New Yorkers: Punch a panda tomorrow

Photo (detail) by Rob Bennett for the Wall Street Journal

Artist Nate Hill, whose Punch Me Panda project earned an excellent Rob Bennett photo essay and writeup in the Wall Street Journal, will be available for your punching pleasure tomorrow at the Union Square L train platform from 5-6 pm. The project:

Do you ever get so mad that you want to punch something? I'm here for you. My name is Punch Me Panda.

If you find yourself frustrated, angry, or just had a bad day, I will come to your house, and you can punch me. I wear a chest protector, and you wear boxing gloves, so no one gets hurt. It costs one cent per punch.

I am sympathetically masochistic, so you can hit me as hard as you can.

Serving individuals and couples, one-time basis or continuous. Serving all Brooklyn only.

Alternately, the panda is available by appointment for punching in the comfort of your own home.

(Thanks @museumnerd for turning me onto the project.)

Also: For those who don't follow me on Twitter, here's the San Francisco mural (no longer extant) where I got my Kiss panda icon.

Garage-sale photo finds

Newsweek on this photographic "masterpiece" found at a garage sale (detail above):

The best part of this photograph, [collector John] Foster says, is the contrast between the twins' formality and the kid in the window frame (at right). "Put your finger over the the kid backing out of or climbing into the window, and you have a normal photograph," he says. "But that boy is the big exclamation point on this posed, straightforward image. It's absolutely nutty."

Thanks, Craig P.

Bits: 11.26.10

Monika Sziladi, Untitled (Ribs), 2009

• Picture Black Friday is "an open call for photographers throughout the U.S. to go out and produce images that document Black Friday -- how you see it, on your terms." Submissions accepted through Dec. 5.

• PDN: "To cheer up his 91-year-old Hungarian grandma, Frederika, French photographer Sacha Goldberger took a series of photographs with her wearing various crazy costumes in different poses. While the photographs are purposefully surrealistic, Frederika Goldberger is a hero, having saved lives during World War II. "

• Ben Davis at Artnet: "The movement of art and art criticism, as I have come to see it, is a movement of threading, of finding the points where art and its world connect back to everything else, the big, beautiful, sometimes fucked up and scary world beyond it. If you can’t stomach being interested in the wider world and having a thought about it, and figuring out how that relates back to what artists are doing in the present, then all you are left with is meaningless professional opinion, of interest mainly to other art professionals or those in their spell. "

• Flashmob sings Handel's "Messiah" in a mall food court. Had I not grown up a Catholic school kid enlisted to sing Christmas carols in malls, I'd think it could be construed as subversive.

• Pomplamoose -- the duo that does excellent, quirky multi-track (looped? multi-layer video?) covers of everything from Beyonce and Lady Gaga to The Chordettes -- just made Hyundai's new holiday TV commercial.

Minneapolis gun-ban signs

Minnesota's 2007 "concealed-carry" law allows permit-holding gun owners to carry an unlimited number of handguns on their person in public except for certain cases and when businesses specifically post their policy banning guns on site. While Flickr users -- including Kelly Haferman, Geoffrey Brown, Kerim (1, 2, 3) and Jeff Houck -- have documented many of these ubiquitous signs, I haven't seen any contemporary art photographers address the topic. Have you? Please let me know in comments. Or if you find any examples of hand-made or uniquely designed signs, send them my way.

Operation Exposure: War is Trauma

On Nov. 15, veterans, artists and volunteers in Chicago hit the streets to wheatpaste posters on boarded-up buildings and corporate ad spaces calling attention to the suicide epidemic among veterans and the military's redeployment of soldiers with traumatic brain injuries. A collaboration between Justseeds and Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), Operation Exposure is part of the National Veterans Art Museum's Chicago in War series, which "explores the continued rupturing of the traumas of war in everyday America." The posters, reports Art Threat, are on view at the Co-Prosperity Sphere in Chicago for one month.

The Groundswell Collective has more on the project.

Happy Buy Nothing Day

Today. Via Unconsumption.

Gropy-hands TSA tee

By Skreened, purveyor of other fine t-shirts like these featuring LBJ and Jimmy Carter.

Bits: 11.05.10

Banksy, You Concrete Me

• Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is placed under house arrest for planning a party to "celebrate" the government-decreed demolition of his studio. Police won't let him leave his home til midnigiht Sunday, the day he scheduled the party.

