Eyeteeth: Incisive ideas

Found art: Striped tree

2012-01-09T08:28:00.000-06:00

Memories of Marfa: "I smell like a campfire"

2012-01-02T15:03:00.000-06:00

File under: Found art (of sorts).

I found this note in Craig Phillips' studio last week. Craig is a "media concierge and analogue bon vivant" and, most importantly, host of MAKESH!T, a weekly art-making get-together in St. Paul. He tells me he kept a journal last time he visited Marfa (home base of the late, great Donald Judd), and eventually jotted some of his musings on hotel stationery. While it'd be great to see these compiled somewhere, it's also nice to find his notes-to-self amid the sedimentery layers of his well-used and rather magical studio.

3 from '11: Ai Weiwei, Nadia Plesner, John Yang

2012-01-01T16:33:00.000-06:00

With 2011 gone, I'll spare you the self-serving top-10 list. But in the spirit of self-reflection, I have been looking back at the year at Eyeteeth. What I noticed: the most-read stories weren't really the best ones. And the best ones weren't really... ones.

So, if you'll indulge me in a quick wrap-up of 2011, here's the three topics I feel best about from the past 12 months.

Ai Weiwei: You'll recall that the Chinese artist's detention and captivity for 81 days in early spring took up a lot of space here. The vig ils, open letters, and street-art his detention sparked. The responses from art-world figures to it (my favorite: Dia director Philippe Vergne's ballsy reaction, which he later expanded on for ArtInfo.com). The Change.org petition that was targeted by Chinese hackers (a fact I was the first to confirm). The way Ai's arrest and imprisonment without charge drew attention to other artists and dissidents who've been detained or disappeared in China. Anyone who's read this blog for awhile should be able to see why it captured me so: Free expression and the ability of artists to bear witness to social problems and imagine different worlds are recurring themes here.

Nadia Plesner: Ultra-profitable and ultra-sensitive, Louis Vuitton tried to silence Danish artist Plesner this year, for artistic appropriation that was clearly fair use. Her gigantic painting Darfurnica included a likeness of an LV Audra bag slung on the arm of a Darfuri boy--Plesner's rather overt way of chastising the developed world for being focused on celebrity and consumerism at the expense of people dying in the region of Sudan. Although Plesner's motive wasn't profit, Vuitton wanted to collect 5,000 euros for each day the image remained on her website. At the Hague, however, the company's copyright infringment case was tossed out, the court finding that "the importance of Plesner (freedom of expression through her work) outweighs the importance of Vuitton (protection of property)." "Today is a great day for art," Plesner told Eyeteeth following the ruling. "Now we have won back our freedom to make reference to the modern society we live in."

John Yang: Biking around Minneapolis in July, I spotted a graffiti stencil that looked familiar. I'd seen the image of a sleepwalking boy two places: spraypainted on the wall of an art squat in Berlin in 2005 and on the sleeve of a Sigur Ros album. Digging into the image, I unearthed a curious story. The stencil is based on a photo by the late John Yang, who shot it in France during a tour of duty that included time playing with the 7th Army Symphony, as I discovered after contacting Yang's archives and connecting with his daughter, Naomi, a designer and founding member of the band Galaxie 500. She told me that the band Sigur Ros used a stencil version of the image, Blindman's Bluff, on its album ( ) -- but her dad never got officially credited or compensated. I love this story not because I want to stick it to Sigur Ros -- although it seems like they could stand some of that -- but because it suggests there are similarly deep stories around many of the images we find around us every day. I'm glad I spotted this rabbit hole on the side of a boxcar passing through Minneapolis and dove right in.

Happy 2012, all.

After Plesner, Vuitton sues Warner Bros.

2011-12-31T16:41:00.001-06:00

Luxury bagmaker Louis Vuitton is at it again. After unsuccessfully suing Danish artist Nadia Plesner for copyright infringement for depicting an Audra bag in her large-scale painting Darfurnica, the company is suing Warner Brothers for trademark infringement for a joke in the movie The Hangover II about a knock-off Vuitton bag. The Wall Street Journal describes the scene:

...the drug-addled doofus played by Zach Galifianakis fancies himself fancy because he is carrying what appears to be one of the company's bags. "Careful," he cautions in the movie, "that is a Louis Vuitton." The line is said to have become something of a pop-culture catchphrase, which has Louis Vuitton bent out of shape—specially since, according to its court filing claiming trademark infringement, the bag in question is a fake. The company wants the knock-off and the catchphrase excised from all copies of the film, and some compensation culled from the movie's profits for good measure.

TMZ has a clip of the offending 6-second scene.

Vuitton, which posted profits of $28.26 billion in 2010, doesn't have much of a chance in court, WSJ's Eric Felten writes, citing a dismissed suit by Wham-O over a scene in the film Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star that showed a dangerously misused Slip'n'Slide. He continues:

If "Careful, that is a Louis Vuitton" has really become a catchphrase, the filmmakers ought to trademark it. Then they can sue Louis Vuitton for using that trademark in its litigation against the "Hangover" crowd.

The film has every right, as I see it, to satirize the company's products, even if the gag is used in a movie with an aim of making a profit. That wasn't the case with Plesner: Her painting, a riff on Picasso's Guernica, was created for (nonprofit) artistic and activist reasons. The cause: Raising awareness of the plight of people, especially children, dying in Darfur -- and the apparent indifference of many, including ultra-wealth celebrities, to their suffering. Louis Vuitton sought to collect 5,000 euros for each day the painting stayed on Plesner's website.

Bits: 12.27.11

2011-12-27T15:02:00.000-06:00

Stress (Monumental), Yoan Capote

• Via @dansinker, a 1995 news report on how the CIA "used American modern art--including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko--as a weapon in the Cold War."

• Regine Debatty reviews Art & Activism in the Age of Globalization: Reflect No. 9 (NAi Publishers).

• "Street journalism": Three USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellows, including design writer Alissa Walker, are exploring “a new context for covering arts and culture”—hyperlocal, personal, and accessed by bike, foot or public transit.

• Photographer Larissa Sansour on being removed from the Lacoste Prize shortlist, allegedly for work the luxury goods company deemed too “pro-Palestinian”: “This kind of situation is exactly what I fear. Money ranking over artistic freedom.” Lacoste ended up yanking sponsorship, effectively cancelling the 25,000 euro prize, which was administered by the Elysee Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland.

• Ever since reading about the arts boom in rural Minnesota, I can't stop looking at the evocative relief works of LeSueur, Minnesota-based artist Gregory Euclide. (You might recognize his work from the cover of the new Bon Iver album.)

• Speaking of art being made outside major metropolitan areas, here's a piece on how Eau Claire, Wisconsin, tops all global cities for the number of pop-music hits per capita (according to Pitchfork's top 100 tracks of 2011): Thanks to Bon Iver's base there, the city has 1.2 hits per 100,000 people. Copenhagen, at number two, is at .517 per 100,000.

• From MOMA, an interactive guide to prints: woodcut, etching, lithography and screenprinting.

• Rest in peace, Helen Frankenthaler.

• The Tent Centipede: A modular tent system by Japan's Logos design.

See Something, Say Something: Abu Ghraib edition

2011-12-22T11:27:00.003-06:00

Subway Art Blog:

I caught this piece at Fountain Miami referencing the MTA’s infamous fear campaign.

With Bradley Manning's pre-trial hearing continuing for a seventh day, it's a good time to revisit such campaigns. The government wants us to alert them to suspicious goings-on, unless, of course, it's within their ranks.

Trailer: "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry"

2011-12-22T11:22:00.001-06:00

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry TEASER from Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry on Vimeo.

Ghost Birds: "Oil on Canvas" prints made using birds killed in NZ oil spill

2011-12-19T14:15:00.000-06:00

Osocio points out the New Zealand Oil on Canvas exhibition/campaign:

The oil prints featured in this exhibition were made with birds killed by the Rena oil spill. They are just two of an estimated 20,000 birds killed after the shipwrecked Rena spilled 350 tonnes of oil into the Bay of Plenty. These works were created in a collaboration between Greenpeace and Publicis Mojo.

Bits: 12.19.11

2011-12-19T13:54:00.000-06:00

"No Man's Land" (2004) from Zander Olsen's Tree, Line

• "Pick your targets well," writes Jonathan Jones in The Guardian of activists' efforts to get the Tate to drop BP's sponsorship. "Museums are beacons of culture. They are not the running dogs of capitalism – and if they can get BP to hand over its filthy lucre for the cause of art, well, it is going to good use."

• BP, meanwhile, has committed £10M (around $15.5 million) to four British arts organizations, the Tate, the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Royal Opera House.

• Good luck finding political art at Art Basel, writes Art Threat, although it's there if you know where to look.

• Nice: Murals made by pressure washing a moss wall with water.

• Urban intervention du jour: Four Czech artists turn a billboard into a merry-go-round swing.

• The art world is bloated and gross, the art overpriced and shallow, yet it's not entirely devoid of substance, Roberta Smith contends.

• From the work files, here's me discussing the new Walker website with METRO magazine.

• Occupy: A gallery of poster art, and n+1's Occupy Gazette, featuring writings by filmmaker Astra Taylor and others.

Video: Inflatable Kim Jong-Il

2011-12-19T11:43:00.000-06:00

The death of Kim Jong-il immediately brought to mind this piece installed at the Franconia Sculpture Park north of Minneapolis: Korean-born, New York-based artist Chang-Jin Lee's Dear Leader, an inflatable "Supreme Leader" accompanied by North Korean propaganda songs extolling Kim's god-like virtues. The artist writes:

Many in Western society see Kim Jung Il as an inexplicable anomaly, but from the traditional and isolated point of view of rural North Koreans the values of Confucianism directly support a kind of caste system and rigid traditional hierarchy with the King as demigod figure at the top - the father and the protector of the Nation.“Dear Leader” is intended to pique interest and to provoke curiosity and exploration of this complex and multidimensional phenomenon, and at the same time to isolate it and to put into physical form, elements of its social, political, and religious origin.

Minneapolis Street-Art: Purth

2011-12-15T13:25:00.000-06:00

I do not know who Purth, a street artist in Minneapolis, is, but maybe Brooklyn Street Art does.

JoAnn Verburg launches iPad app

2011-12-12T14:44:00.001-06:00

Over at the Walker's Visual Arts blog, I interviewed photographer JoAnn Verburg, subject of a MoMA solo show in 2007, about her new (free) iPad app, AS IT IS AGAIN, which is likely the first book conceived and created by an artist to be experienced on an iPad. Big ups to Minneapolis' Location Books for a great project.

Pepperspray cop graffiti

2011-12-02T16:19:00.001-06:00

Spotted in the Bowery, New York, by Justseeds.

It's here: The new Walker Art Center website

2011-12-02T15:15:00.003-06:00

This is what I've been working on since mid-September, when the Walker Art Center hired me back, after four years away, to be web editor for its new, totally revamped website. The format and functionality are more like a new site than an art museum home page. And that's the biggest philosophical change it represents: As a contemporary art museum, the Walker is engaged each day with the collection, curation and presentation of work largely by living artists, not to mention the contextualization of such work by a team of educators and curators. So the new site acknowledges such work and creates a place to host some of this thinking. As web editor, I'm overseeing the site, which means both generating content myself and corralling writing and videos from others at the art center. In her welcome to the site, the Walker's Olga Viso calls the site an "idea hub," which I like: all kinds of thinking in all kinds of formats (videos, blog posts, news articles, tweets, and scholarly essays) will come together here.

I'm excited by the early reception: Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes called it a "game-changer, the website that every art museum will have to consider from this point forward," while the anonymous museum tweeter @museumnerd picked up that kind of language, dubbing it "a forward-thinking, best-practices #gamechanger." I hope, and believe, they're right. I may write more about the site here, time permitting, but for now, please take a look and let me know what you think.

World AIDS Day: Jim Hodges on 9/11, HIV and politics

2011-12-01T10:20:00.007-06:00

Jim Hodges Photo: Gene Pittman, Walker Art Center

It's World AIDS Day, and there's room for cautious optimism on the AIDS front: HIV infection rates are down 21 percent worldwide since a high 14 years ago. But there's more to be done, and that's one of the messages of artist Jim Hodges' film Untitled, which is screening today at at some 60 U.S. art and community organizations, including my workplace, the Walker Art Center.

His film is a 60-minute mashup of cultural references from the culture wars of the 1980s, when his late friend, artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, was working, and from around history. But while Hodges and collaborators Carlos Marques da Cruz and video Encke King include ample mention of the struggle for justice by HIV/AIDS activists -- there's some great footage of ACT UP actions -- he also jumps around in history, from 9/11 to the death camps of World War II, Gitmo to the Rodney King beatings. The structure gives a nod to Gonzalez-Torres' "dateline" pieces, which present historical events out of sequence, while also placing the activism around AIDS within the context of other social justice fights around racial inequality, poverty and war.

Hodges says the film isn't really done, nor will it likely ever be. It's a "fragment of a continuum," he told me in an interview at the Walker late last month. That is, it can be re-edited and added to as new events -- Occupy Wall Street? The Arab Spring? -- merit.

In a memorable part of our conversation, Hodges recalls his experiences following the 9/11 attacks in his home city of New York:

I would never want this to happen to anyone else. This is so horrible. This should never happen to anyone, to have this kind of horror imposed on you from you-don’t-know-what.

I felt: Wow, I know what this feels like. This feels like what it felt like in 1988, when Scott was diagnosed with HIV. This is what it felt like when he died in 1993 of AIDS. It was like, “Oh my god, that’s the same feeling.” I thought: “Okay, now the circle just expanded. It’s not just me and my friends and a small percentage of the population who are suffering from this phenomenon. Actually, all of us have been brought into this reality of horror.”

So now, we’re all vibrating from that same place. We’re all on the same ground. So now is the time to actually have a dialogue: What’s going on in this world? How could this happen to us? Why would we never want to do this to someone else?

What’s the politicians’ answer? This is a time to, boom-boom-boom, beat those drums and, boom-boom-boom, make some money and blow somebody up and expand ourselves and take advantage of someone in this weakness.

Read more from the interview, which will be published in its entirety on the redesigned Walker home page, which launches later today.

Video: Karl Marx and Adam Smith at #OccupyWallSt

2011-11-09T09:14:00.007-06:00

As mentioned last week, here's the new scene in artist Pedro Reyes' ongoing video series Baby Marx, in which puppet versions of Karl Marx and Adam Smith take their discussion on capitalism and socialism to Occupy Wall Street.

Also, check out the two preceding episodes, recently posted by Reyes online, and the first two, produced late this summer.

#OWS subway art

2011-11-08T07:26:00.004-06:00

The Subway Art Blog catalogs a few pieces of Occupy Wall Street art, including this culturejammed Chase subway poster, which now reads "Cheat Freedoom" and "OWS."

Centerpoints: Daily art-link roundup at the Walker

2011-11-02T13:25:00.002-05:00

Before there was Bits here at Eyeteeth, I was doing Centerpoints, a daily(ish) roundup of arts links at the Walker Art Center. Now that I'm working there again, I've picked up where I left off. Check it out, willya?

Marx & Smith go to Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-01T15:48:00.001-05:00

Mexican artist Pedro Reyes, who's been shooting a video series called Baby Marx at the Walker Art Center, recently removed the program's key characters -- puppet versions of Karl Marx and Adam Smith -- from the exhibition for a trip to Occupy Wall Street. Curator Bartholomew Ryan writes that Reyes shot new segments for his ongoing series at the Financial District protests, with Marx interviewing protesters and Smith setting up the First Occupied Bank. The trip is a perfect fit for the project, which approaches the conflicts between Marxist and capitalist theories with alternating seriousness and humor. (Full disclosure: I work at the Walker with Bart.)

Earlier: Marx in Minneapolis: Soap Factory, Walker host the iconic beard

One more time: The Sponsored Candidate

2011-10-31T07:37:00.003-05:00

Nice to see this idea surfacing again. Thomas Friedman, who gives a hat tip to "the blogosphere," on banking and the finance sector's influence on politics:

U.S. congressmen should have to dress like Nascar drivers and wear the logos of all the banks, investment banks, insurance companies and real estate firms that they’re taking money from.

