Filmed at 780 fps with a Phantom Flex from the back of a moving SUV, James Nares' Street depicts people walking New York streets in super slow motion.
The film runs 60 minutes (depicting about three minutes of real time footage), Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore did the soundtrack, and it's on display at The Met until the end of May.
Linus Edwards proposes building a museum comprised of exacting recreations of famous sets from movies.
Thinking about the specifics of this museum, the sets would either be actual sets from the movie (if they still existed), or meticulously recreated sets. The recreated sets would have to be very exacting, and basically made to look indistinguishable from the real thing. I realize that even if you had an actual set, many of them are missing things, like ceilings or fourth walls. Those pieces would all be recreated to match the rest of the set and create an entire room. The key would be every room you enter would be a complete 360 degree environment, and you would feel as if you actually were in the movie.
I imagine a person walking from set to set, at one moment in a 40s noir movie, and the next in an 80s comedy. It would be a surreal place to visit, as you would enter into these various worlds you've spent your entire life watching. Each room's set would be lighted to match exactly how it looked on film, and there would be ambient sound playing in the background matched to the reality of the place. So a set of a New York City apartment would have genuine street sounds, while a set of a space ship might have the hum of the ship's engine. All the sounds will be taken directly from the movie if at all possible.
Some of Edwards' proposed sets include the 7 1/2 floor office from Being John Malkovich, Ferris' bedroom from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Vito Corleone's office from The Godfather.
This looks interesting: Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC.
In the new exhibition Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture, the American Museum of Natural History explores the complex and intricate food system that brings what we eat from farm to fork. In sections devoted to growing, transporting, cooking, eating, tasting, and celebrating, the exhibition illuminates the myriad ways that food is produced and moved throughout the world. With opportunities to taste seasonal treats in the working kitchen, cook a virtual meal, see rare artifacts from the Museum's collection, and peek into the dining rooms of famous figures throughout history, visitors will examine the intersection of food, nature, culture, health, and history -- and consider some of the most challenging issues of our time.
The exhibition is on from November 17, 2012 to August 11, 2013.
NYC's Metropolitan Museum of Art has an exhibit running until January 27, 2013 featuring over 200 photos employing old timey trickery.
For early art photographers, the ultimate creativity lay not in the act of taking a photograph but in the subsequent transformation of the camera image into a hand-crafted picture.
MoMA has acquired 14 video games for their permanent collection. Presumably they paid more than MSRP?
We are very proud to announce that MoMA has acquired a selection of 14 video games, the seedbed for an initial wish list of about 40 to be acquired in the near future, as well as for a new category of artworks in MoMA's collection that we hope will grow in the future. This initial group, which we will install for your delight in the Museum's Philip Johnson Galleries in March 2013, features...
The games include Tetris, Passage, The Sims, and Katamari Damacy. No Nintendo games on that list, probably due to ongoing negotiations with Nintendo.
Beginning in October, a copy of Edvard Munch's iconic The Scream of Nature will be on display at MoMA for a six-month stint.
Of the four versions of The Scream made by Munch between 1893 and 1910, this pastel-on-board from 1895 is the only one remaining in private hands. The three other versions are in the collections of museums in Norway. The Scream is being lent by a private collector, and will be on view at MoMA through April 29, 2013.
I can't find any other information about this online or anywhere else, but tucked away in a fall arts preview in today's NY Times is the juicy news that MoMA has picked a date for their screening of Christian Marclay's 24-hour movie, The Clock. The show will open on Dec 21 and run through Jan 21. It sounds like the screening will happen in the contemporary galleries and won't show continuously except on weekends and New Year's Eve. Which is lame. Just keep the damn thing running the whole month...get Bloomberg to write a check or something.
Anyway, probably best to check this out on the early side during the holiday season because it'll turn into a shitshow later on.
MoMA Unadulterated is an unofficial audio tour of some of the works on the museums fourth floor, narrated by kids aged 3-10.
Each piece of art is analyzed by experts aged 3-10, as they share their unique, unfiltered perspective on such things as composition, the art's deeper meaning, and why some stuff's so weird looking. This is Modern Art without the pretentiousness, the pomposity, or any other big "p" words.
A lot of these sound like my internal monologue when looking at art. What's the difference between childish and childlike again?
Nipples at the Met is a photographic collection of all the nipples on display in the permanent collection at the Met Museum in NYC.
(via @claytoncubitt)
I've gotta get over to the MoMA to see the Eugene Atget exhibition. PDN has a selection of photos from the show.
ps. And Cindy Sherman!
Cory Arcangel has a solo exhibition coming up at The Whitney.
Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools, an exhibition of new work, revolves around the concept of "product demonstrations." All of the works featured in the exhibition -- ranging from video games, single channel video, kinetic sculpture, and prints, to pen plotter drawings -- have been created by means of technological tools with an emphasis on the mixing and matching of both professional and amateur technologies, as well as the vernaculars these technologies encourage within culture at large.
Opens May 26 and runs through September. Interview Magazine has a recent profile and interview.
I love this "bowling saloon" in the basement of The Frick Collection museum in NYC.
Gothamist has a bunch more photos of the Frick's secret places.
For their latest mission, Improv Everywhere got someone who looked very much like King Philip IV of Spain to sign autographs in front of a Velázquez painting of the monarch.
But we've got to wait a whole year...the exhibition opens on Feb 26, 2012.