• Henry Rollins and artist Shirin Neshat visit a "hipster" East Village record store. (Also: Rollins signs my name several times.)

• Slavoj Zizek, in a statement accompanying a portrait in Steve Pyke's series of photos of philosophers: "I HATE philosophy, but I cannot find peace if I do not get rid of a philosophical problem. Philosophy is or me like women: they are impossible, but it is even more difficult without them."

• Hans-Peter Feldmann wins the 2010 Hugo Boss Prize.

• Boats recycled as sheds. (Thanks, SP!)

• From 1995: How the CIA used art by the likes of Rothko, DeKooning and Pollock as Cold War weapons. (I forget how I found the link; if it was you, let me know.)

• Next Halloween, consider going as a Banksy mural. Via Make.

Bits: 11.02.10

Danh Vo, No-Rat Box, gold foil on found cardboard, 2010 [via]

• Please, for the love of God, vote. It matters.

• Then head to the Walker Art Center. Admission is free all Election Day.

• As part of the just-opened SFMOMA exhibition Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870, Marie Sester's ACCESS is installed in the museum's atrium: Go online and use a "robotic spotlight and acoustic beam system" to follow museumgoers with light.

• NYT: “Because Obama’s presidency seems to many to not have lived up to its promise of a different, progressive way of doing things, people have perhaps pulled away from his font,” said Robert Arnow, a font designer in San Francisco. “For the most part, the fonts chosen by candidates do not take chances, but rather tend toward what’s been done the past.”

• Japanese-American dance legends Eiko and Koma are performing Naked naked in the Walker galleries, six days a week through Nov. 30. Here's the Star Tribune's writeup of it.

• Barcelona exhibition: Eugenio Merino: We Don't Need Another Hero, ADN Gallery, now on view.

• Beautiful/Decay on Thomas Struth.

• A letter from John Lennon to the laundry: Yoko "does not sweat."

Photos: Broken Crow in Gambia

Minneapolis mural duo Broken Crow (John Grider and Mike Fitzsimmons) is back after two weeks in Gambia, where they were part of the Wide Open Walls project. In advance of Saturday night's closing party for BK's show at XYandZ Gallery (which is up through Nov. 13), here's an assortment of photos of their work, courtesy of Christin Crabtree Grider.

Semi-obscure now-defunct-post-punk-orchestral-rock-collective reference du jour (with coffee)

Or maybe it's just an old Japanese film reference. Via Warnick.

Listen.

Correction: Apparently GYBE isn't defunct. According to Pitchfork (via commenter Timothy), they'll be touring Europe and America December 2010 through March 2011.

Bits: 10.25.10

Bunker 599

• Bunker 599 by Atelier de Lyon and Rietveld Landscape slices in half a seemingly indestructible military bunker situated along the New Dutch Waterline, which up til 1940 was used to protect the cities of Muiden, Utrecht, Vreeswijk and Gorinchem from intentional flooding.

• Minnesota is now home to a $200,000, 18-foot-tall bronze sculpture depicting Jesus as a "mighty warrior," complete with drawn sword and rearing horse. Behold it... at the Christian Family Church in Owatonna.

• Hyerallergic, featuring Mel Chin, Futurefarmers and others, asks, "Which installation artists are actually green?"

• Photographer Terry Gydesen remembers the late Paul Wellstone, who died along with his family eight years ago today.

• Slideshow: MNspeak visits the art studio of Scott Nedrelow.

• Shepard Fairey's homage to Burmese democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi winds up on a wall of a clinic in Mae Sot, Thailand in a new installment at The Big Picture.

• Artist Ben Cuevas' knitted skeleton.

• Chairs designed after aersol-can "fat caps."

Artist Talk: Nina Katchadourian at MCAD

Monday, Oct. 25, 1:00 pm, Minneapolis College of Art & Design.

Bits: 10.22.10

Mounir Fatmi, Between the Lines, via Art Documents

• After getting hacked, Ubuweb is up, running and nicking content right and left. Writes founder David Goldsmith: "[I]n terms of how we've gone about building the archive, if we had to ask for permission, we wouldn't exist. Because we have no money, we don't ask permission. "

• Slideshow/stop-action animation: Cai Guo-Qiang making the gunpowder painting Odyssey for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

• Video: Chris Beckman’s experimental short film, Oops, composed solely of YouTube videos of people dropping their cameras.

