Breathing Apple

Filmmaker Andreas Söderberg makes an apple breathe in this experimental short.

"Diversity of Species in the Rainforest"

By Oro/Verde via No Caption Needed.

Consumerism's albatross: Chris Jordan travels to Midway Island

Next month photographer Chris Jordan and a team of artists are heading to Midway Island, in the middle of the Pacific "garbage patch." There, albatross are dying off because the birds mistake floating debris for food. Follow their progress here, and donate some cash by emailing midwayjourney at gmail.com.

Mindfully.org runs this shocking photo of the carcass of a bird, obviously killed by consuming bottle caps and filth.

And Shifting Baselines gets more (and less) graphic with this display of the contents of a single Midway albatross' stomach:

Via Jen Graves.

The Face of Impermanence

Tibetan anatomical paintings via Eyebeam's reBlog.

Bits: 08.26.09

No. 225 by Henrijs Priess, used with permission

• Latvian artist Henrijs Priess "translates archetypal symbols from Islam, Judaism and Christianity into textured paintings composed of gold, silver and red. His abstract paintings are constructed in a process that recalls the practice of alchemy."

• Photographer Tod Seelie continues his bike trip through Indonesia, meeting up with kids on "crazy tall bikes."

• Graffiti-writing is on the rise in China, but don't expect any political messages (save the occasional pro-government throwup).

• Art:21's "Gastro-Vision" series continues with a look at Atom Cianfarani's new Welcomed Guests, ten poles fitted with local wine casks to provide homes for nesting birds.

• Reboot yourself, as artist Kristin Lucas did, by legally changing your name to the one you've already got.

• Artist Li Wei is a superhero, but probably not as huge as Bruce Lee, Bob Marley or any of the other icons commemorated in monuments in eastern Europe.

• What's on Dick Cheney's bookshelf? Nesting dolls of him, Colin Powell and others of George Bush I's cabinet.

• Mark your calendars: On Sept. 17, I'm participating in the Weisman Art Museum's WAM Chatter. In conjunction with their Rauschenberg show Currents, I'm one of three journalists doing pecha kucha–style presentations on the topic "What is news now?"

• That same night you can support St. Paul's Forecast Public Art at a fundraiser with music, live art and more.

• Time's Richard Lacayo on Ted Kennedy.

Bits: 08.21.09

• As The Pop-Up City looks at a floating campsite near Amsterdam (above), Kevin Cyr creates both a prototype and a painting of his functional pedal-powered, one-man RV, the Camper Bike.

• Banksy, interviewed by Shepard Fairey, on his favorite piece of nontraditional art:

The most perfect piece of art I saw in recent times was during an anarchist demonstration in London a couple of years ago. Someone cut a strip of turf from the grass in front of Big Ben and put it on the head of the statue of Winston Churchill. Later, the demo turned into a riot, and photos of Winston with a grass Mohican were on the cover of every single British newspaper the next day. It was the most amazing bit of vandalism, because it was the perfect logo for this eco-punk movement that was trying to reclaim the streets, bring an end to global capitalism, and defend the right to sit in a park all day getting wasted on discount lager.

• "Feral houses" in Detroit, and the problem of "ruin porn" of the Motor City.

• Art:21 launches a monthly food column, Gastro-Vision, with a look at the aesthetics of urban farming.

• NOMAD and some other guy paint the roof of a Las Vegas casino.

• In 2001, a 19-year-old woman is approached by a Getty photographer and given fifty bucks to be in a stock photo. Years later, her image is popping up everywhere.

• Hou Hanru "On the Spectacle of the Everyday."

• Via @cmonstah, a nice tilt-shift photo of Song Dong's new MoMA installation.

• The Simpson's get a blackface makeover in honor of the show's debut in Africa. Harry Allen calls it a "MASSIVE fail."

Bookshelf: Installations by Architects

I've been poring through Installations by Architects: Experiments in Building and Design, to be published by Princeton Architectural Press this October. It's a remarkable compendium of projects by architects including Diller + Scofidio, Allan Wexler, Anderson Anderson (with Cameron Schoepp) and others. My favorites tend to be sculptural interventions in public space.
Périphérique Architectes' Pink Ghost created an outdoor salon, injecting an element of play in urban Paris.