The MoMA retrospective will be thematic. There will be rooms devoted to Ms. Sherman's explorations of subjects like the grotesque, with images of mutilated bodies and abject landscapes, as well as a room with a dozen centerfolds, a takeoff of men's magazines, in which she depicts herself in guises ranging from a sultry seductress to a vulnerable victim. There will also be a room that shows her work critiquing the fashion industry and stereotypical depictions of women.
As you might have heard, MoMA recently acquired 23 typefaces for its Architecture and Design collection. I was curious about how such an acquisition works, so I sent a quick email to Jonathan Hoefler, one of the principals at Hoefler & Frere-Jones, a New York City type foundry that contributed four typefaces to the MoMA.
Kottke: Three of the four H&FJ typefaces acquired by MoMA are available for purchase on your web site. Did they just put in their credit card info and voila? Or was there a little more to it?
Hoefler: MoMA's adopting the fonts for their collection was much more complex than buying a copy online (and not only because Retina, one of our four, isn't available online.) I should start by stating that you can never actually "buy fonts" online: what one can buy are licenses, and the End-User License that surrounds a typeface does not extend the kinds of rights that are necessary to enshrine a typeface in a museum's permanent collection. The good news is that H&FJ has become as good at crafting licenses as we have at creating typefaces, an unavoidable reality in a world where fonts can be deployed in unimaginable ways. This was a fun project for our legal department.
It was actually a fascinating conversation with MoMA, as we each worked to imagine how this bequest could be useful to the museum for eternity. What might it mean when the last computer capable of recognizing OpenType is gone? What will it mean when computers as we know them are gone? How does one establish the insurance value of a typeface: not its price, but the cost of maintaining it in working order? Digital artworks are prone to different kinds of damage than physical ones, but obsolescence is no less damaging to a typeface than earthquakes and floods to a painting. On the business side there are presumably insurance underwriters who can bring complex actuarial tables to bear on the issue, but I think it's an even more provocative issue for conservators. 472 years after its completion, the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel underwent a restoration that scholars still find controversial. What might it mean for someone to freshen up our typefaces in AD 2483?
--
Thanks, Jonathan.
The photographs taken of everyone who sat with Marina Abramovic at her The Artist is Present show at MoMA are being compiled into a book called Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramovic.
Just as Abramovic's piece concerned duration, the photographs give the viewer a chance to experience the performance from Abramovic's perspective. They reveal both dramatic and mundane moments, and speak to the humanity of such interactions, just as the performance itself did. The resultant photographs are mesmerizing and intense, putting a face to the world of art lovers while capturing what they shared during their contact with the artist.
The Museum of the City of New York has put a sizable chunk of their photography collection up on their web site. The interface is a little hinky, but it's worth wading through. This is 220 Spring St from 1932, from right near Sixth Avenue:
Photo credit: 220 Spring Street by Charles Von Urban. From the Collections of the Museum of the City of New York. (thx, @bamstutz)
The newest exhibition in The Tate Modern's cavernous Turbine Room is Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds:
The room is filled with millions of handcrafted ceramic sunflower seeds:
Each seed has been individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. Far from being industrially produced, they are the effort of hundreds of skilled hands. Poured into the interior of the Turbine Hall's vast industrial space, the 100 million seeds form a seemingly infinite landscape.
Porcelain is almost synonymous with China and, to make this work, Ai Weiwei has manipulated traditional methods of crafting what has historically been one of China's most prized exports. Sunflower Seeds invites us to look more closely at the 'Made in China' phenomenon and the geo-politics of cultural and economic exchange today.
For the first couple of days, people could walk around on the tiny sculptures (as you can see on Flickr), but health concerns prompted the museum to put a stop to that. Still pretty cool, but this remains my favorite Turbine Hall exhibition. (via hilobrow)
The only reason I ever go to MoMA anymore is so that my son can see the helicopter and whatever motor vehicles are on display in the design collection, but if I get a chance to sneak away soon, I'm definitely making use of the MoMA's new iPhone app: tours, a catalog of thousands of works, events calendar, etc.
That's from behind the scenes at the National Museum of Natural History in DC.
MoMA intern Julia Kaganskiy did an interview with Paco Blancas, who you might recognize as the man who has sat with Marina Abramović at MoMA more than a dozen times.
Maybe it's just an image that pops while I'm connected with Marina. Let's say it's an image of someone I love deeply, and then this creates the emotion, the tears just come out. Most of the time it's tears of joy. You're just being and thinking about somebody or something that's important in your life. And then just acknowledging this person or situation and moving on into being present because yeah, the tears come, but I don't want to cry for the entire sitting. I want to move on and continue to be with Marina, to be present.
At the behest of MoMA, photographer Marco Anelli has been taking photographs of all the people participating in Marina Abramović's performance in the main atrium of the museum and posting them to Flickr. To review:
Abramović is seated in [the atrium] for the duration of the exhibition, performing her new work The Artist Is Present for seven hours, five days a week, and ten hours on Fridays. Visitors are invited to sit silently with the artist for a duration of their choosing.
The photographs are mesmerizing...face after face of intense concentration. A few of the participants even appear to be crying (this person and this one too) and several show up multiple times (the fellow pictured above sat across from Abramović at least half-a-dozen times). The photos are annotated with the duration of each seating. Most stay only a few minutes but this woman sat there for six and a half hours. This woman sat almost as long as was also dressed as the artist. (It would be neat to see graphs of the durations, both per day and as a distribution.)
