Broken Crow at XYandZ

Before heading off to join eight other artists/groups in the Wide Open Walls project in Gambia Oct. 12, Minneapolis stencil duo Broken Crow (John Grider and Mike Fitzsimmons) open a show at XYandZ Gallery. When Trust is the New Money opens Oct. 1; after that, follow their African adventure here.

Bits: 09.28.10

• Chicago's Brian Ulrich, interviewed here, provides photography (above) for the New York Times' look at how artists are part of a resurgence of hope in recession-era Detroit.

• PBS Art Beat looks at some of the 2010 MacArthur "genius grant" winners, including typographer Matthew Carter (who designed the Walker Art Center's iconic typeface, among many others), artists Jorge Pardo and "The Wire" co-creator David Simon. Here's the full winners list.

• Here in Minnesota, Lucinda Naylor, the Basilica of St. Mary's artist in residence the past 15 years, was suspended for criticizing the Catholic bishops' anti-gay marriage campaign, which involves sending "over a million" DVDs about the evils of same-sex unions to state Catholics. Her infraction: She invited people to send her DVDs to make into sculpture to counter a message of discrimination with one of "creativity and hope."

• Thomas Hirschhorn (who I interviewed back here) and Andrea Thal have been tapped to represent Switzerland at the 2011 Venice Biennale.

• Hyperallergic on the "Raam," the global currency of peace.

• Our favorite local art/design blog ROLU has launched a line of furniture. Check it out at Design Within Reach in Uptown (2939 Hennepin Avenue S., Minneapolis) between 5 and 8 Thursday night.

• Malcolm Gladwell on why the revolution won't be tweeted.

Video: David Shrigley makes an animated pitch for the arse, er, arts

David Shrigley -- one of a 100 major artists supporting the UK's Save the Arts -- makes a compellingly weird case for the importance -- and sustained funding of -- the arts in a new animated film.

"No not arse, son. Arts!"

(Thanks, Jim)

John Morse's haiku bandit signs

At first glance, John Morse's art might read as a scam: installed on telephone poles around Atlanta, he borrows the vocabulary and medium of "bandit" or snipe signs -- illegal ads, often for weight-loss schemes, payday loans or work-at-home jobs -- but delivers more positive kinds of messages. The hitch: they all fit the requirements of traditional haiku. He's placed 500 of these 17-syllable poems around town, mapping the locations on Google.

Via Ed Kohler who tracks similar illegal snipe signs -- which he likens to corporate graffiti or street spam -- in the Twin Cities.

Flux Film 001 | Morse from Proper Medium on Vimeo.

Bits: 09.08.10

Carl Corey, Mocassin Bar, Hayward, WI, from the series "Wisconsin Tavern League"

• Images from the Motherland: Carl Corey's series on northcentral Wisconsin bars conjures images of my youth... or what I can remember of it. Part 1 and Part 2 (which includes the image above; that bar has made me think Maurizio Cattelan's taxidermy squirrel is a bit ho-hum.) Via Flak Photo's Andy Adams.

• Barcelona-based curatorial office Latitudes (Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna) are looking for unpaid interns to help create a daily newspaper as part of the New Museum’s fall exhibition The Last Newspaper (6 October 2010–9 January 2011).

• Anthropologist Lewis Hyde (The Gift, Trickster Makes This World) interviewed by Creative Commons on his new book, Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership.

• Catholic monks in Arkansas who started hand-making caskets for the victims of Hurricane Katrina are now facing down the "casket cartel" who want them to knock it off.

• Flickr fun with Alec: In conjunction with his upcoming Walker show, photographer Alec Soth has started a Flickr project, whereby he posts ten topics he wants users to photograph; on October 1, he'll pick his favorite and send the shooter the exhibition catalogue.

• Minneapolis exhibition: Scene from Above: New Sculpture by Asia Ward, Rosalux. Opens Sept. 10.

