Two new video moments by Banksy

If you can't see it, the dolphin in the second piece is stuck in a net and jumping a BP barrel.

Via Andrew Flanagan.

Barbara Kruger: "You want it. You need it. You buy it. You forget it."

Barbara Kruger at Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY. Via the New York Times.

Bits: 08.28.10

The Oikos Project's Jellyfish Theatre, London (during construction)

• "London’s first fully-functioning theatre made entirely from recycled and reclaimed materials," Jellyfish Theatre is "a unique mix of public-made art, architecture and performance that explores how a new sustainable society can flourish in a world altered by climate change." It debuted the new work Oikos on Thursday.

• NEA chair Rocco Landesman, in Minneapolis this past week, on how the arts can help us come out of recession.

• Seattle exhibition: Fort Branch: Zack Bent at Vermillion, closes Sept. 4. Via ABB. (Read my interview with Bent: part 1, part 2.)

• Film: Aric Mayer's Aesthetics of Catastrophe, the Short Film, about Hurricane Katrina. Via No Caption Needed. And The Big Picture remembers Katrina, five years later.

• Video: MN Original on Brock Davis (whose art I featured back here and here).

• Anna Wintour is a rag-doll.

• Alec Soth on art and the internet: "I still like physical stuff. The pleasure of being a photographer is having an excuse to wander out into the world. I’ve come to think of the process as being like web-surfing in the real world."

• Prank du jour: Tardis on an MIT roof.

• Video: Norwegian journalist Paul Refsdal embedded with the mujahideen in Afghanistan.

• Jeff Koons transforms a CT Scanner room at a children's hospital.

• Koons' next project? John McCain and the devil.

• Your moment of meat-based desserts.

Destroy this Memory: Richard Misrach's Hurricane Katrina graffiti photos

If you're like me, you don't need images of bloated bodies and rooftop refugees to be reminded of the devastation left behind after Hurricane Katrina five years ago this week. Which is why Richard Misrach's photo series, now on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is so striking: His unpopulated images of spraypainted messages marking flood-ravaged homes conjure the despair, rage and resilience without indulging in a revisitation of the etched-in-memory gore. In an excellent narrated slideshow of images at PBS' site, Misrach talks of both the letterforms and the poetry of the texts, which he calls "small haikus," noting that he marveled at how "peoples voices were in the way they wrote these things."
He says he began to mentally categorize the graffiti into themes, including messages of mourning and fear, anger at the government and insurance companies, and "existential pleas to the universe." Of the image below, showing an overturned car sprayed with the lone word "Sorry," he says, "I don't know if that was God writing that to people, or who wrote that...."

Misrach is commemorating the five-year anniversary of the hurricane by donating works from the 69-piece series to the New Orleans Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the National Gallery in Washington D.C., the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Richard Misrach: After Katrina is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through Oct. 31. The series is also compiled in the book Richard Misrach: Destroy This Memory.

William Powhida's "Tips For Artists Who Want to Sell (New and Improved)"

William Powhida, Tips for Artists Who Want To Sell (New and Unimproved), a 2010 remake of Baldessari's 1966-68 Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell.

PBS NewsHour on Community Supported Art

PBS' NewsHour has produced a video about CSA, the Community Supported Art project co-organized by Springboard for the Arts and mnartists.org. The video segment features Springboard's Laura Zabel, Minneapolis artist Andy Ducett and yours truly. Watch it here.

Fake store opening signs

Rob Cockerham at Cockeyed has a little contest: Throw up a fake "Store Opening" sign in the window of a vacant storefront or warehouse in your town, take a snap and send in the image. It's a way to "liven up our neighborhood streets and remind everyone that economic recovery is just around the corner." Deadline: 11:59 Pacific this Friday night.

Via Urban Prankster.

Journalism warning labels

My favorites from Tom Scott's "Journalism Warning Labels" series.

Via Rebel Art.

Bits: 08.24.10

Yumi Roth, Meta Mapa, 2007

• Yumi Roth's Meta Mapa, as described in the engrossing new book From Here to There: A Curious Collection from the Hand Drawn Map Association: "...Yumi invites local residents to draw maps on their hands that lead to interesting places in their neighborhoods. She photographs the maps and then prints them to create actual maps that she and others then use to navigate the city." See more hand-drawn maps here and here.

• And: Regine reviews The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography.

