Trailer: Art21, Season 5

Featuring Mary Heilmann, William Kentridge, Yinka Shonibare and others.

Lo-fi pop: Vintage computers play Queen, Lipps Inc.

Lipps Inc.'s "Funkytown," as played by a Commodore 64, several TI-99s, an Intel modem and other vintage computer hardware, followed by an equally lo-fi remix of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," with a dot-matrix printer playing lead.

Onion headline:

Here.

Bits: 04.19.09

Jason Lazarus, Untitled (2008), via i [heart] photograph

• Rest in Peace: Novelist J.G. Ballard.

• The idea of making fake utopian newspapers is catching on: The Yes Men's faux New York Times (Nov. 2008), a ginned-up Financial Times (Mar. 2009); and Attac's forward-looking fake Die Zeit, distributed in 90 cities across Germany last month.

• The Guardian's Jonathan James: "The reason I don't like street art is that it's not aesthetic, it's social. To celebrate it is to celebrate ignorance, aggression, all the things our society excels at. For middle class people to find artistic excitement in something that scares old people on estates is a bit sick."

• Smash for Cash: An emergency stash of bills installed near an ATM machine, by Imbue.

• Fire graffiti by Ellis Gallagher.

• Trailer: Food, Inc.

AT-AT anatomy t-shirt

Redbubble:

Anatomy of the AT-AT

Since the Dark Side started using genetically modified walkers, they found many had to visit the Imperial Veterinary Clinic of Osteology suffering with acute pain in their hip joints. X-rays revealed their skeleton structure was just not strong enough to manoeuvre wearing those heavy boots. No amount of Cod Liver oil would ease their pain.

Via Coudal.

Video: Magnum visits Alec Soth's St. Paul studio

Andrew Hetherington goes "inside the photographers_studio" at the St. Paul digs of Alec Soth (who's wasn't there for filming).

Bits: 04.17.09

Street-art plaque by We Will Kill You, via GammaBlog.

• Designer Ji Lee is on a mission: to preserve, photographically at least, New York City logos that still show the World Trade Center towers in their skylines. "These logos will not last forever as many of the small business will either update their logos at some point or close their doors eventually," writes Lee. "Thus the Twin Towers would sadly vanish forever." (Via logodesignlove.)

• Exhibition: Chris Larson's True North opens tonight at the Chambers Burnet Gallery, Minneapolis, with works related to shotguns: shotgun shacks shrouded in ice and 2- and 3-D works made "by literally shooting objects repeatedly and then capturing or reconstructing the aftermath."

• Art Nouveau magazine interviews Justseeds' Josh MacPhee on art and activism.

• A local winner in the PBR Art Contest features two handpainted renderings of a burly guy, a giant squid and a can of beer.

• Here's where to go to win an original Damien Hirst. Really.

• BLDGBLOG on space-based storm control.

• Free stream of Wilco's recent Tangletown show.

Stop-action pig chase

Amazing lo-fi (yet hi-speed) chase between a pig and a wolf. Via Slog (thanks, Jim).

Warning signs

A new public art project by Justseeds in Milwaukee. There's more here.

Art math

Design for Mankind, via Digg.

Bits: 04.16.09

Umbrella sculpture by OzCollective, via Crooked Brains, which offers a compendium of umbrella artworks

• A bit like "droplifting," designer Nick Hum has been buying thrift-store t-shirts, silkscreening on them and then returning them to the stores.

• Zak Smith quoted in Plastic Water (via): “For the last eight years, if not longer, people have felt like this: our country -- and most of our planet -- has been taken over by Martians. Insane, gibbering beings driven by greed and bloodlust, and arcane religious beliefs rule and fight with each other over our planet with weird weapons, while below, we homo-sapiens try to survive any way we can in a haywire of cynicism and wrecked civilizations and technologies that come on like viruses. I cannot think of anything more alien than whatever drives are seething in the heads of Cheney and Bin-Laden and Putin and Wal-Mart.”

• Self portraits by nude models as they sit for painters, via Jörg Colberg.

• Curator Peter Eleey discusses The Quick and the Dead, "an exhibition about the things we don’t know, the big questions and deep mysteries in life, and our desire for experiences that transcend those we have every day," which opens Apr. 25 at the Walker: "I find great beauty in works such as Jason Dodge’s simple bundle of cloth sitting on the gallery floor. The artist asked a weaver in Algeria to make it for him using the length of yarn it would take to go from the surface of the earth to where the weather ends -- essentially the border with outer space. Though it leads your mind to the outer reaches of the atmosphere, the cloth turns out to be much smaller than you might think. But I don’t think the works in the show clarify anything -- like Jason’s cloth, they instead offer expansive ways of thinking about things that are much bigger than themselves."