Richard Kroeker describes his Eye Level project (above), a collaboration with university students in Canada:

General Cornwallis is officially regarded as the founder of Halifax. He was a British General, who during his time in Nova Scotia issued a decree offering a bounty for the scalps of Mi’maq including non-combatants, women and children. This was part of a grim history of genocidal policies targeting indigenous people. The Eye Level project created the opportunity for anyone to climb the stairs to visit Cornwallis, and read his proclamation back to him. The implication is that we need to constantly revisit history, to re consider how and why we create heroes and monuments to our pasts.

Walking the Park, a grass-lined walking wheel, featured here in 2006:

Ink calendar by Oscar Diaz

"Spanish designer Oscar Diaz has designed a calendar that uses the capillary action of ink spreading across paper to display the date." Via Protein.

Creative Time sells short-shorts.

Yes, Creative Time is really selling short shorts. No, despite the video above, Dov Charney isn't the public art org's new marketing director.

Bits: 08.18.09

Damara Kaminecki's Bang Bang, via Street Anatomy

• Chicago 20-year old Firas Alkhateeb is unmasked as the creator of the original Obama-as-Joker image that was later manipulated into the "SOCIALIST" posters being plastered everywhere. Still doesn't answer the question about who --lobbyist or guerrilla artist -- turned it into street-art, a question Hrag's been noodling for awhile. (Via @Groundswellblog.)

• Speaking of rightwing art: A fascinating post -- also via Groundswell -- about Ku Klux Klan quilts. (Here's one donated to Michigan State University in 2000.)

• A thoroughly engrossing essay by Adam Levy on how 701 photos of Hiroshima were unearthed in a suitcase more than five decades after the bombing.

• Last Wednesday, Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei and colleagues were detained in a hotel room so they couldn't attend the trial of Tan Zuoren, an activist who tried to investigate whether graft by Sichuan officials contributed to shoddy construction of schools that fell during last year's earthquake. Ai was to testify at the hearing; he and a supporter were roughed up by police during a 3 a.m. raid in which they were hauled off, the AP reports.

• Shown only three times -- in 1971, 1984 and 1989 -- Robert Irwin's Slant/Light/Volume, a series of translucent scrims installed in the gallery, is now on view at the Walker Art Center.

• New work by Blu in Grottaglie, Italy.

• This ain't right: Guernica in 3D.

• LEGO Guggenheim.

• It's 90 degrees and sunny out in Minneapolis, but it's time to start thinking about ice: Proposals for the 2010 Art Shanty Project are due October 5.

• Gum wall heart.

Brooklyn Walls

Dumbo

Stephan Geras sends a series of shots of wall-, commercial- and sidewalk-art from around Brooklyn. Check out the Flickr pool.

Williamsburg

Red Hook

RIP Les Paul

Damn.

John Fekner's Cash for Clunkers

Stenciled junkers from John Fekner's series Cash for Clunkers, via Just Seeds.

Trevor Paglen black-ops tees

Experimental geographer/artist Trevor Paglen has teamed up with FreshJive to make t-shirts and caps emblazoned with imagery from his collection of military black-ops patches. Buy me one here.

Bits: 8.13.09

Send a note to airport X-ray operators with Evan Roth's TSA Communication, steel inserts for carry-on bags

• Shimon Naveh, former co-director of the Israeli Defense Force's Operational Theory Research Institute, says students there read John Forester, Gregory Bateson and Clifford Geertz. Lessons on military and guerrilla operations "employed the language of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari," according to Eyal Weizman. Via @jaymjordan.

• Free ideas for rightwing poster art (KISS Pelosi!).

• Pruned posts on the oddly beautiful soil maps of Africa, via GlobalSoilMap.net.

• Gawker: "Shepard Fairey, career vandal, applied 'anti-graffiti coating to the walls' of his LA gallery. Wack."

• A "permanent" graffiti wall by Brad Downey... in mosaic tile.

• Favify your website. Whatever that means. Via Wax by the Fire.

• Skeletal kids-room wallpaper.

• Via Gothamist, a creepy breastfeeding doll.

City on the Make: Chicks on Bikes

I ran into Mike Massey of City on the Make at Save Canvas Saturday and asked him about the band's new video, "Chicks on Bikes." It was shot last summer on vintage film stock (16mm, if I recall correctly; no video effects) right here in Minneapolis.

