After four days of processions and parties for the Diamond Jubilee, the Royal Family wrapped up its celebration of the Queen today with a lavish church service at St. Paul’s Cathedral, in London. Afterwards there was a reception at Mansion House and then a lunch at Westminster Hall. For the last few days everything’s been regal and elaborate, with the requirement of hats for the women adding an extra layer of flair to the proceedings.

At the services today, for instance, Kate Middleton topped her nude-colored lace dress — by Alexander McQueen — with a pillbox hat contraption adorned with structured lily pad flaps. The piece was assembled for her by milliner Jane Taylor.

But the biggest outfit news of the Jubilee? Kate Middleton picked out a dress previously worn by Kim Kardashian.

As soon as Middleton walked out for the Queen’s river pageant celebration on Sunday in a red dress — a McQueen from designer Sarah Burton’s fall 2011 collection — observers felt a jolt of recognition. Could it be? Yes, Kardashian wore the same dress in New York last August.

Despite mostly mild praise for the look, British papers were not terribly kind about the association between a Queen-to-be and the reality TV tabloid favorite.

“The Duchess of Cambridge is never afraid to wear something that might not be bang up to the minute,” the Daily Mail reported.

A piece in the Telegraph quipped, “Fame-ravenous Kim Kardashian insists on pouring her hourglass curves into designs approximately three sizes too small.”

And then there was this headline in the Mirror: “God Save McQueen.”

To be fair, the Duchess of Cambridge touched up the frock a bit. Kardashian showed some skin, opting to go with the original sleeveless design, while Middleton added sleeves for the pageant.

We’re pretty sure that a repeat offense won’t happen again anytime soon. Kardashian is now leaving all style advice up to her new boyfriend, Kanye West, and to our knowledge Middleton has not yet picked up a look from the latest collection of the rapper’s fashion line, Dw. 

See more ARTINFO fashion and style coverage on our blog Silhouettes.

June 5, 2012, 2:38 pm By DAVE ITZKOFF After a film career that has included “Terms of Endearment,” “Urban Cowboy” and “An Officer and a Gentleman,” it was only a matter of time before someone swept Debra Winger off her feet and carried her over the thres

KASSEL — “I don’t have a concept,” said documenta 13 artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev to those gathered to kick off the year's most anticipated exhibition. While that may be the case, what Christov-Bakargiev does have is a lot of thoughts. “I want to give a lecture,” she continued, later laughing, “This is serious you know; this is documenta.”

The curator's 30-minute opening remarks spanned from Adorno and aesthetic autonomy to neurology, and from the desires of meteorites to the digital roots of rifts between rich and poor, causing some actually to cry out for her to end. (One outspoken woman burst out, “This is very un-polite. People from all over the world have come to listen to you!” as the artistic director skipped through vast portions of her opening essay.) Despite the commotion, four abstract curatorial themes or narratives became clear in the opening speech: the stage of subjecthood; besiegement by others; hope, optimism, and anticipation; and the state of retreat.

As for the all-important artist list, it is nearly 300 strong. Participants for the most part hail from a visual arts background — as one would expect at a big art show — however, philosophers and social and cultural theorists such as Judith Butler, Andrea Cavalletti, Donna Harraway, and Christoph Menke dot the list, as well as more obscure figures such as Suely Rolnik, listed as an “Unconscious analyst.” Demographically, the list is extremely gender-balanced in comparison to many international art exhibitions. A great number of artists who figured in Christov-Bakargiev's 2008 Sydney Biennale such as Janet Cardiff & George Burges Miller, and various Arte Povera artists — a specially of this curator — such as Giuseppe Penone and Alighiero Boetti also make the trip to Kassel.

As Christov-Bakargiev’s own feminist background suggests, issues of women's rights figure heavily in the exhibition. However, other tenets also prove important, such as questions of location — highlighted by the co-existence documenta 13’s four cities: This year, the show is also launching exhibitions in Kabul and Bamiyan in Afganistan, Alexandria and Cairo in Egypt, and Banff in Canada. “Located in an apparent simultaneity of places and times, they acquire meaning only through their interrelations,” Christov-Bakargiev explained to the crowd.

She also stated that she wished to point to non-human artistic and political motivations, addressing at length her failure to bring the El Chaco Meteorite to Kassel from its age-old seat in Argentina, a curatorial gambit that was announced last January. “Does [El Chaco] have any rights and how could it express them...would it have enjoyed a short trip to an art exhibition?” she asked.

Finally, it's worth noting that this year, writing and storytelling both figure prominently in the exhibition, via a writing residency titled, “Chorality. On Retreat.” 

As was predicted, within the city of Kassel itself, locations have multiplied in comparison to past documentas. Beside the Fridericianum, the documenta-Halle, and the Neue Galerie, the exhibition spans nine further locations, including the Karlsaue Park where Tacita Dean has created an installation in a small house. Now the race to see it all in three short days begins.