• The return of U.S. soldiers killed overseas has gone undocumented more than 5,000 times since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan. On Apr. 5, the remains of Air Force Staff Sgt. Phillip Meyers came home, and for the first time in 18 years the press was allowed to photograph it. The Big Picture offers a selection of photos showing the sobering yet stirring scenes from the return of fallen U.S. war heroes to home soil.

• An urban sketcher has created a Google Map of drawings throughout Barcelona.

• Hey: buy some pixels at Rhizome's 50,000 Dollar Webpage, equal parts "fundraiser, art collaboration, billboard, classified ad and community builder."

• LA artist Mark Bradford is giving a free artist talk at the Walker Art Center this Sunday.

• NASA's Chandra X-ray captures an image of the Helix planetary nebula, dubbed "the hand of God."

The Wrong Brand

"We here at The Wrong Brand do not intend to confuse (ahem, ahem you trademark lawyers out there), but rather to mock." So say the creators of the site that sells t-shirts bearing the mashed-up logos of Saks and Wal-Mart, Google and Yahoo, and (shudder) Apple and Microsoft.

Via Rob Walker's Delicious.

Bits: 04.15.09

Ryan Waller's entry into the One World Trade Center logo design contest, via Media Assassin.

• "The first Biennale for International Light Art will take place in 2010, in the Ruhr Area in the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia, from 28 March to 27 May 2010."

• The Smithsonian launched a new blog on its photography collection on Monday: The Bigger Picture.

• Trailer: Lars Von Trier's Antichrist (Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Scariness).

• Seven of 17 charges of vandalism against Shepard Fairey were dropped in Boston Monday, due to lack of evidence.

• Eddie Van Halen's coming out with a line of Converse-style hi-tops, marked with the same stripes as his guitar.

• Warhol-style Brillo box bathroom tiles.

• Tattoo artist Scott Campbell's laser-cut stacks of $1 bills.

• Via Cynical-C, 25 years of Las Vegas' growth, as seen from a satellite.

Steve McQueen's Hunger

When Steve McQueen showed the financiers of his new feature-length film an early cut, they were "shitting themselves," the British artist recalls. His first full-length film, which captures the final weeks of Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands' life, begins with a 22-minute scene -- 17 minutes of which have no cuts, pans or closeups -- of an actor playing Sands discussing his plan to starve himself. Not exactly the stuff of box office gold. But McQueen says, “I knew what I was doing.”

Apparently so. The Turner Prize winner won a Caméra d'Or at Cannes this year for Hunger, which plays at Minneapolis' Walker Art Center Apr. 10 through 26. McQueen was a boy when Sands, a member of the Irish Republican Army, started his hunger strike in 1981, but while it left a mark on him, he says the story has been "swept beneath the carpet, it hasn't been given any daylight, and for me it was one of, if not the, most important events happening in Britain in the last 30 years."



Then 27, Sands' final weeks of life were slow and excruciating: it took him 66 days to starve himself to death. But while Sands protested the British government, Hunger isn't intended as a fiercely political work (critic Rob Nelson says the World Socialist World criticized McQueen for the apolitical nature of the work). He told the Wall Street Journal, "Hero or villain, that's for other people to decide. For me, it's one of those situations where I'm a filmmaker, and this is actually what happened in history, this is a true event. For me, this is what happened. I'm not here to judge the situation; I'm here to examine and document it."

Still, McQueen won't say it's "art" either. The Observer's Sean O'Hagan writes:

A friend of mine from Northern Ireland, who has seen Hunger, said McQueen had 'pulled off the impossible' by 'making an art film about the IRA'. When I mention the term 'art film', McQueen thows me a fierce look. 'I don't know what you mean by that,' he says. 'What I tried to do was make the strongest, most powerful film I could from the events and the story. It may not have the conventional narrative of most feature films but that is my way of grappling with the subject. Art has absolutely nothing to do with it.'

More:
IndieWIRE: Weights and Measures: Steve McQueen’s “Hunger”

Making homelessness visible

Two projects set out to raise visibility of homelessness -- the first by making a homeless man invisible. In Düsseldorf during Christmas, a man named Lutz hawks copies of FiftyFifty, a paper made by homeless people, while projected him on him is video of the scene behind him. The message (as a cardboard placard in front of him says): "Don't ignore me."

The placards visible in a project for the Weingart Homeless Center in Los Angles reads, "Before you look away, put yourself in my place." A photographer shot some of the city's 70,000 homeless "in the places they call home," and then printed the images out as life-sized cardboard cutouts with the faces removed. These cut-outs were placed in upscale shopping districts in Beverly Hills.

