UPDATE: More from New York Magazine, including MoMA’s Sex Change: The museum’s Pipilotti Rist show cheekily feminizes a bastion of masculinity. and Collecting Smoke: How does a museum acquire art that vanishes the moment it’s made? “So the museum marshaled some troops—namely, 80 of the most influential forces in art—and, last March, started scheduling private workshops to figure out some rules for preserving ephemeral art. Biesenbach invited in artists (like Abramovic, Matthew Barney, and Francesco Vezzoli), curators (the Whitney’s Chrissie Iles and Shamim Momin), and performers of all kinds (Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons, Laurie Anderson, Jason Sellards of the Scissor Sisters). “The sessions go on forever—like, hours,” Biesenbach says. “People just do not leave.” They addressed everything from the discrepancies between a performance and its remnants to legal quirks to the appropriateness of an institution’s owning work created to subvert institutions.”
” IN his six decades as one of America’s pre-eminent landscape architects, Lawrence Halprin has seen his creations come and go. He has watched as they’ve been neglected and abandoned, distorted from their original vision, rendered irrelevant or tweaked by others in the name of bringing them up to date.
In a phone interview from his office in Marin County he spoke of the public’s lack of understanding of landscape work. “I think it’s very much easier to look at a piece of architecture and a building and say, ‘Here they put in some tower and some plaza,’ than it is to understand what we do and why we do it,” he said.
“That’s where the difficulty is,” he went on, “because our work is much more poetic and has themes and reasons for its design which are much more deep-seated and almost biblical very often. Our work is harder to appreciate because it’s more difficult to understand its steps.”
That’s where Charles A. Birnbaum of the Cultural Landscape Foundation comes in. For the past decade he has been viewed as something of a savior by Mr. Halprin and his peers, whose works are threatened by declining maintenance, encroaching development and a simple lack of interest, as trends in landscape design fall in and out of favor.’ Read the rest here.
“IMAGINE you’re an artist finishing work for a big gallery show. You’re standing on a ladder trying to reach the top of a wooden sculpture with a chain saw; the next thing you know, you’ve sliced open your left hand. You’ve severed the tips of two fingers and nearly cut your thumb to the bone. You’ve hit an artery. Blood is spurting everywhere.
To make matters worse, he had attached the chain-saw blade to a grinder for speed.
He credits his studio manager, Catherine Wallack, with thinking quickly, pressing his paper-towel-wrapped hand in hers, almost tourniquet-style, to staunch the bleeding and letting emergency paramedics know he was an artist. (Pity the studio intern, three days on the job, who had the unglamorous task of finding the fingertips.)
He also credits his reconstructive surgeon, Jerry Haviv, with skillfully repairing his ligaments and tendons. (Mr. Martínez Celaya says he now has 80 percent function in his left hand — which is not his dominant hand — and expects a full recovery within a year.)
As for his own reaction that day, he described it as strangely calm. “I said to Catherine as the paramedics were taking me away: ‘Don’t throw away the paper towels. I might want to use them in an artwork.’ ”
It was the reaction of an artist who has often used unorthodox materials like tar, blood, hair and feathers in his paintings. It was also the response of a highly rational, self-disciplined scientist who once worked on the femtosecond laser as a physicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island.
Mr. Martínez Celaya is one of the rare contemporary artists who trained as a physicist. He studied quantum electronics as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, until he found himself more and more often sneaking away to paint, something he had considered a hobby.” Read the rest here.
“ FOR one day this month the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had the distinct feel of summer camp. In the inner chamber of a Richard Serra sculpture visitors sat in a circle around two musicians, one drumming and the other strumming. Outdoors some took a workshop to learn how to crochet small fluffy birds. Others helped make what was billed as an army of foals — four-legged wooden structures that lurched under their own power into the crowds.
Mark Allen, the 38-year-old founder of Machine Project, an alternative arts space that staged this mix of performances, workshops and installations, had other metaphors for this meta-event.
He called it “A Machine Project’s Field Guide to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,” as if the goal were to explore the natural habitat of the museum. And in conversation, Mr. Allen invoked parks. “Los Angeles has so few public spaces where people can gather, we wanted to treat the museum as a sort of park, creating these pockets of social activity,” he said.
“Visiting a museum can be like visiting a very rich person’s house, where you feel pressure to admire the furniture,” he added. “We wanted this to feel more like hanging out with friends.”
Generating analogies for the unlikely workings of Machine Project is one of Mr. Allen’s skills. Another is helping individual artists and rogue arts organizations, which are fast proliferating here, to realize odd projects under his group’s umbrella. Since 2003, when he opened an arts space for Machine Project in a small storefront in the Echo Park neighborhood, he has played host to a wide range of projects, like an attempt to rebuild Rome in a day by the artist Liz Glynn and a workshop on psychobotany (yes, plant telepathy) by the Center for Tactical Magic.
But these days, he said, “we are in some sort of transition from being an art venue to being a collective that works like a theater troupe. It’s like we have this home theater that produces plays there, but we are also developing this ability to take shows on the road.”