Serfican Ozcan in 2010:

And 2006:

Shepard Fairey offers free Occupy downloads

2011-10-30T14:36:00.004-05:00

As Hyperallergic runs down Occupy Wall Street–related art -- including Rachel Schragis' Mark Lombardi-esque diagram, The Declaration of the Occupation of NYC -- Shepard Fairey has made several downloadable designs available on his site. A sampling:

Walker Art Center gets a black-metal logo

2011-10-28T15:20:00.003-05:00

When I interviewed Christophe Szpajdel, "the Paul Rand of Metal," last week for an upcoming video as part of the Walker Art Center exhibition Graphic Design: Now In Production, I asked the UK-based artist if he could create a black-metal logo for the museum. He returned today, and after showing off some 50 new logos he created in the past week -- for bands like Jucifer, Human Remains and Powerlord -- unveiled his Walker black metal logo.

Bits: 10.19.11

2011-10-19T06:28:00.003-05:00

• A student at Cambridge in 1979, artist John Devlin was forced to move home to Canada after a year due to mental illness, and ever since he's been obsessed with the university's architecture -- the beauty and mathematics of it; the new book NOVA CANTABRIGIENSIS features Devlin's renderings of reimagined and reconfigured Cambridge buildings as they appear on his imagined utopian island of the same name in Nova Scotia's Minas Basin.

• In his book Pig 05049, Christien Meindertsma tracked all the products made from a single pig -- the title is its tracking number, of sorts -- which ranged from ammunition and photo paper to heart valves and chewing gum. The project is part of the Walker exhibition Graphic Design: Now in Production, which opens Saturday.

• In a similar vein, photographer Dacia Pierson explores the meat industry, noting that a half million chickens are killed for food each hour in the U.S. "Within the American food system, this process is largely hidden by the USDA and willfully ignored by consumers," she writes. "The project aims to create more transparency in this system."

• The Guggenheim diversifies... into house paint.

• What I've been writing at my day job: "The Hippocratic Oath of a Photographer," "Aesthetic Apparatus’ ‘Monotonous’ Poster Installation and ‘Waterfall’" at the Walker, " and "The Art of Letterhead," among others.

• Bookmarkable: The ACLU on the rights of photographers.

• Walker director Olga Viso (full disclosure: my boss) on what the Istanbul Biennial is lacking: "an indefatigable spirit of generosity and faith in the potential of art to not only transcribe the exigencies of the present moment but transcend them too."

• Urban farming... on w heels.

• Your moment of hobo skull nickels.

Bike-lane stencil: "You look good."

2011-10-08T19:42:00.003-05:00

Spotted in Northeast Minneapolis.

NY intervention: "What is essential..."

2011-10-07T13:28:00.002-05:00

Via Social Design Notes.

Superflex's Power Toilets

2011-09-26T13:50:00.001-05:00

Danish collective Superflex looks at seats of power in a new series that replicates key restrooms. In The Netherlands, it’s a replica of the toilets used by members of the UN Security Council in UN headquarters in New York, “one of the most secure buildings in the world.” And in a Greek restaurant on the Lower East Side, the public restrooms are now identical to those used by execs at J.P. Morgan Chase’s HQ.

Anish Kapoor on Ai Weiwei and the art world's need for a "singular voice" on freedom of expression

2011-09-26T11:09:00.002-05:00

In discussing his support for Ai Weiwei earlier this year -- he dedicated his sculpture Leviathan to the then-imprisoned Chinese artist and withdrew from a show in Beijing -- Anish Kapoor hits on a point I've been making for years: That part of the power art has in the realm of politics and social justice comes from its ambiguity. That is, because art is difficult to define, it's harder to dismiss as mere protest.

Says Kapoor:

An art work can be nebulous in relation to the politics of its situation. It can indicate a discomfort without actually articulating it and therefore it’s much harder to pin down. It’s much harder to say: ‘This is subversive.’ It’s hard to define what subversive is –– especially in contemporary language and contemporary visual culture. Ai Weiwei, in that sense, is somewhat more articulated towards a series of events — noting down the number of people killed by corruption and maladministration, or collecting and making monuments with marbled doors of all the houses that have been knocked down and land that’s been taken away from the so-called squatters. It’s still nebulous though. If you look at the work it’s just a bunch of marbled doors. It doesn’t obviously say what we infer from it. Though we know what to infer of course.

He also is critical of the art world for its lack of unity on human rights issues:

The art world is extremely fragmented. It is a place that’s also infiltrated by money and other instruments of influence. And it never finds itself in a place where it can shout. I think we need to learn how to do that and find a way to have singular voices. Through the whole period of Soviet repression of artists, which was severe, the art world didn’t say a thing. The avant-garde has held itself away from human rights. It’s been a great struggle for artists of non-European origin. It’s been a great struggle for women artists, quite contrary to the sense that the aesthetic world is an open forum –– it isn’t. It’s extremely doctrinaire and extremely partisan. And I think those battles are still being fought. So it’s not surprising at one level anyway.

I can only explain it by [the fact that] these old instruments of power in the art world are generally male and white, and within a certain aesthetic tradition. All of that has begun to fall apart in the last decade or so. We still haven’t got to the point where, if you like, lone, outsider voices can be properly heard.

On corporate personhood

2011-09-22T11:07:00.002-05:00

Via Edward Winkleman.

Solidarity with Moustache Man

2011-09-20T15:56:00.004-05:00

Moustache Man -- New York resident Joseph Waldo -- has friends. After his arrest in June for scrawling the word "moustache" on subway ads, sympathetic graffiti is cropping up -- spelling out in Sharpie the word "solidarity."

Bits: 09.17.11

2011-09-17T15:34:00.003-05:00

STRICTLY AMERICAN, SCARCITY TERMINAL, Erik Brandt, 2011, part of the MCAD show Supergraphics

• In a rare radio interview today, Ai Weiwei said he's considering dropping out of activism. Urged by friends and family to do so, the 54-year old artist and social critic said, "I have to be careful ... because I may lose my life." Detained for 81 days without charge earlier this year, he noted that of thousands of artists in China, "nobody dared ask one question." He advised young artists to leave the country, noting, "This is crazy." On Aug. 31, China's parliament published its plan to make disappearances like Ai's -- detentions without charge or contact with family or legal representatives -- legal.

• Video: Gerhard Richter painting.

• Mike Leavitt's "Art Army" action figure series has some new members, including Ai Weiwei , Barbara Kruger and a sawed-in-two Damien Hirst. [via]

• Kellogg Co. is threatening legal action against a Mayan archeological group for using a toucan image in its logo; company lawyers say the depiction is too close to Toucan Sam, the Froot Loops cereal mascot. Compare the two.

• Minneapolis exhibitions: 2010/11 MCAD–Jerome Fellowship Exhibition: Greg Carrideo, Teri Fullerton, Julia Kouneski, Brett Smith, and Jonathan Bruce Williams, opens Sept. 30, at the MCAD Gallery, and Supergraphics, now on view at MCAD's Gallery 148.

• Your moment of Robert Rauschenberg's chili and John Cage's cookies.

• Twin Cities Zinefest, organized by antiquarian photographer and self-described radical librarian Lacey Prpić Hedtke, is next Saturday, Sept. 24, in Powderhorn Park, Minneapolis.

• This week, Modern Arts Notes' Tyler Green asked me what work from the Walker Art Center collection best fits news of the spike in bullying and LGBT suicides in Minnesota's largest school district. Here's what I came up with.

• Shepard Fairey's art makes a cameo on The Young and the Restless.

Panel tonight: Art, politics, censorship at the Soap Factory

2011-09-17T11:45:00.000-05:00

Hope to see you there:

As part of the Soap Factory's fall exhibition of Three Artists: Guo Gai, Meng Tang & Slinko, we present a moderated discussion on the subject of Art, Politics and Censorship.

Speakers are Professor Edward Farmer and Professor Tom Rose from the University of Minnesota, Eric Lorberer Editor of Raintaxi Review of Books and journalist and blogger Paul Schmelzer from the Eyeteeth blog.

The discussion will be informed and wide-ranging, covering the interlocking issues that Meng Tang, Guo Gai and Slinko address in their work: all artists who have lived and practiced under repressive regimes, and have used their work to negotiate and understand their lives as artists in those societies. The central concept is the intersection of art and politics: the speakers will look at how and why visual art can be censored, for whatever reason, across different cultures and what engagement, if any, should art have in issues that disturb the cultural status quo.

Please join us at 7:00pm for an evening of lively and informed discussion, and be prepared to join the debate.

More on Guo Gai and Natliya Slinko. Pictured: Installation of Guo Gai's works at the Soap Factory.

Marx in Minneapolis: Soap Factory, Walker host the iconic beard

2011-09-08T13:00:00.001-05:00

For Soap Factory director Ben Heywood, what's most surprising about the installation of Crowd Pleaser -- Ukrainian artist Nataliya Slinko's giant steelwool rendering of Karl Marx's beard -- is how few visitors seem to recognize it. The Soap and the Walker Art Center are currently doing their parts to refresh the cultural memory about the famed facial hair and ideas of the German socialist philosopher and Marxism's namesake.

Slinko's piece -- which is part of a larger installation that includes a crude machine that pounds a shoe heel on a podium, Krushchev-style, and a display of work implements like shovels melded with fabricated bricks and bread -- is part of the current exhibition Three Artists: Guo Gai, Meng Teng, Slinko. Slinko's work hearkens back to her life growing up in the waning days of the Soviet Union. Writes Heywood in an email to Eyeteeth, "The whole project is about working through the memories of the material culture of her childhood and teenage years. In that way the emptiness and façadism of a steelwool Marx beard reads quite easily, as does the title; something to please the masses."

At the Walker, Mexican artist Pedro Reyes is shooting the video series Baby Marx in the galleries and the Walker environs. The premise: "The founders of communism and capitalism, Karl Marx and Adam Smith, have been brought to the future by way of a glitch-prone Smart-O-Wave magic microwave oven." The first two scenes (below) have surprisingly funny and incisive moments: Puppet Marx unimpressed by the Marxist notion of Warhol's 16 Jackies being created at The Factory, for instance, and a deadpan quip about Facebook and the lineup of Jackie Kennedy Onassis' mugs.

Circling back to Heywood's note that few in the younger generation that makes up the Soap Factory's core audience know much about Marx, Reyes' project has an instructive mission as well: According to the Walker's description, Baby Marx is playing with the "potential for mass entertainment to operate as a radical educational tool."

Three Artists: Guo Gai, Meng Teng, Slinko is on view at the Soap Factory through Oct. 23. Baby Marx is on view at the Walker through Nov. 27.

Inside the Moveable Type mobile letterpress lab

2011-08-30T16:20:00.002-05:00

Starting out in Oregon, Kyle Durrie's Moveable Type, a box van loaded with letterpress gear that's been making stops around the country, rolled into Minneapolis last night. Parked by the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, the type truck opened its doors to visitors who wished to give the press a pull or talk to Durrie about the project, which she says she's been documenting for an upcoming exhibition. She's designed unique pieces at each stop, and here's what she came up with here.

More shots here.

Moveable Type letterpress van stops in MPLS tonight; afterparty at the Zine Apothecary

2011-08-29T10:00:00.003-05:00

Moveable Type -- a 1982 Chevy van loaded with letterpress equipment -- makes a pit stop in Minneapolis tonight with a workshop and talk at the Minneapolis Center for Book Arts, followed by a potluck after-party in South Minneapolis at the Zine Apothecary, a resource center for zine makers near Powderhorn Park.

Moveable Type founder Kyle Durrie, fresh off a stop in Iowa (which is neither Idaho nor Ohio) brings her mobile letterpress studio to MCBA (1011 Washington Ave S) from 4 to 7 as she gives visitors a chance to try out a press and hear about her itinerant printing practice (a slideshow's part of the deal). Then the festivities move to the Apothecary (3310 15th Ave S.), a zine library created by artist/photographer Lacey Prpić Hedtke, where zine makers and fans can share a dish and their work.

"I'd been admiring the Moveable Type truck from afar and was sad it wasn't coming to Minneapolis," Hedtke explains via email. "I must have sent out an Aquarius brain wave, because MCBA asked if I'd want to do an afterparty at the Zine Apothecary if they could get the Type Truck to do an event at MCBA."

She says that following the MCBA event, the type truck along along with the Fly Away Zine Mobile will head to her place, where zine fans can peruse and check out zines (three-week limit). A sister project of the Zine Apothecary, the Fly Away Zine Mobile will be open as a reading loung, she adds, "complete with a stripy orange cat."

Opened this May, the Zine Apothecary combines the zine libraries from the Belfry Center for Social and Cultural Activities and the Stevens Square Center for the Arts, offering some 2,000 zines on topics ranging from politics and health and wellness to food and photography.

"I'm really excited about our large how-to section, and would like to build the collection so that's one of our main focuses," she notes. "We also have a 'Weird' section, and a 'Little of Everything' section."

With the surge in food-truck culture of late, the project seems to fit into the zeitgeist. But Hedtke points out Minneapolis' unique culture as more of a factor.

"It embodies a lot about what I love about Minneapolis -- it's sort of private, sort of public. It's sort of underground, but enough people know about it that it's not unapproachable. The Zine Apothecary is a little old fashioned in its content, a little new-fangled in its approach, and has something for almost everyone."

Graffiti Wars: Banksy v. Robbo

2011-08-27T11:59:00.015-05:00

Are there rules to graffiti? That question is at the crux of the fascinating new Channel 4 program Graffiti Wars, which chronicles a long-running feud between a legendary London graffiti artist and an artist whose fame and marketability are unsurpassed in the street-art genre. While the movie tells of an alleged physical altercation between Banksy and King Robbo years ago as one possible motive for the feud, the central question of Graffiti Wars is whether Banksy "broke the rules" of graffiti by altering the last remaining work by 1980s writer Robbo.
Robbo apparently thought so, and engaged in a call-and-response with Banksy:

He responded to Banksy's image of a worker painting over Robbo's piece on a canal wall in north-central London by replacing his old mural with the words KING ROBBO.

To that, Banksy or his fans replied, adding a FUC before KING.

Banksy's infamous "I don't believe in global warming" piece was likewise modified by Robbo, who reportedly canoed to the site in a confiscated canoe (paddling with his hands) to alter the message to read: "I don't believe in global war," with the added note, "It's too late for that, Sonny." He signed it Team Robbo.

The back-and-forth continued from late 2009 and into 2010, with some of Banksy's more famous works getting Robbo retouches. Eventually, as the film tells, things got uglier, with Banksy's fans threatening Robbo (someone added a "Die Robbo" tag to one piece) and Robbo altering one of Banky's trademark rat pieces to give homage to Blek le Rat, the Parisian graffiti artist who pioneered both street stenciling and rat imagery in the '80s: Banksy Le Rat.

While Banksy once acknowledged his debt to Blek, the French artist doesn't seem to share the sentiment. "I'm not sure about his integrity," says Blek in Graffiti Wars about the appropriation of his style and imagery. Blek, whose website says he's the "original stencil pioneer," also doesn't get the same kind of props in the art world. The Deitch-curated Art in the Streets exhibition at LA MOCA dissed Blek altogether, as Carolina Miranda wrote in her ARTnews review of the show: "British prankster Banksy is given a sprawling space for an installation that includes a steamroller, stencils, and a taxidermied dog apparently relieving itself, while Blek Le Rat, a pioneer in the stencil form whose tongue-in-cheek images predate Banksy's work by at least a decade, is left out entirely."