The full list of artists follows:

Leeza Ahmady, Agent; Curator

Korbinian Aigner, Artist; Gardener; Priest

Vyacheslav Akhunov, Artist

Barmak Akram, Filmmaker; Artist

Khadim Ali, Artist

Eric Alliez, Philosopher

Allora & Calzadilla, Artists

Maria Thereza Alves, Artist

Alÿs, Francis, Artist

Ayreen Anastas, Agent; Artist; Researcher

AND AND AND, Commoners; Poets; Whatever-singularities

Arjun Appadurai, Anthropologist of globalization

Ida Applebroog, Artist

Irina Aristarkhova, Cultural Theorist

Mohammad Yusuf Asefi, Artist

Doug Ashford, Artist

Tarek Atoui, Artist

Kader Attia, Artist

Julie Ault, Artist

Alexandra Bachzetsis, Artist

Bactrian Princesses Nanni Balestrini, Artist; Poet; Writer

Amy Balkin, Artist

Lars Bang Larsen, Art Historian

Karen Barad, Physicist; Philosopher; Theorist; Scholar; Author

Bassam El Baroni, Art Critic; Curator

Judith Barry, Artist

Massimo Bartolini, Artist

Gianfranco Baruchello, Artist

Ahmed Basiony, Artist

Hrach Bayadyan, Cultural Critic

Thomas Bayrle, Artist

Jérôme Bel, Choreographer

Mario Bellatin, Advisor; Writer

Gordon Bennett, Artist

Jill Bennett, Cultural Historian; Theorist; Curator

Franco Bifo – Berardi, Activist; Philosopher; Writer

Rossella Biscotti, Artist

Iwona Blazwick, Advisor; Curator

Manon de Boer, Artist

Alighiero Boetti, Artist

Anna Boghiguian, Artist

Bruno Bosteels, Critic

Carol Bove, Artist

Ali Brivanlou, Advisor; Biologist

Kristina Buch, Artist

Susan Buck-Morss, Philosopher; Cultural Historian

Andrea Büttner, Artist

Judith Butler, Cultural Theorist; Philosopher

Gerard Byrne, Artist

CAMP (founded 2007 by Shaina Anand, Sanjay Bhangar, and Ashok Sukumaran), Artists