Has anyone out there sat across from Abramović? Care to share your experience? (via year in pictures)
Update: On the night of the opening exhibition, the third person to sit across from Abramović was her ex-boyfriend and collaborator of many years, Ulay (pictured here on Flickr). James Wescott reports on the scene:
When she looked up again, sitting opposite her was none other than Ulay. A rapturous silence descended on the atrium. Abramović immediately dissolved into tears, and for the first few seconds had trouble meeting Ulay's calm gaze. She turned from superhero to little girl -- smiling meekly; painfully vulnerable. When they did finally lock eyes, tears streaked down Abramović's cheeks; after a few minutes, she violated the conditions of her own performance and reached across the table to take his hands. It was a moving reconciliation scene -- as Abramović, of course, was well aware.
Here's a description of one of the projects they did together in the 70s:
To create this "Death self," the two performers devised a piece in which they connected their mouths and took in each other's exhaled breaths until they had used up all of the available oxygen. Seventeen minutes after the beginning of the performance they both fell to the floor unconscious, their lungs having filled with carbon dioxide. This personal piece explored the idea of an individual's ability to absorb the life of another person, exchanging and destroying it.
Wescott also sat across from the artist:
I was immediately stunned. Not by the strength of her gaze, but the weakness of it. She offered a Mona Lisa half-smile and started to cry, but somehow this served to strengthen my gaze; I had to be the mountain.
Carolina Miranda sat down across from Abramović:
When I finally sat down before Abramovic, the bright lights blocked out the crowd, the hall's boisterous chatter seemed to recede into the background, and time became elastic. (I have no idea how long I was there.)
Amir Baradaran turned the exhibition into a venue for a performance of his own...he even made Abramović laugh. Joe Holmes got a photo of the photographer in action. (thx, yasna & patrick)
Update: The look-alike who sat with Abramović all day did an interview with BOMBLog.
At certain times I thought that we were really in sync. Other times I didn't. Other times I was totally hallucinating. She looked like a childhood friend I once had. Then she looked like a baby. [...] I thought time was flying by. Then time stopped. I lost track of everything. No hunger. No itching. No pain. I couldn't feel my hands.
Update: Author Colm Tóibín sat opposite Abramović recently (here he is on Flickr) and wrote about it for The New York Review of Books. (thx, andy)
Update: Singer Lou Reed sat. (thx, bob)
Update: Rufus Wainwright sat. And perhaps Sharon Stone? (via mefi)
Update: More first-hand accounts from the NY Times.
Update: And CNN's Christiane Amanpour. (thx, ian)
Everett Fahy, the former head of the European painting department at the Met, believes that one of the museum's paintings by Francesco Granacci is actually by Michelangelo.
I believe Michelangelo painted it in 1506, two years before he started on the Sistine ceiling. It was already in my brain in 1971, the year after it was bought. When the Metropolitan showed it in 1971, I wrote for an exhibition called 'Masterpieces of Fifty Centuries' that the second panel recalled the figures in the Sistine Chapel. As years went by, it firmed up. I had long believed it to be by Michelangelo, but exactly when I don't know. There wasn't a moment when I suddenly said, 'This is absolutely by Michelangelo.' It was a gradual recognition.
One the clues Fahy used to make his determination involves the rocks in the painting; they resemble the quarry at which Michelangelo spent several months in 1497. The painting can be viewed larger on the Met's website.
I got a look at the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit at MoMA the other day and loved it. Seeing his work, especially his earlier on-the-street stuff, makes me want to drop everything and go be a photographer. If you're into photography at all, this show is pretty much a must-see.
(BTW, I chuckled when I saw this photo on the wall...it was the subject of an epic Flickr prank a few years back.)
The Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA has made a, er, symbolic acquisition of the @ symbol.
The acquisition of @ takes one more step. It relies on the assumption that physical possession of an object as a requirement for an acquisition is no longer necessary, and therefore it sets curators free to tag the world and acknowledge things that "cannot be had" -- because they are too big (buildings, Boeing 747's, satellites), or because they are in the air and belong to everybody and to no one, like the @ -- as art objects befitting MoMA's collection. The same criteria of quality, relevance, and overall excellence shared by all objects in MoMA's collection also apply to these entities.
Atlas Obscura is organizing a worldwide event on March 20th called Obscura Day, "a day of expeditions, back-room tours, and hidden treasures in your own hometown". Events include tours of a pneumatic tube system in Palo Alto, an underground salt museum in Kansas, a Icelandic museum of phalluses, a Cuban perfume museum, and a hikaru dorodango demonstration in Albuquerque.
Upcoming at MoMA: a retrospective of the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson.
For more than twenty-five years, he was the keenest observer of the global theater of human affairs -- and one of the great portraitists of the twentieth century. MoMA's retrospective, the first in the United States in three decades, surveys Cartier-Bresson's entire career, with a presentation of about three hundred photographs, mostly arranged thematically and supplemented with periodicals and books.
After MoMA, the exhibition will visit Chicago, SF, and Atlanta. Quite excited for this one.
The recent acquisitions should give you some idea of the curatorial vision of the Museum of Bad Art. (thx, joe)
The New York Transit Museum has developed an extensive online version of their The Future Beneath Us exhibit, featuring eight NYC-area underground projects that are currently under development. The exhibit is on display in two Midtown locations until July 5. (thx, michael)
A collection of quirky toilet signage. And for what to read after you've latched that door, there are several sites dedicated to writing found on the walls of bathroom stalls. (Warning: most of it does contain language that falls soundly in the "potty mouth" category.)