• Minneapolis exhibition: A Theory of Values (aka the Minnesota Biennial), featuring Ute Bertog, Jennifer Danos, John Fleischer, Isa Gagarin, Caroline Kent, Chris Larson, Dustin Larson, Kirk McCall, Megan McCready, Andy Messerschmitt, Lester B. Morrison, Jesikah Orman, Joe Smith, Bruce Tapola, Karl Unnasch, Aaron Van Dyke. Opens Aug. 28, the Soap Factory.

• While the AP and Mannie Garcia, who took the shot of Obama that Shepard Fairey appropriated, have dropped charges against each other, Fairey's still on the hook. The AP's copyright infringement suit against him gets going in courts next March.

• A bit of Lady Liberty's nose is for sale. "It's the tip of the nose with the area around the nostrils. It doesn't sound like it would be, but it's fairly attractive looking," said Arlan Ettinger, president of Guernsey's Auction House.

• Nikea. The North Facebook. Blu-Ray-Ban. Logo mash-ups via Logo Design Love.

• One of the top ten jokes at the Edinburgh Fringe: "I picked up a hitch hiker. You've got to when you hit them." (By Emo Phillips.)

• Today in creepy security technology: Airport skeletal scans! (Via Bruce Schneier.)

• The Tron-a-Sutra. And Darth Vader teaches tai chi.

Bits: 08.20.10

Urban Nests, by Madrid-based light-art collective Luzinterruptus

• Luzinterruptus has modified the yellow protective covers for scaffolding joints at Madrid construction sites to add 130 birds and lighting "to achieve a warm, cozy atmosphere throughout the scaffolded area, inviting one to remain and contemplate such an unusual habitat." More on Urban Nests here.

• Rirkrit Tiravanija, whose first solo show in his native country the Bangkok Post calls "undeniably a defining moment in the history of contemporary Thai art," on politics: "Thai politics impacts my soul. I feel more qualified talking about the ongoing [socio-political] crisis in Thailand than protesting against George W. Bush [for his decision to go to war with Iraq]." (who’s afraid of red, yellow, and green) runs through August at Bangkok's 100 Tonson Gallery.

• Wired previews artist Trevor Paglen's new monograph Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes with an overview of the Berkeley experimental geographer's work (including, ahem, a link to my description of his art being “part Gerhard Richter painting, part Bigfoot sighting."

• And here's Joerg Colberg's review of Invisible.

• Minnesota's own, Bob Dylan opens a show of his paintings at the Denmark Museum of Art (SMK) in two weeks. This first showing of his "Brazil Series" -- previewed in by Rolling Stone here -- opens Sept. 4.

• Hammers in art.

• Lebanon, KS, exhibition: The Centers of the USA, by the Center for Land Use Interpretation and the Institute of Marking and Measuring, opened this week. It "describes several of the “Centers” of the United States, such as the geodetic center, in Lucas, Kansas; the geographic center, near Belle Fourche, South Dakota; and the current population center, in Edgar Springs, Missouri."

• Vicious cycle: Minneapolis "Work of Art" contestant Miles Mendenhall landed a New York show for participating in the Bravo series -- from none other than one of the show's judges.

• A gallery of vintage Japanese manner posters.

• Finally a political story about governor-wannabe wrestlers that's not from Minnesota.

Bits: 08.18.10

Matt Stuart, Earls Court, 2010 (Thanks, Kristina.)

• Tate Britain is now exhibiting eight "strange, impenetrable" etchings by William Blake of individuals consumed by flames, but stranger still is where they were discovered: between pages of an old railway schedule found at a used bookstore.

• Trailer: This looks amazing. Art 21's first feature film on a solo artist, William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible. Broadcast premiere: Oct. 21, PBS.

• Stop-action miniature graffiti-painting animation of the day.

• Uniformed Israeli soldier posts a Facebook photo of herself posing in front of bound, blindfolded Palestinians.

• Chicagoland exhibition: Leon Golub: Live & Die Like a Lion?, Block Museum of Art, Evanston. Via On the Make.

• A gallery of WWII-style propaganda posters for the "calming" Chamomile Tea Party.

• New York artist panels: "On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Congressional decision to require the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to consider 'general standards of decency and respect' in awarding grants, the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) presents How Obscene is This?, a program about censorship and arts funding." Sept. 22 and 27, the New School.

• A gallery of hubless or spokeless bikes, and a bike tire with LED lights embedded in its tread.

• The Political Carnival: "According to Gawker, in Beverly Hills, one salon owner claims that tweens represent 20% of her clientele," with some girls as young as eight getting bikini waxed at salons.

• Worthy of its own post but I'll stick it here: Japanese-food-shaped iPhone cases!

