Bits: 02.15.11

Raphaël Zarka, Riding Modern Art, 2007

• The Indianapolis Museum of Art, which has "152 acres of gardens and woodland," outlines its environmental stewardship work, and how it measures its carbon footprint.

• Kentucky Rising activists, including poet Wendell Berry, ended a four-day sit-in protest at the Kentucky governor's office yesterday afternoon, emerging from the building to a crowd of 1,000 people. Highlighting the destructive practice of mountaintop-removal mining, Berry vowed to keep pressure on the governor, who's up for reelection. He said, “We came because the land, its forests, and its streams are being destroyed by the surface mining of coal, because the people are suffering intolerable harms to their homes, their health, and their communities.”

• Read Wendell Berry's poem, "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front."

• Michael Bloomberg's family foundation is making $32 million in grants to arts organizations around New York City; 250 small and midsized art groups in operation for at least two years have been invited to apply.

• Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has cancelled his first retrospective in mainland China. AFP reports that the show, scheduled for the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, was canned after its organizers told Ai the show was "politically sensitive." Ai has long been a critic of China's communist government, and has paid the price: he's been arrested, beaten and jailed, and in November his studio was razed. "The timing is sensitive and politically they feel it is not suitable at the moment," he said.

• Italian collecitve IOCOSE has futzed with Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds, an installation of 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, to create Sunflower Seeds on Sunflower Seeds: On Jan. 31, they left real sunflower seeds in with Ai's replicas, apparenlty shooting some of the seeds in with slingshots.

• Vintage book cover: Secrets of the Shopping Mall, apparently a horror book, via Brian Ulrich.

• Banksy's Exit Through The Gift Shop is up for an Oscar, prompting questions about how or if the incognito artist will accept his trophy. Amid the hubub: a sighting of a new Banksy piece in LA, and a new mini-documentary on the artist.

• With Crashvertising -- what Bruce Sterling calls "wry and smirking European anticapitalist intervention-art," Italy's Kook-Artgency sends a team "immediately to the spot, showing an advertising campaign on large scale posters and giving away safety vests with a brand’s logo to all the people involved in the road accident. Furthermore, 'a special warning triangle with your brand message is located near the cars,' and 'gadgets or other advertising stuff are given away to people in the area.'"

Mentalgassi's giant camera street-art in Spain

Berlin-based wheatpaste team Mentalgassi, last seen at Eyeteeth here, was in Spain late last year for GETXOPHOTO, and left a few contributions around Getxo (about 14 km from Bilbao).

B Movie: A Film About the Art of Banksy

Via Laughing Squid.

Bits: 02.14.11

Kunsthofpassage Funnel Wall, a raingutter musical instrument in Dresden, Germany

• American Airlines in-flight magazine revisits the Miss Rockaway Armada's Minneapolis launch in 2006 (I'm interviewed) as a preview of Swimming Cities' upcoming project on the Ganges in India. Here's my look at the Swoon-led project just before the flotilla of sustainable rafts launched on the Mississippi a few blocks away nearly five years ago.

• Passive Aggressive Vending Machine by Yarisa Kublitz: Put in a coin and your selected piece of china will crash to the bottom of the machine.

• Gun street art + stop sign = alarm in Atlanta. (Thanks, Maryn.)

• Minneapolis calls for art: FEAST (Funding Emerging Art with Sustainable Tactics), due Feb. 18; and Northern Lights, which is curating the nuit blanche (i.e. dusk-to-dawn) site-specific festival Northern Spark on the Minneapolis riverfront June 4-5; deadline Mar. 7.

• The Walker design department posts fliers from the late '60s and early '70s for shows by The Who, Led Zeppelin, Muddy Waters and others.

• An amazing gallery of German aerial photography.

• Secrets of the City visits with sculptor Kinji Akagawa.

• Shatner's doing a metal album.

Kentucky Rising: Poet Wendell Berry, others protest mountaintop-removal mining at KY guv's office

Daniel Shea, Hell's Gate, from his 2007 Appalachian photo series "Removing Mountains"

Today is day four of a sit-in in the Kentucky governor's office by 76-year-old poet Wendell Berry and 13 other Kentucky Rising activists who are calling for an end to harsh mountaintop-removal mining. The group is urging Gov. Steve Beshear to "lead by ending mountaintop removal, by beginning a sincere public dialogue about creating sustainable jobs for our hard-working miners, by putting the vital interests of ordinary Kentuckians above the special interests of an abusive industry." In his 2011 State of the Commonwealth speech, Beshear decried "Washington bureaucrats" over what he calls the "arbitrary and unreasonable regulations on the mining of coal." "Get off our backs," he said of the EPA.

Writes Berry: "[O]ur protest is against methods of mining that are abusive. We do not oppose mining per se. Our purpose is to protect our land and water. And we most certainly bear no ill will against those who work in mines."