The program -- which includes interviews with Ben Eine, Robbo, Blek le Rat and others -- concludes with Robbo starting to see some Banksy-style success of his own. After criticizing Banksy's lucrative career and his lack of "street cred" Robbo winds up with a solo show at a gallery that helped launched Banksy's commercial career, and gets a commission to do a giant mural to promote a film at the Berlin Film Festival. Unlike Banksy, who didn't make an appearance at the Oscars when Exit Through the Gift Shop was nominated, Robbo attended the film's premiere, wearing a suit and a mask to hide his identity, to vamp for the cameras on the red carpet.

But that seems to have been the end of his rise, at least for now: A few days after filming for Graffiti War finished in April, Robbo was found unconscious with serious head injuries near his home and put into an induced coma. Robbo has been released from the intensive care unit, the London Standard wrote last week, "but his condition is not thought to be improving." As Team Robbo plans a fundraiser Sept. 4 to raise funds for Robbo and his 17-month old daughter, Banksy is being urged to donate a work for auction. He reportedly hasn't yet responded to that request.

Bits: 08.25.11

2011-08-25T14:41:00.000-05:00

Big Yellow Rabbit, Florentijn Hofman, Oreboro, Sweden, via Juxtapoz

• Damien Hirst's sculpture Charity, a 22-foot girl with a leg brace holding a collection box, has been vandalized in Bristol, UK. The word "HOAX" has been spraypainted on her dress. Via @GroundswellBlog. (Which reminds me: I, too, am on Twitter. Are you?)

• Pete Brook, who runs the excellent site Prison Photography, is fundraising on Kickstarter to fund a road trip to do some 40 audio interviews cross-country with photographers addressing prisons and prison reform. Help fund this worthwhile project.

• Little-known fact about Clara Kim, former REDCAT director and new senior visual arts curator at the Walker: She learned to drive stick shift from a member of Superflex. That, as well as news that she'll be curating a show of video projections by Minouk Lim next May, in Minnesota Monthly's interview.

• The Rochester (Minn.) Art Center has reportedly been getting some unfriendly press over its unsuccessful request from the city for $23,000 in funds to help cover a shortfall in operational costs. Go to the local paper to vote on whether you think the center should receive taxpayer funding.

• The new issue of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, on "Grassroots Modernism," is ready for advance orders.

• Your moment of dogheadwall.

Twin Cities art weekend: Hopsack, Sing Along, Nightmare, S.S. Soap Boat

2011-08-25T10:45:00.001-05:00

Clockwise from top let: Guo Gai, Hopsack Painting Co., Nightmare, Giant Sing Along

• The Soap Factory opens the exhibition Three Artists: Guo Gai, Meng Tang, Slinko Saturday night. Beijing-based Guo Gai's politically charged large-scale photos will be on view, and his chorale work "Lament" will be performed live by a local choir. Gai was detained by Chinese authorities for a month this April for his involvement with the pro-democracy movement; he is prohibited from traveling outside China and won't be attending the opening. Minneapolis-based Chinese artist Meng Tang will present her projection/installation piece Impression: Babel, and Ukrainian-born, New York-based sculptor Slinko will present the work-in-progress Make-Believe, which explores "the poetic possibilities of a physical object, its cultural role, the artistic labor invested in its materiality and its place in the contemporary circulation of immaterial commodities."

Mark your calendar: I'm part of a panel discussion on "the interlocking issues of art, politics and censorship" on Sept. 17 with sculptor and exhibition co-curator Tom Rose, University of Minnesota China historian Edward Farmer and Rain Taxi editor Eric Lorberer.

• The Future Presence Gallery, an occasional gallery at 1126 2nd St. NE, Minneapolis, presents Future Presence 3, a group show featuring works by Bryant Locher, Nathaniel, Austin Swearengin, Justin James Sehorn, Joshua Wilichowski, Hannah Hall, Russ Olson, Danielle Voight, Gregory J. Rose, Ben Lansky and Andy Shannon. Aug. 26–28.

• Hopsack Painting Co. is redoing the Dressing Room. Named after Valspar Paint's most popular color, Hopsack is the brainchild of Broc Blegen, whose inflatable George W. Bush monument I featured awhile back. His team of artists will unveil their creative use of the bland color at the Dressing Room, the residence/gallery of former Art of This Gallery head David Petersen and Crystal Quinn. Recepti0n Saturday night.

• Saturday afternoon sculptor Aaron Dysart embarks on the maiden voyage of the S.S. Soap Boat, a seaworthy vessel made from 550 pounds of soap -- a metaphorical probing into the question of what it means to clean up the Mississippi. Launch starts at 1 pm at Boom Island in Minneapolis.

• And going on now at the Minnesota State Fair, the Giant Sing Along. Step up to one of 32 microphones to sing along with karaoke favorites presented on a giant LED screen. Shy singers, fret not: the mics are auto-tuned to disguise voices. A project by Montreal-based artists Mouna Andraos and Melissa Mongiat, the project is put on by Northern Lights.

• Also from Northern Lights, Andréa Stanislav's Nightmare, a public video work that creates the illusion of a white horse galloping on the Mississippi, at night, and in slow motion:

Nightmare makes its much-anticipated debut launch from Harriet Island in St. Paul, MN, on Friday, August 26, 2011, at 9:00 pm.

Nightmare will initially travel downriver past the Wabasha Bridge toward Lowertown Saint Paul after the launch, visible only from the Harriet Island side of the river till it turns around. Once Nightmare turns around, it will head upriver toward the High Bridge and Minneapolis, visible only from the downtown Saint Paul side of the Mississippi. It is anticipated Nightmare will be visible from downtown Saint Paul with views of the Mississippi between approximately 9:30 and 10 pm, passing by Upper Landing Park (across Shepard Rd from the Science Museum at Chestnut St.) at approximately 10 pm.

Photographer Wing Young Huie on the stabbing death outside his Minneapolis studio

2011-08-24T15:32:00.007-05:00

Known for his photographs of Minneapolis' urban communities, Wing Young Huie has long lived and worked in some of the city's most diverse and bustling neighborhoods. His new one in south Minneapolis was recently the site of a stabbing: 22-year old Justin Jackson was killed Friday at an intersection near Wing's studio. Police won't be pressing charges as the stabbing was ruled self-defense and likely gang-related. On Facebook today, Wing reflects on the situation and welcomes visitors to the neighborhood for today's vigil to stop by his studio. While "art and engagement" is a buzzword in the institutional artworld these days -- and an admirable one at that -- I respect the many artists like Wing who embody it, by opening their studios or using their work to reflect and examine who we are and how we're connected.

His Facebook message and photo (above):

The tragic stabbing death last Friday in front of my Third Place Gallery on 38th & Chicago has been highly charged, provoking a multitude of reactions from paralyzing fear to connective support. It shocks and exposes our bubbled realities.
I've been interacting with many of the mourners keeping a vigil, inviting them into my gallery as the blood stained sidewalk became a growing shrine. To consider all the things that had to happen, the confluence of personal and historical dynamics, in this neighborhood, in this country, to bring this horrible incident to my front door, ostensibly over a pair of shoes, is dizzying and incomprehensible.
How will this corner and beyond respond to this and its rippling currents? The wake is today, Wednesday August 24, 2011. Sometime after 3 pm a large contingent will converge here to pay their respects. A very, very large police force will be here also.
I will be here too. All are welcome to come to The Third Place today and show their support.
Peace.
Wing Young Huie

Bits: 08.24.11

2011-08-24T14:30:00.003-05:00

Jerome Liebling, Butterfly Boy, New York, 1949

• Of Lei Yixin's monument to Martin Luther King, Jr., just unveiled in Washington, Hyperallegic writes: "It is the first monument to a non-US president on the National Mall and the first dedicated to a black American, except, well, it is memorialized in white … to fit in, we assume."

• Meanwhile, in Indianapolis, members of the African-American community are protesting a planned sculpture of a freed slave by Fred Wilson, and in Charlottesville, a resident wants a 1919 sculpture of Sacajawea moved inside because it "obviously denigrates both women and Native Americans."

• RIP Jerome Liebling, photographer, filmmaker and founder of the University of Minnesota's film and photography program. Here's Mike Hazard's short film on the photographer.

• Today Tyler Green's Tumblr blog 3rd of May -- which groups headlines with relevant works of art -- links Otto Dix's Shock Troops Advance Under Gas (1924) from his amazing series The War with news about fears of the safety of Syria's chemical weapons stockpile.

• Warhol contemporary Ultra Violet proposes a Robert Indiana-esque 9/11 memorial.

• Must-read from Pete Brook: How Google's mapping tools have spawned a new breed of art projects, for Wired.

• $278.4 billion: How much "key cultural industries" contributed to the U.S. economy in 2009, according to the NEA.

• Get your geek on: R2D2 sweater.

Cinephile graffiti: "Ichi the Killer" stencil

2011-08-23T08:53:00.003-05:00

Filmmaker Takashi Miike's character Ichi, from the 2001 film Ichi the Killer, shows up in a stencil by Inome near the Minneapolis riverfront. The film, shown at the Walker as part of a 2003 retrospective, is based on the Hideo Yamamoto manga series of the same name.

Swoon brings Haiti to Minneapolis

2011-08-18T18:00:00.002-05:00

The artist Swoon's ties to Minneapolis run fairly deep: She helped launch the Miss Rockaway Armada from the Mississippi shores here (and did some wheatpaste pieces around town) in 2006; her work was part of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts' 2010 exhibition Until Now; and she did a residency last year with the Kulture Klub Collaborative, an art program with youth experiencing homelessness. Near Minneapolis' Cedar-Riverside light rail station, I recently spotted one of her works on a wall, nearly covered by vines. But it's about another locale to which she has deep ties: Haiti.

The work features an image Swoon also used on prints created to raise funds for the Konbit Shelter, "a sustainable building project with the objective of sharing knowledge and resources through the creation of homes and community spaces in post earthquake Haiti." (See the construction of the shelters on the project's blog.) The project's first community center was inaugurated this January.

A version of the piece in Minneapolis appeared in a London show, and on London streets, and here it has an equally global context. Situated in the heart of Minnesota's Somali community, it's now got company across the tracks in Broken Crow's new mural of running cheetahs. Broken Crow's travels took the duo -- Mike Fitzsimmons and John Grider -- to Gambia last year just as Swoon was returning to Haiti. Her journeys, likewise, have hit the African continent: Last spring, she taught artmaking in Zambia.

Broken Crow goes for speed in new Minneapolis cheetah mural

2011-08-18T17:22:00.008-05:00

The ever-prolific Broken Crow (Mike Fitzsimmons and John Grider) recently finished another mural: A gigantic piece showing running cheetahs that's viewable from the light rail train as it passes north through Cedar-Riverside en route to downtown (update: John tells me they're not cheetahs, but servals). The piece stands in contrast to the towering minimalist architecture of Ralph Rapson, whose Riverside Plaza is both famous (it was featured as Mary Tyler Moore's apartment building on later seasons of the show) and infamous (some dubbed it the "Ghetto in the Sky" for problems there in the '80s and '90s). But the piece's site specificity refers mainly to the bike path and train tracks right beside it.

The piece -- which follows Broken Crow's collaboration with OverUnder in Northeast Minneapolis and a more grisly savannah scene in South Minneapolis this summer -- seems tamer in comparison to other recent pieces. But the theme is all movement: Situated next to the passenger train and bike routes, the artists hoped the work would give viewers whizzing past the sensation of bounding felines. (Here's an animated gif they created to convey the idea.)

But a funny juxtaposition of mural and advertising (above) suggests one possibility of what they might be bounding after.

See more photos at my Flickr page.

Video: Etsuko Ichikawa's "glass pyrographs"

2011-08-18T14:04:00.003-05:00

Jen Graves tips us off to this lyrical video of Etsuko Ichikawa creating her enigmatic works on paper -- using molten glass pressed briefly onto paper. In her artist's statement, Ichikawa says her "glass pyrographs" are "made by drawing hot molten glass, which is one way to capture and eternalize the immediacy of a moment, while my hanging and floating installations are about ever-changing states of mind."

Bits: 07.25.11

2011-07-25T17:15:00.003-05:00

Ceramic milk crate, Matthias Merkel Hess, via C-Monster

• Combat photographer Adam Ferguson in the audio slideshow, "War is boring": "One can feel like a predator working as a conflict photographer, looking for those extreme moments, the ugly ones that ram the absurdity of this war home... War strips the child out of being human, because war talks in absolutes. I guess many grunts can't find that child inside again..." Via Yumi Goto.

• Also via Yumi, the late photojournalist Tim Hetherington's last photos.

• Long silent on his blog and Twitter, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is now on Google+.

• Over the weekend, "Bono and Somali–born singer and poet K’naan met in Minneapolis with several Somali Minnesotans to discuss and draw attention to the growing famine in Somalia, where a food crisis has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people and is putting nearly 12 million more lives at risk. There has been very little coverage of the crisis in the US media to date, despite the gravity of the situation."

• Meet Dyslexie, a typeface designed to help people with dyslexia read. Via Leif Utne on paper.li.

• Jen Graves on bear poop, volunteerism and Mark Dion's living Seattle installation, Neukom Vivarium. Via MAN.

Bits: 07.21.11

2011-07-21T14:23:00.003-05:00

Irina Werning, La Negra 1980 and 2010, Buenos Aires

• Irina Werning's been asking people to reenact childhood photos, to awesome effect. Via Andy Ducett on Facebook.

• Clash Music picks up on yesterday's story of the band Sigur Ros using the photographer John Yang's iconic image of a sleepwalking boy for its 2005 album without permission, noting "that Sigur Ros have been the victim of this sort of thing in the past. Publishing an article on their own blog, the Icelandic group bemoaned ad agencies who use 'sound-a-like' versions of their material without giving any credit to the original composition."

• The Mighty Flynn responds via a Tumblr comment to the story with a link to Jonathan Lethem's Harper's essay, "The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism."

• RIP Lucien Freud.

• Fossil fuel interests in Wyoming are none too thrilled by British environmental artist Chris Drury's forthcoming sculpture, Carbon Sink, which will feature a "flat whirlpool of beetle-killed logs spiraling into a vortex of charred, black wood and studded with large lumps of Wyoming coal." A Wyoming mining official said of the piece, which was commissioned by the University of Wyoming: "They get millions of dollars in royalties from oil, gas and coal to run the university, and then they put up a monument attacking me, demonizing the industry. I understand academic freedom, and we're very supportive of it, but it's still disappointing."

• Culturejamming preacher Rev. Billy took his tour -- and his gown-bedecked Earthalujah gospel choir -- to Tate Modern Monday to exorcise the "evil spirit" of BP, a major financial sponsor, from the gallery.

• Worth reading of the day: "Testing the Limits: Cultural Activism in the Gateway City" at Art21. Via Erik Moe.

• Minneapolis exhibition: Finally, We Are All Young Again: Adam Caillier and Michael Mott and Movie: Scott Nedrelow, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, opens tonight Thursday, July 21.

• Also tonight at the MIA: It's Bike Night!

• Also tonight in Minneapolis: Eat Ramen! Help Japan!

In the age of derivatives, reasserting an original: John Yang's "Blindman's Bluff"

2011-07-20T08:00:00.013-05:00

Yang's work adapted as stencil art on a boxcar in Minneapolis, 2011

Sometimes in the life of images, derivatives end up eclipsing the original, leaving creators of unique works unacknowledged -- and, often, unpaid -- for their creative endeavors, even as spinoffs of their art zoom around the globe. And that's the case with a 1960 photo by the late John Yang called Blindman's Bluff. The first time I saw a version of Yang's photo of a sleepwalking boy was in 2005 when I spotted a stencil rendering of it outside an art squat in Berlin. I quickly learned that it was an "adaption" [sic] of Yang's photo, used to promote the Icelandic band Sigur Ros' album ( ). I forgot about the image until I noticed another stencil version of it on a boxcar in Minneapolis earlier this month. It's showed up in Reykjavík, Melbourne and elsewhere -- likely by artists who know little, if anything, about the original.