Cardiff, Janet & Bures Miller, George, Artists

Emily Carr, Artist

Mariana Castillo Deball, Artist

Andrea Cavalletti, Philosopher

George Chan, Agroscientist; Engineer

Paul Chan, Artist

Kudzanai Chiurai, Artist

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Artistic Director

Geoff Cox, Critic; Writer; Curator

Critical Art Ensemble, Artists

Abraham Cruzvillegas, Artist

István Csákány, Artist

Attila Csörgő, Artist

Antoni Cumella, Artist

Salvador Dalí, Artist

Marie Darrieussecq, Writer

Dietmar Dath, Writer; Translator

Lydia Davis, Writer; Translator

Tacita Dean, Artist

Mark Dion, Artist

Thea Djordjadze, Artist

Willie Doherty, Artist

Nikola Doll, Art Historian; Curator

Trisha Donnelly, Artist

Sam Durant, Artist

Jimmie Durham, Artist

Epaminonda, Haris & Cramer, Daniel Gustav, Artists

Cevdet Erek, Artist

Michael Eskin, Author; Literary Critic; Publisher

Faivovich, Guillermo & Goldberg, Nicolás, Artists

Matias Faldbakken, Artist; Writer

Geoffrey Farmer, Artist

Omer Fast, Artist

Lara Favaretto, Artist

Silvia Federici, Feminist; Scholar; Activist

Ceal Floyer, Artist

Llyn Foulkes, Artist

Abul Qasem Foushanji, Artist

Chiara Fumai, Artist

Bettina Funcke, Writer; Editor

Rene Gabri, Agent; Artist; Researcher

 Peter L. Galison,Historian and Philosopher of Science; Filmmaker

Dario Gamboni, Art Historian

Ryan Gander, Artist

Dora García, Artist

Fernando García-Dory, Artist

Mario Garcia Torres, Artist

Theaster Gates, Artist

Jeanno Gaussi, Artist

Ashraf Ghani, Anthropologist; Political Scientist

Mariam Ghani, Artist

Simryn Gill, Artist

Kenneth Goldsmith, Poet

Julio González, Artist

Avery F. Gordon, Writer; Social Theorist

Tue Greenfort, Agent; Artist

Boris Groys, Philosopher

Durs Grünbein, Poet

Péter György, Cultural Theorist

Zainab Haidary, Artist

Fiona Hall, Artist

Dorothea von Hantelmann, Art Historian

Donna Haraway, Advisor; Science Studies and Cultural Theorist

Michael Hardt, Philosopher; Political Theorist

Graham Harman, Philosopher

Salah M. Hassan, Advisor; Art Historian; Cultural Theorist

Florian Hecker, Artist

Alanna Heiss, Curator

Daniel Heller-Roazen, Philosopher

Tamara Henderson, Artist

Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Agent; Curator; Writer

Susan Hiller, Artist

Horst Hoheisel, Artist

Brian Holmes, Cultural Critic

Judith Hopf, Artist

Hourani, Khaled with Amjad Ghannam and Rashid Masharawi, Artists

Pierre Huyghe, Advisor; Artist

Sonallah Ibrahim, Writer

Sanja Iveković, Artist

Emily Jacir, Artist

Alejandro Jodorowsky, Filmmaker

Toril Johannessen, Artist

Joan Jonas, Artist

Brian Jungen, Artist

Jungen, Brian and Linklater, Duane, Artists

Rudolf Kaesbach, Artist

Kahn, Robin & La Cooperativa Unidad Nacional Mujeres Saharauis (The National Union of Women from Western Sahara), Artist

Masood Kamandy, Artist

Amar Kanwar, Artist

William Kentridge, Artist

Hassan Khan, Artist; Musician; Writer

Sunjung Kim, Agent; Curator

Adam Kleinman, Agent; Curator; Writer

Alexander Kluge, Filmmaker; Writer

Koyo Kouoh, Agent; Curator

Joasia Krysa, Agent; Curator

Christian Kuhtz, Inventor

Erkki Kurenniemi, Artist; Physicist

Marta Kuzma, Agent; Curator

Adriana Lara, Artist

Horacio Larrain Barros, Cultural Anthropologist

Lê, Dinh Q. in collaboration with Vu Giang Huong, Quang Tho, Huynh Phuong Dong, Nguyen Thu, Truong Hieu, Phan Oanh, Nguyen Toan Thi, Duong Anh, Minh Phuong, Kim Tien, Quach Phong, Nguyen Thanh Chau, Artists

Pamela M. Lee, Art Historian; Art Critic

Jolyon Leslie, Architect

Gabriel Lester, Artist

David Levi Strauss, Art Historian; Cultural Critic

David Link, Artist; Computer Scientist

Maria Loboda, Artist

Mark Lombardi, Artist

Aníbal López, Artist

Renata Lucas, Artist

Lutyens, Marcos & Raimundas Malašauskas, featuring Sissel Tolaas, Artists

Goshka Macuga, Artist

Anna Maria Maiolino, Artist

Catherine Malabou,Philosopher

Nalini Malani, Artist

Raimundas Malašauskas, Agent; Artist; Curator; Writer

Man Ray, Artist

Chus Martínez, Head of Department; Core Agent; Curator; Writer

Maria Martins, Artist

Francesco Matarrese, Artist

Fabio Mauri, Artist

Julie Mehretu, Artist

John Menick, Artist; Writer; Filmmaker

Christoph Menke, Philosopher

Gustav Metzger, Artist

Lee Miller, Photographer

W. J. T. Mitchell, Art Historian

Aman Mojadidi, Artist

MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho, Artists

Gareth Moore, Artist

Giorgio Morandi, Artist

Romaine Moreton, Poet

Rabih Mroué, Artist

Stephen Muecke, Cultural Theorist; Writer

Christian Philipp Müller, Artist

Zanele Muholi, Artist

Ingo Niermann, Writer

Arne Nordheim, Composer

M.A. Numminen, Composer; Performer

Objects damaged during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), Deformed Sculptures