Video: Global nuclear tests, 1945-1998

Isao Hashimoto's animation of all 2,053 nuclear tests worldwide from 1945 to 1998 is both mesmerizing in its electronica-like aesthetic and haunting in what it portrays. Via Gear Gab.

Baldessari's "Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell"

John Baldessari, 1966-68 [via]

Brad Downey in Germany: Beneath the paving stones....

The Beginning and the End, Hamburg, 2010 [via]

Louisville-born, Berlin-based artist Brad Downey has apparently been interpreting the '68 Situationists graffito "Beneath the paving stones, the beach" ("Sous les pavés, la plage!") by unearthing German street stones to create sand castles, impromptu 3D installations, and domino-style performance interventions.


Castles Beneath Cities, 2008

Un-Stitching Karl, Berlin, 2007, a performance captured on video in which Downey created dominoes from the surface of Karl Marx Allee and toppled them

Bits: 08.14.10

• SMSlingshot (above), "a handheld digital slingshot device for spreading information on public screens," is:

equipped with an ultra-high frequency radio, hacked arduino board, laser and batteries. Text messages can be typed on a phone-sized wooden keypad which is integrated in the also wooden slingshot. After the message is finished, the user can aim on a media facade and send/shoot the message straight to the targeted point. It will then appear as a colored splash with the message written within.

Here it is in action.

• The Takeaway interviews Roseanne Cash on famous parents, death and why it's hard to make great art when you're happy.

• The New York Times on museum directors pulling in big salaries, getting free housing, and not having to pay taxes on the value of that housing. Via Unbeige.

• Conference: The Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice, Oct. 9-10, NYC, with presentations by Futurefarmers' Amy Franceschini, Minneapolis-based FEAST organizer Jeff Hnilicka, experimental geographer Trevor Paglen, curator Nato Thompson, Superflex, Eyal Weizman, and others. Via Greg.org.

• A job for you: The Brooklyn Museum's hiring an associate editor.

• Event: Lewis Hyde, the anthropologist who wrote the excellent books The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property and Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art is coming to the Walker on Sept. 2 to discuss his new book, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership.

• A statue of Hernan Cortés, the conquistador who conquered the Aztec empire, was splashed with red paint in Medellín, Spain (before, after), and a vandalized Louise Bourgeois sculpture is leaving New Orleans.

• Love it: Gumball machines filled with seed-bombs.

Bits: 08.13.10

From the series, "Desert Indoors," by Alvaro Sanchez-Montañes, featuring photos of abandoned homes near Namibia's deserted diamond mines. Via B/D.

• Trailer: The Tillman Story. This documentary about the U.S. government's cover-up of the friendly-fire killing of the NFL star and soldier just lost its bid to get its R rating reduced to PG-13, a designation that would help the film appeal to wider audiences. The reason: Language. When Tillman was being fired upon by U.S. soldiers, he shouted, "I'm Pat Fucking Tillman." The film opens in limited release on Aug. 20, with screenings starting nationwide Sept. 3.

• An "authentic" stencil of a caged canary allegedly by Banksy is up for sale on eBay. Asking price: $75K. Current bids: 0.

• Minneapolis exhibition: Discard: New Work by Dane Johnson, featuring paintings of non-winning lottery tickets by the Minneapolis native and LA resident, Aug. 13–Sept.2, XYandZ Gallery; opening tonight.

• Catching up with MNO: Two bits of note from TPT's Minnesota arts show MN Original: Eyeteeth pal and mixed-media artist Andy Ducett, and a brief segment on Minneapolis' graffiti artists Deuce 7 and crew.

• Anna Garforth, of moss graffiti fame, gets Goldsworthy-esque with a "RETHINK" mural made of leaves.

• Class Wargames presents: Guy Debord’s “The Game of War”

• I haven't it watched it yet, but apparently Minneapolis' Miles Mendenhall didn't win the Bravo "reality TV" show "Work of Art: America's Next Great Artist." Abdi Farah of Pennsylvania did.

• A Calvin and Hobbes search engine. Via DB.

Skeletal sculpture

A trio of skeletal artworks, via Happy Famous Artists: A piece from Stephanie Metz's "Teddy Bear Natural History"; a miniature skeleton by Tim Hawkinson, constructed from his own finely ground fingernails; and a skull by Laurent le Deunff made with fingernails and glue.