Bits: 08.11.09

Mural near Dikeman and Dwight, Red Hook, Brooklyn, photographed by Stephan Geras

• New NEA head Rocco Landesman on the organization's old slogan, "A Great Nation Deserves Great Art": "We might as well just apologize right off the bat."

• It's confirmed: the Obama/Joker poster is a bona fide media meme. It must be if Shepard Fairey is weighing in on it. "I have my doubts about the person's intelligence," he tells the LA Times. "It's not grammatically correct. It would be 'socialist' ... Obama is not Marx. He didn't create socialism..."

• Bloomberg's top-museum-salaries list is out and -- no suprise -- MoMA's Glenn Lowry tops it, raking in a cool $1.32 million last fiscal year (down from $1.95 million the previous year).

• Ben Davis' "The Museum Bubble" -- via @enjoybanking -- writes about big salaries pulled in by museum execs like the Getty Trust's James Williams who made $1.28 million in compensation, "even as his investment decisions led to the loss of 205 jobs." He continues: "I am not of the camp who hates on art students just because they were sold the idea that art could be a lucrative and glamorous career, or who thinks that art dealers are the spawn of Satan (only some of them are). But the art bureaucrats at the top, those pious guardians of our nonprofit castles of culture -- they deserve our scorn right now." Worth reading.

• Behold, the DORYU 2-16 pistol camera, a 16mm police-issue film camera from Japan.

• The LA Times' Christopher Knight responds to Rush Limbaugh, who says Obama's healthcare logo is "damn close to a Nazi swastika logo":

Asserting a resemblance between the two logos is like saying Limbaugh resembles Gary Busey because both men have two eyes, a nose, a mouth and a drug addiction. Obama's healthcare logo includes no eagle, Roman symbol of imperial authority, and it has no swastika, the bent-arm cross designed by Hitler himself as the emblem of National Socialism. Instead, the Obama design surmounts the red, white and blue landscape of his presidential campaign logo with a caduceus, the winged staff entwined with serpents that derived from the rod of Asclepius, son of Greek god Apollo. An ancient symbol of healing, the rod is often used as a medical logo. So the Obama design shows a medical symbol above the American landscape.

Make that two hitches: The claim that Nazism embraced healthcare is obscene.

• More moss graffiti.

• A new street-art animation by BLU in Bologna.

• 100 Years of Design Manifestos.

• Sock monkey? Feh! Spock monkey!

RIP Marwa Omot

I don't know much about Marwa Akway Omot, except that he was 23, he came here from Ethiopia in 1996, and his body was found on Sunday in the Mississippi not far from my where I live. As a 16-year old, he took part in the Walker Art Center's 2002 project, "Minneapolis and St. Paul are East African Cities," which was part of Ethiopia-born artist Julie Mehretu's residency. Mehretu and Walker staffers worked with Somali, Oromo and Ethiopian kids to help them map their lives here in Minnesota; the result -- including audio Omot recorded in his chemistry class at Edison High School in Northeast Minneapolis -- was presented in an online interactive map; plus participants' photos, notebooks and audio recordings are now part of the permanent collection at the Hennepin History Museum, where they were exhibited in 2003.

Given my tenuous connection to this young man, I'm not sure why I'm writing about this, except maybe to acknowledge sadness that his long journey here, presumably to find better circumstances, ended abruptly. And as a (probably unnecessary) reminder that when it comes to charting our own lives, we never know how soon 'til that last X on the map is laid down.

Condolences to his family and friends.

Anti-usury group hits the streets

10 Percent is Enough is a group of anti-poverty and religious groups seeking to cap credit-card interest rates at ten percent. While the group's late July rallies around the country seemed successful, an anti-usury bill in the U.S. House -- which would set the interest-rate ceiling at a whopping 36 percent --remains mired in committee. (Thanks, Kemi!)

Eyeteeth video: "Save Canvas," Minneapolis

At 11 pm last night, I got a sneak preview of Save Canvas, a temporary takeover of vacant buildings in downtown Minneapolis by artists Aaron Bickner, Andy Shannon and Overproof Studio. The project debuts tonight, but here's my video preview of Save Canvas, which can be seen in three buildings on the South side of 10th Street, between Nicollet and Marquette, through August.