Determined to figure out the back story of this arresting image, I contacted the estate of Yang, who passed away in September 2009. The reply I got back from his daughter was both beautiful and disconcerting.
Yang's work adapted as stencil art on a Berlin wall, 2005

Born in Suchow, China in 1933, Yang emigrated first to the UK with his family, then, when he was six, to the United States. A U.S. citizen living in New York, he attended Harvard where he got his philosophy degree, then went on to architecture school at the University of Pennsylvania before being drafted into the military. Stationed in Germany, he played cello in the 7th Army Symphony and performed throughout Europe, according to his daughter, Naomi Yang, herself an artist (graphic design) and musician (Galaxie 500). It was in Strasbourg, France, just across the border from Germany, where he encountered the iconic sleepwalker: "The photo was not posed, my father was taking street scenes at the time and happened upon the boy," Naomi writes in an email.

John Yang later focused his lens closely on details of urban life, including ornamental stonework on the facades of New York brownstones and memorial photographs on headstones at an Orthodox Jewish cemetery in Queens, but at the time he shot Blindman's Bluff, he took a broader view, shooting documentary-style streetscapes. The photo was reproduced in the Time/Life book Photographing Children, which Naomi surmises, is where Sigur Ros found it -- and took it.

Blindman's Bluff, courtesy the John Yang Archives

"[Sigur Ros] did not ask permission and they have never paid for the usage of the photograph, which as a musician and a graphic designer myself, I really, really object to," says Naomi, who is now half of the music duo Damon & Naomi. "Approaching their management for some compensation has just met with indifference." (Interestingly, the one place Sigur Ros gives Yang credit is on Flickr, where the band's composite of Yang's photo and the stencil is copyrighted and marked "all rights reserved.")

Upon seeing the graffiti version of her father's work, Naomi wrote, "Wow, that image really gets around."

After retiring from his architecture practice in 1978, John Yang committed himself to photography full-time. His final project explored the remnant of Indian Ladder Trail, a path threading the ridge known as the Helderberg Escarpement, in John Boyd Thacher State Park, near Albany, New York. Near the end of his life, Yang conducted an interview -- with himself -- that was included in the catalog for the "Indian Ladder" series. His words reference the seemingly unpeopled cliffs of the park, which he photographed mainly from the shadows in a style that has echoes of Ansel Adams, whom he admired. But they could just as easily apply to that 1960 photo -- much more resonant than later works it inspired -- of a French boy, silently and undisturbed in his private world of sleep, walking down a rain-damp street:

Am I correct in noting that there is also an unearthly silence that can be heard in many of your photographs?

Could be. Someone once said that my pictures have a distinctive elegiac tone, that they are pictures taken in a minor key.

For more on John Yang, visit johnyangphoto.com.

Bits: 07.18.11

2011-07-18T17:55:00.001-05:00

• Pete Brook of Prison Photography and Wired's Raw File blog offers a great look at the California Department of Corrections, a culture-jamming group that since 1994 has described itself as "a private correctional facility that protects the public through the secure management, discipline, and rehabilitation of California’s advertising." It's most recent project (above), released as guerrilla bus shelter ads just prior to the July 4 holiday, commemorates the assassination of Osama bin Laden.

• The "Shared Sacrifice" mural at Intermedia Arts has a blog, with posts ranging from developmental sketches and in-process photos of the piece to news stories related to the political themes behind the work.

• Stumbled upon at the Intermedia site, images from photographer Dirk Anschütz's series of portraits of people with cognitive or developmental disabilities, created for Upstream Arts.

• Just like the title says: uglybelgianhouses.tumblr.com.

• Legendary Minneapolis artist Frank Gaard, blogged about here, here and here, has a solo show scheduled at the Walker Art Center. Dates: Jan. 19–May 6, 2012. Here's an (excellent) interview Permanent did for Gaard's (excellent) CO Exhibitions show this spring.

• At OPEN Magazine, the war photographers of India.

Gun-shot Avedon still at home in Minneapolis German restaurant

2011-07-18T15:36:00.006-05:00

A Minneapolis German restaurant is home to a work by famed photographer Richard Avedon, but the tale of the work's current state -- peppered with a few bullet holes -- makes it an even better story (via @artsmia).

Minneapolis Institute of Arts associate curator of photography Christian Peterson blogs about Avedon's 1963 work Generals of the Daughters of the American Revolution. In town for a 1970 MIA show of his work, Avedon frequented the Black Forest Inn a few blocks away and befriended its owners, Erich and Joanne Christ. Before leaving town, he gifted the first print of the photo to his new friend, and it still hangs in the restaurant's bar today. But it now bears two signs of age: Many years later, a customer pulled out a gun and shot it.

Writer Christy DeSmith chronicled the event in a 2004 piece for The Rake:

Sixteen years later, Ellis Nelson, a regular at the bar, was sitting on his favorite stool when he pulled out a revolver and opened fire on the photograph. “That was a wild day,” remembers Erich, who was walking his wife and infant son through the parking lot when the shooting occurred. “People came running out of every hole in the place shouting ‘He’s got a gun! He’s got a gun!’ and I said to myself, ‘Ellis, this time you really did it.’” When police later questioned the shooter, trying to uncover a motive, Nelson was reported to have answered, “That photo always bugged the hell out of me.”

"[S]ince you could smoke in the bar until fairly recently, those holes are now rimmed in a distinctive nicotine brown," writes Peterson.

The Black Forest nicely chronicles its art on its website, but only nods to the photo's history by calling it "infamous." The restaurant's online image of the work, however, shows evidence of the two shots -- a chest wound and an eye shot -- that make two of the Daughters of the American Revolution look more like soldiers in the American Revolution.

"We're All in This Together"

2011-07-15T11:24:00.002-05:00

A recent work by Nick van Woert: Found steel, steel, polyurethane adhesive, plexiglass, hair gel, chlorine. Via Jennilee.

Tonight in Minneapolis: Auction of works by Yoko Ono, Alec Soth, Laurel Nakadate, others, to benefit Leon Shambroom

2011-07-14T11:29:00.005-05:00

Leon Shambroom

Some of the art world's big names are stepping up to help a fellow artist and his parents, Minneapolis-based independent curator Joan Rothfuss and photographer Paul Shambroom. Last July, 25-year old Leon Shambroom, a musician and DJ, was found unconscious from smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning after being trapped in a house fire in South Minneapolis. He's unable to speak or walk, and his medical bills are sure to mount.

Tonight, a benefit art auction will be held at Weinstein Gallery to help defray the costs. Organized by Chicago photographer Brian Ulrich, Alec Soth, Soth's studio manager Carrie Thompson, MCAD and Weinstein, the event will include a silent auction featuring works by more than 50 artists from around the world: Edward Burtysky, David Goldis, Todd Hido, Glenn Ligon, Sharon Lockhart, Richard Misrach, Yoko Ono, Martin Parr, Soth, Ulrich and many others. Channy from the band Roma di Luna will perform.

That's tonight, July 14, 6-9 pm, at Weinstein Gallery, 908 West 46th Street, Minneapolis. I hope to see you there.

Martin Parr, England. New Brighton, from "The Last Resort" (1983-1985)

"Shared Sacrifice": Intermedia Arts mural tackles Minnesota's government shutdown

2011-07-13T17:20:00.008-05:00

Perhaps you've heard: The State of Minnesota's government has shut down. At issue is a budget impasse between the Democratic governor, Mark Dayton, and the GOP legislature: While Dayton favors bridging the budget gap with solutions including tax increases for the 7,700 richest Minnesotans, Republicans are holding firm with their no-new-taxes pledge. As compromise seems to have ground to a halt, people statewide are suffering, including (but certainly not limited to) teachers whose licenses are in limbo, grant-funded nonprofits serving some of the state's most vulnerable people, out-of-work state workers and average folks who are required to pay taxes during the shutdown but won't be getting any refunds, rebates or tax credits -- or many of the services they've paid all year for.

So Intermedia Arts' ever-changing mural wall caught my eye today for its timely political message: "Shared Sacrifice." I don't know anything about who made it -- although I'll ask -- but its carnival typeface is reminiscent of the politically charged boxcar graffiti of Impeach and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Its sentiment -- that all of us should bear the burden of the budget mess and the poor economy, instead of the wealthiest being treated with deference -- hits home for me, and I'd bet, many, many Minnesotans.

The mural's theme, of course, has national significance as the debate rages about raising the United States' debt ceiling. Just this afternoon, the U.S. Senate failed to get enough votes to pass a symbolic resolution calling for "shared sacrifice" from the wealthy in addressing the debt-limit conflict. The text of the non-binding resolution:

SECTION 1. SENSE OF THE SENATE ON SHARED SACRIFICE.

(a) Findings - Congress makes the following findings:

(1) The Wall Street Journal reports that median pay for chief financial officers of S&P 500 companies increased 19 percent to $2,900,000 last year.

(2) Over the past 10 years, the median family income has declined by more than $2,500.

(3) Twenty percent of all income earned in the United States is earned by the top 1 percent of individuals.

(4) Over the past quarter century, four-fifths of the income gains accrued to the top 1 percent of individuals.

(b) Sense of the Senate- It is the sense of the Senate that any agreement to reduce the budget deficit should require that those earning $1,000,000 or more per year make a more meaningful contribution to the deficit reduction effort.

Emphasis mine.

Chairs -- including Ai Weiwei's -- gather at the Walker Art Center

2011-07-12T12:50:00.017-05:00

As I write this, chairs are gathering along Minneapolis' Hennepin Avenue in anticipation of an observation tonight of the 100th day of artist Ai Weiwei's arrest and the continued imprisonment of hundreds of dissidents in China today. Inspired by Ai's work, Fairytale: 1001 Qing Dynasty Wooden Chairs, the Walker Art Center has asked the community to bring chairs, and they have -- 250 or so already. While many more are yet to come -- yours, hopefully -- one has yet to be placed: An office chair from Ai Weiwei's studio has been sent from Beijing and will be present for a moment of silence at 6 pm tonight.

The urgency of Ai's plight has diminished some -- he's been freed, although he remains under a media gag order that, according to the BBC, includes Twitter -- but I commend the Walker for sticking with the event nonetheless, and using it as a way to bear witness to China's continued crackdown on creative expression and political speech among those without Ai's star power.

And for making the event so visible. For those unfamiliar with Hennepin Avenue, it's a major thoroughfare near downtown Minneapolis, and while it often provides an unpleasantly cacophonous front yard for the Walker, the eight or 10 lanes of roadway provide a perfect stage for such a highly visible event. As I dropped off our chairs, quizzical passersby peered from car windows and cyclists rolled up with cameras to shoot the quirky scene: an artist's sculptural chair, children's toy furniture, rummage sale chairs, a plywood chair by ro/lu, a "gold-plated" lawnchair, among them.

Most fitting, though, is the event's placement beneath Lawrence Weiner's wall piece, a Walker icon placed on the building's facade of bricks, that simply reads, "BITS AND PIECES PUT TOGETHER TO PRESENT A SEMBLANCE OF A WHOLE" -- a testament, in this context, to the potential power of collective action. Naysayers may scoff at the effectiveness of this kind of arty assemblage of mismatched chairs in affecting Chinese policy half a world away, and I suppose they're right. But this is the realm of art, which, for me anyway, puts the power of this collectivism more in the realm of spirituality than policy. If we ask what the effectiveness of art is, then we should also ask about the effectiveness of a prayer or a hope or a spiritual practice that connects its adherents with those in their community or those around the world.

Maybe that's why the Walker's site is perfect for the event: This repository of art -- which I've called "divinity for the reality-based community" -- is situated across the road from a line of churches, including the country's first Catholic basilica.

Update: Here are some photos from the event, including this shot of the chair Ai would sit at to use his studio computer.

Tuesday in Minneapolis: The Walker gathers 1001 chairs for Ai Weiwei -- and artistic expression

2011-07-11T14:31:00.006-05:00

Ai Weiwei, Fairytale, 2007
While Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is free, it's not the kind of freedom I'd want: He can't speak to the media for one year, he can't travel, he hasn't been back on Twitter or his blog, and you can bet he'll be monitored non-stop by "China's all-seeing eye," to use Naomi Klein's words. Noting that more than 500 people associated with democracy movements have been detained in the last four months, Newsweek reports that "China’s persecution of dissidents and political enemies of the state hasn’t been this ruthless in decades."

To mark the 100th day since his detention by Beijing police -- and to express solidarity with Ai and the many unnamed artists, journalists, bloggers and dissidents who are still imprisoned in China -- the Walker is hosting a 1001 Chairs for Ai Weiwei event on Tuesday, July 12. Like the April protests worldwide, the event takes its inspiration from Ai's 2007 work Fairytale: 1001 Qing Dynasty Wooden Chairs — an installation at Documenta 12 consisted of 1001 empty late Ming and Qing Dynasty wooden chairs. The Walker asks people to drop off chairs at the Walker's Open Field anytime tomorrow to be assembled with other chairs for a 6 pm observation, which will be kicked off with remarks by museum director Olga Viso.

"We believe that no artistic voice should ever be silenced in any society," said Viso, who also spoke out when Ai was still detained. "We envision the chairs on the Open Field as a reminder of artists across the world -- artists we may not even know --- who have been lost and who face repression and censorship every day. Weiwei's art and his recent detainment have brought this reality into disturbing and important focus."

The Walker will be screening Alison Klayman's 18-minute Frontline segment, "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" throughout the day. It notes that it also plans to screen Klayman's documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry at the museum after it is completed next spring.

The Walker notes that museum admission is free all day tomorrow because of the event, and asks that chairs be dropped off during the day and picked up between 6:15 and 8. Viso speaks at 6.

Video: Minnesota Artists for Equality

2011-07-10T10:29:00.006-05:00

Minnesota artists put out a video urging voters to stand against the proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, which will be on the ballot next year. Learn more at the all-volunteer group Minnesota Artists for Equality.

(Thanks, Kelsey.)

Bits: 07.07.11

2011-07-08T15:14:00.002-05:00

Evan Drolet Cook, Places I Haven't Been (North America), 2011.

• I particularly like Evan Cook's work above in light of the revelation that presidential candidate Michele Bachmann has signed a vow to, among other things, ban pornography. According to a 2009 study, conservative states -- like those in Cook's Bible belt (at least that's what I think he's conveying here) -- consume pornography at higher rates. Could Bachmann be killing her presidential bid with this vow? [Apparently, I misread this piece, which actually depicts Cook's drive from Minneapolis to L.A., where he now lives.]

• Greg Allen, of Greg.org fame, has started a new nonprofit, The Jetty Foundation, and its first order of business was to apply to the State of Utah in an attempt to win the lease of Robert Smithson's seminal earthwork Spiral Jetty after its lease expired and with no clear indication that leaseholder and artwork owner the Dia Foundation will get a new one. "In the simplest terms, I'm bidding for the lease because it seems irresponsible not to," Allen writes:

As weeks passed, with no resolution, the possibility that Dia might not automatically get a new lease grew, along with the uncertainty of Spiral Jetty's fate. Once I received assurance that submitting an application would not automatically trigger an open bidding situation, I felt the responsible thing to do was to present apparently undecided State officials with the most constructive, credible set of choices: the status quo, or an independent, locally based institution whose purpose is to manage the site and collaborate with the artwork's owners as they fulfill their own missions.

• Felix Salmon, noting Allen's nod to the Dia Foundation's "undisputed" ownership of Smithson's work, writes that said ownership isn't quite that clear-cut:

Indeed, if Greg’s bid is accepted, there will be no fewer than four entities with ownership claims here: the Jetty Foundation, with the lease to the land; the state of Utah, which owns the land; the Dia Foundation, which owns the artwork; and the Smithson Estate, which owns the intellectual property rights associated with the artwork. Clear? I didn’t think so.

• Kevin Kelly's ever-awesome Street Use looks at what he terms "jailhouse tech," improvised tools -- from weapons to cook stoves -- made out of re-used materials by inmates. Worth an entire post of its own, had I time, the fascinating topic is covered well at Tóxico, which features an interview with Toño Vega Macotela, the artist whose work in prisons unearthed the illegal innovations.