Hans Ulrich Obrist, Critic; Curator

Shinro Ohtake, Artist

Rahraw Omarzad, Artist

Roman Ondák, Artist

Füsun Onur, Artist

The Otolith Group, Artists

Lívia Páldi, Agent; Curator

Christodoulos Panayiotou, Artist

Nikos Papastergiadis, Cultural Theorist

Aaron Peck, Writer; Art Critic

Giuseppe Penone, Artist

Claire Pentecost, Artist

Alexei Penzin, Philosopher

Hetti Perkins, Agent; Curator

Michael Petzet, Advisor; Conservationist

Susan Philipsz, Artist

Pratchaya Phinthong, Artist

Sopheap Pich, Artist

Griselda Pollock, Art Historian; Cultural Theorist

Lea Porsager, Artist

Michael Portnoy, Artist

Margaret Preston, Artist

Seth Price, Artist

Ana Prvacki, Artist

Walid Raad, Artist

Atiq Rahimi, Writer

Michael Rakowitz, Artist

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Artist

Doreen Reid Nakamarra, Artist

Pedro Reyes, Artist

Gunnar Richter, Artist; Historian

Sarah Rifky, Agent; Curator

Stuart Ringholt, Artist

Robbins, Ruth & Red Vaughan Tremmel, Artists

Rodas, Juana Marta & Isidrez, Julia, Artists

Suely Rolnik, Unconscious Analyst

Jacqueline Rose, Cultural Theorist

Andrew Ross, Social and Cultural Analyst

Pascal Rousseau, Art Historian; Curator

Paul Ryan, Artist

Hannah Ryggen, Artist

Nawal El Saadawi, Writer

Natascha Sadr Haghighian,  Architect

Anri Sala, Artist

Charlotte Salomon, Artist

Issa Samb, Artist; Writer

Annemarie Sauzeau, Writer; Art Critic

Ines Schaber, Artist

Eva Scharrer, Agent; Curator; Writer; Art Historian

Kitty Scott, Agent; Curator

Tino Sehgal, Artist

Albert Serra, Filmmaker; Artist

Nicola Setari, Agent, Philosopher

Tejal Shah, Artist

Wael Shawky, Artist

Zolaykha Sherzad, Designer

Adania Shibli, Writer

Vandana Shiva, Seed Activist

Nedko Solakov, Artist

Song Dong, Artist

Tamás St.Turba, Non-Art-Artist

Alexandra Sukhareva, Artist

Imre Szeman, Cultural Theorist

Mika Taanila, Artist, Filmmaker

Mohsen Taasha, Artist

G. M. Tamás,Philosopher

Alexander Tarakhovsky, Advisor; Geneticist

Michael Taussig, Advisor; Anthropologist

Jane Taylor, Advisor; Cultural Theorist; Writer

Javier Téllez, Artist

Aase Texmon Rygh, Artist

Warwick Thornton, Filmmaker

Time/Bank (e-flux: Julieta Aranda & Anton Vidokle), Artists

Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Artist

Jalal Toufic, Artist; Writer

Rosemarie Trockel, Artist

Mario Tronti, Political Philosopher

Vandy Rattana, Artist; Photographer

Vann Nath, Artist

Chiara Vecchiarelli, Curator; Writer

Ignacio Vidal-Folch, Writer

Enrique Vila-Matas, Writer

Andrea Viliani, Agent; Curator

Adrián Villar Rojas, Artist

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Anthropologist

Jeronimo Voss, Artist

Vu Giang Huong, Artist

Roy Wagner, Anthropologist

Ian Wallace, Artist

Jessica Warboys, Artist

Lori Waxman, Critic

Clemens von Wedemeyer, Artist

Apichatpong Weerasethakul in collaboration with Chaisiri Jiwarangsan, Filmmakers; Artists

Lawrence Weiner, Artist

Eyal Weizman, Architect

Yan Lei, Artist

Haegue Yang, Artist

Akram Zaatari, Artist

Zalmaï, Artist

Alejandro Zambra, Writer

Anton Zeilinger, Advisor; Physicist

Konrad Zuse, Artist; Computer Engineer

It was a fruitless search for Chloé jeans that sparked a retail revolution on the Internet. Natalie Massenet, who was a fashion editor at Tatler in London in 1999, was looking to buy a pair of jeans by the French luxury label to no avail. So she decided to do something about it. In June 2000, she radically changed the luxury online shopping landscape when she founded Net-A-Porter — the retail Web site that sells high-end brands — just as the Internet bubble was about to lose air. But her unique business venture persevered from a Chelsea flat where she worked with two other employees, monitoring purchases on a computer as they wrapped up designer garments in the company’s now signature tissue paper, matte black boxes, and ribbon.

A decade later, Massenet sold her portion of the company to the Swiss luxury goods group Richemont — which owns such brands as Chloé, Cartier, and Montblanc – for an astonishing sum of an estimated  £50 million ($77 million). Each month approximately 3 million visitors land on Net-a-Porter to browse its vast inventory of 350 designer collections that includes everything from Christian Louboutin heels to Oscar de la Renta gowns to Yves Saint Laurent handbags. Massenet also added two new luxury e-tail Web sites to her empire: Mr Porter, which is targeted at men, and the Outnet, where customers can find heavy discounts on designer items.

Massenet also has a staunch interest in art. Net-a-Porter sponsored Frieze New York, launched a special fashion and art issue for the company’s online magazine, and held a lavish dinner with luminaries from both worlds. For this week’s Tastemaker, Massenet talks to ARTINFO about her anti-aging secret, her latest art purchase, and what kind of heels she prefers to wear to the office.

Click on the slide show to see Natalie Massenet’s Tastemaker picks.

See more ARTINFO fashion and style coverage on our blog Silhouettes.

Tomorrow, Chicago’s Wright House, the premier auction house of modern and contemporary design, is hosting “Important Design,” its bi-annual auction of the last centuries’ rare gems. For the occasion, Italian manufacturing power house Cassina has done a rare thing and opened its archives, relinquising a few treasured pieces by Italian design deities to hungry bidders.