D&D co-creator Arneson dies

Huffington Post:

Dave Arneson, one of the co-creators of the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy game and a pioneer of role-playing entertainment, died after a two-year battle with cancer, his family said Thursday. He was 61.

Arneson's daughter, Malia Weinhagen of Maplewood, said her father died peacefully Tuesday in hospice care in St. Paul.

Via Secrets of the City.

Bits: 04.09.09

A Mark Wagner dollar-bill collage, via SynapseCollapse.

• Buy:COLLECT, an exhibition curated by Yuri Arajs and Robyne Robinson opening this Saturday at the Bookman Stacks, Minneapolis, with works by Aesthetic Apparatus, Frank Gaard, Amy Rice, Ben Olson and others.

• Desperate plea for attention: artist flies banner on New Museum facade that reads, "Please New Museum show my work." (Via C-Monster.)

• Also via C-Monster, Yayoi Kusama-designed cellphones.

• Trailer: Crips & Bloods: Made in America, a new documentary by Stacy Paralta (Dogtown and Z Boys, Riding Giants).

• Guerrilla slide installed by artists Stefan Benchoam and Christian Ochaita in Guatamala City "as a protest against Mayor Alvaro Arzu, for his lack of interest in providing the City with adequate public areas for recreation."

• Free Artist's Talk: Mark Bradford at the Walker Art Center, Sunday, April 19.

• Roger Ebert compares Bill O'Reilly to a mouse with an erection.

• Chia President: Walgreen's pulls Barack Obama Chia Pet after receiving complaints.

Congrats, Brian!

Congratulations to Brian Ulrich, Chicago-based photographer and Eyeteeth pal, on winning a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship. (Via Amy Stein.)

Bits: 04.08.09

A Buckminster Fuller portrait for Mined magazine, created by HunterGatherer. Via AMNP.

• "Recessional Aesthetics": In Dubai, the UK, and beyond, artists may be the accidental beneficiaries of the cruddy economy. As businesses and commercial spaces close, artists are moving in to score affordable studios.

• Today in pink: Day-glo trash bags, and a natty stormtrooper at the G20 protests.

• With LA artist Mark Bradford giving the keynote at next week's National Art Education Association conference here in Minneapolis, Art:21 interviews Bradford and offers a clip of the artist discussing Practice, a video of a hoopskirt-wearing Bradford shooting baskets (part of the Walker Art Center's collection).

• Frank Zappa on What's My Line?, Zappa on "The Monkees," and a Zappa soundtrack to a 1967 Ludens coughdrops commercial.

• Exhibition: Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World / Part 1_Volume 1_Chapter_1 (Beirut: 1992-2005), a project by Walid Raad, opens Friday at REDCAT.

• Video: An excerpt from René Laloux’s "mesmerising psychedelic sci-fi animated feature," Fantastic Planet (1973), via Jennifer Yin.

• MCAD grad Mike Perry has a new project: a kit of 50 iron-ons.

• UK residents swarm a Google Street View car, complaining about "invasion of privacy" and fears that the imagery could be used by burglars.

• Argyle skull socks!

Bits: 04.07.09

IBM 360 Model 30 Tape Drives 1965 by Mark Richards, via 20x200

• WiiSpray, a project by Bauhaus media students to create "an interface to give graffiti a new virtual level surpassing tactile boundaries of the tangible world." Via Graffart.eu.

• Letters to Bob, a Tumblr blog featuring correspondence between art-school buddies jotted on pages ripped from Artforum.

• Matt's right. This is what American Idol should be like: Stephen Sondheim instructing a singer on "Send in the Clowns."

• Evan Roth has created stickers for guerrilla use at music stores that read, "Available for free on the internet."

• Exhibition: Barry McGee, Raymond Pettibon and Ed Templeton at CIRCLEculture Gallery, Berlin, Apr. 10-May 30.

• Harmony Korine (Gummo, Kids) is doing ads for Liberty Mutual?

• Fruity design, via Coudal.

• It's the little things that matter.

• The Onion: "Scholars Discover 23 Blank Pages That May As Well Be Lost Samuel Beckett Play."

• Picture: Ohio man arrested for drunk driving on a motorized bar stool.

G20: Pantsless protest

The Boston Globe's Big Picture has the best G20 protest pictures, but it's this one at Huffington Post that begs for a caption. Suggestions?

Bits: 04.03.09

In the wee hours of April Fool's Day 2009 in St. Petersburg, Russia, teenagers detonated explosives in the backside of a statue of Lenin.

• Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris turns his Interrotron -- which he's used to interview Abu Ghraib guards, Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara, and moderate voters who supported Barack Obama -- on a new topic: his and hers Depends adult diapers.

• There are some real gems in Yoko Ono's official Flickr stream.

• Art:21 episodes are on Hulu!

