[deli.ci.us bookmarks] 11.12.08

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Welcome to eclectic avenue
"The festival explores the notion of urban space in a temporal and mobile way," curator St/(c)phane Bertrand said. "It's an exchange between residents and artists based on the themes of gesture, movement and infiltration into the everyday."

Anish Kapoor Opens London's New 'Gallery Without Walls' – 24 Hour Museum
t heralds what promises to be an new era for public art

Abstract Public Art Bike Rack I – Reno, NV – Bicycle Tenders on Waymarking.com
Abstract (Green) Public Art Bike Rack in downtown Reno, Nevada

MinnPost – From Our Partners: Walker Art Center: The UnConvention: unscripting the political convention
"We're working with artists who are very adept at creating powerful messages that encourage people to get involved and think differently,"

Loreto Martin: Autonomous public art workshop, Madrid
A course about unsanctioned art in public spaces: urban intervention, graffiti, postgraffiti, free muralism, creative activism, outsider public art

Controversial art shows Arpaio holding people at gunpoint
Cardboard cutout vigilantes?

Comment: 'Berkeley Big People' invites mockery
SF Chron critic Kenneth Baker on public art and whether "bad art celebrate good causes?"

Turbulence causes waves in Cardigan – WalesOnline
What is status of this Lozano-Hemmer project?

Exploding Language Public Art Project | Twin Cities Daily Planet | Minneapolis – St. Paul

Public Art in Google Street View (Good Mag)
Cybrid public art

"Bad artists copy. Great artists steal."Picasso: Art in the Public Realm
Quotations and viewpoints on the role of artists in the public domain.

3 Rivers Fest should weigh visual art role
Sobering but not saber rattling analysis.

Street Art That's Approved by the Authorities, For Once
Not sure why soemthing like this isn't part of every city infrastructure project…

“Top 5 High-tech public art masterpieces”

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The surprising thing about this CNET compilation of Top 5 “Hi-tech public art masterpieces” is that it’s a pretty good list.

Watch video.

It’s a little hard to tell, but it looks like Jim Campbell’s “light bulb grid” was the version shown in New York, but we also commissioned a new version for the recent 01SJ Biennial, 1st and San Fernando.

More pix of the amazing Moveable Type by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin here.

More pix of The Fountain by David Small and Ben Tre here.

Also in the top 10 is Nuage Vert by HeHe (Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen), which won the 01SJ Green Prix for Environmental Art.

via weplaytech

Quiet time in Times Square

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Times Square At 44 1/2 Presented by Creative Time. Photo: Steve Dietz
Times Square At 44 1/2 Presented by Creative Time. Photo: Steve Dietz
Times Square At 44 1/2 Presented by Creative Time. Photo: Steve Dietz
Times Square At 44 1/2 Presented by Creative Time. Photo: Steve Dietz
Times Square At 44 1/2 Presented by Creative Time. Photo: Steve Dietz
Times Square At 44 1/2 Presented by Creative Time. Photo: Steve Dietz

I was in New York last weekend and made a point of going to see Gilbert & George’s 1970 video “A Portrait of the Artists as Young Men,” which Creative Time was presenting as part of its 44 1/2 program in Times Square. I was not disappointed. The dissonance between the stillness of the video, where they stare unblinkingly (pretty much) at the camera without making any kind of effort – including to be perfectly still – and the frenetic blinking of the Times Square signage around them is even eerier than seeing the video in a white cube setting.

PDPal: Julian Bleecker, Scott Paterson, Marina Zurkow

PDPal, which I commissioned while at the Walker was also presented by Creative Time as part of its 59th minute program in 2003, and the sheer scale is always impressive, but Gilbert & George’s video was memorable for more than its scale.

I suppose at some level it’s just the difference of stillness, length, and black and white, which makes it stand out and like the Richard Linklater-influenced Chuck (Schwab) ads, the effect would lose its power through over-saturation, but I enjoyed it immensely.

Journal: Germaine Koh

Gilbert & George also reminded me of another favorite work, “Journal,” by Germaine Koh, which I commissioned for the Cleveland Ingenuity Fest in 2007. She wrote a daily 40 word “diary” on a LED news ticker in downtown Cleveland for a month – each day, the cumulative entries would be displayed hourly. Something about inserting her private tribulations into the latest stock news and international crises was equally compelling, even if one didn’t know her or the characters in her life (apologies for the dirty window through which this was recorded).


Germaine Koh, Journal from Steve Dietz on Vimeo.

Urban Screens

Where can we start an art urban screen program in the Twin Cities?