Please Do Not Throw Toothpicks in The Urinals The Crabs can Pole Vault.
I wonder if they frisk for pens and markers before allowing admittance to the Art Museum Toilet Museum of Art.
New MoMA web site is launching tomorrow...here's the preview.
This advice to museums applies equally well to troubled magazines, newspapers, companies, and the like.
The Louvre has Venus. What do you have instead? If you can answer that question confidently and concisely without a lot of stimulating-the-following-target-audiences mission statement hooey -- and your answer isn't on SecondLife, then you may be one the few museums that doesn't suck.
You're a museum, right? You're not an outreach summercamp. You're not an Imax theatre lobby. You're not a social networking iPhone app. Be a museum. And try harder not to suck at it.
(via migurski)
The interior walls of the Whitney Museum were painted by the Frank Painting Company in 1966. The company painted the wall again 40 years later, this time as part of artist Jordan Wolfson's unusual contribution to the Whitney Biennial. (via reference library)
The Printed Picture is an exhibition of physical specimens made using all the different ways that type and image can be printed on paper, metal, glass, etc, with a special emphasis on dozens of photography techniques, from albumen prints to dagguereotypes to color photography. On view at MoMA until June 1.
Hey, the USS Intrepid, an aircraft carrier and museum, is back in her old spot on the west side of Manhattan. The Intrepid somewhat famously didn't want to leave her berth in 2006 for refurbishment in New Jersey.
Thanks to artist Carsten Holler, you can spend a night in the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan.
Revolving Hotel Room is an art installation comprising three outfitted, superimposed turning glass discs mounted onto a fourth disc that all turn harmoniously at a very slow speed. During the day the hotel room will be on view as part of the Guggenheim's theanyspacewhatever exhibition, which runs from October 24, 2008-January 7, 2009. At night, the art installation becomes an operative hotel room outfitted with luxury amenities.
The view from the rotating bed.
Holler was previously responsible for the seriously fun-looking slides in the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall a couple of years back.
Color palettes taken from a MoMA exhibition of nighttime paintings by Vincent van Gogh. Review of the show by the NY Times.
The Natural History Museum in NYC has put a collection of historical photos online, including some fantastic images of the construction of some of their famous displays and dioramas. Pruned pulled out a few of the best for a recent post.
During the first decades of the 20th century, the AMNH posed its T. rex bones in an upright position, propped on its tail. Skeletons were broken, some bent and others removed altogether so that it looked like the "marauding predator" people thought they were. And also so that it didn't look too diminutive in the large exhibition hall. Natural history as a function of architecture: it had to reach high up to the ceiling, fill up all that space, loom large over the crowds.
The new Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee looks pretty nice.
The museum sits on a twenty-acre reclaimed industrial site directly across the Menomonee River from downtown Milwaukee and has been conceived as an urban factory ready-made for spontaneous motorcycle rallies. The three-building campus includes space for permanent and temporary exhibitions, the company's archives, a restaurant and cafe, and a retail shop, as well as a generous amount of event and waterfront recreational space. The museum's indoor and outdoor components were inspired by the spirit of Harley rallies in towns like Sturgis and Laconia, where thousands of riders congregate every year.
1. Perhaps the most playful art I've ever seen in a major museum is Olafur Eliasson's Ventilator, a fan hung on a long cord in the main atrium in the museum. Watching it blow around the huge room, chased by children, is hard-to-beat fun.
2. The rest of Eliasson's show on the third floor. His art seems so conceptually and constructurally simple yet, I dunno, I just wanted to hang out in the gallery all day, like I was required to remain part of the experience. Left me wishing I'd made it to London to see The Weather Project.
3. The typology photos of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Recommended if you like photography and multiples of things.
Irritated that I missed: van Gogh's Starry Night (out on loan to Yale until Sept...I've seen it 20 times at least but still like checking it out whenever I'm there), the exhibition of George Lois' Esquire covers, and lunch at Cafe 2.
I very much liked Gerhard Richter's Cage paintings on display at the Tate Modern.
Part Pollack, part Rothko, part glitch art. From the Financial Times:
The six paintings are composed in his characteristic swiping, blurred style of over-painted and obliterated layers, fine-tuned nuances of grey and white worked through with coruscating colours -- carmine, emerald, turquoise, cadmium yellow, fiery orange -- dragged across the canvas, smeared, wiped, leaving fragments of beauty on cool but sensuous surfaces. They suggest rain and mist, instability and displacement, absence and endings, classical rigour and postmodern ruin. They echo the northern European palette of earnest darkness and piercing brightness that goes back to Grunewald and Caspar David Friedrich, but Richter is also a minimalist, a denier of meaning, ideals, personal signatures. He has named the works in honour of composer John Cage, in reference to his Lecture on Nothing -- "I have nothing to say and I'm saying it."
Three other things I found interesting there:
1) Miroslaw Balka's 480x10x10, a sculpture consisting of used bars of soap held together by a stainless steel rope hanging from the ceiling. It's not often that contemporary art smells Zestfully Clean.
2) Jean Dubuffet's The Exemplary Life of the Soil (Texturology LXIII). The online image doesn't do it justice...the painting looked just like a slab of rock hanging on the wall.
