Monday market the opening of the latest show at the Crazy Horse in Paris. The show runs through May 31. In anticipation of the show, I have been seeing reviews and promotions featuring the following image:
via Focus on Style
Not feeling terribly philosophical today — just a few images to share:
The Giselle Lounge Table by Anna Neklesa for Kerozen Design
Neklesa is a 23 year old designer from Saint Petersburg, Russia. The design is inspired by ballet. Personally I absolutely love the magazine holders.
When I first came across Chinese artist Liu Bolin’s work, it was extremely amusing. Enough so that I showed it to everyone in my family. It was clever. We laughed. We moved on. But the artist’s collaboration with Bazaar magazine for it’s March issue takes the artist’s clever trope and pushes it to the next level — moving it beyond the joke to something more profound (something that is perhaps there in all of the earlier work, but which gets overshadowed by the game). And I don’t think it’s just because we’re dealing with fashion here. Admittedly, art and fashion are a little like my own personal Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup (although the metaphor suffers a little bit from the fact that a deadly sweet tooth means that the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup is really my ultimate Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, still, you put art, fashion and a dash of cleverness together in one place and you’re bound to rock my world) — but I think it’s more than that.
Liu Bolin is known for hiding himself in his photographs.
Photograph by Liu Bolin via anonymonk's flickr stream
We just saw the Dance/Draw exhibit at the ICA. It closed yesterday. You’re welcome – I am happy to tell you about exhibits after they close any time. I’m afraid you’ve gotta kind of expect it from me. Anyhow … serious post … Dance/Draw is a collection of works by a number of artists along the theme of defining drawing as the traces left behind as our bodies move through space, understood and realized through every medium and in every way imaginable. In Loving Care, by Janine Antoni, a video shows the artist dragging her paint soaked hair along the floor. In Trisha Brown’s Footwork #5 the artist has placed a pencil between the toes of her right foot and then used that foot to trace her left foot, and then placed the pencil between the toes of her left foot and traced an image of her right foot over it. Some of the works are bizarre. Most are incredibly creative in their approach to art making. (The Phoenix’s review of the show, ‘Dance/Draw’ at the ICA – Museum And Gallery, includes a slide show of a number of the works in the show.) But one particularly stood out. People often have difficulty knowing how to judge contemporary art. What makes it good? Is something inherently good because the concept is original? How do you judge the content? This work is, without question, both extremely original and exquisitely, brilliantly beautiful.
After Ghostcatching, by The OpenEnded Group, is a 3D film with a run-time of about 13 minutes. In it, dancer Bill T. Jones performs three dances. (The show also included Tseng Kwong Chi’s 1983 photographs of Bill T. Jones painted with body art by Keith Haring which apparently served as the original inspiration for Ghostcatching). The artists (Marc Downie, Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser) have recorded the dances. As The OpenEnded Group puts it:
“Though the work’s imagery comes entirely from a computer simulation, it bears an unmistakable human trace — that of dancer Bill T. Jones, abstracted from his physical body via a process of optical motion capture that preserves his movement but not his likeness.”
What you watch in the video is a sampling of his movements (through this optical motion capture) and his voice, which are worked into an exquisite light show inhabited by the ghost of a dancer. I have reluctantly included a couple of film stills which IC Institute shared on their flickr because I think they are necessary to even begin to grasp what we’re talking about here. But don’t be fooled, the stills really tell you very little about the experience of watching an installation of this video in 3D.
Admittedly, my attraction to art produced under the watch of authoritarian governments has always seemed a bit perverse. In part, I find the playing out of the dynamic between art and politics to be engaging. I also think that when truly brilliant and gifted artists confront (and try to express themselves both in spite of and because of) the constraints of a dictatorial political structure, they come up with some pretty phenomenal visions.
Chinese artist Li Wei’s work is both performance art and photography. Amazingly, his photographs are not the result of digital montages. A key part of Li Wei’s work is that – with the aid of acrobatics, scaffolding, mirrors, wires – the images commemorate a staging of which the artist is both the subject and the photographer (with minor post-production manipulation).
Li Wei, 040-02.<<29层自由度>>."29 levels of freedom",2003,07.24. Beijing, 120x175cm
Untitled, Dream Houses, 2005
While the movement of street art into the gallery room, and its concomitant appropriation by the art establishment, is intriguing and all that, perhaps even more interesting is art the manages to encompass both worlds at the same time, through the same object (or object set). Like Slinkachu, Robin Rhode’s work brings together all of my favorite art forms. His work combines street art, photography, performance and, above all, humor to address social concerns. What more can you ask for, right?
I just need to share this artist because he brings a smile to my face. And if you can’t afford one of his photographs, there’s a little book of his work that is absolutely delightful. Yes, you read that correctly, delightful. As in it will actually make you giggle. Slinkachu is a London-based artist. His “Little People Project” occurs at several levels. Slinkachu repaints and manipulates little figures from model train sets. He then sets them up in miniature scenarios around the city (most often in London, but he has installations in other cities as well). He photographs the figures both close up and then at a bit of a distance. And then he just leaves them there.
By nellyfus CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
The artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have sparked an enormous amount of controversy with the plans for his latest public art project. Over The River – a proposed project for the Arkansas River in Colorado – was originally planned to open in the Summer of 2010. The projection is now August 2014. It has been held up in it’s effort to gain the approval of a number of agencies at the federal, state, county and town level as well as facing a large grass roots opposition movement calling itself “Rags Over Arkansas River”. This week the project finally received Federal approval, but still awaits permits at the local level. The plan is to suspend 962 panels of fabric over a 40 mile stretch of the Arkansas River. This is not the first time that the pair have faced controversy over their work. This project in particular seems to raise a number of crucial questions about the role of art as a public endeavor.
Left: Christo, Over the River (Project for Arkansas River, State of Colorado), Drawing 1999, 22 x 28" (55.9 x 71.1 cm), Pencil, charcoal, wax crayon and pastel // Photo: Wolfgang Volz // © 1999 Christo; Right: Christo, Over the River (Project for Arkansas River, State of Colorado), Drawing 2010, 13 7/8 x 15 1/4" (35.3 x 38.7 cm), Pencil, charcoal, wax crayon and pastel // Photo: André Grossmann // © 2010 Christo
Segment from “Am I a House?” by Erwin Wurm.
I just discovered this artist at a museum last weekend. His work is brilliant. I am completely obsessed with him. Erwin, I love you. It is difficult to convey his work here, but if you have any opportunity to see it, I recommend you do.
MUST WATCH – a short video in which Erwin Wurm discusses his view of his Art and it’s relationship to “reality” at the LM Artist Video Series.
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