• Trailer: Sasha Baron Cohen follows up Borat with... Bruno. Here, Bruno interviews skinheads at "Evilfest."

• The Twin Cities' artsiest tax guy, Mark Fox, interviewed by TCBiz.

• G20 photo, aptly headlined, "How Many Cameras Does it Take to Break a Window?"

• A Marcel Dzama-directed video for Department of Eagles.

• The U.S. Post Office is making Simpson's stamps.

"Pity the Nation"

I've got chills: Staceyann Chin reads Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "Pity the Nation." Here's Ferlinghetti reading it 10 weeks earlier, in September 2007, and here's the text:

Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own
and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.
Pity the nation—oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.

Via Curate.

Decemberists, Calexico to headline Rock the Garden '09

Rock the Garden 2008, by Cameron Wittig

The Walker Art Center just announced the lineup for Rock the Garden 2009, their annual outdoor music festival, to be held this June 20:

The Decemberists

Calexico

Yeasayer

Solid Gold

One welcome change this year: Instead of standing in the street to watch bands, as in past years (see above), the stage this year will be moved so that audiences can sit on the grassy hillside beside the Walker. That according to Walker performing arts curator Philip Bither, who just made the band announcements on The Current.

Bits: 03.31.09

"Louis Vuitton watermelon slice" lollipop by Massimo Gammacurta

• Misquoting Voltaire: It turns out the famed French philosopher never said, "I disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

• Excellent: 27 visualizations and infographics to understanding the financial crisis. Via Proximity.

• Marilyn Minter's latest lip-goo video installation.

• "Anti-globalization activists Attac distributed 150,000 fake copies of Die Zeit, Germany’s largest weekly newspaper. Headlines present reports the group said it thinks can become reality within 13 months, from nationalized banks to agreement among global leaders."

• How an African-American in the White House plays in Russian advertising: "Chocolate in Vanilla."

• Think twice about getting Red Stripe beer to sponsor your art opening: Boycott Jamaica says rights activists have dubbed the island the "most homophobic place on earth."

• RIP: Photographer Helen Levitt

• Video: 8 Million Stories, 2009 by David Ellis, in which he and his crew "discovered how to precisely control the player-piano solenoid systems that automate the recycled garbage in their work."

• Bauhaus B&B: Famed art/design school in Dessau opens up student quarters for tourist lodging.

• A Seattle crosswalk that lights up when you set foot on it.

• Kid's rooftop weiner drawing viewable from space.

Amnesty ad: "Everybody is against everybody, but somebody has to be for them"

This ad for Amnesty Portugal offers a "big message, delivered in a heightened reality, given appropriate weight without vibing like overbearing charity bullshit," writes AdRants. Agreed.

Sign of the times: "America is dying" graffiti

31st and Clinton, Minneapolis

Culturejamming Claes: Spoonbridge and Cherry "replaced" with an exact replica

While the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden's centerpiece, Spoonbridge and Cherry, is undergoing refinishing, it has been replaced with a "recent acquisition," Spoonbridge (before Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen) -- "an exact replica of the original sculpture's spoon bridge." At least that's what the sculpture's new descriptive panel now says. The new work, attributed to American artist Evan Drolet Cook (b.1984), was discovered by one Peter Englund, who emailed me his photos of the sculpture and didactic label. The label includes Oldenburg's famous quote about being "for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all," as well as a quote by aritst Maurizio Cattelan, and reads, in part:

Meant to toy with Spoonbridge and Cherry's undisputed status as an icon of the Twin Cities; a marvel that (like all sculptural icons whose image over time begins to stand in for the city's skyline itself, as the Eiffel Tower does for Paris, the Statue of Liberty does for New York, or the Flying Pigs do for Cincinnati) has inhabited the public's image bank for so long it has become frozen, like a picture affront the postcard that made it famous. By replacing the sculpture for a limited period of time with an exact but imperfect replica for a finite amount of time, it begs us to revisit the site and thusly rediscover the true icon's scope, importance and magic in the notable dissonance of its absence.

Click for larger version

Indeed, that seems to be how Englund discovered the altered label. Englund explained in an email that he was photographing the sculpture, but didn't bother reading the label ("who does? it's the the friggin' Spoon and Cherry after all"). Only when he dropped his lens cap, did he notice the culturejammed curatorial statement. "Appropriation to its logical end, it seems," he wrote.

Another layer of intrigue: Cook -- if he's really behind this -- is a gallery monitor at the Walker Art Center, which owns Spoonbridge and Cherry, and a former Film/Video intern and blogger at the institution.