Gaetano Pesce's long and illustrious relationship with Cassina produced fabulously eccentric creations; there was the Feltri Chair in 1986, a wool and polyester seat with a strong resemblance to a sleeping bag offering a welcoming hug, and the 1983 New York Sunset, a sofa with cushions colored to look like twilight over the city skyline. Pesce's largest collaboration with Cassina was the 2011 Sessantuna collection, a set of 61 irregularly-shaped, tricolored tables celebrating the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy. Arranged together, the tables, manufactured from resin with legs that could be individually manipulated and rearranged, form the country’s unique shape, including land, sea, and islands. The pieces were auctioned by Phillips de Pury in 2011 so that unified Italy could be “fragmented all around the globe,” Pesce said, but one of two completely finished prototypes for the series is going up on the auction block tomorrow.

Would-be owners can also look forward to Pesce’s molded polyurethane Dalila 2 Chair and Dalila 3 Armchair, as well as his bizarre Golgotha Chair, a synthetic polyester-filled and resin-soaked fiberglass cloth suspended on a wire framework with a strange, lacquered dishrag look that also sits in MoMA's permanent design collection. Although Mario Bellini’s Teneride Chair, a single piece of black polyurethane molded into what looks like an accordion tube bent for sitters to nestle into, was too difficult to construct to go into production, bidders will have a chance to take the prototype home. And the 14th of the venerated Alessandro Mendini’s edition of 20 spare but striking Terra chairs will have bidders chomping at the bit.

To see the Cassina works going up for auction during “Important Design,” click the slide show. The auction takes place tomorrow. 

Ray Bradbury, passionate and prolific writer of science fiction classics like "Farenheit 451" and "The Martian Chronicles," died Wednesday at the age of 91.

Debra Winger, best known for her roles in "Terms of Endearment" and "Shadowlands," is set to make her Broadway debut in David Mamet's new play "The Anarchist" later this fall.

In a decision filed yesterday, the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia ruled in a 2-1 that Brooklyn artist Elli Bern Angellino can once again take up his lawsuit against the Saudi royal family. The al Sauds are allegedly deadbeat buyers who refuse to fork over the $12.6 million they owe the sculptor for the 29 works he created specifically for them.

In 2010, Angellino sued the Saudi royal family and 16 of its members, claiming they had not paid for the sculptures he created for them and shipped to the Arabian Peninsula in 2006 and 2007. Under the contract, the Saudis could either pay for the works once they arrived in Riyadh or send them back to the artist. After they did neither, Angellino sued. But, a court found that Angellino, acting as his own lawyer, failed to properly meet all the legal requirements for pursuing payment and threw the case out last year. Tuesday's decision reinstated the case, allowing Angellino to pursue payment anew.

Luckily for other artists pursuing deadbeat Saudi royals — and for Angellino himself — judge Karen LeCraft Henderson ends up giving him a nice little primer for suing a foreign entity accused of neglecting art payments. Here, then, are the most helpful excerpts from the decision if you are trying to sue any foreign governments that owe you millions, with minimal personal expense:

1) Argue the case yourself.

As we observed in Moore, "[p]ro se litigants are allowed more latitude than litigants represented by counsel to correct defects in service of process and pleadings."

The court may go easier on you if you represent yourself. That said — can you imagine trying to navigate both U.S. and international law without a lawyer?

2) Know the law.

"The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (Act, FSIA), 28 U.S.C. § 1608, governs service of process on a foreign state, including a political subdivision, agency or instrumentality thereof."

Ordinarily, a foreign government is protected from lawsuits in the United States under a 1976 law called the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (the same ones that allow diplomatic cars to ignore parking tickets). However, one of the exceptions is when a foreign government engages in commercial activities here. Art purchases apply.

3) Don't mail it in.

"Given his practice of communicating with the defendants through the Embassy, Angellino believed he was required to serve process on the defendants using the same means. But when he attempted to serve a copy of the summons and complaint by mailing them via first class mail to the Embassy, it refused to accept the mailing." 

A lot of this case rests on a mail mix-up. The law states that you first have to try to deliver the summons in other ways before you can try the postal service. When and if you get to that point, you must make sure you use the kind of mail that requires a signature and a receipt.

4) Do some tricky Hollywood-type stuff that someone else did before.

"We believe there exists a 'reasonable probability' that Angellino can effect service on the defendant Royal Family given the success of other parties … [Quoting from a 2005 case] ('The  [U.S.] Embassy in Khartoum delivered the summons, complaint and notice of suit … to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on June 28, 2005 under cover of a diplomatic note…')"

Basically, the judge is laying out a proven way to serve papers to the Saudis: Have the U.S. embassy in Riyadh send the summonses in an envelope that says "diplomatic note." Then they have to open it.

5) When in doubt, just keep trying.

"Angellino’s  dogged (albeit inadequate) attempts to  effect service of process  and the district court’s failure to provide 'a form of notice sufficiently understandable to one in [Angellino’s] circumstances fairly to apprise him of what is required' to serve process … we conclude the district court abused its discretion in dismissing Angellino’s complaint'"

This case is being allowed to continue because Angellino gets points for effort (albeit only from two of the three judges). 