And his shows are getting bigger. Two years ago he took over the Santa Monica fair Art L.A. with events and nonevents, like a napping area. Last summer he produced four performances for Glow, an arts festival on the Santa Monica Pier, where musicians were perched in the baskets of a Ferris wheel to form an orchestra.
For the Field Guide he assembled 35 artists to explore and exploit the museum over several months, generating hundreds of ideas. They whittled that down to about 55 projects, like Holly Vesecky’s creating from flowers a copy of a Sam Francis painting; Lewis Keller’s making ambient music from the hum of the museum’s air-conditioning; and Jessica Hutchins and Dawn Kaspar’s staging a campuswide 26-clue murder mystery, beginning with a female corpse, tarred and feathered, found under a Calder mobile.” Read the rest here.
“For over three decades, New York-based artist Matt Mullican (b. 1951, Santa Monica, CA) has created a complex body of work concerned with systems of knowledge, meaning, language, and signification. Since the end of the 1970s, he has also conducted performances and created drawings while under hypnosis as a means to explore the nature of behavior. Matt Mullican: A Drawing Translates the Way of Thinking will include work from throughout Mullican’s artistic career, emphasizing the role of drawing in his attempt to understand, organize, and categorize experience. Mullican’s practice, surveyed through drawings, collages, video, and installation, confronts the nature of subjective understanding, rationality, perception, and cognition—in essence proposing a ‘picture’ of the world through the medium of drawing. Curated by João Ribas.”
“Retrospectives of two veteran contemporary artists who make a lot of people happy, including me, have opened, as if on order for hard times. “Franz West, To Build a House You Start with the Roof: Work 1972-2008,” at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and “Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone,” at the New Museum, in New York, merit, besides praise, something like pledges of allegiance. Both artists affirm values beneath and beyond the market anxieties and affiliated buzz in the art world, where they have demonstrated sturdy integrity throughout career ups and downs.”
“An eventful show now at the Museum of Modern Art, “Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927-1937,” explores dizzyingly rapid-fire, experimental developments in the artist’s work, influenced by Dadaism, Surrealism, and the savage materialism of the writer Georges Bataille. (In no other period was the ingenuously intuitive Miró so receptive to intellectual impetus.) With cultivated “automatist” spontaneity, he worked on raw canvas, copper, and the recently invented Masonite; employed gross materials, including sand and tar; made thoroughly abstract pictures; and hatched funky varieties of collage and assemblage, whose influence would extend to Robert Rauschenberg. It’s not his fault—or is it?—that the show leaves an impression of being distant and dated, and strangely tame.”
Change rarely follows sanctioned plot lines. Rather it often pivots around hoax, hyperbole and stray details. These phantom turning points are not easily taxonomized or moralized within orthodox political logics. We expect the right story—an epic binary tale of enemies and innocents, when it is often the wrong story—a little epidemic of rumor and duplicity—that rules the world.
Still, the fact that most pigs are wearing lipstick expands an activist repertoire!
Some True Stories is thrilled that two can play at this game. The research collected here considers a dissensus that is less self-congratulatory and less automatically oppositional but potentially more effective (and sneakier). Unlikely or outlying political evidence, with its fickle or underexplored logics, excites feelings of resourcefulness and ingenuity. Here is a large field of mongrel events and category leftovers—butterflies that are not pinned to the board because they do not reinforce expectations.
Architecture and urbanism contribute many wrong stories to the mix as they move headlong into the world, propagating forms of polity faster than proper political channels can legislate them. If the world spins around the actions of discrepant characters, architects, as classic facilitators of power, have long had a seat at the table.
Some True Stories happily swims in these dirty waters with all the other shills, butlers and go-betweens, looking for new points of leverage within the fictions and persuasions that we already have running through our fingers.
Hoax is design. The collection expels utopian prescriptions in favor of agility, ricochet and cultural contagion. It is attracted to spatial entrepreneurialism, unreasonable innovation, impure ethical struggles and obdurate problems that continually resist intelligence. We hope to spread rumors that the world has changed and to operation with all the guises and none of the disadvantages of truth.
In a phone interview from his office in Marin County he spoke of the public’s lack of understanding of landscape work. “I think it’s very much easier to look at a piece of architecture and a building and say, ‘Here they put in some tower and some plaza,’ than it is to understand what we do and why we do it,” he said./2.1(projects)/abirdlongsincedead/thetwoworlds.jpg)
Start with the Roof: Work, 1972-2008
experimental developments in the artist’s work, influenced by Dadaism, Surrealism, and the savage materialism of the writer Georges Bataille. (In no other period was the ingenuously intuitive Miró so receptive to intellectual impetus.) With cultivated “automatist” spontaneity, he worked on raw canvas, copper, and the recently invented Masonite; employed gross materials, including sand and tar; made thoroughly abstract pictures; and hatched funky varieties of collage and assemblage, whose influence would extend to Robert Rauschenberg. It’s not his fault—or is it?—that the show leaves an impression of being distant and dated, and strangely tame.”
easily taxonomized or moralized within orthodox political logics. We expect the right story—an epic binary tale of enemies and innocents, when it is often the wrong story—a little epidemic of rumor and duplicity—that rules the world.