Bits: 03.26.09

Sam Spenser's Bloom, via rebel:art

• Obama and the arts: "[T]he three lesser appointments Obama has so far made in the cultural arena — a Chicago lawyer named Kareem Dale, a Hollywood fund-raiser named Jeremy Bernard, and an Obama Senate staffer named Anita Decker — have been strange at best and, at worst, deflating. None has much arts expertise; what they do have are political connections."

• Mussolini's Rome bunker transformed into a contemporary art gallery.

• George Orwell's adopted son recalls his dad's “heart of deep paternal affection.”

• Bachelard, Benjamin, Bey.... An experimental geography reading list compiled by Rhizome's Marisa Olson.

• LACMA takes a look at Jedediah Caesar’s Gleaners Stone, a public sculpture in Culver City "assembled from resin, pigment and various found objects culled from the environment and the artist’s studio."

• Video: A 2007 "urban camouflage" performance in Stockholm.

• After art and politics, Art:21 takes on art + economics, and they want your input.

• Weatherization rap: M.I.A.'s Paper Planes becomes an ode to double-pane windows. ("We've got fewer leaks than the KGB.")

• KFC seems to think that filling potholes (and spraypainting their logo on the black fill piles) is going to make me want to fill my belly with their fried chicken.

Turn-off

Find more videos like this on AdGabber

Janeane Garafolo painting with her armpit hair is less of a turnoff than the Big Turn Off, the World Wildlife Federation's action this Saturday at 8:30 p.m. when everyone is asked to switch off the lights for an hour.

Trailer: Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are

Here's a first glimpse of Spike Jonze's theatrical adapation of the book, Where the Wild Things Are.

Minnesota's Finest: Bachmann's bizarre questions on financial bailouts

Just...wow. Minnesota Republican Michele Bachmann questioned Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke today about financial bailouts and succeeded in annoying just about everyone and exposing her lack of knowledge about governance. Right out of the gate, Barney Frank introduces Bachmann as the "gentleman from Minnesota" (am I hearing that correctly?). Then Bachmann asks Treasury Secretary Geithner what specific clause in the Constitution give the Treasury the authority to do what it's done since March 2008; she didn't seem to grasp that, as Geithner said, “Every action that the Treasury and the Fed and the FDIC has been using authority granted by this body, the Congress.” She then asked both Geithner and Fed Chair Bernanke if they "categorically renounce" China's call for a global currency. "They both are like uhh, obviously," Wonkette reports. "And then it’s a few more questions until Barney Frank finally tells Bachmann to shut the fuck up." (Note the guy behind Bernanke who at 3:54 starts shaking his head, I'd guess in disbelief.)

Bits: 03.23.09

Brian Ulrich, CIRCUIT CITY, 2008, courtesy of the artist

• Chicago photographer Brian Ulrich's new series on abandoned big-box stores and empty malls is featured in the Mar. 23 issue of TIME. From the archives, here's my audio slideshow/interview with Brian from last March. Related: The trailer for the film Malls R Us.

• This Saturday, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, presents the international panel, "Curating and Activism," a daylong shindig featuring videos by Andrea Bowers and Josephine Meckseper; lectures and panels with guests including Michael Rakowitz, Sharon Hayes, Steve Kurtz and others; and more. The Galleries at Moore has the details.

• Forecast announces its 2009 public-art grant recipients.

• Spacesick redesigns logos for evil fictional corporations from movies, including Tyrell Corporation from Blade Runner and Rekall from Total Recall. Related: Your Logo Makes Me Barf. Via Adfreak.

• A German company that makes Obama-Fingers fried chicken tenders "says it was unaware of the possible racist overtones of the product.”

• While no empirical evidence exists yet, animal rescue groups say black dogs are more discriminated against than dogs of other colors-- meaning longer shelter stays and higher euthanasia rates. [via]

Bits: 03.22.09

German artist Johan Lorbeer floats above the crowd at a Madrid train station (his leaning arm is fake, concealing a support structure connecting to the wall).

• Israeli arms manufacturer RAFAEL tries to sell "indigenous air systems" to India with a cheesy Bollywood-style video.

• The Walker's red-turned-yellow giant cherry is now green (temporarily).

• Improv Everywhere turns a Manhattan subway station into a temporary art gallery.

• Video of a 1994 project at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, Calif., by Nina Katchadourian, Steven Matheson and Mark Tribe in which "50 professional and volunteer parking attendants directed the arriving cars to predetermined lots according to car color" -- nearly 3,500 cars in all.

• Pharrell William's suggestive "Perspective Chairs."

• Thousands of LED lights + night time + hundreds of sheep = art.

• A young Hunter S. Thompson plans his spectacular funeral.

• Shuga Records, opening this spring in the former Minnesota Center for Photography space gets a write-up in Finance & Commerce.

