From Anna Skladmann's "Little Adults," a series of portraits of children of Russia's nouveau riche. Via Conscientious
• The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum just announced the winners of the 10th National Design Awards. A local winner: the Walker Art Center gets the Corporate Achievement Award. (Runner up was Dwell Magazine, creative directed by former Walker graphic designer Kyle Blue.)
San Francisco filmmaker Craig Baldwin's essential "Sonic Outlaws" is now online in its entirety at Ubuweb. The 1995 documentary profiles the audio-collage band Negativland just after they were sued by Island Records for their parody album featuring U2 and audio of cussin' "American Top 40" host Casey Kasem. A classic for anyone interested in fair use, copyfight and culturejamming.
• The Big Picture runs a haunting, odd, beautiful, sobering series on "human landscapes from above," and GOOD follows it up with aerial views of California highways, shot by Benny Chan and on view at the Pasadena Museum of California Art (through September).
• Minneapolis' John Grider of Broken Crow (above) and Brooklyn's Logan Hicks of Workhorse Visuals are being set loose on an abandoned bank in Brooklyn this week: Broken Horse will be the temporary installation of their collaborative work in the former Hamilton Savings & Loan Building. The opening reception is May 1; the following night Grider will be part of the Artbreak Gallery (Williamsburg) exhibition, The Great Out Doors.
• John Perreault: "Currently art is not global; but art education is. The stress-free Generationalfeels like, looks like, smells like any MFA thesis show that one might happen upon anywhere in the world." Via South 12th.
• Peter Eleey on the human skeleton buried in an unmarked location on the Walker Art Center grounds by artist Kris Martin: "Kris wanted to take a human skeleton that had been used for medical research and to bury it in an unmarked site, so this person who had been objectified would have a dignified resting place. You know it's there, but the anonymity makes it a powerful symbol of death itself... Kris' piece reminds us of how we treat our war dead. Until recently we didn't even allow photos of their coffins covered with flags. His piece only achieves the right to explore this issue because it's fundamentally rooted in a gesture of respect."
On April 25th, 2009, Jordan Seiler and PublicAdCampaign.com organized a massive takeover of these [unregistered, illegal] billboards called NYSAT (New York Street Advertising Takeover): 126 billboards throughout the city were white washed by dozens of volunteers. Then, over 80 artists transformed the advertising space into their personal pieces of art. Here's what I made.
The call-and-response street-art campaignEnjoy Banking takes the visual vocabulary of marketing, especially the kind of low-low-prices hype seen in windows of discount stores and loan-hawking banks and renders them, fittingly in "bubble" type, on stickers for application around New York City. Via NEWSgrist and Edward Winkelman.
• Paul Fryer's Pieta, a sculpture of Christ in the electric chair, has been raising hackles in Gap, France. Some, including the newspaper Le Monde, reacted angrily to its installation in a cathedral, but the work (from the collection of Francois Pinault) was suggested by the local bishop, Jean-Michel di Falco. He says:
"Usually, one does not feel any real emotions in front of something really scandalous: the Crucifixion.
• Issue 56 of Visionaire, the editioned art and fashion publication, is "solar": it "uses photo-sensitive printing wizardry that instantly transforms black-and-white artwork—by contributing artists that include Yoko Ono, M/M Paris, Alex Katz, John Baldessari, and Ryan McGinley—into vibrant color when exposed to direct sunlight."
• There's little of interest in this Flavorwire interview on "redefining urban art at the auction house," except for the last paragraph, in which Phillips de Pury & Co. curator Alex Smith give props to artist Judith Supine.
Walker Art Center curator Peter Eleey discusses two works in the exhibition The Quick and the Dead, which opens tonight. Tobias Rehberger's All your last week's desires, which features 11 lamps that replicate and respond to the lighting conditions at the museum one week prior to the moment you're looking at it. Pierre Huyghe's Timekeeper, a simple work made by sanding down a spot on the gallery wall revealing the history of the room, like rings on a tree. (Kudos to the Walker on this: hopefully, many more such videos are in the works.)
• Eyebeam/Anti-Advertising Agency guy makes "ADVERTISING: WE WANT GRAFFITI" stencils to apply to ads placed on graf walls.
• Stock market down, "agrivestment" up: "According to the NCREIF US Farm Index and the Lehman US Bond Index, returns to direct investments in farmland have exceeded stock and bond returns over the past 5, 10, and 17 years, with less volatility."
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.
• 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."
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.
• 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."
• 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.”
• 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.
• Hey: buy some pixels at Rhizome's 50,000 Dollar Webpage, equal parts "fundraiser, art collaboration, billboard, classified ad and community builder."
"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.
• "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.
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."
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.'
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.
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.
• 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.
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.
• 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.
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.
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.
Paul Schmelzer is a writer and editor in Minneapolis. Formerly managing editor of Walker Reader(2011–2020), the Walker Art Center's digital magazine, he is cofounder of The Ostracon, an art writing site created through funds from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Creative Capital's Arts Writers Grant program; creator of Signifier, Signed; a former editor at Adbusters; and contributor to Artforum.com, Cabinet, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, The Progressive, Raw Vision, Utne,and others.More >>