• Election day is Tuesday, and thanks to Minnesota Citizens for the Arts, you can look up various candidates' positions on the arts. (Via MinnPost.)

• Minneapolis exhibition: Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers, opens Oct. 23, Walker Art Center.

• Website: Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things, a Tumblr blog reacting to news that MPR analyst Juan Williams has been fired for telling Bill O'Reilly, "[W]hen I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous."

Meet Latitudes at Midway Contemporary Art tonight

After leaving their temporary home of Minneapolis several years ago, curators Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna relocated to Barcelona where they've been running their "curatorial office" Latitudes ever since. This week, I'm glad they're coming back.

Latitudes' projects are often, but not always, ecological in theme, and they tend to be boundrary-blurring site-specific public artworks. In recent weeks, for example, they've been producing a weekly newspaper within the New Museum exhibition The Last Newspaper (issue 3, just out, includes a short bit I was invited to write about my employers at the nonprofit American Independent News Network, plus an essay by former Walker curator Doryun Chong on the artwork Vanilla Nightmares by Adrian Piper). Previous projects include Portscapes, a series of commissioned projects using and responding to the expansion of Rotterdam's seaport; No Soul For Sale: A Festival of Independents at Tate Modern this May; an upcoming exhibition in Arhus, Denmark, of energy-related work by Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller; and the 2006 book (edited by Andrews), Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook, which I'm proud to say includes my interviews with Winona LaDuke, Cameron Sinclair and Rirkrit Tiravanija; to name just a few.
Documentation of the Jan Dibbets' Portscapes project, 6 Hour Tide Object with Correction of Perspective

Tonight at 7 pm the pair will give a talk at Minneapolis' Midway Contemporary Art about their work and the project, Vic Cambrils Barcelona / Verges Cervera Barcelona / Viladamat Castelldefels Barcelona / Vilafranca Cornella Barcelona / Valls Collserola Barcelona... A Library Project:

In response to Midway Contemporary Art Library’s holdings of museum catalogues and from publishing houses in Barcelona, Latitudes has assembled a counter-accession of approximately 50 self- and micro-published books and paper editions by artists. Each publication is the work of an artist, designer, curator, or publishing initiative based in Barcelona or Catalonia since 2005. Although some were produced in conjunction with exhibitions, the books – or in some cases CD editions, newspapers, etc. – tend not to be traditional accompanying catalogues per se, but rather editorial propositions in themselves.

The title of the initiative presents various playful corruptions of the title of Woody Allen’s movie Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) by substituting place names from Catalonia, suggesting a local alternative to the hackneyed cultural construction of Barcelona, as well as the depiction of the star artist.

Details about Midway here.

Bits: 10.16.10

J.G. Posada image from the book Calaveras: Mexican Prints for the Day of the Dead, Redstone Press

• At Guernica, Susie Linfeild asks, "Would Americans have reacted less violently to our most disturbing day if we’d been allowed to see photographs of its most disturbing aspects?" -- specifically, photos of those who jumped from the Twin Towers on 9/11.

• The woman who attacked an Enrique Chagoya print at the Loveland (Colo.) Museum/Gallery pleaded not guilty to the charge of criminal mischief, a class-four felony that, if convicted, could mean a prison stay of up to six years. The works showed Jesus in sexual positions, but the artist -- who is offering to create an image of Christ for the woman's church -- said the image is "not Christ. It is my way of saying that something precious got corrupted."

• Saturday synched: "The Simultania Project is about having different people from all over the world film the same 1-minute-moment in time on Saturday, November 13, and then assembling the resulting footage into a video installation that plays back all the simultaneous perspectives together and in sync."

• Minneapolis' Aesthetic Apparatus designs Cake's new album cover. Via MnSpeak.

• ArtReview's "Power 100" list is out, but don't read it without this handy guide, which comes in the form of charts.

• Photo backstory: A banner at the Metrodome touts the Minnesota National Guard as "Minnesota's First Line of Defense." But defense against whom? The photo features Guard members as they were deployed against protesters at the 2008 Republican National Convention.