Bits: 03.17.09

Rirkrit Tiravanija's Less Oil More Courage on view in the Kunsthalle Fridericianum (Kassel) rotunda through June 21

• Andrei Molodkin, whose past sculptures have rendered Jesus and the word "Democracy" in liquid petroleum, is taking that idea a step further: He's developed a way to boil human corpses down into a "yellowish, sweet crude" oil, which he'll pour into clear molds to create sculpture. He's already got two volunteers, a BBC reporter and a French porn star. The latter wants to be turned into a sculptural depiction of praying hands. Molodkin's Oil Evolution is on view at New York's Daneyal Mahmood Gallery into April.

• Meet Death, Detroit's long-defunct all-black punk band, which preceded Bad Brains by nearly five years. Listen to an mp3 of their frickin' amazing 1976 song "Politicians in My Eyes."

• In New Orleans, artist Mel Chin is enlisting kids to make "fundreds" of millions of dollars. The goal is to make three million of the symbolic bills -- equivalent to the number of real dollars needed to clean up the toxic lead in the city's soil. In the meantime, the bills are stored in a "safehouse," a home transformed into a symbolic bank. Listen to Studio 360's audio report. [via]

• Lion in a sidecar! Plus more on 1930s motordomes.

• Your moment of AIG Guy in a Ché T-shirt.

Landescape: Rich Barlow's "Covers"

I don't intend this as faint praise, but I'm comfortable with Rich Barlow's paintings. At first I attributed this ease to a familiarity with the type of work he makes, which references traditions of landscape representation, and the way he softens familiar motifs by using sumptuous silver leaf and multiple layers of vellum. Then I realized: I recognize them -- at least one of them. The image below is based of the cover art from Hüsker Dü's 1984 album New Day Rising, focusing only on the landscape. (For others of his 12 x 12"-square works, I had to look at the titles: below are Amon Düül II's Phallus Dei and Further by Flying Saucer Attack.)

Barlow's "Covers" series, part of the group show Landescape now on view at Minneapolis' Thomas Barry Gallery, plays with notions of landscape and subtly suggests an interrogation of what landscape is and how we ascribe significance -- or commonly in the realm of rock records, myth. In a general statement on his recent work, Barlow writes:

Though inherently meaningless, the natural world is again and again imbued with meaning in visual art. It is treated as a repository of emotion, emblem of nation, and expression of spirituality, inscribed with myth and history and controlled through our gaze. When viewing the natural world and its representations, there is a seductive tendency assume that the meanings we ascribe to it are themselves natural. These meanings are arbitrary, ephemeral and dependent on context, but the desire to render them universal is powerful.

But this series seems not to grasp for meaning but to muddle it in dreamy layers of vellum and foil, raising more questions than answers. He continues:

I am interested in how this imagery is used to produce meaning within the album covers themselves, supposedly saying something about the artist or music they represent, but also in how album covers and other popular culture imagery is used to produce self. I reproduce the images in silver leaf on several layers of vellum, making the images frustratingly unstable and difficult to consume. This difficulty in fully comprehending or consuming the image creates a deferral and heightens the desire to consume the image. The more the meaning is drained from these images and the more their consumption is deferred the more beautiful they become.

Barlow's installation of 25 album-sized works at Thomas Barry delivers on beauty -- trapped under a layer of vellum, the metallic foil appears foggy white; the layers of silverleaf shift from shine to flat black in the gallery's light -- but the significance of the source material gets lost. The gallerist offers neither didactic cards telling the artwork titles or material (they may have appeared on a price list located elsewhere in the gallery) nor the artist's statement to offer a clue that "A Forest," say, is an interpretation of an album by the Cure, instead of say, a painting of... a forest.

But on second thought, perhaps that entirely misses the point.

Bits: 03.15.09

Jota Castro's Mortgage (2009) via C-Monster

• MSNBC told their staff not to mention Jim Cramer's abysmal performance on Thursday's edition of The Daily Show on the air.

• Mug shots of Phish fans arrested at the band's Mar. 11 return concert; street value of confiscated drugs: $1,213,882.80.

• Painted patches, including the I-94 sign.

• Dollars for "goners."

• Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: "The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake."

• The Andy Warhol-directed video for The Cars' "Hello again."

Bits: 03.13.09

• Pardon the hiatus from "Bits." Blame Norm Coleman and whoever gave his donor database to Wikileaks.org.

• Yoshitomo Nara was arrested in New York last month for graffiti writing (above) in the Union Square subway station. After his release from jail he said he enjoyed being locked up: It was just "like in the movies."

• Röyksopp's new video envisions a live-action Space Invaders attack!

• Deuce Seven's show at Minneapolis' SOOVAC opens tonight from 6 to 9.

