Wagner saw something more when he first cut up a dollar 15 years ago. Now he's assembles collages entirely from one dollar bills that can sell for tens of thousands of dollars. Anthony Mason reports. Video here and here
BRIAN DETTMER
New York–based artist Brian Dettmer carves intricate sculptures from outdated materials like encyclopedias, textbooks, maps and cassette tapes. To create his works Dettmer seals the object with varnish, then swiftly and deftly moves through it with an X-Acto knife until he comes out the other side, cutting away material to form something new. His beautiful carvings reflect how, in a digital information landscape, even the oldest forms of knowledge can be repurposed. Video here
JAE RHIM LEE - MUSHROOM DEATH SUIT
http://www.ted.com Here's a powerful provocation from artist Jae Rhim Lee. Can we commit our bodies to a cleaner, greener Earth, even after death? Naturally -- using a special burial suit seeded with pollution-gobbling mushrooms. Video here
Thursday, November 14, 2019
Monday, November 11, 2019
Dead or Alive MAD
Dead or Alive online here
Dead or Alive, presented by the Museum of Arts and Design from April 27 through October 24, 2010, will showcase the work of over 30 international artists who transform organic materials and objects that were once produced by or part of living organisms-insects, feathers, bones, silkworm cocoons, plant materials, and hair-to create intricately crafted and designed installations and sculptures.
The exhibition explores a territory related to MAD's Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary, which featured contemporary works created from multiples of ordinary manufactured items. In Dead or Alive, the materials transformed by the artists are entirely natural. Once-living parts of flora and fauna are recombined and rearranged into works of art that address the transience of life, and all that is elegant and alarming about the natural world.
Dead or Alive features new site-specific installations and recent work by contemporary artists from around the world, including Jennifer Angus, Nick Cave, Tessa Farmer, Tim Hawkinson, Jochem Hendricks, Damien Hirst, Alastair Mackie, Kate MccGwire, Susie MacMurray, Shen Shaomin, and Levi van Veluw among others. A special weeklong visitor preview starting Thursday, April 22, will allow MAD visitors to observe artists as they create and install site- specific works in the museum galleries.
New commissions include works by Costa Rican artist Lucia Madriz, who will create a massive, politically charged floor installation made from black beans and rice; German artist Christiane Löhr, who fabricates fragile nests of thistle and dandelion silk suspended in the air; American artist Jennifer Angus, known for her architectural interiors covered with thousands of dried insects that are pinned to mimic vintage wallpaper; and Kate MccGwire who will create a large cascade of 1000s of pigeon feathers emanating from one of MAD's signature glass bands that cut across the gallery ceilings. Chinese artist Shen Shaomin has created an imaginary animal skeleton made from pulverized bones; and internationally renowned installation artist Xu Bing will make a shadow version of a 24-foot Song Dynasty painting using only vegetable detritus, weeds, leaves, and roots.Dead or Alive
TIM HAWKINSON
Video here and here
Tim Hawkinson gives a tour of his sculpture exhibition at Pace Gallery in New York City. He provides insight into each artwork and discusses the variety of materials he used, such as resin and bronze casts of his body, pieces of his daughter's old bicycle, and pine cones and palm fronds from his garden. Hawkinson made some of the works over time with his daughter Clare, a Girl Scout Brownie. "She has kind of given me ideas," he says. Hawkinson named each sculpture in the exhibition after a different Girl Scout cookie, alluding to Clare's involvement in his creative process. Tim Hawkinson is known for creating complex sculptural systems through surprisingly simple means. Inspiration for many of Hawkinson's pieces has been the re-imagining of his own body and what it means to make a self-portrait of this new or fictionalized body. Sculptures are often re-purposed out of materials, which the artist then mechanizes through hand-crafted electrical circuitry.
CORNELIA PARKER
Cornelia Parker here and here
Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art is about to present the largest ever exhibition of the work of Cornelia Parker. The British artist work has collaborated with high profile and unexpected figures such as actress Tilda Swinton, Julian Assange and even the British Army.