Do you know the Central Corridor?

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The Metropolitan Council is seeking community members to work with artists selected for each of the Central Corridor LRT stations. According to Met Counci’s Public Involvement page:

Community members are needed for the Station Art Committee. Please read the Station Art Committee Charter (pdf) prior to applying. Applications must be submitted via email no later than November 14th, 2008. If you are having any problems submitting your application or have questions, please contact Jessica Hill at jessica.hill@metc.state.mn.us or (651) 602-1840.

Station Art Committees

  • West Bank
  • East Bank
  • Stadium Village
  • 29th Avenue
  • Westgate/Raymond
  • Fairview
  • Snelling
  • Lexington
  • Dale
  • Rice
  • Capitol East/10th
  • 4th and Cedar
  • Union Depot

via MinnPost

Art vs Audience

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After teaching a class on art and social change, I have held the belief that artists need to consider the responsibility they have to their audience when creating work in public. Taking the cue of what not to do from missionaries and service learning programs that tend to have a “drop in and fix the problem” approach, I always encouraged my students to think long and hard about their artistic presence in a community. To ask themselves a series of questions related to the relevance of their work. Why here? Why now? Why me? Am I assuming to know more than my audience? In short, what gives me the right? These become important questions when you attempt to expose unsuspecting and sometimes uninformed audiences to your work.

For the most part I stand by these beliefs, although a new thought process is beginning to take place in all of this. What about experimental public art? Art that is often being figured out as the the artists goes along (much like me with this blog). Art that sometimes is created as a testing of an artistic hypothesis on the part of the artist.

I do believe that the artist has every right to conduct these types of experiments but I sense some tension when the public becomes the petri dish. One can choose to partake in a concert of experimental music or improvised dance (which if not done well can border on the tenuous line of self indulgence on the part of the musician or dancer). But innocent bystanders in the public realm may not always have that choice. What if they are not in the mood to be accosted by a public performance piece in the name of art? Or try to negotiate the space around the Tilted Arch ?

I fully embrace artistic experimentation and love love love unanticipated artistic encounters for the unsuspecting public. The wackier the better as far as I am concerned and with the advent of new technologies the possibilities are endless. I believe these two methods of working in public can co-exist but I wonder if we should (and if so how?) apply a sort of artistic social code to artists working in public in order to address the difference of art for audience and art for the artists.

Perhaps I should hedge my bet on the notion that all artists drawn to work in public posses some kind of innate desire to share beauty and thought provoking experiences with the world.

Thoughts?

Mainstreet meltdown

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ligorano/reese, Main Street Meltdown

On October 29, 2008, the 79th anniversary of Black Tuesday, the stock market crash that caused the Great Depression in 1929, artists Ligorano/Reese will meltdown the “Economy.”

In a new, time-based event, called Main Street Meltdown the artists will install the word “Economy,” carved in ice, in Foley Square, using the New York Supreme Court as a back drop.

The event begins on Wednesday, October 29th at 9 AM and will last 24 hours.

Northern Lights co-presented ligorano/reese’s earlier frozen Cassandra warning, The State of Things, which spelled out the word Democracy, during the Republican National Convention as part of the UnConvention.


Interview with bystander at The State of Things from LigoranoReese on Vimeo.

If the Shua fits…

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Shua Group test

“If you’re near Federal Hill [in Baltimore] on Sunday afternoon, and 200 people simultaneously drop to their knees and begin crawling on the ground, you might think that you’re witnessing a mass, public-spirited search for a lost contact lens.

“You’d be completely wrong, but also kind of right. Public Moves Federal Hill has nothing to do with locating a tinted disc roughly the size of a fingernail. But the community art project has everything to do with seeing the world from a sharper, more focused point of view.

“‘Hopefully, this will encourage both the people participating and accidental observers to open their senses to what’s happening around us,’ says Joshua Bisset, 34, who is organizing the event with his wife, Laura Quattrocchi.

“‘That’s really one of the purposes of art. If I’m in a gallery looking at a painting, and then go outside, I’m flooded with details about my surroundings that I hadn’t noticed before. If people see this work, and a day later, see a kid scrambling down Federal Hill, they might look at it in a new way. One of our goals is to show how everyday movement is inherently aesthetic and can be transformed into art.'”

via Baltimore Sun
Public Moves Federal Hill
Shua Group

Compare Shua’s intervention to Francis Alys’ When Faith Moves Mountains (2002).