• The Walker interviews its new senior curator for visual arts, Clara Kim. The former director of REDCAT starts in Minneapolis Aug. 1.

• Artist Brad Downey goes from urban interventions into The Studio.

• Design I like: A coffeemug with a plug you remove so others don't swipe it at work. And the "love mattress" by Mehdi Mojtabvi, made of foam slats that make it "possible to wrap your arms around someone without cutting off your circulation, or sleep on your belly while sticking your feet straight down."

Steve Lambert: "Capitalism works for me!"

2011-07-07T22:41:00.003-05:00

Steve Lambert -- the artist behind familiar projects including The Yes Men's fake New York Time edition, the ad-blocking Firefox extension Add-Art and a wonderful "Utopia" letterpress poster -- is back, this time planning his biggest project yet: A giant interactive sign that reads, "Capitalism works for me!" The metal sign will be mounted on a truck that'll hit major cities; wherever it stops, people can walk up and push true or false buttons to have their say on the question of capitalism.

Thing is: Steve needs your help. He's fundraising on Kickstarter to gather the $9,500 he needs to fabricate the sign, fund the national tour and produce a book documenting the project.

Like anything he does, even the Kickstarter pitch is art. For instance, kick in $40 or more, and you'll get both a copy of the book and a personal phonecall from Lambert's parents. He writes:

Brief, but not boring, and you can ask questions. Mom used to be a nun, has an MA in Theology, and can spray lacquer like a pro. Dad used to be a monk, built custom furniture, and coached a championship high school soccer team from inner-city Oakland. Just note: they will probably put you on speaker phone.

A thousand dollars or more will get you, among other things, a personal performance by Lambert of "Free: a talk and walking tour with jokes." At just about every tier of giving you get something: the book, your name in the book, a work of art, his one and only Do It sculpture (at the $2000+ level).

Here's part of his rationale:

The word "capitalism" is a red flag. And for good reason – pretty soon some dude is talking your ear off about "The System, man." Ugh.
At the same time, capitalism is discussed every day using euphemisms like "jobs," "job creation," "the business climate," and discussing whatever "crisis" is deemed relevant; a housing crisis, financial crisis, social security crisis, tax crisis, or fill-in-the blank crisis. But the whole is rarely a topic of frank discussion - much less alternatives or meaningful reform.

As a culture, we need the vision and boldness it takes to discuss the problem itself. The idea that "there is no alternative" to the way our world works takes away our ability to dream! And as citizens we need the courage to begin these discussions on order to move on to new and better visions for the future.

But what to do? Start a conversation about capitalism and friends edge away slowly, and strangers even faster.

And here's his Kickstarter video explaining the project:

Feds visit artist behind People Staring at Computers, confiscate laptops

2011-07-07T14:56:00.013-05:00

One of the many images McDonald's app captured at NYC Apple stores

In yesterday's Bits, I linked up Brooklyn artist Kyle McDonald's project People Staring at Computers, in which he created an app that took snapshots, one every minute, of people shopping for computers at Apple stores in New York, and uploaded them to his site. His project description says the project is "exhibited on site with a remotely triggered app that displayed the photos full screen on every available computer."

Now it appears that project may be in jeopardy. On Twitter, McDonald reports that he received a visit from the Secret Service today and they took his laptop. "Please assume they're reading any emails you send me," he tweeted. The site, for now, is still up and running.

McDonald, whose work was featured in last month's Eyeo festival of digital art in Minneapolis, discussed the case a bit more on Twitter today:

Here's a video McDonald created about the project:

People Staring at Computers from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.

Update: Before noting that the Secret Service took "two computers, an iPod and two flash drives, and told McDonald that Apple would contact him separately," Mashable describes how McDonald made it happen:

On three days in June, McDonald’s program documented people staring at computers in Apple stores. Since the stores wiped their computers every night, he had to go back in and reinstall the program each day he took photos. He uploaded a collection of the photos to a Tumblr blog, and last Sunday he set up “an exhibition” at the Apple stores. During the unauthorized event at the Apple stores on West 14th Street and in Soho, when people looked at an Apple store machine, they saw a picture of themselves. Then they saw photos of other people staring at computers. Amazingly, nobody made a fuss.

[...]

Over the course of the project, McDonald set up roughly 100 Apple store computers to call his servers every minute. That’s a lot of network traffic, and he learned that Apple monitors traffic in its stores when he received a photo from a Cupertino computer of what appeared to be an Apple technician. The technician had apparently traced the traffic to the site McDonald used to upload the program to Apple Store computers — and installed it himself.

Here's the U.S. code McDonald may be in violation of, entitled "Fraud and related activity in connection with computers."

Via Andy Gifford on Twitter.

HOTTEA's Wildlife: 12 skeins of yarn, a stencil and an empty urban lot

2011-07-07T14:22:00.005-05:00

Minneapolis yarn artist HOTTEA emails about a new project on Nicollet in South Minneapolis which, like the last one, goes away from straight yarn throw-ups (for lack of a better word) of the artist's tag:

I took 12 skeins of yarn and two stencils to create my latest piece. I strung the yarn between two points around the existing architecture within the space creating an alternate surface. Once the surface was strung I painted an image on top that speaks of the fragility of non-destructive street art and how vulnerable it is.

I like the swaths of color, although not necessarily the figurative stencil piece, and the further exploration of interventions in three dimensions.

Here's the time-lapse:

WILDLIFE from Hot Tea on Vimeo.

Photos by Thomas Dunning.

Broken Crow time-lapse: Brunch

2011-07-07T14:00:00.003-05:00

Brunch. from Broken Crow on Vimeo.

Minneapolis art duo Broken Crow has a sweet new website, plus a new time-lapse of their recent South Minneapolis mural, which I blogged about here. Check it out (if you look carefully, I'm in there with Finn, the street-art dog).

Bits: 07.06.11

2011-07-06T11:24:00.004-05:00

Ben Venom, Don't Wake Me Lucifer!, quilt, 2010

• Heavy metal quilter Ben Venom, interviewed here, has a piece in Yerba Buena's exhibition BAN6, which opens in San Francisco Friday night. The SFAI grad says he was pondering a piece he was to make for a show in 2008 when, looking at all his metal shirts in his closet and recalling the exhibition of Gees Bend quilts he saw at the De Young, he had a catharsis: "So...I decided to combine the two: Metal and Quilts!"

• RIP Cy Twombly.

• So Minnesota's government has shut down. What's that mean for the arts?

• PopTech finds a creepy work: "Kyle MacDonald created an app that snapped photos of people who were using computers in Apple’s retail locations in New York, and uploaded them to his site. He logically called the project, People Staring at Computers."

• PRI's The World created a nice audio-visual piece on AFP reporter Rory Mulholland, who spent three weeks documenting anti-Qaddafi graffiti with his iPhone in Libya.

• Radiohead has joined China's largest microblogging platform, Sina Weibo.

• It's no Miss Rockaway Armada, but I've gotta hand it to anti-Scott Walker protesters in Wisconsin, who created a flotilla to bring their voices to Walker's home, the lakeside governor's mansion.

Guerrilla bike culture: Urban interventions

2011-07-05T07:37:00.008-05:00

In my Northeast Minneapolis neighborhood, I've spotted a few interventions by and for bicyclists.

My favorite is the simplest: Under Broadway Avenue -- the neighborhood's busiest thoroughfare, a four-lane that takes cars over the Mississippi -- someone poured a concrete ramp, just the right width for bike tires, up the curb to take bikers through a sidewalk gate and beyond an often-locked chain-link fence across the road.

(Update: Contrary to what commenters at Reddit say, the design does incorporate a drain hole to let water pass beneath it, as these photos document. While the image above does show dried grass clumped into one side of this hole, it's not a fair argument that the ramp is the problem, as the unobstructed sewer grate down the street was even more clogged following the last big rainstorm. Can't blame guerrilla ramp-builders for that.)

On the other end, a sandbag makes a downramp. A simple, useful, anonymous and much appreciated urban modification.

More whimsical is a Sharpie addition to the lane marking on the nearby 18th Avenue bike path. A wear-your-helmet admonition, perhaps?

Farther afield, less bike-centric and more symbolic are British artist Pete Dungey's pothole gardens. While the plantings will quickly get destroyed, Dungey's site says the project's aim is to highlight "the problem of surface imperfections on Britain's roads," something we in the Twin Cities ought to consider highlighting.
Got tips on similar urban interventions in Minneapolis or elsewhere? Send them my way!

Street stencil: "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources"

2011-06-28T09:03:00.002-05:00

Hide Your Sources, a photo by Rob React on Flickr.

Street-art commentary in Boston. Via Frontlin.es.

Bits: 06.26.11

2011-06-26T10:48:00.001-05:00

José Castrellón, from his series "Priti Baiks"

• Street Use points out a series of photos of highly modified Panamanian "priti baiks" by photographer José Castrellón. Notes Kevin Kelly, "[T]hese guys are too poor to own a car so they soup up their bikes. Note the air horns, normally found on trucks."

• Photographer Brian Ulrich's new monograph is now on press in China and set for a Sept. 30 release. It takes its name from a hand-painted sign Ulrich photographed in the back room of a K-Mart store, one he told me during a 2008 interview is part of the indoctrination that's ubiquitous in corporate retail: Is this place great or what! "It's hilarious to me, because the place looks like a meat locker," he said. "It's definitely a hard sell." It's the first monograph for this Chicago-based winner of a 2009 Guggenheim fellowship (although he's moving to Richmond for a job at Virginia Commonwealth University). Preorder the book at Amazon, or buy it directly later from the Aperture Foundation.

• The lease for the land on which Robert Smithson's earthwork Spiral Jetty sits has expired, or so says the Utah Department of Natural Resources. The work's owner, the Dia Foundation, says it has "promptly paid every annual Spiral Jetty lease invoice, up to and including one sent out by the Department of Natural Resources in February 2011. Although the Department of Natural Resources deposited Dia’s check for this latest invoice, it subsequently took the position that the invoice had been sent in error." A decision on the lease was expected this past week.

• Minneapolis designers ro/lu bring their project A Simple Chair to Mass MOCA's Night Market (now through Sept. 30), fresh off its showings in town at the Soap Factory and Northern Spark. Via Greg.

• Gothamist: "French graffiti artist JR and the Bronx's Hunts Point Alliance for Children have teamed up to present 'Through A Mother's Eyes,' a community art project that involves members of the neighborhood, through images taken by and of Hunts Point residents themselves."

• After a two-month investigation, Mannhattan resident Joseph Waldo was apprehended by police and charged with felony criminal mischief, among other counts. The crime spree requiring such police attention? He wrote the word "moustache" on the upper lips of people featured on NYC subway ads.

• For Minneapolis Pride weekend, a series of same-sex Craigslist personals for sculptures seeking hookups, including the "full figured hard body," the Father of Waters, Larkin Goldsmith Mead's marble sculpture in City Hall.

Amnesty Int'l: China deflecting criticism through Ai release

2011-06-22T13:30:00.008-05:00

Ai Weiwei, released after 80 days. Photo: Ng Han Guan/AP

"Ai Weiwei’s release on bail by the Chinese government must not diminish the international outcry about other activists detained during this year’s ‘Jasmine’ crackdown," Amnesty International writes, noting that the artist is out on bail just as Chinese premier Wen Jiabao is heading to the UK and Germany, countries where Ai is popular and has shown work (think: his sunflower seed installation at Tate and his show at neugerriemschneider in Berlin, to name two).

“His release on bail can be seen as a tokenistic move by the government to deflect mounting criticism," Catherine Baber, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Asia Pacific, says. “It is vital that the international outcry over Ai Weiwei be extended to those activists still languishing in secret detention or charged with inciting subversion.”

More than 130 activists, journalists, bloggers and lawyers are still held by Chinese authorities. Among them are Ai's associates, Wen Tao, Hu Mingfen, Liu Zhenggang and Zhang Jinsong.

“While Ai Weiwei’s release is an important step, he must now be granted his full liberty, and not be held in illegal house arrest as has been the pattern with so many others recently released from arbitrary detention," Baber said. “The reality is that his long detention without charge violated China’s own legal process."

Roderic Wye, a China analyst at a London think tank, offers a different perspective on the timing with The Guardian:

"I think the timing is one of coincidence rather than a deliberate signal. In the post-Tiananmen days, there was the occasional high-profile person released, but usually before a US presidential visit rather than a trip to Europe, with all due respect to our leaders. The whole point for China is: we don't give in to pressure these days, China is big enough to make its own decisions without taking foreign pressure into account."

Ai Weiwei released on bail

2011-06-22T10:18:00.011-05:00

Xinhuanet, China's state-run news service, reports:

The Beijing police department said Wednesday that Ai Weiwei has been released on bail because of his good attitude in confessing his crimes as well as a chronic disease he suffers from.

No word yet on his whereabouts, however, and his family says they haven't yet heard from him.

Updates:

• According to Hyperallergic, Ai texted his lawyer, Liu Xiaoyuan, confirming that he's been released.

• Ai tells the German tabloid Bild, "I am fine, I am back home and I am free. But I cannot speak. Please understand." Around 11:30 Central Time, Alison Klayman notes at her film's Facebook page: "We just spoke with Weiwei. He is with his mom and is happy he is out."

• The New York Times shares photos of Ai after his release.

• ABC News ponders the timing: "Ai's release might also have been a face-saving move, coming just days before Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao was due to travel to Hungary, Britain and Germany, countries where supporters of the artist have been vocal in their condemnation of his detention."

• In an email, filmmaker Klayman writes: "The conditions of Weiwei's release have yet to be confirmed, but Weiwei's legal counsel, Liu Xiaoyuan, did suggest over Twitter that the artist would not be allowed to exit Beijing city limits. Weiwei himself has stated that he will not be allowed to conduct interviews or use social media for at least "one year."

Your moment of: Wilco's Jeff Tweedy in a dunk tank

2011-06-20T16:38:00.001-05:00

At Mass MOCA last August, no less. Via Mass MOCA on Facebook.

Buren backs out of Beijing show in solidarity with Ai Weiwei

2011-06-18T10:28:00.007-05:00

A week after sculptor Anish Kapoor announced he was backing out of a show of his work in Beijing over Ai Weiwei's continuing detention, French sculptor Daniel Buren is doing the same: He said Friday that he's canceling his exhibition at the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing in "solidarity" with Ai.

"I don't think it is possible to do nothing," he told AFP. "First I signed petitions to free Ai Weiwei. But as he is still being held, virtually in secret, after two months I think the best solution is for me to pull out ... If I carried on without doing anything, it would be a mistake that I would regret for the rest of my life."

"When freedom of expression is flouted in a country, what value can be given to the works of artists who are still allowed to express themselves? That compromises our own work," he said.

The show was scheduled to open in mid-July.

Photo: Wikipedia

Bits: 06.16.11

2011-06-16T14:43:00.000-05:00

• Minneapolis yarn-art crew HOT TEA forgo spelling out their name on a fence near the farmer's market, instead opting to draw a pair of geese.

• The Atlantic offers a truly amazing photo gallery: "DIY Weapons of the Libyan Rebels."

• The New York Times runs an interactive feature by Roberta Smith that asks readers to comment on artworks in the Venice Biennale using only six words. LA Times arts writer Christopher Knight tweets in response: "Odd: Why would an art critic ask readers to comment on art they hadn't seen?"

• Starving artists often have to hustle to make ends meet. Student Joshua Dickson did just that, signing on for more than 100 medical research tests -- and documenting the entire process in video and photography for an art project.

• In video at the gossip site TMZ, Shepard Fairey publicly dresses down his wife after she revealed that it's been a long time since the street artist, instead of his crew, has been out on the streets installing his work.

• Congrats to Minneapolis-based Highpoint Center for Printmaking on winning an AIA Minnesota Merit Award for its new facility, designed by architect James Dayton.