3) The Turbine Room is an amazing, amazing space...I could have spent hours in there. I took this photo of Ollie attempting to take his first steps in the Turbine Room. Oh, and they've patched the cracks from Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth. The patching is shoddy...I wonder if that's on purpose as a permanent aftertaste of the artwork.
A tiny coat built out of living mouse stem cells that was a part of the Design and the Elastic Mind show at MoMA was killed because it was growing too fast.
Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at the museum, had to kill the coat. "It was growing too much," she said in an interview from a conference in Belgrade. The cells were multiplying so fast that the incubator was beginning to clog. Also, a sleeve was falling off. So after checking with the coat's creators, a group known as SymbioticA, at the School of Anatomy & Human Biology at the University of Western Australia in Perth, she had the nutrients to the cells stopped.
Did you know that there's a teensy museum on the moon?
Now I find out there was already an entire Moon Museum, with drawings by six leading contemporary artists of the day: Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, Forrest "Frosty" Myers, Claes Oldenburg, and John Chamberlain. The Moon Museum was supposedly installed on the moon in 1969 as part of the Apollo 12 mission.
I say supposedly, because NASA has no official record of it; according to Frosty Myers, the artist who initiated the project, the Moon Museum was secretly installed on a hatch on a leg of the Intrepid landing module with the help of an unnamed engineer at the Grumman Corporation after attempts to move the project forward through NASA's official channels were unsuccessful.
On view at MoMA through May 12, 2008: Design and the Elastic Mind.
In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design's most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change.
I was surprised at how many of the show's ideas and objects I'd seen or even featured on kottke.org already. But getting there first isn't the point. The show was super-crowded and I didn't have a lot of time to look around, but here are a couple of things that caught my eye.
Michiko Nitta's Animal Messaging System (AMS), part of a larger project she did called Extreme Green Guerillas. The basic idea of the AMS is to use the radio ID tags worn by migratory animals to send messages from place to place. Nice map.
Molecubes are self-replicating repairing robots. Video here.
And I've been looking for Brendan Dawes' Cinema Redux project for several months now...most recently I wanted to include his work in my time merge media post.
Using eight of my favourite films from eight of my most admired directors including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, each film is processed through a Java program written with the processing environment. This small piece of software samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time.
For more, check out the online exhibition (designed by Yugo Nakamura and THA Ltd, the folks behind FFFFOUND!). Thanks (and congratulations!) to Stamen for hosting a tour of the exhibition.
This summer's big public art project in NYC: 4 large waterfalls falling into the East River and New York Harbor, including one falling from the Brooklyn Bridge. Olafur Eliasson is the responsible party...he's done a couple previous waterfall pieces.
Update: Eliasson's work will also be on display at MoMA and P.S. 1 this summer, April 20 through June 30, 2008. (thx, praveen)
Diane Arbus' archives were recently gifted to the Met in NYC.
Unlike the belongings of artists who fade gradually from view, which are sometimes scattered, pilfered or lost, Arbus's effects were in some ways frozen in time when she committed suicide at 48. Quickly her life began to acquire a cult status paralleling that of her photography.
(via sippey)
I'm writing these down in the hope that doing so will motivate me to actually get out of the apartment to check these out.
- Paula Scher: Recent Paintings at Maya Stendal. Through January 26, 2008.
- Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections at Neue Galerie. Through June 30, 2008.
- Edward Burtynsky: Quarries at Charles Cowles. Though December 1, 2007.
- This Is War! Robert Capa at Work at ICP. Through January 6, 2008.
- Georges Seurat: The Drawings at MoMA. Through January 7, 2008.
Did I miss anything? (Besides Jill Greenberg's bear photos at Clampart?)
In the past few weeks, I've seen several people mention the 50 Years of Helvetica exhibit at the MoMA along with some variation of "Woo! I might need to take a trip to New York to go see this!" You should know that this exhibit takes up just a small corner of the Architecture and Design Gallery on the 3rd floor...it's essentially a case and a handful of posters and other specimens. If you're in the museum already, definitely check it out, but you'll be disappointed if you make a special expensive trip just to see the Helvetica stuff.
I can't see how on earth Julie Jackson's Subversive Cross Stitch didn't make it into the Museum of Arts & Design show on Extreme Embroidery. Maybe it's too straightforward but still...
Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York is an exhibition at The Municipal Art Society of New York.
Coming at a time of unprecedented growth and redevelopment in the city, this exhibit aims to encourage New Yorkers to observe the city closely and to empower them, with a combination of tools and resources, to take an active role in advocating for a more livable city.
The exhibit runs from Sept 25 through Jan 5, 2008.
Update: A review of the exhibition in the NY Times (slideshow). Among the artifacts at the show is a letter sent by Robert Moses to Jacobs' publisher: "I am returning the book you sent me. Aside from the fact that it is intemperate and inaccurate, it is also libelous."
Eugene de Salignac was the official photographer for the NYC Department of Bridges from 1906 to 1934. His collection of photographs was recently uncovered and, as it turns out, de Salignac was a great photographer and his photographs charted the progress of New York growing into a big city. The New Yorker has a slideshow of some of his photos and there's an exhibit of his work at the Museum of the City of New York until Oct 28. (thx, stacy)
Timelapse video of a map showing Civil War battles and movements...four years of war in four minutes. The video was produced by Harvest Moon Studio for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.