Francis Alys, When Faith Moves Mountains

“On April 11, 2002, five hundred volunteers were supplied with shovels and asked to form a single line at the foot of a giant sand dune in Ventanilla, an area outside Lima. This human comb pushed a certain quantity of sand a certain distance, thereby moving a sixteen-hundred-foot-long sand dune about four inches from its original position.”

via Artforum

It also reminds me of one of my favorite public performances, Frozen Grand Central by Improv Everywhere.

Not a flash in the pan

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Atlanta’s take on Nuit Blanche.

“If you head out to Castleberry Hill the evening of Oct. 24, beware: You may get mobbed. A nomadic band of paparazzi photographers may accost you, detonate flashbulbs in your face, stick microphones at you and then turn suddenly to swarm the next unsuspecting noncelebrity.

“If you’re fortunate enough to be caught in the melee, then you’ve stumbled into “Paparazzi Flash Mob,” a work of guerilla street theater by artist Trey Burns. The piece is one of more than 40 art projects that comprise Le Flash, an evening of light-based public and performance art that aims to engulf Castleberry Hill all Friday night and leave its impression on the neighborhood for days, and perhaps years, to come.”

via Cinque Hicks

Check out Cluster

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Cluster

“Cluster is an open network situated at the intersection of city, design and innovation; where creativity is the drive for change.

“Cluster gives voice to the potential of innovation, peripherical and central visions, and global outlooks. It is a place where architects, designers, artists, curators, critics and everyone can exchange and confront opinions. The aim is to encourage debate and active participation, the promotion of cultural events and support for creative expression in different disciplines. Current events, journalistic information and music, but above all critical reflections make the fabric of Cluster.”

These projects are smokin’!

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Memory Cloud, Trafalgar Square

“Animating the built environment through conversation”

is the great tagline for the project Memory Cloud by Minimaforms, which was just presented at Trafalgar Square in London.

According to the website

“Memory Cloud is based on smoke signals – one of the oldest forms of visual communication, for three nights the public will be invited to participate by sending text messages that will be grafted onto plumes of smoke. Fusing ancient and contemporary forms of communication, Memory Cloud creates a dynamic hybrid space that will project personal statements as part of an evolving text, animating the built environment through conversation.”

via Public Art Goes Up In Smoke


In 1999, Germaine Koh presented Prayers, an “ntervention with computer, electronic circuitry and fog machine,” at the Ottawa Art Gallery.

“Throughout the day, a computer interface captures all the keystrokes typed on another computer within the same building. In real time, it translates this raw data to Morse code and broadcasts into the surrounding atmosphere as Morse-encoded smoke signals (longer and shorter puffs of smoke from a standard fog machine) through a vent or other opening in the building. More and less active at various times of the day and its output more and less visible under varying conditions, the apparatus is a kind of exhaust system for the machine of daily industry. At the same time, it relates today’s electronic communications to previous revolutions in technology and communications: telegraph, binary languages, steam power, smoke signals. Everyday hopes and fleeting desires, channelled through the implements of daily work, are briefly given form as they are dispersed into the world at large, on the wing of a prayer.”

Also this past week, Ali Momeni and Robin Mandel presented Smoke and Hot Air at the Almost Cinema Festival in Vooruit, Gent.

“Smoke and hot air animates my response to the relentless threats against Iran by a myriad of more fortunate countries in recent years. Sentences that include ‘attack Iran’ are scavanged from Google News and spoken using a text-to-speech synthesizer. The voice is then picked up by a microphone, analyzed, and translated into rhythmically corresponding smoke rings from a quartet of smoke ring makers.”
Ali Momeni

video here

A new direction for Banksy

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Banksy has been most well known for adding his own brand of poetic street art to public spaces and toying with the establishment by altering classic imagery.

Image via http://www.banksy.co.uk/outdoors/horizontal_1.htm

This month he moves in a new direction with public installation “Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill” in NYC. Complete with animatronic creatures real and imagined.

The Village Pet Store and Grill

The result is an interesting intersection of public art, an ironic macabre, and magic.

How long is permanent?

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Lin Utzon tile mural, San Jose Convention Center

Scot Herhold wrote a pitch-perfect, elegaic question mark about the possible demise of the mural on the facade of the San Jose Convention Center.

“The reason? The convention center is planning an expansion that would add roughly a third to its overall square footage. And the Utzon mural is in the way.

“‘We know to make the expansion work, it’s smack dab where that piece stands,’ said Bill Ekern, the redevelopment project manager.

“‘We can’t save it as it is, or cut holes in it. You’d end up cutting so much of it off that what you’d have left would be marginal at best.’