• Mashup: Allison Kraus' "I'll Fly Away" + Beastie Boys' "Intergallactic" = "Oh Brother, Thou Art Intergallactic."

• A few shots by day and by night of Twist and Amaze's tag wall at Houston and Bowery, New York.

• That's not a tree. This is a tree.

Allora & Calzadilla to represent the U.S. at the 2011 Venice Biennale

The Indianapolis Museum of Art -- selected to represent the U.S. at the 2011 Venice Biennale -- will present the work of Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla at the U.S. Pavilion, which will house six installations designed by the duo. It's the first time a collaborative instead of an individual has represented the United States at the festival. When the husband-and-wife couple was in Minneapolis for a Walker residency in 2004, I interviewed them on art, social change and works they were involved with around that time, including chalk likenesses of conquistadors that deteriorate when used on school chalkboards; shoe soles imprinted to leave messages behind for the U.S. military on the sands of the then-active Vieques bombing range; giant pieces of chalk left on the streets of Lima; and the charcoal dance floor installed at the Walker, which featured images of hip dancers that wore away as gallerygoers walked over it.

Of that last work, Allora explained:

The idea is that you would be walking around [on a floor drawing of dancers, rendered in charcoal that easily smudges underfoot] and looking at the different people, and as you look at the work, you inevitably step on the people who are dancing below. And, because we're wearing these shoes that are part of this global commodity culture, people start getting branded with all those same things that are trying to make them feel like they're different. So they've got Nike emblazoned on their face, and Adidas, and not only that but the actual shoes start to smudge all the drawings and instead of them being very clean and detail-ful, they become smudged and dirty and homogenized and erased.

Read the interview and my Adbusters story, "Insurgent Inquiry: The Art of Allora & Calzadilla."

Landmark, Vieques, Puerto Rico, 2003

Chalk Monuments

Chalk, Lima, Peru, 2002

Behind the scenes: Rosenthaler Platz's giant guerrilla paintjob

Here's just released video of how somebody in Berlin -- "IEPE & the anonymous crew," apparently -- turned the intersection at Rosenthaler Platz into a giant painting this April with "500 liters of waterbased environmentally friendly paint."

Rupert Murdoch's UK news outfit accused of voicemail hacking

Could Rupert Murdoch's other "journalistic" ventures be phone-hacking as well?

Journalistic ethics, Rupert Murdoch-style:

...AS OF THIS SUMMER, five people have filed lawsuits accusing News Group Newspapers, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s publishing empire that includes News of the World, of breaking into their voice mail. Additional cases are being prepared, including one seeking a judicial review of Scotland Yard’s handling of the investigation. The litigation is beginning to expose just how far the hacking went, something that Scotland Yard did not do. In fact, an examination based on police records, court documents and interviews with investigators and reporters shows that Britain’s revered police agency failed to pursue leads suggesting that one of the country’s most powerful newspapers was routinely listening in on its citizens...

Via @cmonstah.

Bits: 09.01.10

Edward Burtynsky, Oil Spill #2, Discoverer Enterprise, May 12, 2010, via Flavorpill, where you can see the entire series

• Starting Monday, likenesses of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera will appear on opposite sides of 500-peso bills in Mexico.

• "After serving 30 months in the Navy and participating in four overseas invasions during World War II, comedian Lenny Bruce went to the sick bay on the U.S.S. Brooklyn in May 1945 to report that he was feeling a little gay...." Via Cynical-C.

• Video: The Chapmann Brothers interviewed on blood, guts and horror films.

• Curator Bart Ryan interviews Alec Soth in advance of the Sept. 12 opening of the Walker exhibition, From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America.

• MPLS.tv goes behind the scenes at The Hold Steady–inspired indie film, Stuck Between Stations, filmed in Minneapolis and featuring cameos of the Walker, First Avenue, the Irene Hixon Whitney footbridge, etc. Opens in 2011.

• Yoko Ono performs Vocal Piece for Soprano at MoMA.

• Askacurator.com.

• Your moment of salsa-dancing dog.

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!