The Cooper Hewitt Design Museum has announced plans for expansion. I was up there this weekend checking out the Design Triennial and found the exhibition a bit small; a similar show at the expansive MoMA might have run to twice the size and would have included larger items. I hope they don't do too much to the building though...in many rooms, the building is just as much of an attraction as the items on display.
Map of the cracks in the Guggenheim's facade. "Since the Guggenheim Museum opened in 1959, Frank Lloyd Wright's massive spiral facade has been showing signs of cracking, mainly from seasonal temperature fluctuations that cause the concrete walls, built without expansion joints, to contract and expand."
Exhibit on Helvetica (the font, not the film) opens tomorow at the MoMA and will be available for a good long time (until March 31, 2008). "Widely considered the official typeface of the twentieth century, Helvetica communicates with simple, well-proportioned letterforms that convey an aesthetic clarity that is at once universal, neutral, and undeniably modern."
I quite liked the work of Barbara Probst in the New Photography 2006 exhibition at the MoMA. Probst shoots the same scene with multiple cameras at the same time.
The USS Intrepid stubbornly remains in its Manhattan berth at Pier 86, stuck in the mud, four tugboats unable to pull it free. "The hulking Intrepid, which survived five kamikaze attacks in World War II, looked like a mule resisting the force of several farmhands."
A comparison: London's Tate Modern versus the MoMA. The MoMA is a stuffy, inaccesible place, while the "Tate Modern is an enormously user-friendly place, physically comfortable and hospitable, with inexpensive places to eat and frequent opportunities to sit."
Thoughtful review of the Picasso and American Art show currently on at the Whitney.
Museum camouflage photographs by Harvey Opgenorth. (via nick baum)
"From September 27th - October 21 the Museum of American Illustration at the Society of Illustrators will host '30 Years of Fantagraphics,' a retrospective art exhibition of over 100 pieces of original art published by the Seattle underground giant." Artists in the exhibition include Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, and Robert Crumb.
The London Science Museum will hold a video game exhibition starting in October. Visitors will be able to play vintage video games, including Spacewar, the world's first computer game.
One of the three statues on the top of the Washburn Lofts in Minneapolis unwittingly represents the period in the city's history when it led the world in the production of prosthetic limbs. See also The Mill City Museum. (thx, paul)
In 1965, the Washburn A mill, the last operating flour mill in Minneapolis, became also the last flour mill to close its doors, having been preceded by an entire industry that, at one time, produced more flour than any other place in the U.S. The closure came when the mill's operating company, General Mills, moved its headquarters to Golden Valley, where real estate was plentiful and inexpensive. The area around St. Anthony Falls, the geological feature responsible for the beginnings of industry in the area, had long since fallen into general disrepair and it wasn't long before the Washburn A was deserted and inhabited by the homeless.
The area started to show signs of life again in the 70s and 80s after being added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. Old mill buildings were converted for non-industrial business and residential use as people began to recognize the unique character and history of the area around the falls. In 1991, the Washburn A building burned and part of its structure collapsed, but firefighters saved the rest of the historic building from destruction. The remnants of the building and the adjacent grain elevators remained empty for years afterwards, save for the occasional graffiti artist and urban spelunker.
I knew very little of this when I moved to the Twin Cities in 1996 and not much more when I left Minneapolis for San Francisco in 2000. Almost every weekday for two years I drove or pedaled past the shell of the Washburn A mill on the way to and from work on Washington Avenue in the warehouse district, where we manufactured web pages to fill a growing online space. Topped by the Gold Medal Flour sign, the mill became my favorite building in the Twin Cities, leading me to include it in The Minneapolis Sign Project I did for 0sil8 shortly before I left for the West Coast.
It seemed the perfect symbol of a time and industry long past, broken down but not entirely wiped away. I returned to visit Minneapolis occasionally and would drive past the Falls, wondering what would happen to my building, hoping against hope that they wouldn't eventually tear it down. With the structure in such bad shape, demolition seemed to be the only option.
Last week, Meg and I spent a day in Minneapolis on our way to visit my parents in Wisconsin, my first stay in Mpls since mid-2002. Meg wanted to investigate running trails and I wanted to sneak a peek at the Gold Medal Flour Building (as I had taken to calling it), so we walked the three blocks to the river from our hotel, housed in the former Milwaukee Depot. The Gold Medal Flour sign was visible from several blocks away, so I knew they hadn't torn down the grain elevators, but it wasn't until I saw the shell of the Washburn A building peeking out around one of the other mill buildings that I knew it had been spared as well. As more of the building came into view, I saw a glass elevator rising from the ruins, backed by a glass facade.
What the??!?
Now practically running along the river in excitement and bewilderment, dragging poor Meg along with me in a preview of her jog the next morning, I saw a wooden boardwalk in front of the building and headed for what looked like the entrance. The burned out windows and broken glass remained; except for the elevator and the 8-story glass building sticking out the top, it looked much the same as it had after burning in 1991. I scrambled through the entrance and, lo, the Mill City Museum.
And what a museum. It was just closing when we got there, but we returned the next morning for a full tour of the museum and the Mill Ruins Park. The highlight of the museum is an elevator tour of the mill as it was back in the early 20th century. They load 30 people at a time into a giant freight elevator, which takes the group up to the 8th floor of the museum, stopping at floors along the way to view and hear scenes from the mills workings, narrated by former mill workers. After the elevator tour, you're directed to an outdoor deck on the 9th floor, where you can view the shell of the mill building, St. Anthony Falls, the Stone Arch Bridge, the Gold Medal Flour sign, and the rest of the historic area.
Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle are the architects responsible for the project, and they deserve all the accolades they get from one of the most unique museums I've ever been to. The statement from the American Institute of Architects jury explains the design of the museum:
A creative adaptive reuse of an extant shell of a mill building, with contrasting insertion of contemporary materials, weaving the old and the new into a seamless whole...A complex and intriguing social and regional story that reveals itself as the visitor progresses through the spaces. It is museum as a verb...A gutsy, crystalline, glowing courtyard for a reemerging waterfront district that attracts young and old and has stimulated adjacent development.
I still can't quite believe they turned my favorite Minneapolis building (of all buildings) into a museum....and that it was done so well. More than anything, I'm happy and relieved that the Gold Medal Flour Building will always be there when I go back to visit. If you're ever in Minneapolis, do yourself a favor and check it out.
Photos on Flickr tagged "mill city"
Photos on Flickr tagged "mill city museum"
Mill City: A Visual History of the Minneapolis Mill District was helpful in writing this post
A Washington Post review of the museum from September 2005
The new Guthrie Theater is right next door and is a dazzling building in its own right (photo, more photos)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is raising its ticket price to $20 (from $15). The fee is recommended...you can pay nothing if you wish.
The Tate Museum in Britain lets you make your own collection out of all their works of art. "You can create your Collection, print it as a leaflet, or send it to a friend." Current collections include The I've Just Split Up Collection, The Odd Faces Collection, and The I'm Hungover Collection. See also unofficial audio guides for MoMA and the Met. (via nick)
They're refurbishing the outside of the Guggenheim and stripping away the facade reveals a doublestrike on the "T" in "The". It's like they started putting the printing on the building and then the architect stops by and says, whoa! that text is supposed to be lower, you morons.
The Type Museum, located in London and housing "one of the world's best typographic collections", is being shut down due to lack of funding. The folks in the TypeMuseumSociety GoogleGroup are trying to find a way to save it. (thx, mark)
Whitney Biennial 2006, through May 28 in NYC. NY Times review. Momus describes his first day as a performance artist at the Biennial.
Mark Rothko's Seagram murals were to hang in the then-new Four Seasons restaurant in NYC. How did they come to hang instead in the Tate Modern in London?
I can't remember where I first ran across Edward Burtynsky's photography, but I've been developing into a full-fledged fan of work over the past few months. From a Washington Post article on Burtynsky:
Burtynsky calls his images "a second look at the scale of what we call progress," and hopes that at minimum, the images acquaint viewers with the ramifications -- he avoids the word price -- of our lifestyle. But what if viewers just see, you know, some dudes and a ship?
"Another photographer might focus on the loss of life or pollution," acknowledges Kennel of the National Gallery. "He uses beauty as a way to draw attention to something. It's a very particular strategy."
The Brooklyn Museum of Art is displaying an exhibition of Burtynsky's photos until January 15. Well worth the effort to try and check it out. The scale of modernity, particularly in his recent photos of China, is astounding. In Three Gorges Dam Project, Dam #4, this huge dam seems to stretch on forever and you don't know whether to goggle in wonder or shrink in horror from looking at it.
MoMA just opened their show about Pixar last week and on Friday, we went to a presentation by John Lasseter, head creative guy at the company. Interesting talk, although I'd heard some of it in various places before, most notably in this interview with him on WNYC. Two quick highlights:
At 15 minutes long, the Q&A session at the end of his talk was too short. The MoMA audience is sufficiently interesting and Lasseter was so quick on his feet and willing to share his views that 30 to 40 minutes of Q&A would have been great.
[1] For you Pixar completists and AICN folks out there, the clip showed Lightning McQueen leaving a race track on the back of a flat-bed truck, bound for a big race in California. As the truck drives across the US, you see the criss-crossing expressways of the city stretch out into the long straight freeways of the American west, the roads literally cutting into the beautiful scenery. A cover of Tom Cochran's Life is a Highway plays as the truck drives. The world of the movie features only cars, no humans...the cars are driving themselves.
A quick note about the Van Gogh show at the Met that's closing at the end of the month: if you're in NYC, go see it. Admittedly, I'm a fan of Van Gogh, but I thought this was one of the best museum exhibitions I've ever seen. The exhibition features drawings (as well as a few paintings) from his short 10-year career as an artist, and you can really see how much he progressed during that time and how much his drawings and paintings were related. I can't wait to go back over to the MoMA and look at Starry Night and The Postman and view them not as paintings, but more as drawings done with paint.
Audio interview with John Lasseter (basically creative director at Pixar) and Ron Magliozzi, who helped curate the just-opened show at MoMA on 20 years of Pixar.
A museum of pull-down menus, for US states, currency, colors, etc. (via do)
At the risk (ha!) of missing it, I waited until this late in the game to check out Safe: Design Takes On Risk at the MoMA. Great show. Two of my favorite items:
For you armchair museum goers, what looks to be the entire exhibition is available online.
Also, the MoMA around holiday time, not so crowded. (Well, relatively so. There were still a fair number of people there, just not so many as in the Build-A-Bear store on 5th Avenue.)
The Burtynsky exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art sounds good. I hope to get over there before it closes on January 15. Here's his site with lots of photographs. "He often will shoot an image on three or four different brands of film, then print each image on three or four different brands of paper...then chooses the combination that produces the richest and most vivid look."