Ai Weiwei Update: 06.16.11

2011-06-16T08:00:00.005-05:00

• Video: AFP on how Ai Weiwei's detention -- now 74 days and counting -- has sparked creative protest in Hong Kong (including the artwork pictured above).

• Sculptor Anish Kapoor -- who's been outspoken about China's detention of Ai Weiwei and dedicated his new work, Leviathan, to the Chinese artist -- says he's backing out of plans to present his work at the National Museum of China in Beijing in protest.

• Of the British Council–organized "UK Now" project to take place in 12 Chinese cities, in which Kapoor's work was to be shown, The Telegraph's Peter Foster writes, "How comfortable will it be for senior figures in the British arts and political establishment to be hobnobbing with the Communist Party’s cultural tsars when Ai, China’s most internationally famous artist, still languishes in jail – as its reasonable to presume he will be?"

• Ai's imprisonment got "virtually no official acknowledgment" at one of the art world's biggest soirees, the Venice Biennale. Writes Jon Wiener:

Perhaps the most striking thing about all this is the absence of any recognition of Ai Weiwei’s imprisonment on the part of the officials of the Biennale, especially curator Brice Curiger. Ai Weiwei was mentioned only once at an official event: at the first day opening of the preview, Paolo Baratta, president of the Biennale, told reporters, “We are great friends with the Chinese.” Then came a pause that implied “but,” followed by “I have written a letter to the ambassador of China in Italy saying how wonderful it would be if we could have happy news about Ai Weiwei.” And that was it for Ai WeiWei at the 2011 Venice Biennale.

• Architizer looks at the sanctuary Ai designed for pilgrims on Mexico's Ruta del Pelegrino. (Via Curbed.)

• Activists hold a sing-in at the Milwaukee Art Museum, a museum slammed for long remaining neutral about Ai's detention while showing an exhibition of work presented collaboratively with Chinese authorities. (Via MJS.)

• The State Department's Dan Baer has discussed the denial of service attack by Chinese hackers on Change.org's Ai Weiwei petition (an attack first confirmed by Eyeteeth). Baer "raised the case of Change.org directly" with China's foreign ministry in April, and the "Department will continue to press China on the importance of an open and unrestricted Internet," according to letter from Change.org to Rep. Rosa DeLauro.

Finished: Broken Crow mural at Peace Coffee

2011-06-09T12:47:00.005-05:00

I finally got back over to the Peace Coffeeshop in South Minneapolis to get some photos of the finished Broken Crow mural and was pleased to find that, fitting the stencil-art duo's depiction of cheetahs devouring a zebra, savannah grass had been planted to complete the scene. More shots here.

Ai Weiwei Update: 06.09.11

2011-06-09T12:11:00.006-05:00

Free Ai Weiwei Glasses, F.A.T.

• Philip Bishop, publisher of Artists Speak Out, writes in the Guardian that museums should be publicizing the plight of Ai Weiwei in their spaces, and gives props to those -- including the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Walker Art Center -- who are.

• Roundly criticized for doing the exact opposite is the Milwaukee Art Museum, which is about to open a major exhibition of Chinese art in collaboration with China, and its director Dan Keegan. Keegan has refused to comment, and the museum hasn't said much about Ai, but Milwaukee Journal Sentinel arts writer Mary Louise Schumacher finally did get him on record. His response is both feeble and contradictory. "From the get-go we said we have to have the contemporary voice in this," he told Schumacher, yet that contemporaneousness is apparently utterly passive: "We don’t do protests," he said, echoing his PR flak, who recently said, "We don't do any politics."

• Keegan's official statement doesn't mention Ai: "The Museum, as a cultural institution, does not support censorship, including self-censorship, of art exhibitions or artists based on unpopular or controversial subjects. We invite the public to experience the exhibitions and to attend the programs."

• Tyler Green on Keegan's statement: "I believe that art museum directors should be leaders in their communities, especially when it comes to issues that affect art, artists and our shared cultural heritage. I posit a 'fair question': Does Keegan have the ethical fortitude to be an art museum director?"

• The deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Mass., goes where Keegan won't.

• China's fear of words: The mere presence of Ai's name -- presented on an empty wall -- was enough for authorities to shut down the Incidental Art Festival at Beijing's CCD 300 gallery last week. The empty wall represents the absence of Ai, who has been in police custody for nearly 68 days.

• F.A.T. (Free Art Technology), which has given us a way to flip the bird at websites, like the Milwaukee Art Museum's -- in homage to Ai's "Study in Perspective" series -- now offers a low-tech version of the same: Glasses (above) that show Ai's outstretched middle finger, great for your next visit to Milwaukee. (Via Huh.)

New Broken Crow: Carnivores in South Minneapolis

2011-06-02T17:21:00.006-05:00

Fresh off their mural with Over Under in Northeast Minneapolis, Broken Crow (John Grider, Mike Fitzsimmons) is just about done with another one, this time on the back wall of the building that houses XYandZ Gallery, the Trylon and Peace Coffee in South Minneapolis. I stopped by twice over the past few days to capture the process -- from the initial black stencil layer to the hand-painted color overlays to the final black stencil coat -- but I'll have to grab a shot of the final piece tomorrow. As BC's Mike said this morning, there's some irony in the fact that their giant image of cheetahs feasting on a downed zebra now advertises the parking lot of a place called Peace Coffee.

See more shots at my Flickr page.

Bits: 06.02.11

2011-06-02T10:00:00.000-05:00

• Banksy's Balloon Girl image -- which has appeared on the Israel-Palestine partition wall, in Lego ads and in umpteen tattoos -- has been appearing around New York, rendered in yarn by the artist Olek. Photo by Pace Ebbesen.

• Minneapolis' Art of This may not exist as a gallery anymore, sadly, but it's still running as an online platform for artists. To that end, David Peterson et al have launched a new website which has a nice new Open Studio feature that lets artists create their own pages to showcase audio, video or image-based work. It's kind of our own version of PS1's Studio Visit artists' hub.

• The City of Toronto pays artist $2,000 to create a mural then paints over it. The work -- ironically, a “commentary on the mathematics of modern finance" -- was whitewashed after a citizen complained that it was too political and city officials concluded that it might've referenced PM Stephen Harper (the artist, Joel Richardson, says it doesn't). The erasure, which one city councillor calls "$2,000 wasted," brings into focus the city's new graffiti abatement program, which will be up for public debate at a June 29 meeting of the licensing and standards committee.

• This weekend in Minneapolis: Northern Spark, a festival "modeled on a nuit blanche or 'white night' festival—a dusk to dawn participatory art event along the Mississippi and surrounding areas." Created by former Walker Art Center and 01SJ Biennial curator Steve Dietz, it'lll include "multi-story projections, audio environments with vistas, floating works on barges, houseboats and paddleboats, headphone concerts, and the use of everything from bioluminescent algae and sewer pipes for organs to more traditional media such as banjos and puppets."

• In her Artnews review of LAMOCA's Art in the Streets, Carolina (C-Monster) Miranda writes that while the show has some gems, it includes "puzzling juxtapositions" of works, with little in the way of wall didactics explaining the relationships between them, and gives short shrift to certain significant styles and artists. She notes, for instance, that while Banksy gets beaucoup coverage, his French stencil art precursor, Blek Le Rat, gets no mention at all.

• What 71-year-old conceptual artist Hans-Peter Feldman did with his $100,000 Hugo Boss Prize winnings: Wallpapered the Guggenheim with 100,000 one-dollar bills.

Going "Outside the Planter Boxes"

2011-06-01T09:30:00.005-05:00

Highlighting neglected curbside planters, the project Outside the Planter Boxes features creative interventions throughout Toronto. Participating artists include Sean Martindale, who made grass spill from a fractured box (below is the before view), and Groundswell Collective's James David Morgan, who made his own cast planters. According to project organizer Martindale, the aim is to "encourage more direct participation and interest in our shared public spaces – to demonstrate that the public can play a more consciously active role in how our city is shaped." He received funding for the project through FEAST Toronto.

Update: Oops, I got part of that wrong. James David Morgan emails to explain his project:

The planter I was working with is actually a sculpture at the start of Toronto's fashion district that the city transit commission and a local business organization commissioned Stephen Cruise to install, I think back in 1997 when the light rail system was put back on Spadina Avenue. So, unfortunately, it's not my own cast - I wish we'd had those resources to pull off something like that!

If you're interested, full history from a walking tour I did during Mayworks. The sculpture is a 9' high pile of buttons with a thimble on top, with a couple other buttons flanking the thimble tower where they've installed trees in the button holes. The sculpture is dedicated to the garment workers who created so much of Toronto's wealth in the days when that was a huge industry here, and there were mills all along that street with tiny apartments for the workers (with few or no windows) on the top floor. Now there's a Starbucks right next to the sculpture, and the patrons trash it with cigarette butts and coffee lids, which is probably a stronger statement than I was trying to make by cleaning out the button holes and planting yarrow. I figured a medicinal herb that doubled as a stimulant and a circulatory/digestive aid was appropriate to match the focus of the piece that would house the plants, and I thought a planting something productive in public would be a tiny act of commoning, both in further tribute to the workers (because they likely had to do that kind of thing all the time to get by) and as a protest of the prefigurative variety.

Thanks for the explanation, and apologies for the error!

Ai Weiwei Update: 05.31.11

2011-05-31T11:53:00.005-05:00

• As Ai Weiwei's detention continues -- he's now been in Chinese police custody for nearly 59 days -- activists continue turning their protests from the tone-deaf Chinese authorities to the western art museums and galleries that are still engaging with the country's art scene. A new web bookmarklet created by F.A.T. let's you superimpose the central image from Ai's series "Study in Perspective" -- in which he photographed himself flipping the bird to seats of political power in China and elsewhere -- onto websites of your chosing. Some, naturally, are targeting museum sites, like that of the Milwaukee Art Museum, which is taking a show of Chinese art, yet remains silent about the imprisonment of that country's most famous artist.

• Also from F.A.T. -- that's Free Art Technology -- the China Blocker, a web browser extension that inverts China's internal web censorship by blocking out all Chinese sites from your browser while web surfing.

• When the exhibition The Emperor’s Private Paradise opens in Milwaukee next week, artist Mike Brenner will be there to protest. He'll be publicly shaving his head to look like Ai and invites others to do the same. He's not the only artist with Milwaukee's ties who'll be protesting the museum's showing of the work.

• Hari Kunzru in The Guardian:

Ai's detention is, among other things, a watershed moment for the international art world, the equivalent of the moral tests so badly flunked by technology companies like Cisco and Yahoo when faced with the dizzying financial vistas of the Chinese market. Notoriously fond of adopting radical postures, and notoriously shy of turning down money, players in the business of contemporary art – gallerists, collectors, curators, auctioneers and fellow artists – must now decide what risks (if any) they are prepared to take in defence of one of their own. In the US, the Milwaukee Art Museum, which is about to host a "Summer of China" in collaboration with the Palace Museum in Beijing, has become a focus for discussion about what role museums can or should play in the debate about artistic censorship and human rights.

• China now says it wants back works by Ai that were the center of protests in San Diego. Tyler Green reports that Chinese authorities want the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego to return their recently acquired Marble Chairs (2010). While the pieces were part of the museum's 24-hour protest of Ai's detention, the call for the pieces' return goes back to last fall. China is challenging the export license the museum used to ship the pieces, but MCASD director Hugh Davies says "until compelled by the authorities to return the chairs, we have no intention of doing so."

• The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), home to The Warrior Emperor and China’s Terracotta Army, a major exhibition of archaeological works presented in collaboration with the People’s Republic of China, doesn't "do" politics. Says museum flak Sabrina Merceron: "We don’t do any politics, we just support art as this is the mission of a museum. It’s very important that you make the distinction as one can perfectly cohabitate with the other.”

• Join the nearly 130,000 other people who have signed this petition calling for a western art-world boycott of China.

Mashup: Double Rainbow v. Donald Judd

2011-05-29T12:39:00.003-05:00

Untitled from VJ Peter Rand on Vimeo.

The "double rainbow" meme meets Judd, via Kelly Shindler.

Ai Weiwei Update: 05.25.11

2011-05-25T08:43:00.008-05:00

Nemesis-Ai Weiwei: The Elusiveness of Being, guerrilla projection, Geandy Pavo, May 20, 2011, NYC

• Nearly two months after he was first taken by police, Ai Weiwei has finally been officially charged. A report on New China News Agency on Friday, which was quickly removed, said Ai's Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd. had "intentionally destroyed accounting records" and evaded "huge amounts" of taxes. Despite the fact that Ai's whereabouts went unacknowledged by police for days after taken into police custody and the fact that his wife was only allowed to visit him for the first time early last week, China claims Ai was "legally placed under supervised residence" and that "authorities have protected his rights to family visits." He remains in lockup.

• As noted here last week, Ai's wife, Lu Qing, has already addressed the tax evasion issue: "He's not the company's legally-designated representative, nor is he the chief executive. So even if the company is accused of these crimes, Ai Weiwei should not be detained."

• Chinese lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan, one of a dwindling number of people who still speak out on Twitter about sensitive issues, has problems with the Chinese case against Ai, including their claim that they never targeted Ai for his controversial art activities.

• Ai's detention has sparked creative responses from artists worldwide. The latest follows in the footsteps of both Cpak Ming, who projected an image from an Ai stencil on the wall of Hong Kong's People's Liberation Army barracks, and Krzysztof Wodiczk, who has made politically incisive art by projecting images on monuments and government buildings worldwide. Cuban artist Geandy Pavon has projected a photo of Ai's face on the exterior of the Chinese Consulate in New York (here's video).

• Pavon tells Hyperallergic that he created the image by filmed an image of Ai's face reflected in sunflower oil (a referene to Ai's sunflower seed installation at Tate Modern). Born in Cuba but forced to leave for his political views, Geandy sees a parallel between Ai and Cuban political prisoner Orlando Zapata: "Ai Weiwei is a victim of the same system as Zapata. When I projected Ai weiwei’s face, I projected all the people who have suffered, who have gone through the same thing. I think a victim is always a mirror of other victims."

• Read recent Ai Weiwei Updates.

Time-lapse: Broken Crow + Over Under in NE MPLS

2011-05-24T19:12:00.003-05:00

Broken Crow / Over Under. from Broken Crow on Vimeo.

You've seen the photos, now see the time-lapse. Via Linda Xayamongkhon on Facebook.

Northeast Minneapolis mural: Broken Crow + Over Under

2011-05-23T21:22:00.005-05:00

Two years after they collaborated on a mural at Shuga Records, Twin Cities artists Broken Crow (Mike FitzSimmons and John Grider) and Brooklyn-based Over Under (Erik Burke) again team up for a piece in Northeast Minneapolis, this time just three blocks away. The piece, located behind the 331 Club and Modern Cafe on 13th Avenue, has familiar themes: houses (seen in the Shuga mural, Over Under's recent St. Paul piece, and a few Broken Crow works), stencil animals, and human anatomy (the arms bring to mind Burke's recent collaboration with Seattle's No Touching Ground, which featured a wheatpasted reproduction of Burke's own notebook tattoo). It seems to continue Broken Crow's recent divergence, away from images of static animals (think: the billygoat on the former Salon Stella six or so blocks away on Lowry Avenue) to more active, or less animal-centric, pieces (think: carnivorous penguins).

See more of the shots of the mural here, and don't miss the opening of the exhibition Over Under -- Building on Building Saturday night, May 28, at XYandZ Gallery in South Minneapolis.

And here's the time-lapse of the making of the mural.

Ai Weiwei Update: 05.20.11

2011-05-20T09:35:00.000-05:00

NYC wheatpaste poster spotted by Jason Andrew, via Hyperallergic

• China's state-run media says Ai Weiwei, in police custody for 47 days and counting, evaded taxes, a claim his family says is bogus. Ai's wife, Lu Qing, says Ai's not even "the company's legally-designated representative, nor is he the chief executive." Lu has been told that her husband is "under residential surveillance" and that he still hasn't been formally charged.