• Adbusters' video "The Production of Meaning" (2006), "a collection of television spots and video clips produced over the years by regular culture jammers," is now on Ubuweb.

The Land, Mar. 1, 2008

Here's a scan of a photo taken at The Land, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Kamin Lertchaiprasert's sustainability/art project near Sanpatong, Thailand, last March 1. It appeared months later in Chiang Mai Magazine. (That's me, front row, third from the right; Kamin is back row center in the white shirt.) More photos from the trip here.

Bits: 03.06.09

From Elizabeth Heyter's The Travelers: James "La Smoothe" Patterson Jr. Born: September 1966; Died: February 2004

• Worldchanging looks at lk RIP: About death and self-representation on the internet at Mediamatic Amsterdam. An exhibition that looks at "what you leave behind in the online world," the show appears to be in turns macabre, funny and sobering, ranging from Elizabeth Heyert's nearly life-size photos of elaborately dressed deceased Harlem residents, a Ghana-made teddybear coffin, and the website ikRIP.nl, which includes digital last wishes for online profiles.

• Must-read: Bruce Haley's Tao of War Photography (via Kottke). Some of Haley's musings are incredibly funny (i.e don't wear shorts when riding an Asian elephant), but if you look at Haley's porfolio, the more serious offerings stand out: "11. Do you believe in a personal, loving God who really cares about us mortals down here...? Go to a few war zones and famine areas and watch all those innocent children die, then answer this question." (It's followed by: "12. On the flipside of #11: many of the people who have actually suffered through such hardships show the greatest faith I’ve ever encountered on the planet... go figure...")

• In two posts on "branding the recovery," NYT Magazine "Consumed" columnist Rob Walker looks at the Obama administration's recovery logo, calling it, "a bit wimpy to me, a bit, I don’t know, Facebooky or something — or like it represents an iPhone app." (Co-worker Chris emailed that his concern is that the gears don't mesh.) Here, apparently is the rightwing version of it.

• Thoughts about MoMA's NewYorkTimes-worthy MoMA's new website design?

• Opening tonight: Landescape, a group show reconsidering landscape at Thomas Barry Fine Arts. (I plan to review it, so check back.)

• "God Hates Signs!"

The Walker's yellow cherry

Spoonbridge and Cherry, the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden's iconic centerpiece, is getting refurbished, and right about now you'd hardly recognize it. The cherry's been removed from the spoon and shipped to Hugo, Minn., to be sandblasted (above) and resurfaced. A coat of yellow primer (below) will be followed by "another coat of grey epoxy primer, followed by a green fairing compound (similar to bondo), followed by even more layers of primer, paint, and clear-coat." Follow the progress on the museum's Flickr page. (Currently, there are only these two shots.)

And in local cereal box design news...

General Mills is doing throwback cereal boxes...

Bits: 03.04.09

San Suzie at C-Monster: "In Naples, even the street art depicts gory acts of martyrdom."

• Stephen "The Art of Getting Over" Powers, interviewed by GLOB. A taste: "Q. If Tom Cruise made art what would it look like?" "A. hopefully paintings of the volcano on the cover of the dianetics book. maybe he’s a performance artist that puts a giant couch at 76 grand and jumps up and down on it for 30 days." (It, like all of them, are repeated questions; see how other New Yorkers answered.)

• The Winterhouse Awards for Design Writing & Criticism, an AIGA joynt, seeks to "increase the understanding and appreciation of design, both within the profession and throughout American life." Deadline: June 1.

• MAKE Magazine's Make Day is coming to the Science Museum of Minnesota, March 14.

• Via @mnstories, we learn that the Minneapolis Institute of Arts is reducing its staff by 6.1 % -- 11 full-timers and 8 part-timers. MIA director Kaywin Feldman will be taking a 10% cut in pay, and other senior staffers will see salary reductions as well. Read the MIA press release (pdf). Word from the Walker, meanwhile, is that there will be an institution-wide 10 percent budget cut; no details yet on how or if staffing levels will be affected.

• Paddy Johnson, doing a guest post at Art:21, introduces three activist artists you should know: Aaron Gach, Center for Tactical Magic, Jill Magid, System Azure and Carrie Moyer and Sue Schaffner, Dyke Action Machine.

• Pleased to meet you, Provisions Library.

Graffiti zipper

Zip Tape by French-born, Rotterdam/Brussels-based artist Benoit Lemoine. Via Urban Prankster.

For you and your unruly goatee

Speechless.

Gandhi stencil: "Pacifism kicks ass"

[via]

Bits: 03.02.09

A map of "Philippe Gonzalvez Island" via Strange Maps.