Bits: 08.07.10

Falcon corpse from Indonesia, from Taryn Simon's forthcoming book Contraband, featuring photos of prohibited items seized from passengers at JFK airport

• Vote here for works you think should be in the Walker's exhibition, 50/50: Audience and Experts Curate the Paper Collection. Voting ends Sept. 15.

• Peter Fuss' nail-studded cross in Poland, and Dean Radinovsky's soon-to-be-razed chapel hidden within a warehouse near the West Side Highway in New York.

• Artist (and Eyeteeth reader) John Devlin on mental illness, art, and his memory drawings of Cambridge. And here's an interview with him on CBC One Radio.

• Daily Serving interviews Andrea Bowers.

• Futurefarmers are building megaphones TODAY at the Walker's Open Field.

• Street art: MOTHER.

• Graph paper and notebook page mugs.

• Ish: "For only $175 you can install a little piece of metal engraved with a QR code on your loved one’s tombstone. Scan the code with your cellphone, and the code will redirect you to a website featuring text, photos, and video about your beloved."

Interview: Princess Hijab

As Defaced finds a shot of an H&M ad modified by Princess Hijab, Hyperallergic interviews the anonymous Paris-based artist. Janelle Grace writes:

Although I do believe her work is often misinterpreted as solely working to hide bodies, and is perhaps challenging ubiquitous conventional body imagery instead, whatever her explicit agenda is doesn’t seem to be the point. She’s much more interested in ambiguity as a tool, which “allows the questions and content of my work to form to the viewer. And I think a society which asks questions is a healthy society.”

Please help: Son of Paul Shambroom, Joan Rothfuss hospitalized after fire

On July 15, Leon Shambroom -- the son of photographer Paul Shambroom and independent curator and writer Joan Rothfuss (formerly of the Walker Art Center) -- was trapped in a house fire in South Minneapolis and was overcome by smoke inhalation. Rescuers found him alive but unconscious, and he remains in a coma today, likely with severe brain damage.

With costly long-term care expected, his friends are working to raise funds to help his family cover medical expenses. Acknowledging Leon's twin jobs as a DJ (Schlomo Sapien) and a delivery driver in Minneapolis, two events are being planned: "Pizzas for Leon" next Tuesday, and a concert this Wednesday night in Northeast Minneapolis. (Out-of-towners: Scroll down for news on ways you can help.)

Benefit concert: A fundraising concert for Leon will be held Wednesday night, Aug. 4 from 8 'til 2 a.m. with 100 percent of proceeds going to the family:

Club Underground/Spring Street
355 Monroe Street Northeast, Minneapolis
$8 (suggested donation)

8 pm - 2am
18+ until 10:30 pm
21+ only after 10:30 pm
8-9 Skroller - psychedelic breaks invocation & circle blessing
9-10 AARGH! (Neil vs. Nestor) - hardstyle
10-11 PMT vs. Serious B - happy hardcore
11-12 SQUIGGLES - happy hardcore
12-1 Pistoff Christoff - psytrance
1-2 Hardkornate - psycore

Pizzas for Leon: When you order a pizza from any of these Pizza Hut locations between 5 and 10 pm on Tuesday, Aug. 10, and tell the dispatcher you want to help Leon, a portion of sales will go directly to his medical care:

Uptown Pizza Hut (612) 374-4000
2313 Hennepin Ave S Minneapolis, MN

Broadway Pizza Hut (612) 522-1778
1300 West Broadway Ave S Minneapolis, MN

Dinkytown Pizza Hut (612) 623-0775
1402 5th St SE Minneapolis, MN

Chicago Ave Pizza Hut (612) 825-9820
4800 Chicago Ave S Minneapolis, MN

Nokomis Pizza Hut (612) 721-4191
5004 34th Ave S Minneapolis, MN

Columbia Heights Pizza Hut (763) 781-4000
3854 Central Avenue NE Minneapolis, MN

Robert Street Pizza Hut (651) 457-1855
1730 South Robert Street St. Paul, MN

Portland Ave Pizza Hut (952) 884-2822
7844 Portland Avenue S Minneapolis, MN

Grand Ave Pizza Hut (651) 221-1000
975 Grand Avenue Saint Paul, MN

Cliff Road Pizza Hut (651) 289-3672
2135 Cliff Road Eagan, MN

For those outside the Twin Cities or not fond of pizza: The family has set up The Leon Shambroom Fund and a PayPal account to go with it. Click to donate:

I've never met Leon, but as a longtime colleague of Joan's at the Walker and the guy often pestering Paul for quotes or permission to reprint his photos, I've always been fond of the family. I hope you'll help out however you can with this sad situation.