• It's clear that petitions, condemnation of China by global diplomats and street-art campaigns won't sway China to release Ai. So many voices are now calling for an art-world boycott against the country. A petition at Avaaz.org -- which now has nearly 127,000 signatures -- suggests there's some interest in such a move, but a big question is whether galleries and institutions follow? Early indications aren't promising.

• London's Lisson Gallery, which has an Ai Weiwei show up now, won't back out of the Hong Kong art fair. In a release it stated why:

ART HK is an important international art fair that takes place in a special administrative region of China with its own democratic process, greater freedom of press and an independent judiciary. Hong Kong is a gateway to the entire Asian region, not just China, and its ART HK fair, auction houses and galleries represent the plurality of Asian voices and identities.

At this stage we feel that we can do more for Ai Weiwei by being present at the fair. By continuing to show his work we build new audiences for it and draw attention to his plight. We also wish to show our support for those people in Hong Kong who have come out on to the streets to protest in greater numbers than in any city in the West. To withdraw from ART HK and not show work by the artist would make us complicit in the authorities’ attempt to silence him and his supporters.

• London art blog Cathedral of Shit applauds Lisson for the explanation, but says the issue is more "complex":

...This isn’t a problem if you haven’t got an issue with China’s human rights abuses – and plenty of commercial galleries haven’t. Peculiarly, it’s more of a problem for those galleries who have, to their credit, gone on the record as disagreeing with China’s human rights record and in particular, the imprisonment of Ai Wei Wei. Which goes to prove, it’s not easy having a moral compass and working in the commercial art world – good luck to those, such as the Lisson, who seem to.

• The Art Newspaper notes that Lisson is joined by galleries like neugerriemschneider in Berlin (which is now showing Ai's work), Swiss dealer Urs Meile, and others in exhibiting at Art HK.

• Yesterday, Modern Art Notes' Tyler Green asked, "Is it appropriate for an American art museum [and specifically the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which plans to show its collection at the Palace Museum in Beijing] to be engaged in this kind of transaction with the Chinese when the Chinese have demonstrated their hostility to — and fear of — their country’s most internationally prominent artist?

• Via Artnet.com, German curator Roger Buergel, who brought Ai to Documenta in 2007, has this explanation for the "enormous passivity" of the western art world over Ai's plight: "[M]ost of them are glad to be rid of Ai Weiwei." Says Buergel: "Ai Weiwei is in the right. His arrest is a political crime. That's also why it's so important that the West protests. Yet our artists are obviously lacking in their sense of historical awareness."

• Milwaukee Journal Sentinel critic Mary Louise Schumacher asks whether the Milwaukee Art Museum, which is showing a traveling exhibition of Chinese art, The Emperor’s Private Paradise, this summer, should protest Ai's captivity. She writes that the museum has been silent on the issue. Museum director Dan Keegan offered this flaccid defense: “The political situation is extremely complex and the Museum is sensitive to the discussion that Ai Weiwei’s detention has created and we are obviously concerned for his well being. To that point, I think that our ‘Summer of China’ can play a role in expanding understanding and forwarding the dialogue between cultures.”

• Kudos to those in the art world -- from institutions like Dia and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, which yesterday hosted a 24-hour protest, to artists worldwide, including just yesterday, Damien Hirst -- who have gone where Keegan won't. A measure of the lack of optimism about Ai's situation: Protests are planned to commemorate Ai's 10oth day of captivity, nearly two months from now, while others I've talked to are considering 90-day observances.

Street-art mural: Over Under in St. Paul

2011-05-17T10:20:00.005-05:00

Erik Burke -- aka street artist Over Under -- is back in town for a show opening May 28 at XYandZ Gallery. Last in the Twin Cities to collaborate with Broken Crow on Shuga Records' mural (and last seen on Eyeteeth for his collaboration with No Touching Ground in Bushwick), he recently made a piece in St. Paul. Unurth has the photos.

Video: Ai Weiwei filmmaker Alison Klayman on The Colbert Report

2011-05-17T07:41:00.002-05:00

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Obey-style Ai Weiwei graphic by Artorical

2011-05-16T20:39:00.005-05:00

I've been half-expecting a Shepard Fairey Ai Weiwei poster, but as Niborama (via Hyperallergic Labs) reports, somebody beat him to it: Artorical created this poster, inspired by Fairey's ubiquitous Obey imagery:

The Chinese text 爱未来, (replacing the omnipotent “OBEY”) translates in English to “Love The Future”, which has been adopted as the watchword, or rallying cry in support of Ai’s release because it is very similar to the Chinese spelling of his name 艾未未.

Writes Fairey in response to a query by Niborama:

“I think the poster is great. I wholly endorse the message and I’m proud that an homage to my work is the form it has taken. I have been following the Ai Weiwei situation sympathetically and I am a strong advocate of social justice in my own work, so I like and support the poster Andrew made.”

Also, after my foray into rubylith, here's a glimpse of my Ai rubylith in progress.

Ai Weiwei Update: 05.16.11

2011-05-16T08:00:00.000-05:00

Image via the Facebook page Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

• Forty-three days into his captivity, Ai Weiwei has been allowed to briefly see his wife, Lu Qing, for the first time. The 15-minute, highly monitored visit Sunday didn't yield much information about the conditions of his imprisonment, but he appeared healthy, dispelling rumors that he'd been tortured (to his elderly mother's relief). Lu noted that he wasn't wearing prison clothes and his beard wasn't shaved, suggesting he may be under house arrest instead of in a jail. According to reports, authorities warned Lu about talking the press, lest she worsen Ai's case.

• "I could see redness in his eyes," Lu said of the visit. "It was obvious that without freedom to express himself he was not behaving naturally even with me, someone from his family. He seemed conflicted, contained, his face was tense ... We could not talk about the economic charges or other stuff, mainly about the family and health. We were careful, we knew that the deal could be broken at any moment, so we were careful."

• In a late April interview with CBS, released Friday, Ai's mother pleaded, "Save my son. Save my son. I hear that he's suffering now -- (they're) treating him cruelly and inhumanely." Seventy-eight-year old Gao Ying also said that Ai has no ties to the Jasmine Revolution, Falun Gong or any other groups that have run afoul of the Chinese government. "[H]e was taken because he was protecting the rights of ordinary citizens and speaking for them," she said. "With many things that happened, he just had to speak out -- he said a lot, criticizing the government for not abiding by the rule of law in dealing with certain incidents."

• The Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego has just bought two pieces from Ai's "Marble Chairs" series, works that gain resonance the longer Ai is missing (i.e. the longer the artist is absent from his work). This week the museum will host a silent protest: "Beginning at 11 AM on Thursday, May 19 and continuing through 11 AM on Friday, May 20, volunteer participants will occupy two traditionally styled Chinese chairs for one-hour periods. This 24-hour sit-in references Ai Weiwei’s sculpture series, Marble Chair, two of which are currently on view in the Museum’s exhibition, Prospect 2011."

• CNN offers a nice view of Ai's show at Lisson Gallery in London, which includes a clip from an old interview with the artist: "Art is not just decoration. Art is not just items of the collectors' habit. Art is about social change. It's about how we define our time and our culture."

• Had to reread this headline three times: "Ai Arrest Jangles Beijing Art Scene Nerves as Fish Head, Bike Go on Show."

• Filmmaker Alison Klayman: "I will appear on The Colbert Report tonight. Tune in to see my first television appearance, hear about my experiences with Weiwei and maybe even speculate about what Weiwei would think about Colbert's portrait recently auctioned at Philips de Pury"

Ai Weiwei Update: 05.12.11

2011-05-12T09:28:00.000-05:00

Ai Weiwei in the hospital after being beaten by police, Sept. 2009. Via Twitter.

• Torture and Ai Weiwei:

The most sinister development — and the only real glimpse yet of what might be going on with the artist himself — has been the release of an account, penned under a pseudonym by someone identifying himself as a disaffected reporter with the state-controlled Xinhua News Agency. The piece was published in English translation by ChinaAid, a United States-funded organization dedicated to tracking religious persecution in China, with the caveat that the organization could not independently confirm its veracity. It states that a "Public Security Ministry official with a conscience" told Xinhua insiders the details of the brutal means used on Ai: "Fu Zhenghua, the chief of the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau, instructed those handling the case to show Ai Weiwei the video of [dissident lawyer] Gao Zhisheng being tortured, including shots of electric batons being inserted into Gao's anus and his blood, semen, feces, and urine spurting out," the account alleges. "Fu Zhenghua also issued an order saying: Whatever methods were used on Gao Zhisheng, use the same ones to make Ai Weiwei give in. After several consecutive days of torture, Ai Weiwei was finally compelled to sign a statement of confession, admitting to tax evasion."

• An online editorial marking today's anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake three years ago has disappeared from the website of Guangdong’s Southern Metropolis Daily, China Media Project reports. The piece included three allusions to Ai Weiwei, whose art and activism frequently addressed the quake -- and corruption by local officials that may have exacerbated its effects -- that killed some 90,000 people:

“In our hearts, we lowered our flags to half-mast for them. On the day of mourning we called them home and wished them peace. We gathered together all the human evidence of them we could. We read their names together. We promised that we would bear them constantly in mind, never forgetting, over and over again. We did so much, and yet we did too little. Those of you who were lost and did not return, where are you? Can the light we kindle shine across your path? We cannot do more.”

Ai sought to compile a list of the children killed in the quake, something the government refused to do. The editorial also mentioned quake victims who "lived happily on this earth for seven years, or for longer or shorter periods of time" -- a clear reference to an installation by Ai that spelled out a grieving mother's words about her late daughter in children's school backpacks on the exterior of a Munich museum: "She lived happily for seven years in this world."

• Ai's studio has released a video commemorating the quake's anniversary. Edited before Ai's detention more than a month ago, the video "consists of harrowing interviews with black-clad parents whose children died in the quake, and who have braved beatings, official harassment, and detentions in an attempt to protest alleged shoddy construction in the quake-hit schools," Radio Free Asia reports.

• Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, traveling in China this week, called Beijing's human-rights record "deplorable": "They're worried and they are trying to stop history, which is a fool's errand. They cannot do it. But they're going to hold it off as long as possible." The State Department is reportedly investing $19 million to help Chinese and Iranian dissidents bypass government internet censors through new technology dubbed “slingshots” that sidestep firewalls in those countries.

• Sculptor Anish Kapoor on Ai's detention:

I feel that as artists we have a communal voice and it's important that we stick together, that we have a sense of solidarity with each other. It would be nice to see the art world come together a little more. Perhaps all museums and galleries should be closed for a day across the world. I think some such campaign needs to form itself... It does bear witness to the barbarity of governments that if they're that paranoid they have to put away artists. It's a ridiculous situation.

• Alison Klayman, director of the documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, will be a guest on The Colbert Report Monday night, May 16, the film's Facebook page confirms. Support production of the film on Kickstarter.

• Jed Perl at the New Republic writes on Ai, "the Chinese answer to Joseph Beuys, a post-Duchampian shaman with an Asian spin."

• ArtInfo.com looks at a fashion trend around Ai's plight, noting a Free Ai shirt in the window of Brooklyn Industries... an apparel company called out in 2009 for outsourcing its work to China.

Video: Minneapolis artist Amy Rice for Manifest Equality

2011-05-11T19:54:00.000-05:00

It's an odd week for Minnesota: As bloggers and Twitterers tout the state being dubbed the nation's "gayest" and "hippest," the Minnesota Senate voted today in favor of a Republican plan to put a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage on the ballot next year (despite the fact that such unions are already illegal here). Once it passes the House -- as is likely, since Republicans are the majority there, too -- it'll be up to the voters. Depressing, yes. But artist Amy Rice has a more hopeful stance. On Facebook today, she offered a link to a video for Manifest Equality that features her work. "Minnesota will vote for love," she writes. "I am sure of it."

Befitting art's long history of supporting equality for LGBT people, Manifest Equality was backed by a large number of art figures, including Edgar Arceneaux, UCLA Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin, Ed Ruscha, Barry McGee, Maya Hayuk, and many others. They follow the example the late Louise Bourgeois, who donated one of her last artworks to Freedom to Marry.

"Everyone should have the right to marry," Bourgeois, who died last May 31 at age 98, said of the project (quoted in a blog post here one year ago today). "To make a commitment to love someone forever is a beautiful thing."

Dorothy Parvaz, American citizen and Al Jazeera English journalist, missing in Syria

2011-05-10T08:49:00.007-05:00

Al Jazeera English calls for the release of American-Canadian-Iranian journalist Dorothy Parvaz, who went missing in Syria 12 days ago. Her family fears the former Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter has been targeted, as many others have been, for being a journalist in Syria. (Here's the "Free Dorothy Parvaz" Facebook page.)

The Committee to Protect Journalists has called on Syria to release Parvaz and another journalist being held, Al-Massae editor Rachid Nini, vowing that "A revolving door detention policy will not stop journalists from reporting on the country's uprising." (Syria has been detaining then releasing journalists, reportedly in an attempt at intimidation.) Reporters without Borders reports that Parvaz's detention is part of a larger sweep of journalists covering the pro-democracy protests in Syria.

Journalists are under fire worldwide, yet their role in informing us about these democracy movements -- not to mention their key role of holding governments and politicians accountable domestically and abroad -- is more important than ever. If you agree, please support groups like Reporters without Borders, The Committee to Protect Journalists, the World Press Freedom Committee, and many other global, regional and country-specific press freedom groups.

Earlier:
"Restrepo" director Tim Hetherington, Pulitzer-nominated photog Chris Hondros killed in Libya

War correspondent Janine diGiovanni discusses the dangers of international journalism

(Thanks, Jillia.)

Video: Broken Crow in Mexico City

2011-05-09T14:14:00.003-05:00

Via Brooklyn Street Art, a mini-documentary on Minneapolis stencil-art duo Broken Crow's recent trip to Mexico City, where they did a mural at the Antique Toy Museum Mexico.

Earlier: Broken Crow (Mike Fitzsimmons and John Grider) in Gambia, Minneapolis and Brooklyn.

Ai Weiwei Update: 05.09.11

2011-05-09T08:36:00.008-05:00

• Two pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong have been arrested for doing Ai Weiwei graffiti there, AFP reports. The pair, who weren't named, have been released on bail, but have a June 8 hearing. Activists have been painting and projecting Ai's image, using a stencil originally created by Chin Tangerine. Via Facebook, she tells me that "things are good" and that the police effort to find her "really doesn't bother me that much." She says she's not involved with the recent projections of the Ai stencil by Cpak Ming (pictured, via ArtAsiaPacific), but she hopes to collaborate with him soon. "Ming uploaded some kind of tutorial and inspired by him, a lot of people are trying it out," she writes. "It's exhilarating."

• The China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong says it's confirmed that a new Q & A between Ai Weiwei and an "opinion channeler" -- a member the so-called 50-Cent Army, a group paid to leave pro-China comments on the internet -- is legit. The interview was conducted Mar. 22 and published May 5.

• When Hillary Clinton and Timothy Geithner are in China this week, Ai's imprisonment without charge is off the table. Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai says, "I think it is advisable for the United States to pay more attention to the development of China in terms of human rights, rather than being preoccupied with individual cases."

• Nicholas Logsdail, director of London's Lisson Gallery, where an exhibition of Ai's work opens on Friday:

"In arresting Ai Weiwei, I believe [Chinese authorities] have failed to understand what it means to be an artist. They have failed to be culturally aware. He is exactly the kind of person they should have onside. He's actually much more dangerous now, under arrest, than he ever was before. I think he is a great global cultural ambassador for the new China, but this arrest is making China's new cultural revolution look rather unrevolutionary."