• MoMA has fired ad guy Doug Jaeger for authorizing Poster Boy to alter its ads in a Brooklyn subway station. As Gawker puts it, "MOMA has 'completely severed' its relationship with Jaeger, because he went and let this stupid artist mess up their perfectly good ads."

• "You never call, you never write..." Jackie Chan is tired of waiting for Hong Kong to respond to his request for a site to exhibit seven antique homes he owns (including one that's 480 years old). He's been asking for a decade, to no avail. When he asked Singapore officials if they were interested, they got back to him in a week.

• Following up my Art:21 post on Amy Franceschini's Victory Gardens project in San Franscisco, here's an in-depth interview with the artist in the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest. (Thanks, Kelly.)

• Paddy Johnson declares Art in America "officially relevant" for hiring former Curbed.com San Francisco editor Sarah Hromack as its managing editor for online. She's in turn brought in writers like Grammarpolice's Kriston Capps and Paul Laster of Artkrush. (Kriston has more.) My suggestion for giving them more relevance: Add RSS!

• The trailers for the documentary Brooklyn DIY (via updownacross) and for Art Spiegelman's new collection of sketchbooks, Be a Nose!

• A gallery of bad paintings of Barack Obama.

Justseed's Josh MacPhee on the dearth of rightwing graffiti

At the 2009 Conservative Political Action (CPAC) conference this weekend, The Daily Beast's Max Blumenthal found a rare kind of artist: a conservative hip hop musician. Self-defined "Republican rapper" Hi-Caliber says he takes inspiration from the likes of Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh to lay down lyrics like: "A socialist in the White House / what have we done? / You think Bush was bad? / Now the real fun has begun / The Democrats want to take my gun..."

But what Blumenthal found at CPAC, I haven't had much luck in finding in the visual arts: interesting street art coming from a right-of-center perspective. In my search, raised in my Thursday post, "Where's all the rightwing street art?," I got in touch with artist Josh MacPhee, who founded Justseeds, an artists' cooperative, online store, and blog. He couldn't offer examples of artists, but he shared his thoughts on the topic of why they're so hard to find.

He says the American political Left draws from a long history of visual agit-prop, whereas conservatives have used other vehicles. "When [the Right] is marginalized, it has built itself through local radio broadcasts, direct mailings, election to local office, etc.—channels that appear to be legal, mainstream, and legitimate," he says. "The Left has no problem appearing to be speaking from the margins (even if they are speaking from a position generally held by the vast majority, i.e. the anti-war position right now), but the Right always wants to speak from the center, to claim they are being marginalized, but simultaneously appear to be legitimate and supported by the majority."

He posits that illegal or guerrilla art has long been a way for people whose voices aren't represented by corporate media channels to be heard. "For most of the history of this country, and more specifically for the past eight years, the ideas and opinions of the right wing, and even the extreme right wing, have been common currency. They are seen in daily newspapers, heard on the radio, even spread across billboards," he says. "There is much less of a need for right-wing graffiti, when the right wing speaks to the hundreds of millions from TV screens and evangelical church pulpits."

Practical propaganda: Amy Franceschini reinvents the Victory Garden

Ever since stumbling upon an exhibition by Amy Franceschini in San Francisco in 2007, I've wanted to talk with her about her artistic practice and, specifically, her mission to revive San Francisco's famed Victory Gardens program, which were used during the World Wars to grow food for citizens. Guest-blogging at Art:21 provided the perfect opportunity. The founder of Futurefarmers, Franceschini set out to create everything she needed to attract would-be gardeners and help them get started: seed kits, promotional propaganda posters, uniforms, and both symbolic and functional sculptures, hybrids like the "pogoshovel" and "bikebarrow" (above), which she calls "playful sculptural invitations."

An excerpt from Art:21:

Wanting to welcome the broadest range of people, she struggled with what role aesthetics should play in the project. “I tried to convince myself that aesthetics could get in the way of a potent message,” she remembers. “Some people maybe would only go to the surface and not go any further. And I think in the last couple of years I’ve tried to figure out a balance. If you look at Futurefarmers’ work, the aesthetic is always very strong, and that’s been a really positive thing. But I think it can also be a negative thing where certain people only see that surface layer…Right now I’m very much like: aesthetics are really important. That’s what people respond to, it lures people in, it lures in people who maybe wouldn’t have looked at it in the first place, and if they only get to that surface level, fine. At least they got there.”

She sees objects like the pogoshovel as propaganda in sculptural form. She wanted to create a “wonderful and fantastical image —that if someone saw a bike and a wheelbarrow connected, it would make them do a double-take,” she says. “Just to provoke people through a playful image was interesting to me.” (Some of these pieces are functional, as well. When a family is selected to be part of the program, the project delivers their starter materials, fittingly, via pedal-power in a VG Trike/Wagon.)

Read it all.