NEW YORK — The dealer New York Magazine has called "the tough, platinum princess of the Chelsea gallery scene" is taking up a larger footprint in the neighborhood. Andrea Rosen Gallery is expanding to a new space on 24th Street, reports Art in America. The 1,350-square-foot venue will share the name of the gallery's project space, Gallery 2, which occupies the back of Rosen's existing 24th Street gallery. (The exact address of the second location is not yet clear.)

Rosen, who recently made headlines by scooping up red-hot video artist Ryan Trecartin and his collaborator Lizzie Fitch, told the magazine she will open the new gallery in September with an as-yet-unnamed artist. ("It will be the artist's first solo show in New York," she promised coyly.) Rosen has also added Josephene Meckseper and Aaron Bobrow to her stable in recent months.

The dealer plans to use Gallery 2 as she did its forebear — as a laboratory to explore art with shows that place less emphasis on commercial appeal or success. Since its inception in 1999, the original Gallery 2 has hosted exhibitions of lesser-known, uncharacteristic work by Robert Mangold and John Chamberlain.

Though many recent Chelsea expansions — Pace Gallery and Hauser & Wirth among them — are showy productions that take up a large amount of square footage, Rosen plans to keep Gallery 2 petite. "It's purely about content and experience," she told AiA. 

Check back soon for more details on Rosen's plans for the new space. 

A few days ago, architecture and design magazine eVolo published a conceptual proposal called "Favela Cloud," a formal scheme to redevelop the Brazilian slums of Santa Marta. Renderings for the master thesis project by Aalborg University graduate students Johan Kure, Thiru Manickam, and Kemo Usto depict a massive, porous steel "cloud" made from interconnected polyhedral modules. The amorphous form is raised upon a forest of intersecting poles and made accessible by lift or by whimsically off-kilter spiral staircases. Perched high above the cinderblock shanties of Santa Marta and basking in the midday sun, "Favela Cloud" is meant to proclaim the dawn of a new age, one in which the long-neglected urban poor are both entitled to and empowered by progressive architecture.

The lofty vision of "Favela Cloud" touches upon several trends cycling through architecture today. First, it responds to the rising popularity of "architecture for social change," for which the profession nobly renounces its service to the rich to address the issues of the poor. But the "Cloud" purportedly distinguishes itself from more conventional do-good design because its principle source of inspiration is the slum itself. As eVolo explains, the success of the design hinges on its "additive system that can grow and adapt to its site conditions," motivated by the existing self-organizing logic of the favela. In other words, the intervention draws from the social and organizational qualities characteristic of the very environment it seeks to improve, a methodology that has its own backstory in architectural discourse, as I'll explore later. By returning to its point of departure and theoretically folding back into itself, the shiny edifice straddling Santa Marta brings into question if and how architecture can intervene in communities that have developed in the abject absence of a welfare state.

The "other" urbanism

Though envisioned specifically for Santa Marta, "Favela Cloud" spotlights a highly pervasive and urgent matter: the staggering growth—and plummeting socioeconomic conditions—of urban slums. As the global urban population continues to climb, so has its population of slum-dwellers. Mike Davis's provocative 2006 meditation "Planet of Slums" delivers a cold shower of statistics, estimating that at least a third of the global urban population now lives in slums, with over a billion people crammed into exceedingly underserviced urban peripheries in Africa, South America, and Asia. Forced out of their rural origins by rapid urbanization and barred from the city center by the state and the upper and middle classes, rising numbers of the urban poor are evicted to the underdeveloped city fringes, where life becomes a constant battle against hunger, disease, environmental hazards, and lawlessness. Victory promises nothing, while defeat means certain death: "If you sit down," one citizen of Lagos explained to a visiting reporter, "you will die of hunger."

With basic rights to food, potable water, and shelter categorically denied to slumdwellers, decent public architecture is but a pipe dream. Without functioning infrastructure, working sewage systems, proper housing, and designated civic spaces, slum-dwellers are forced to engineer their own systems of order. Waste from the city proper is salvaged in the slums to form constellations of cinderblock shelters fortified with sheets of tin and plastic-bag insulation; the meager space of a home easily and often doubles as a workshop; makeshift marketplaces sprout like weeds in every available space. As urban sociologist Erhard Berner wrote in his 1997 book examining land use in Manila, "Virtually all the gaps left open by city development are immediately filled with makeshift settlements that beat every record in population density."

It is precisely this creative and thoroughly bottom-up organization of space and materials that is extoled in eVolo's "Favela Cloud" proposal. Enchanted by the 'other' urbanism surfacing in the world’s unheeded territories, the project attempts to distill the spatial practices of the favela into a prototypical, steel-engineered edifice. Elevated high above the existing slumscape, the "Cloud" makes accessible an immense volume of untouched space formerly unreachable for the favela's resident ad hoc architects. It imports the verticality of the traditional skyscraper—the ultimate symbol of metropolitan wealth—but endeavors to integrate and accentuate the organic qualities of its site through its irregular shape and exaggerated lack of spatial hierarchy. "Favela Cloud" emerges as a sculptural, avant-garde reproduction of the organized chaos just below it. Refined through the computer-generated expressionism of contemporary design, the problem somehow becomes a solution.