Authors Michael Pollan and Bill McKibben have been vocal in support of the activists. McKibben:

It's about time that people said: 'No more business as usual, if that means leveling the mountains of southern Appalachia.' And it comes as no surprise that Wendell Berry is in the forefront, as he has been for an entire generation. When the rest of the nation sees the person we most associate with Kentucky taking a stand like this, we pay attention."

Last summer, Berry ungifted his papers to the University of Kentucky, his home state, after it decided to name its basketball players' dormitory after the coal industry.

Today is I Love Mountains Day, when activists are marching to the Kentucky capitol in protest of the mining procedure.

Broken Crow to do mural at Mexican City toy museum

After making murals in Gambia in October, John Grider and Mike Fitzsimmons of Minneapolis' Broken Crow have their next international trip planned: They just confirmed they'll be heading to Mexico City from March 1-11 to do a gigantic mural at MUJAM, el Museo del Juguete Antiguo Mexico (the Antique Toy Museum Mexico). The museum is run by 65-year-old Roberto Shimizu, the son of Japanese immigrants who imported toys and food into the country. Filmmaker Albo Mora Roca writes that Shimizu "deliberately located his museum in a working-class neighborhood, Colonia Doctores, a place people go to buy stolen car parts. He calls it 'a live museum for living Mexicans.'" Shimizu's son Roberto, Jr., helps with art programming, holding a twice monthly event called Collec, in which painters, comic artists and designers sell their works on an empty floor of the museum.

Grider says Broken Crow is planning artmaking trips to the UK and to Anchorage, Alaska, this summer, as well as throughout rural Minnesota where they'll be painting barns. He estimates the pair has created around 100 murals, including 15 in the Twin Cities (here's two: 1, 2) seven in New York, and 30 in international cities including London and Paris. Above, a shot from their Gambia trip, courtesy of Christin Crabtree Grider. Below, Roca's documentary on MUJAM.

Object du jour: Frank Gaard's Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts Snowshovel (1969)

In an email, Minneapolis-based artist Frank Gaard explains this seasonally appropriate readymade from 1969:

I got the snowshovel when I first moved here from California in 1969. It was standard issue for renters in Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts buildings.

I thought it was pretty ironic. The fellow in the photo broke his arm that following summer; the title of the Duchamp readymade was In Advance of A Broken Arm. It seemed as if the readymades could be anywhere, made from anything. It was a skill-less art, no craft, just slight knowledge of contemporary art.

Blog: Born This Way

Isaac, age 7, Karratha, Western Australia, 1995

This is sweet: A blog highlighted by NPR of snapshots submitted by readers "that capture them, innocently, showing the beginnings of their innate LGBT selves."

Certified Steve Martin encounter

Via Reference Library, it makes me think I should try to contact Martin about this.

Didier Faustino's swingset billboard

Architect Didier Faustino's Double Happiness, an "urban reanimation device" installed as part of the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennial of Urbanism and Architecture:

Double Happiness responds to the society of materialism where individual desires seem to be prevailing over all. This nomad piece of urban furniture allows the reactivation of different public spaces and enables inhabitants to reappropriate fragments of their city. They will both escape and dominate public space through a game of equilibrium and desequilibrium. By playing this “risky” game, and testing their own limits, two persons can experience together a new perception of space and recover an awareness of the physical world.

Via PlaceboKatz.

The Words Don't Fit the Picture

Ron Terada, The Words Don't Fit the Picture (installed outside the Vancouver Public Library), photographed by Kenny Louie. (H/t Maryn McKenna.)

Video: Godspeed You! Black Emperor v. Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck's fear-mongering over Egypt, set to an appropriately cinematic score.

Earlier: Godspeed You Black Coffee!

H/t Jon Collins on Facebook.

Bits: 02.01.11

002, Gerco de Ruijter, from Baumschule (2008-2010)

• "How abstract can a landscape become while remaining a landscape?" Gerco de Ruijter asks. His reply is a series of "32 photographs of tree nurseries and grid forests in the Netherlands" called Baumschule. BLDG BLOG has more.

• An upside of the rotten economy: a resurgence of DIY, interventionist and reuse-oriented architectural projects.

• Google Art Project: "Explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces."

• A professor, sued by an author over an academic book review she thinks is defamatory, is now in court in Paris. Writes Joseph Weiler, Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of International Law: "As I entered the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris, the French Old Bailey, my lawyer whispered: ‘Emile Zola was tried here.’ Vive la difference: This was no Dreyfus Affair but the stakes for Academic Freedom and liberty of expression are huge."

• Wilco is founding its own record label, dBpm, to release future Wilco records (including the band's next one, due out late this year). Distro will be by ANTI- Records, which put out Mavis Staples' Jeff Tweedy-produced release.

• "Bohemian Rhapsody," ukelele version.

