Bits: 09.07.09

Stencil spotted on Plymouth Ave. bridge, Minneapolis

• Artist Robert Fontenot has been buying up textiles deaccessioned by LACMA and transforming them into his art: a 1954 Claire McCardle dress became a hobo bag, while a pair of knickers from 1925 were turned into boxing gloves (knickerboxers?). Studio 360 interviews the artist -- who's no friend to some in the fashion industry -- and LACMA curator Rita Gonzales. Via Unconsumption.

• Amsterdam is moving an offshore platform once used as a pirate radio station to be part of the city's Spaarndammerhout neighborhood.

• In Berlin, artists Delavega, Ephemera + Lascarr collaborate to realize a project imagined in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities: "In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses [...]. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain."

• London police put the kibosh on artist Ben Turnbull's plan to install a vending machine filled with fake handguns outside a school. Via FAD.

• Video of David Byrne's just-closed Playing the Building, an "audio installation [that]... turns the building into sort of a musical instrument."

• Pitchfork looks at Yo La Tengo's new album cover, which features a Dario Robleto sculpture. Here's what it's made from: "Cassette: carved bone & bone dust from every bone in the body, trinitite (glass produced during the first atomic test explosion at Trinity test site circa 1945, when heat from the blast melted surrounding sand), metal screws, rust, letraset; audio tape: an original composition of military drum marches, weapon fire, and soldiers' voices from battlefields of various wars made from Electronic Voice Phenomena recordings (voices and sounds of the dead or past, detected through magnetic audio tape)."

• The latest in artworld celebrity gossip: Björk and Barney split?

• Buddha Pears!! Via WBE.