How we learned to stop worrying and love the slum

The notion that the slums can be both problem and solution has a rather long history. In "Planet of Slums," Davis cites the notorious early- to mid-century CIAM (Congrès internationaux d'architecture modern, or the International Congresses of Modern Architecture), a faction of which had romanticized Tunisian slums, or bidonvilles, for their “‘organic’ relationship between the buildings and the site…the flexibility of spaces to accommodate diverse functions, and the changing needs of the users.” The concept was further propagated in the 1970s by the English architect John Turner, who was fascinated by the ingenuity he had observed in Peruvian squatter settlements. Then-World Bank President Robert McNamara was particularly delighted by Turner’s subsequent proposal for slum improvement, which advocated for “self-help, incremental construction, and legalization of spontaneous urbanization.” For McNamara, Turner’s proposition was a conveniently cost-effective antidote to an unrelenting problem.

The policies that developed out of Turner's voyeuristic fascination were not just benign but damaging, however. They excused the state for sidelining serious efforts to abolish slum conditions. Through the 1970s and 1980s, as the world's slums and shantytowns grew like a cancer, quickly forming the bulk of megacities like Lagos and Kolkata despite half-hearted NGO interventions and ruthless local slash-and-burn campaigns, the slums were once again recognized as problems through and through—and seemingly hopeless ones at that. It wasn't until the 1990s and 2000s that the slums were taken up as architectural case studies again, this time with a new initiative: to learn from them and apply their lessons elsewhere.

Forecasting the urban apocalypse

Thus, in his 1995 tome S, M, L, XL, Dutch architect and urban theorist Rem Koolhaas showed a burgeoning interest in the development of slum urbanism (or lack thereof): "In spite of its early promise, its frequent bravery, urbanism has been unable to invent and implement at the scale demanded by its apocalyptic demographics," he writes in one essay, citing the population spike in Lagos from 2 to 15 million within 20 years. A few years later, Koolhaas would observe the urban "apocalypse" firsthand, taking a group of Harvard GSD students with him to Lagos for a five-year research project on the city. The project, which culminated in a 2008 publication entitled "Lagos: How It Works," has since become a hallmark in Koolhaas's personal oeuvre and, not surprisingly, a contentious contribution to the discussion of slums.

With Turner-like enthusiasm, Koolhaas remarks on the cunningly improvised conditions he and his students witnessed in a city that has vastly outgrown its modern infrastructure. Though the alternative systems of order that emerge are clearly born out of unthinkable hardship, to Koolhaas, these devices continuously reinvent the city in creative, albeit desperate, ways. The architect praises Lagos for having "developed in reverse of the direction that was intended" when the city was formally planned in the 1970s, and he asserts that this reversal is not a "backward situation" but, rather, an "announcement of the future." For him, the fact that uncurbed population growth and extreme underdevelopment can be reconciled in Lagos through countless individual ad hoc interventions signals the failure of conventional notions of urban planning but also the infinite possibilities of new ones.

By placing Lagos in contraposition to the accustomed Western ideals he demonizes, Koolhaas comes dangerously close to romanticizing the slums once again. But unlike Turner in the 1970s, Koolhaas does not catapult his own intellectual excitement to a level that justifies a passive stance on the matter: "If you extrapolate current trends," he explains in an interview about the Lagos project, "there are many signs that show that the world is going to be a pretty horrible place. There are many reasons to assume that a laissez-faire attitude is not the answer." Unfortunately, Koolhaas does little to suggest how to extract the lessons of Lagos without perpetuating the abject living conditions that foster them.

Towards a "model of social sustainability"

Around the same time when Koolhaas was traveling to Lagos, San Diego-based architect Teddy Cruz was visiting Mexico's border towns with a similar resolve to study under-the-radar urban phenomena. Cruz observed in Tijuana how developers were importing a superficial image of the American dream across the border in the form of cheap, miniature replicas of the suburbs. "What I noticed is how quickly these developments were retrofitted by the tenants," Cruz told the New York Times, bringing attention to the makeshift mechanics’ shops and taco stands that quickly took over front lawns and the spaces between the homogenous suburban shells. Here along the border, the ersatz American utopia could not help but evolve into something much more layered and complex.

Cruz studied the individuated forms and programs and exported these lessons back across the border to suburban San Diego, where he was working on a design for a residential development for Latino immigrants. His resulting prototype weaves 12 affordable housing units, a community center, offices, gardens, and spaces for street markets and kiosks into a concrete frame. "In a place where current regulation allows only one use, we propose five different uses that support each other," Cruz explains in an article for Residential Architect Magazine. "This suggests a model of social sustainability for San Diego, one that conveys density not as bulk but as social choreography."