Art Sled Rally 2011

Yesterday was the fourth annual Art Sled Rally in Minneapolis' Powderhorn Park. Cold feet cut my visit short, but luckily plenty of photographers were on hand to chronicle the races. Check out shots by Sean Smuda and Ren. As Taylor Carik tweeted yesterday, the event is "like a middle finger to winter. A small and polite middle finger, but middle finger nonetheless."

Above, my shot of a cop car sled arriving at the park.

Paired: Sawblades by Mounir Fatmi and Dan Funderburgh

Mounir Fatmi's Between the Lines -- saw blades "with calligraphy inscriptions of texts from the Surah or Hadith, evoking the beauty of God or man's capacity, or desire, to obtain knowledge" -- and wallpaper artist Dan Funderburgh's My Name Is A Killing Word, a work on painted and etched foamcore.

Earlier: Paired: BP graffiti and Huang Yong Ping's Amerigo Vespucci

Video: Minnesota public artist Kinji Akagawa

TPT's MN Original profiles educator, sculptor and public artist Kinji Akagawa. His work Garden Seating, Reading, Thinking has been in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden since its founding in 1988.

Read my essay on Kinji, "How Care Manifests the World," written when he was named 2007 McKnight Foundation Distinguished Artist.

Minneapolis street art: Phil Jones' Random Acts of Design

Guerrilla street signs have been popping up in South Minneapolis recently touting everything from free hugs for hippies (a tree holds the sign in notoriously lefty Powderhorn Park) to lost ninjas ("Have you seen him? Probably not. Because then you would be dead"). These "Random Acts of Design" are the work of freelance graphic designer and recent transplant to Minneapolis Phil Jones.

Check out more of his interventions on his blog or his Flickr page, and this Wednesday look for an interview with Jones at Secrets of the City.

Bits: 01.26.11

• Two years ago last week -- on the day Barack Obama was inaugurated as president -- Minneapolis artist Broc Blegen traveled to Washington to unveil his inflatable sculpture, The George W. Bush Monument. With President's Day coming up, you can get your own; Blegen writes that the work is "available in a limited edition at an affordable price (compared to other monuments) - complete with a customizable inscription so you can honor the President however you wish!"

• Long ago a curatorial intern in the Walker Art Center's Visual Art department -- before working her way to gallery director/curator at REDCAT in LA -- Clara Kim has been hired back by the Walker. She starts in Minneapolis Aug. 1.

• Two interesting posts by John Thackara at Design Observer: One on 73-year old French farmer Pierre Rabhi, founder of the International Movement for Earth and Humanism; another on Milan's new "service ecology" development plan.

• LA Times writer Christopher Knight tweets: "It's worrisome when an art museum's show-title names a movie star but not the artist." The show: LACMA's Elizabeth Taylor in Iran featuring photographs by Firooz Zahedi.

• Trailer: Among others, sculptor Kinji Akagawa will be featured on the next edition of MN Original, which begins airing on TPT stations Thursday night.

• "Superflex's Flooded McDonald's becomes reality in Brisbane."

• From Vandalog, urban robots in Venezuela by Flix.

• Premakes: Trailers for modern movies -- like UP, The Empire Strikes Back and Ghostbusters -- had they been made in the '40s, '50s and '60s.

Video: Swoon at TEDxBrooklyn

Via GammaBlog.

Bits: 01.05.11

Will Steacy, Mold 10, used with permission

• Works from Will Steacy's series "A Human Stain" (found photographs recovered in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina) and "A Silent Affliction" (moldy interiors in the same city) make up many of the images in the title sequence of HBO's Treme.

• Because he's not rich enough: Artist Jeff Koons has sent a cease-and-desist letter to San Francisco's Park Life, a gallery and shop, for selling balloon-dog bookends. The letter, SFist reports, asked the shop to stop selling and advertising the projects, then "return them to some mutually agreed upon address, [and] tell Koons how many have been sold and disclose the maker of said bookends." Koons, of course, didn't invent balloon animals, although he's represented them in large-scale sculptures. (Via Jennifer Yin on Facebook.)

• Artists and a handful of veterans brought projectors to the exterior of the MOCA Geffen Contemporary Monday night to protest LA MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch's whitewashing of a mural commissioned by street artist Blu that depicted coffins draped with money. Hyperallergic has the story.

• Video: Hennesy Youngman helps you "PURSUE YOUR ART WITHOUT TREADING THE GROUND THAT THAT CRACKA BRUCE NAUMAN ALREADY TREAD." NSFW. (Via Kirk McCall via Kara Walker on Facebook.)

• Works by F. Scott Fitzgerald were supposed to enter into the public domain this year --- 70 years after the St. Paul writer's death -- but thanks to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act we've gotta wait. Via Secrets of the City.

• RIP Worldchanging.com.