TOM FRIEDMAN
View videos here and here and here
Stephen Friedman Gallery is delighted to announce a video of Tom Friedman's solo exhibition featuring the artist's walkthrough, directed by Sketch Films. Furthering the artist's exploration and transformation of the familiar and the everyday, the exhibition promises an exciting range of materials and themes elevated beyond their original form and executed with mesmerising skill. Painstakingly created, the works reveal deeper intricacies from every viewpoint as the delicate nature of the material is revealed. Styrofoam, wood, wire, paper and stainless steel are all transformed by the artist turned alchemist.
Mary Mattingly Art21
Videos here and here
Do objects come with responsibility? In this film, Mary Mattingly transforms personal belongings into sculptural forms that she later incorporates into photographs and performative actions. Experimenting with living in her Greenpoint studio space, Mattingly is determined to live with just the bare essentials. Over several months, she undertakes a process of recording every object she owns and tracing the history of each of her belongings—how it came into her life, its distribution via complex global supply chains, as well as where the raw materials for its manufacture was sourced—before uploading a digital version of each object to her website OWN-IT.US for others to access. Throughout this process, she takes stock of the environmental and societal impact of her personal consumption, wondering if “maybe we need art more today because we’re in a world with so many mass produced things.” Mattingly aggregates all of her personal belongings into boulder-like sculptural bundles, held together with rope, so that she is able to roll and drag them. She’s photographed walking the sculpture Fill (Obstruct) (2013) across the Bayonne Bridge, from Staten Island to New Jersey, and to the Port of New York New Jersey—symbolically returning her personal belongings to the place where they entered the East Coast. “It’s kind of really incredibly Sisyphean in a way,” says Mattingly about her actions, eventually attracting the attention of the Port Authority Police and Homeland Security who surveil the port. Also featuring the works Kart (2008); Floating a Boulder (2012); Pile-High (2012); The Furies (Titian, again) (2013); The Damned (Titian, again) (2013); and Life of Objects (2013).
Mierle Laderman Ukeles "Flow City"
The art of Mierle Laderman Ukeles is about the everyday routines of life. In 1969, after the birth of her first child, Ukeles wrote a Manifesto for Maintenance Art that questioned binary systems of opposition that articulate differences between art/life, nature/culture, and public/private. The manifesto proposed undoing boundaries that separate the maintenance of everyday life from the role of an artist in society. Ukeles was interested in how the concept of transference could be used by artists to empower people to act as agents of change to stimulate positive community involvement toward ecological sustainability.
In the 1960s, Ukeles completed an undergraduate degree in history and international studies from Barnard and studied visual arts at Pratt Institute in New York. Ukeles' work at this time was experimental, and visually and symbolically conveyed social unrest associated with events such as the women's movement and the Vietnam War. Ukeles became increasingly restless about the separation of the artist in society from everyday activities like child care, household work, and other routine labor practices that she felt should be reinterpreted within the contexts of personal and political aesthetic values. Ukeles stated, "Avant-garde art, which claims utter development, is infected by strains of maintenance ideas, maintenance activities, and maintenance materials. . . . I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. (Random order.) I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately) I 'do' Art. Now I will simply do these everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art." (Ukeles, 1969)
Mierle Laderman Ukeles' most recent work synthesizes art and life within the contexts of social, political, environmental, and feminist theory. Patricia Phillips (1995) points out, "The artist's own family dynamics and personal observations underlie the authenticity of her inherently public work, which seems a more effective way to respond to cataclysmic, unanticipated shifts. In fact, this by-play of private-public, the mixing and merging of formerly oppositional designations, has stimulated a wider reconsideration of institutional systems while supporting a process of feminization in the public realm, animating the popular slogan 'The personal is political.'" (p.169)
Ukeles' work is created through a process of participatory democracy that unites people in open dialogue about the characteristics of important community ecological issues. I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day (1976) was a performance/project exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Ukeles collaborated with 300 hundred maintenance staff at a bank in Manhattan. She took Polaroid photographs of men and women doing routine jobs and asked them to discuss their labor as either art or work. Jobs were often discussed by the same person, at different times, in different ways. Later, she exhibited the workers' narrative statements alongside pictures of their daily chores. She asked viewers to challenge the social constructions of aesthetic and cultural values that define what work and art mean.