“Is this an outrage that art lovers should band together to protest? When I ask people about it, I get a shrug. Even sadder, I shrug myself.

“That says two things. First, it’s tribute to our short memory span. It cost a million bucks 20 years ago? Well, that was then, and who remembers?

“Second, for all its joyous color, the Utzon mural never had much to do with San Jose. It could have been art designed by extraterrestrials landing on San Carlos Street.”

via MercuryNews.com

In praise of the temporary

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A recent article about Frank Gehry’s Serptentine Gallery Pavillion reminded me of a somewhat magical rainy afternoon last summer wandering around Olufar Eliason’s 2007 Serpentine Gallery Pavillion with Kjetil Thorsen.

Photo: Steve Dietz
Steve Dietz
Photo: Steve Dietz
Photo: Steve Dietz
Photo: Steve Dietz

According to Time

“Every summer since 2000 London’s Serpentine Gallery, which is located in Kensington Gardens, asks a prominent architect who has not yet built in England to design a temporary pavilion for a site adjacent to the Gallery. Quite a few major names have gotten their first Engish commission through this project — Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Toyo Ito, Rem Koolhaas, Alvaro Siza.”

The Eliason pavillion was not just a chic place to have coffee. Though I missed it, the next day Eliason and uber curtaor Hans Ulrich Obrist organized a 24-Hour Serpentine Gallery Experiment Marathon 2007 featuring experiments performed by leading artists, architects and scientists.

“The experiments explored ideas of time, space and of reality through models, vibrations and perception, investigating Eliasson’s assertion that ‘What we have in common is that we are different.'”

There is so much world-class architecture in the Twin Cities now that you can hardly pick up an in-flight magazine without reading herzogdemeurongravesnouvel, but there is something to be said for the ephemeral. It allows, perhaps, for greater experimentation – on the part of both the artist-architect and the presenter. I love the Walker’s artist-designed mini golf, and the coterminous Design for the other 90% was an important, thought-provoking show, but neither were really spaces you could fully inhabit, and perhaps most significantly, neither represent a regular, ongoing commitment to exploring experimental public spaces. That’s ok. Not their goal, but it would be interesting.

What would an ice house / art shanty by Gehry or realities.united look like – and feel like?

Site Specific Public Art?

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Merce Cunningham’s Ocean @ the Rainbow Quarry in St. Cloud, MN

We heard about it for months – the biggest performance piece of the year to take place on the grandest scale. Merce Cunningham’s epic choreography set to the music of Andrew Culver and electronic score by David Tudor with the Rainbow Quarry as the backdrop.

The backdrop?

While it’s true that no one claimed the piece was site specific, the two hour drive from the cities, the mysterious bus ride down into the quarry, and the PR image of a dancer standing amongst the rocks heightened my expectations. To discover a giant sound stage set up in the middle of the quarry somewhat dulled my curiosity. It became clear that the quarry was the environment for the piece not the inspiration.

Does it matter? Not really. It was still an amazing presentation by one of the granddaddies of dance. The company was polished and the 150 members of St. Cloud’s Symphony orchestra must have had a blast. The Quarry while not completely integrated into the piece became quiet an interesting audience member. A foreboding sci-fi landscape complete with the full moon ducking in and out of the clouds. An extra special treat was the abrupt stop of the performance due to rain twenty minuets before the completion of the piece. John Cage (project co-producer) would have been tickled.

But most importantly it lead me to question, what is site-specific public art? In a culture where we are inundated with experiences made to be accessed at our leisure via TVO and You Tube, the importance of place becomes relevant. What kind of expectations do we have for things that decide to utilize untraditional spaces? Are those expectations justified? Is it really the artists job to live up to what we might imagine could be done in that space? And what about the implications of private entities mimicking the form of site specific practices in public spaces?

Other inspirations…
Eiko & Koma – River
Improve Everywhere – Food Court Musical
Body Cartography – ROOM

Constitutional rights violated karaoke style

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Finishing School, Executive Order Karaoke
If you are in LA tonight and want to add a little public to your Palin-Biden debate watching, try your hand at Finishing School’s Executive Order Karaoke.

Featuring special guest host Tammy Tomahawk, Executive Order Karaoke is a public action in which participants are invited to sing their favorite mixes of George W. Bush’s executive orders to popular music. Finishing School will award a cash prize for the best act. Hors d’oeuvres and cash bar.

THURSDAY, OCT 2, 7–10pm
MOCA Grand Avenue
Sculpture Plaza