• An Urban Outfitters 2010 holiday preview features no products, only photos of Christmas trees by Alec Soth.

• The Statue of Liberty is reportedly struck by lightning some 600 times each year. Here's one rare photo of it.

• And, finally, your moment of Duchamp urinal tattoo.

Minneapolis' Siah Armajani awarded Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres

Siah Armajani, Murder in Tehran (2009)

Minneapolis artist Siah Armajani -- who created the iconic Irene Hixon Whitney Footbridge across Interstate 94 -- will be given the Chevalier Award of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. According to Meulensteen New York, the award will be conferred in Minneapolis next Thursday, Oct. 21 by Philippe Vergne (the Dia director and former Walker chief curator who received the same honor in 2004) and Marie-Anne Toledano, Cultural Attaché of the Consul General de France.

A resident of Minneapolis since 1960, Armajani's work has often circled back to Iran, where he was born in 1939. In his 1962 piece Prayer, now on view at the Walker's Event Horizon exhibition, he inked verses by Sufi writers Rumi and Hafez to create an abstract, poetic work, while one of his more recent sculptures directly takes on contemporary Iranian politics. His Murder in Tehran is a response to the brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Iran following last year's presidential election. Referencing Goya, Sufi poets, the murder of Neda Agha Soltan and his own disdain for the Iranian regime -- the work includes the text "Satan, drunk on victory, squats at the feast of our undoing" -- the piece is a multi-layered installation. The blog Leaves of Glass describes the work:

Composed of glass, wood, gravel, cast body parts, felt, masonite, paint, and applied and poetry from contemporary and Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlou (1925-2000), “Murder in Tehran” scrutinizes sacrifices made by women in the 2009 protests against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s “reelection” to the Iranian presidency. This sacrifice was illustrated most starkly in the shooting of Neda, whose death was broadcast throughout the globe. The installation also commemorates the way in which Iranians took to their balconies to denounce the government and the policies of the Revolutionary Guard in the days following June 12.

Featuring a balcony-like structure supporting a “human” figure, the tableaux of “Murder in Tehran” recalls the popular uprising of Iranians on their rooftops. With its long history of martyrs losing their lives in pursuit of freedom and justice, Armajani’s work recognizes their various roles in Iranian history.

At the base of this sculpture, the viewer will see scattered casts of body parts littered among the gravel—a reference to the mass shallow graves found in various corners of Tehran in the weeks following the unrest. In the midst of the body parts is a bloody hatchet, an illustration of the Shamlou poem whose text is inscribed on the sides of the piece: “The man who comes in the noon of the night/has come to kill the light/There the butchers are posted in the passageways/with bloody chopping blocks and cleavers…” In placing a sculptural illustration in proximity to the text itself, Armajani employs a technique found in ancient Persian miniatures that contain illustration, description, and poetry on a single page. Additionally, one finds seven pencil-on-mylar drawings in the show entitled “Murder in Tehran (After Goya)”

Via @artnetdotcom.

Bits: 10.15.10

A wall to be repainted by artists during the Moniker Int'l Art Fair in London, now through Sunday.

• Brooklyn artist Julia Torres was arrested, handcuffed, and kept in a holding cell for 23 hours this summer for graffiti. Her crime: Doing outdoor watercolor paintings -- on paper taped to the wall.

• Brazilian street-art duo Os Gemeos makes an awfully nice zine for the Fame festival.

• New York exhibition: The Last Newspaper, "inspired by the ways artists approach the news and respond to the stories and images that command the headlines," on view through Jan. 9 at the New Museum.

• Minneapolis exhibition: Endless Winter, featuring new paintings and prints by Drew Peterson, opens Friday night at Fox Tax Gallery.

• Interview: Photographer Brian Ulrich in BOMB.

• Dummy copy that ain't: Designers, instead of Lorem ipsum, why not use text from Moby Dick, War of the Worlds or other classics?

• The Walker Art Center is now free for those under age 18.

• And today in inflatable Russian artillery....

Light projection: 600 years of the Prague astrological clock

The 600 Years from the macula on Vimeo. Via @shardlow

Ubuweb hacked

Damn. Kenneth Goldsmith's Ubuweb, one of my favorite online art resources, shut down indefinitely. Via AnimalNY.

Update: The site's film and sound archives are back online.