There's a Charles Darwin exhibition at the Natural History Museum in NYC through May 2006. A tidbit not reported in the US press: the exhibition failed to attract corporate sponsorship because "American companies are anxious not to take sides in the heated debate between scientists and fundamentalist Christians over the theory of evolution". Pussies.
Update: This letter sent into TMN throws some doubt on the whole lack of corporate sponsorship angle. (thx, chris)
MoMA is running a Pixar exhibition from December 14 to February 6, 2006. "Featuring over 500 works of original art on loan for the first time from Pixar Animation Studios, the show includes paintings, concept art, sculptures, and an array of digital installations."
Time magazine profile of Ho Chi Minh (see also his bio from the Communist Party of Vietnam site). We went to a couple of museums in Saigon today and I was curious about his life.
Opening tomorrow at the Met Museum in NYC, an exhibition of drawings by Vincent van Gogh. October 18, 2005 through December 31, 2005.
Coming soon to the MoMa: Safe: Design Takes on Risk "presents more than 300 contemporary products and prototypes designed to protect body and mind from dangerous or stressful circumstances, respond to emergencies, ensure clarity of information, and provide a sense of comfort and security".
Update: Business Week has a preview of the exhibition as well as a slideshow of some of the objects in the exhibit.
A look at Jefferson Burdick's baseball card collection which he donated the Met Museum in NYC. One downside to the collection: most of the cards are pasted into albums and so are in poor condition.
Pan of the newish MoMA building in NYC. I like the new building, but I agree that there are too many people sometimes; they're certainly not having a problem with that $20 admission price. (via cdl)
Update: a rebuttal by Greg Allen.
The Chanel exhibition at the Met showcases the fashion designs of Coco Chanel as well as the more recent fashions of Karl Lagerfeld's design. The exhibition attempts to draw parallels between the older Chanel fashions and Lagerfeld's newer work (words like "interpretation" and "reinvention" sprinkled the exhibition walls), but I had a hard time seeing Coco's influence in much of his work. Seems more like Lagerfeld is out on his own, which is in keeping with his thoughts in this 2001 interview with Paper magazine. Initially he says he hates "nothing more than people who only look in one direction, which means only in their direction" but then that he finds it hard to collaborate with others (except with himself). Then:
When I do my own things, I'm not really too interested in other people telling me what to do.
Lagerfeld is a fascinating figure and may have captured the cultural zeitgeist of the 80s and 90s in Chanel's fashions, but I don't know if I buy any of this reinvention business. If you'd like the check out the exhibit for yourself, you'd better hurry...it's only on for a few more days.
Cezanne and Pissarro at the MoMA. "Working in tandem or with each other in mind, Cezanne and Pissarro formulated a distinctly modern art, simultaneously self-confident and self-critical."
J. Seward Johnson, Jr. recreated a bunch of impressionist paintings as sculptures you can walk around in. Looks very cool...the photos are from a show going on through Aug 7th at the Nassau County Museum of Art.
The New Yorker recently ran a feature on how a couple of mathematicians helped The Met photograph a part of The Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries. That same week, they ran from their extensive archives a 1992 profile of the same mathematicians, brothers David and Gregory Chudnovsky. The Chudnovskys were then engaged in calculating as many digits of pi as they could using a homemade supercomputer housed in their Manhattan apartment. There's some speculation that director Darren Aronfsky based his 1998 film, Pi, on the Chudnovskys and after reading the above article, there's little doubt that's exactly what he did:
They wonder whether the digits contain a hidden rule, an as yet unseen architecture, close to the mind of God. A subtle and fantastic order may appear in the digits of pi way out there somewhere; no one knows. No one has ever proved, for example, that pi does not turn into nothing but nines and zeros, spattered to infinity in some peculiar arrangement. If we were to explore the digits of pi far enough, they might resolve into a breathtaking numerical pattern, as knotty as "The Book of Kells," and it might mean something. It might be a small but interesting message from God, hidden in the crypt of the circle, awaiting notice by a mathematician.
The Chudnovsky article also reminds me of Contact by Carl Sagan in which pi is prominently featured as well.
According to Wolfram Research's Mathworld, the current world record for the calculation of digits in pi is 1241100000000 digits, held by Japanese computer scientists Kanada, Ushio and Kuroda. Kanada is named in the article as the Chudnovskys main competitor at the time.
(Oh, and as for patterns hidden in pi, we've already found one. It's called the circle. Just because humans discovered circles first and pi later shouldn't mean that the latter is derived from the former.)
Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art NOW THEN online exhibit. "What did professional comic artists draw like when they were 12 years old"?
If you haven't yet, the Diane Arbus exhibition at the Met is worth checking out. Open through May 30.
A group called Art Mobs is producing their own audio guides for the MoMA.
Among the featured designs at the National Design Triennial was the Demeter Fragrance Library. The company, run by Christophers Brosius and Gable, puts out perfumes, lotions, soaps, candles, and body gels with scents like Creme Brulee, Wet Garden, Funeral Home, Dirt, and Sugar Cookie. According to this article in Happi, the New Zealand fragrance was developed for the Lord of the Rings movie and Demeter's odd scents might have other uses:
Tomato, for example, was found to be an odor absorber. Some of the edible fragrances are said to help curb cravings. And though the company has yet to perform psychological tests, researchers said the Dirt fragrance made Alzheimer patients more lucid.
Perhaps I should tag along with Meg the next time she goes to Sephora. (Never thought I'd find myself saying that...)
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