Similar forms of juxtaposition that challenge definitions of art as separated from life can be seen in other works by Ukeles such as Cleaning the Mummy Case, Keeping of the Keys, and Wash. Ukeles believes that positive social change can occur through the direct interaction of art and life. Art can create a climate for change. Ukeles writes, "Art can give us new air to breathe." (Phillips, 1995)
In 1976, Ukeles accepted an unsalaried position as artist-in-residence with the New York City Department of Sanitation. She proposed to do work that would incorporate dialogue, community participation around life-centered issues, and ecological sustainability. Ukeles focused her creative energies on a series of long term projects: Touch Sanitation (1978-1984); Flow City (1983-current); and Fresh Kills Landfill and Sanitation Garage (1989-present). These projects provided visitors with points of access to issues of urban waste management.
Touch Sanitation was Ukeles' first project as the city's new artist-in-residence. She drew attention to the maintenance of urban ecological systems in general and the use of pejorative language to represent "garbage men" in particular. Ukeles traveled sections of New York City to shake the hands of over 8500 sanitation employees or "sanmen" during a year-long performance. She documented her activities on a map, meticulously recording her conversations with the workers. Ukeles documented the workers' private stories, fears, castigations, and public humiliations in an attempt to change some of the negative vernacular words used in the public sphere of society. In this way, Ukeles used her art as an agent of change to challenge conventional language stereotypes.
Flow City is another example of how Ukeles addresses issues of positive social change through her art. At the 59th Street Marine Transfer Station, Ukeles constructed Flow City as a point of public access to the reconceptualization of urban ecological systems. Phillips (1995) writes, "Using the culture of sanitation work as an allegory of global environmental management, the project reflects Ukeles' commitment to bring citizens to a visceral, participatory experience of the scale and issues of solid-waste management in New York City. As always, the social, political, and environmental issues are inextricably connected." (p.185-187)
In New York, a marine transfer station is where garbage is loaded onto barges prior to being transported to and dumped in a landfill. Ukeles constructed this visitor center as a way for people to view the transference of used and recyclable material and the labor of everyday maintenance workers. She constructed a space with three separate views of city life and urban ecology. Facing east was a beautiful panoramic representation of the city; to the west was a picture of large barges filled with trash and urban waste; and to the south was a bank of video monitors. Scientists, ecologists, artists, and others were invited to contribute information for video displays to help educate people about ecological urban issues. These three perspectives provided a range of views for visitors to see and question everyday consumer choices and to learn more about the consequences of their lifestyle on creating a healthy environment in the future.
The artist used education as a powerful tool to engage community members in active learning processes. Community involvement and affirmation are at the heart of Ukeles' art work. Phillips (1995) states "By creating a point of access, Ukeles enables members of the public to make more incisive connections with the physical dimensions of their urban and natural worlds. Both the city and the river are seen as relational; Flow City serves as the suture that draws the extremes of the natural-culture dialectic into visible coexistence."
(p.188)
Phillips, P. (1995). "Maintenance Activity: Creating a climate for change." In Nina Felshin (Ed.). But Is It Art: The Spirit of Art as Activism. (pp. 165-193). Seattle, WA: Bay Press.
Lacy, L. (Ed.). (1996). Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle, WA: Bay Press.
Oakes, B. (1995). Sculpting with the Environment: A Natural Dialogue. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
SFMOMA DAVID IRELAND AT 500 CAPP STREET
Video here
Bay Area conceptual artist David Ireland is widely admired for installations and sculptures made with humble materials that he accumulated over time. His best known work of art is his house at 500 Capp Street, a ramshackle Victorian in San Francisco's Mission district that he spent more than 30 years transforming. The house and its furnishings showcase Ireland's unique use of materials and wonderfully rich sense of humor, following the basic principle that any object or activity can be art if it is experienced as such.
ART GUYS
For 30 years The Art Guys have been surprising and sometimes confusing audiences with their brand of art that The New York Times called "a cross between Dada and David Letterman". In this profile they share some of the method to their madness. See video here and article here
“The Statue of Four Lies” sits in Lynn Eusan Park, near Moody Dining Hall and Cougar Village 1. The story goes that the builders wanted to outdo Harvard’s similar installation called The John Harvard Statue nicknamed “Statue of Three Lies.” However, no one knows what kind of lies UH could be holding on to. | Jennifer Gonzalez/The Cougar
Tuesday, October 22, 2019
Thursday, October 10, 2019
Sunday, October 6, 2019
Saturday, September 28, 2019
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