Classics: Robert Indiana
Love these iconic photos from the catalog for the Robert Indiana show at Paul Kasmin Gallery in 2008.
Must See: Andy Goldsworthy documentary Rivers and Tides
If you’re an Andy Goldsworthy fan, I’d highly recommend this documentary on him. If you’re not a Goldsworthy fan, I bet you’ll become one really quickly if you watch this film. His work is pure wonderment.
Seeing Goldsworthy at work on his ephemeral pieces, made completely of found materials, is almost meditative just to watch. I don’t know what I expected him to be like as a person, but I was enchanted in the documentary to see that he is so much a part of his work, and vice versa. You can’t imagine him doing anything else with his life, and it seems to completely consume him, so that he is completely at peace while he’s working.
Art For a Cause: Re:Form School
Last week, redu, a movement aimed at rebuilding America’s public school system, sponsored a huge collaborative arts show, called Re:Form School, aimed at raising public awareness about the need to reform our school system.
WK, one of the participating artists, created this awesome installation at a New York City public school playground using photos he took of kids at the school and drawings he collected from them.
Check out this time-lapse video to see how it was created…
Love that even the art world is helping focus attention on our public schools right now!
[Re:Form]
More from Ball-Nogues Studio
Ball-Nogues studio, who created these awesome suspension installations, also created this map of San Diego for a new local hotel.
Not content with merely an “artistic representation” of the layout of the city, they created a geographic and topographic replica using custom-made software to transform an aerial photo in a 3-d bas relief using wood, bronze, and polymer resin.
Arts Visuels >> Claire Morgan
In the same way that people often describe experiencing the moments of a car wreck or calamitous accident as though it were in slow motion, so slow that they can recall every detail with supernatural clarity, Claire Morgan’s painstakingly precise installations composed of taxidermied animanls, manmade plastics, and natural elements seem to reconstruct a freeze-frame of the metaphorical factors that collided to cause the death of the animal on display.
Ball Nogues Studio
Ball-Nogues studio designs these installations of dyed twine, which they call “Suspensions,” using a computer program they created, and then they hang the twine by hand. Are you in awe?? I am!
Ball-Nogues studio is a design and fabrication studio based out of Los Angeles and is headed by Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues, who studied together at Southern California Institute of Architecture. Represented by Edward Cella Gallery in LA, their work has been featured at P.S. 1, the Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim, and many more prestigious institutions and exhibitions.
PS- if you like these, check out these installations.. highly reminiscent!
[via Kitsune Noir]
Urban Play
Graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, in collaboration with lettering guru Jessica Hische and 150 volunteers, created this public installation in Amsterdam composed of 250,000 eurocents proclaiming, “Obsessions make my life worse and my work better.” After it was finished, the installation was left unprotected to see how the public would interact with it.
About 20 afters after it was complete, when the plaza was empty, a man came through and started picking up the coins and putting them in bags. A neighbor, concerned that someone was “stealing the artwork,” called the police, who tried to find the artist, and when they couldn’t, they called a city cleaning company to bag up all the money and put it in a safe until they could reach the artist. Ha!
More on Sagmeister’s site here, including a timelapse video of the installation.
Jessica Hische website here (tons of awesome typography/graphic design stuff to explore).
Jaume Plensa
Jaume Plensa’s Nomade at Antibes.
By constructing figures out of letters, Plensa’s work explores not only the human form, but also the role of language in the human experience. The figures are literally made out of the building blocks through which we communicate and describe emotion, both expressing the importance of language in the human experience and giving a physical, tangible form to language.
Many of his pieces, like Nomade, above, are built so that the viewer can walk inside of the piece. Very different from viewing a three-dimensional sculpture from afar, the viewer is now inhabiting the piece, having his experience of the work shaped both by the shape of his physical environment and by the language it is made out of, incomprehensible though it is.
The contemplative poses of many of his figures also suggests the artist’s interest in the role of language in reflection. While true meditation may be thought of as the absence of thought, by quite literally forming shapes out of letters, Plensa seems to emphasize the importance of language in giving shape to our inner monologues.
In the Midst of Dreams, above, in which three ambiguously-gendered and race-less forms appear illuminated from within while in sleep, was described by the artist as an exploration of the centrality of dreams to the human experience and his own interest in the concept of a universal human race, democratized by common experiences like dreaming.
In Song of Songs, the artist constructed “walls” out of letters that, when read from top-to-bottom, form the classical poem of the same name, walls that guide the movement of and form “rooms” around the viewer as he experiences both his environment and the poem.
Interestingly, the letters are suspended rather than laid against an impermeable surface, meaning that while the sheets of letters form “walls” around the viewer, the walls are transparent, allowing a visual interactivity with the entire room while the viewer reads the poem that mimics the way one also brings outside experiences and reference points to the reading of poetry in more traditional mediums.
If you want to check out more of Plensa’s work, read about his Crown Fountain project in Chicago here.
[Jaume Plensa website]
A Simple Feat of Light
Sadly don’t know where this is or who made it. But I love it. Amazing what simple votive candles can do.
The World’s Largest Work of Art
Remember Jim Denevan, whose work I put up back here (if you didn’t see it, check it out, pretty awesome)? Well apparently back in March, he completed the “world’s largest work of art,” on Lake Baikal in Siberia, and there’s a documentary in the works about the piece (intro below).
Denevan’s large-scale earth works explore the impermanent, carving geometric shapes into element-sensitive areas, like sand and snow, that will eventually be erased by wind and water.
This latest project in Siberia was a 9-square mile spiral of circles, along the fibonacci curve, starting at 18″ and ranging up to miles in diameter.
Jim Denevan site here.
Siberia project as featured on The Anthropologist