• Critic Jerry Salz hated Ai's installation of millions of porcelain sunflower seeds at Tate Modern, but regretting his snap judgment went back for a second look. And:

As I stood on this field of crunchy porcelain bits, I suddenly gleaned an approximation of China itself. A hundred million seeds and the huge physical field and my tiny place in it allowed me to actually sense the billion that is China. In true colonialist fashion, I was part of the millions in the West who were now walking on the billions of the East. It was an extraordinary illustration of infinity, impossibility, life, politics, proximity and individuality. Crowds happily walked on the seeds; it was like a metaphysical beach, or limbo. Kids ran around, played games or buried one another. Like many others, and in violation of the rules, I took home a handful of seeds. My wife kept pointing out gray clouds that puffed up wherever people were walking. She also pointed out that our hands and clothes were covered in the dust.

I thought nothing of it.
I should have. It turns out those clouds were the gray slip being ground off the porcelain seeds as they rubbed together underfoot. Two days later authorities shut down the piece. A notice posted on the Tate’s site reads in part: "We have been advised that the interaction of visitors with the sculpture can cause dust which could be damaging to health following repeated inhalation over a long period of time. In consequence, Tate, in consultation with the artist, has decided not to allow members of the public to walk across the sculpture." Now it can only be seen the way I saw it that first day, from above or outside. I’m saddened that you can’t see it the way I did -- but the metaphor is unmistakably powerful all the same. The coming together of these civilizations and numbers produces a toxic cloud.

• The petitions: 131,000 signatures, plus 118,000 more.

"Dream House": Photographer TJ Proechel looks at the Minnesota foreclosure crisis

2011-05-06T15:00:00.005-05:00

11th Ave., St. Paul MN

The numbers in the ongoing foreclosure crisis can be difficult to get your brain around: More than a million lost homes across the United States last year, including more than 25,000 in Minnesota (according to Housing Link). Put that data into visual form, as journalist Jeff Severns Guntzel did recently with his map of Minneapolis foreclosures, and you get a troubling, if less than human-scaled, picture.

Enter TJ Proechel, a fine art photographer who after getting his BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art found himself doing contracting work on real estate–owned and recently foreclosed properties around the Twin Cities. His "Dream House" series, begun in 2008 and shot on those work sites, gives faces to those affected by foreclosure -- sometimes emotionally so -- but often the more human images are those where former homeowners are no longer present. A hand-written Post-It note of "The Our Father" left on a kitchen wall (apparently in the same home where Proechel found a wallet photo of a woman performing oral sex), a child's stuffed dog toy, bedraggled Christmas decorations long stripped of their jubilance: the items left behind offer clues about what dreams, too -- comfortable domesticity, love, Ameican dream normalcy -- may likewise have been discarded.
Virginia Ave., St. Paul, MN

I caught up with Proechel via email recently to discuss the photos, which he says he feels "conflicted about." With construction experience from high school and college summers he had skills that could serve well in the building trades, but the economic downturn left him with only the option of working with foreclosed homes.

"So on one hand it was my responsibility to clear out these houses and fix them up so they could be resold," he said. "And at the same time it was shocking and emotionally taxing to be amidst people's personal belongings. Many houses where largely vacant and cleaned out by the time I got to them, but often you could really get a sense of, and begin to shape a narrative of, people's lives. And more often than not, people who are going through foreclosure are dealing with more than just that: unemployment, divorce, illness, arrests or countless other things that fuck up peoples' lives."

He said that early on it was unnerving going into such sites of sadness but eventually he grew accustomed.

"The images are voyeuristic. I wish I could say that they weren't, but they give no voice to the individuals being depicted and no agency," he says.

Hazel Ave., Woodbury, MN

"Over time working in foreclosure, you become very desensitized to it," he says. "When you're responsible for maintaining 30-plus houses, that's the overwhelming priority. And there is also something else that's strange about Minnesota and foreclosure. This state's foreclosure policies are much more humane than other states. The foreclosure process here starts nine months before a person has to leave their house. So individuals are more than aware what's going on and are often resolved to the fact that they're going to lose their house. Not to say that it's not emotional and financially devastating, it's just a different environment than many people imagine."

Hazel Ave., Woodbury, MN

Some of the most difficult experiences involved meeting with people who had refinanced their homes into Adjustable Rate Mortgages or took out mortgages against their houses, he said.

"Usually they were older couples who were trying to get a little more money to subsidize their income and their houses were already paid off," Proechel says. "I photographed one couple, Joe and DeAnne, who had lived in their house for 40 years before they had to leave."

Joe and DeAnne, Minneapolis, MN

Ai Weiwei Update: 05.05.11

2011-05-05T06:17:00.002-05:00

• Neugerriemschneider is hosting a show of Ai Weiwei's work, advertised by a huge "Where is Ai Weiwei?" banner on the Berlin gallery's facade by Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija (above). The New York Times on the exhibition (thanks, Kelsey):

Ai’s meditative installation features two sculptures, “Rock” and “Tree,” and offers a sanctuary in which the solace of nature has been fabricated with the help of premodern technology. “Rock” consists of a series of white porcelain outcroppings, fabricated in the city of Jingdezhen (the supposed birthplace of porcelain) and painted with a swirling blue motif. “Tree” assembles two trees together from segments of fallen trunks harvested in southern China, using a traditional Chinese technique involving giant screws and that adds a kinetic twist to their natural shape. The arrangement encourages a Taoist interpretation — the white “rocks” also resemble a formation of clouds floating across the floor, suggesting a temporary union of Heaven and Earth in which distinctions between the natural and synthetic have been collapsed.

• NPR talks to Tang Chin, aka Tangerine, the 22-year old graffiti artist who's been stenciling "Who's afrai of Ai Weiwei?" stencils around Hong Kong. She faces a maximum of ten years in prison if captured by police for property damage. "I have to thank the police for drawing so much attention to this issue. Even if I have to go to jail, I think that would be a very, very worth it price to pay," she says. Others are now downloading Tangerine's stencil to do their own graffiti, and one artist is doing "flash graffiti" -- projections on city walls -- of the imagery.

• As writer/curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist calls Ai's blog -- released in book form last month by The MIT Press --"one of the greatest social sculptures of our time," The Telegraph posts the detained artist's top 10 tweets, translated into English.

• Through their "Ai Weiwei Works Here" campaign, Signal Fire's Amy Harwood and Ryan Pierce offer a downloadable "image as a graphic for screens and printed matter, and thereby brings Weiwei into homes, studios, streets, and virtual spaces."

• “The more a city embraces diversity and tolerates dissent, the stronger it becomes,” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at the unveiling of Ai's Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads sculpture in Central Park Wednesday. Calling on China to release the artist, he said, “And there is no place on earth that gives freer rein to more voices and viewpoints than New York City ... This is a message from America to the whole world that we are the place where people can come and express themselves. China would be well served to listen to our message and to copy us.”

• Sculptor Anish Kapoor on Tuesday: "I wish to dedicate my new work, Leviathan at the Grand Palais, Paris, to my colleague Ai Weiwei. His arrest, disappearance and alleged torture are unacceptable. When governments silence artists it bears witness to their barbarity."

• Now it appears that reporting on Ai is a jailable offense: The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that Caijing magazine journalist Zhang Jialong, who'd written and tweeted about Ai, has been missing since having a "talk" with Beijing police on April 28. Ai's friend, journalist Wen Tao, has been missing since April 3.

Nadia Plesner on Louis Vuitton case: "This is a great day for art"

2011-05-04T11:22:00.005-05:00

Danish artist Nadia Plesner sends an email with her reaction to today's ruling by a judge in The Hague throwing out Louis Vuitton's copyright infringment lawsuit against her. "I am absolutely overwhelmed with joy, and I cried when I heard the great news," she writes.

She continues:

I hoped for the best, but never expected the result to be this positive! The judge completely anulled the court order from January 27th, so now I don't have to pay the fine of 485.000 Euros anymore. I am also free to show Darfurnica and Simple Living [the image that was the subject of Vuitton's 2008 lawsuit against her].

It has been a hard and intensive time, and I am pleased that it is over. The good thing about the legal case is, that Darfurnica got much more attention, and therefore the situation in Darfur got more attention. I hope that my painting has inspired some some debate about media and priorities.

I am also very grateful from all the support I have been receiving from all over the world, especially from Darfurian people who reached out to me.

Today is a great day for art. If I had lost this, I believe it would have caused many artists to censor their own work to avoid legal trouble. Now we have won back our freedom to make reference to the modern society we live in.

EU court rules against Louis Vuitton in Nadia Plesner copyright case

2011-05-04T10:28:00.010-05:00

Artist Nadia Plesner has prevailed in a copyright infringement lawsuit leveled by luxury handbag manufacturer Louis Vuitton for her use of the company's iconic bag in her painting Darfurnica (detail at right). A court in The Hague handed down its ruling this morning, finding that "the importance of Plesner (freedom of expression through her work) outweighs the importance of Vuitton (protection of property)" (according to a Google translation of a Dutch news story).

Vuitton was seeking a penalty of 5,000 Euros per day for each day her large-scale painting -- inspired by Picasso's Guernica, but created to raise awareness of the plight of people in Darfur, Sudan, and western indifference to it -- remained on her website. The company began its tally on Jan. 28. It also sought to prevent her from exhibiting the work online or in the European Union.

Plesner made headlines in 2008 when Vuitton sued her for using the image of a Darfurian boy with an Audra handbag in t-shirts. Plesner has since started a foundation to raise funds to help people in Darfur, Tanzania, Uganda and elsewhere, and the attention of this most recent suit -- which has garnered headlines in newspapers and blogs worldwide (not to mention the eye of street artists) -- will surely help boost the profile of those efforts.

According to a Danish news report, Louis Vuitton -- which posted profits of $28.26 billion last year -- has been ordered by The Hague to pay Plesner's legal costs.

Plesner, who gave her defense at The Hague on April 21, wrote on her website when the suit was filed, "The story about Darfur must be told, and I believe I should have my artistic freedom of speech to do so." The Hague, sensibly, concurred.

Update: Nadia Plesner on Louis Vuitton case: "This is a great day for art."

(Thanks to the commenter who tipped me off about the decision.)

File under: This could be art

2011-05-03T10:28:00.005-05:00

ATV guy celebrates Osama bin Laden's death.

Ai Weiwei Update: 05.03.11

2011-05-03T08:30:00.005-05:00

• One month ago today, artist Ai Weiwei was taken into police custody. No formal charges have been filed, his family reportedly has not had contact with him, and his whereabouts remain unknown.

• In Hong Kong, someone dubbed "Cpak Ming" is projecting "flash graffiti" images of Ai's face on buildings around town, including the barracks of the People's Liberation Army, and then posting photos on Facebook. The likeness is the same as the one created by "Chin Tangerine," who's been tracked by the police for stenciling the image on HK sidewalks.

• Ai's installation of millions of sunflower seeds in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall is scheduled to come down this week, but The Australian reports that 10 million of the porcelain seeds will be retained in a "1.5m-high conical sculpture that willbe a symbol of solidarity with the artist."

• Charlotte Eaton, a 32-year old London woman, protested Ai's detention yesterday with a nude walk across the bed of sunflower seeds. "I didn't want to be removed by security so didn't stay long. I heard someone shout 'bravo', which was very nice," she said. "No action was taken against me by security guards, and a member of the Tate's press smiled at me as I winked at her and left."

• Yesterday's unveiling of Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads in Central Park was postponed by Mayor Bloomberg's office, upstaged by the killing of Osama bin Laden. Despite the delay, activists rallied around the works yesterday to show support for the artist.

• Check out ArtInfo.com's multimedia timeline of Ai's life.

• In another nod to Ai's 2007 work Fairytale: 1001 Qing Dynasty Wooden Chairs -- which sparked global 1001 Chairs for Ai Weiwei protests on April 17 -- pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong commemorated the first month of Ai's captivity by using chairs to form the Chinese character for "prison" in Victoria Park.

• While western governments have condemned Ai's detention without charge, Taiwan's president, Ma Ying-jeou, has not, a fact activists there pointed out yesterday at a rally where they urged Ma to take a stand.

Osama: The stencils

2011-05-02T12:06:00.005-05:00

Segue Sundries

Osama bin Laden has given street artists material for years. While I haven't seen any dead-Osama street-art yet, here's a look at some stencils inspired by the long-uncaught (until now) terrorist.

Bear and Toad

Katutaide

Guo Gai released from detention, but unable to leave Beijing

2011-05-02T11:13:00.003-05:00

Guo Gai, the Chinese artist detained on Mar. 24 after photographing a pro-democracy performance at the Beijing Museum of Contemporary Art is free. The Soap Factory here in Minneapolis confirms its earlier note, adding that according to University of Minnesota professor and sculptor Tom Rose, Gai was released on April 24 and is in "reasonable health." The artist won't, however, be allowed to leave China -- or Beijing -- for any reason, including attending the exhibition of his politically charged large scale photos (pictured) and choral piece in Minneapolis late this summer.

Debra DeNoyelles at the Soap says the art venue is having discussions about how to present and discuss Gai's work in the context of the current crackdown on dissent and free speech in China. His work will be presented with that of Meng Tang and Natalia Slinko. Tang, DeNoyelles writes in an email, was "barely allowed out of China at the beginning of [last] month. (She was only able to leave because a friend who is a flight attendant allowed her to change flights surreptitiously.)" A former instructor at the Beijing Academy of Film, Tang now says she doesn't think she'll be able to leave for the next year.

More on this exhibition, Gai's work and the work of Slinko and Tang as the Aug. 27 exhibition opening approaches.

Newsworthy train graffiti: BIRTHERS

2011-04-29T13:30:00.000-05:00

BIRTHERS graffiti, shot by Martin Olson, on a rail mural by IMPEACH, AMFM and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Here's another shot.

Earlier: Rage on the rails: ALB's IMPEACH, POVERTY, BAILOUT.

Ai Weiwei Update: 04.29.11

2011-04-29T07:33:00.001-05:00

• Twenty-five days since Ai Weiwei disappeared, and counting.

• A new petition calls on international artists, galleries and museums to stop showing work in China. Says the drive posted at Avaaz.org, "We’ll deliver it at the Venice Biennale exhibition soon, and publish the reactions of major galleries and artists." More than 53,000 people have signed.

• Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi tweets about the attack by Chinese hackers -- first confirmed by Eyeteeth -- on Change.org for hosting a petition, now at 126,000 signatories, calling for China to release Ai. According to the San Fransciso Chronicle, the Denial of Service attack, coming from Chinese IP addresses, continues.

• Ai's friend, musician Zuoxiao Zuzhou, tweets “Everything is ok now, thanks for your concerns," after disappearing for several days. Via ANIMAL.

• Didi Kirsten Tatlow, writing from China for the New York Times: "An outspoken artist angers rulers with his savage, satirical wit. A crusader for political freedom and social justice, he lives in fear of arrest. Beaten and jailed, he becomes famous far beyond the borders of his land. That was Voltaire, the hero of Europe’s 18th-century Enlightenment. It is also Ai Weiwei..."

• Time Out London's March interview with Ai is wide-ranging, eerily prescient and instructive about the state of Chinese authoritarianism, from foreign journalists being punched for covering news to a young Chinese person being arrested for placing a white flower on the ground to this:

[O]n the Chinese internet you cannot type any sentence with the word 'tomorrow' in it -- the word 'tomorrow' has become a sensitive word.Because maybe people will say, “Tomorrow we will all walk in Wang Fu Jing.” [The central spot in Beijing for the recent jasmine protest activity]. At the same time you cannot type, 'today'. The machine will just take anything with 'today' in it. [Laughs] It's really amazing that you can't use the words tomorrow and today. So you can see how extremely nervous they have become. And there's no discussion, no intellectual exchanges or argument. It's so much like Chinese parents from the olden times, where the children just had to listen to them without showing any sign of disagreement, or questioning, or different attitudes. To try and challenge the economic and political situation today is not going to be OK. That is going to be devastating. This nation has had no creativity for the past 100 years.

Welded graffiti plaque by NOISE

2011-04-28T15:03:00.002-05:00

This welded plaque on Mississippi railroad bridge in Northeast Minneapolis -- probably a piece by this writer -- is a good book-end to the guerrilla "Struggle" placard that's on the nearby bridge between Boom Island and Nicollet Island.