But Cruz's work doesn't stop at San Diego. Alongside the San Diego residential project, Cruz and his studio developed a proposal for a project in Tijuana, where Cruz had been fascinated by the way residents recycle materials brought in from affluent neighborhoods across the border to construct makeshift dwellings. As Cruz observed, these informal peripheral settlements develop faster than the urban cores they surround. By constructing a prefabricated building frame to support the rapid growth of Tijuana's improvised architectures, Cruz hopes to "strengthen the otherwise precarious terrain without compromising the temporal dynamics of these self-made environments."

Reunifying architecture

One may be tempted to draw a line connecting Cruz’s mixed-use structures to the more aesthetically audacious "Favela Cloud" (and, by that virtue, to CIAM, Turner, and Koolhaas's outsider interest in the ad hoc economies and flexible spaces of the slums). But what is novel about Cruz's approach is its underlying notion of exchange, its premise of a reciprocal interaction between two disparate communities, namely, San Diego and Tijuana, development and under-development. Like Koolhaas, Cruz recognizes that the problem of slums and shantytowns and the socioeconomic disadvantages they reflect is part of a larger problem that exists outside of Santa Marta, Lagos, Tijuana, and other directly affected urban centers. Cruz does not attempt to transform America's Levittowns into versions of Mexico's barrios, nor is he converting barrios into Levittowns. Instead, his designs aspire to bridge the theoretical gap between the two, lending and borrowing material and conceptual elements and facilitating a dialogue instead of a division. To Cruz, the best architecture and urbanism "mediates between large and small, between rich and poor, between formal and informal."

Cruz's practice circles back to the hidden inadequacies behind the notion of "architecture for social change." The establishment of a specified brand of architecture "for social change" immediately divides architecture and the issues it addresses into two separate realms: one that chooses to acknowledge social responsibility and one that is relieved of it. The term might suggest, in an underhanded way, that any architecture that does not directly confront a disadvantaged site can be removed from the problems concentrated there. But the reality is that all architecture—whether it is a stuccoed suburban house in San Diego, a tin-roofed shanty in a Brazilian favela, or a steel white balloon looming above it—plays a part in negotiating the terms of the world's diverse communities.

Josiah McElheny is a rarity among contemporary artists in that he works in a medium requiring an extraordinary level of technical skill, glassblowing, and that he seems to have retained his faith in the fundamental promise of modernism and its belief in art’s ability to lift the human spirit. His latest exhibition at Andrea Rosen gallery, one of a number of recent and upcoming showcases for the artist everywhere from London’s Whitechapel gallery to the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, puts this faith on display in a series of graceful, vase-like abstractions enclosed in austere vitrines that harken back to visual art's fundamental duty of representing the human body. 

Though the striated glass forms in the exhibition, called “Some thoughts about the abstract body,” have a striking visual beauty on their own, it’s their titles that suggest the works are more than just pretty faces. “Models for an abstract body (after Fontana)” exhibits glass volumes with slashes cut through them while “Models for an abstract body (after McQueen)” reduces the fashion designer’s form-fitting corsets and sweeping dresses into minimialist icons. “Models for an abstract body (after Delaunay, Rodchenko, and Vialov)” similarly examines the Orphist and two Constructivists in transparent vases shot through with gray.

The effect could be satirical, but its strength is its subtlety. McElheny is a student and a scholar as much as an artist, as his numerous research-driven curatorial endeavors, like delving into the mind of writer Paul Scheerbart and the co-curation of a Bard exhibition responding to Blinky Palermo, have shown, and these sculptures come across chiefly as case studies of how different artists chose to confront the body, how they idealized it and how they allowed its individuality to persist. For McElheny, abstraction has the power to universalize and empower; in viewing the vitrines, it’s hard not to come away with a heightened sense of space and a feeling for the specific outlines of your own shape, with its simultaneous structural similarity to that of every other human being. 

To transcend individuality while embracing its possibilities was the dream of modernist abstraction, and it’s a dream McElheny continues. My own first brush with art history as a teenager came through a book tracing the development of modernism, and the first work that got stuck in my head was Oskar Schlemmer’s 1932 “Bauhaus Stairway.” The perfectly geometrical forms of Bauhaus students floating up the staircase seemed to exist in perfect space, as crystalline and lucid as it was possible to be on canvas. In another series of works at the gallery, McElheny turns Schlemmer’s figures into instantly recognizable silhouettes cut out of sheets of glass and mounted directly on the wall. They are reflective enough that the viewer is caught inside them for an instant, an imperfect body inside a sublime one.

The four Schlemmer-derived wall sculptures, each with their own unique outline, are quietly ecstatic. They revel in their abstract perfection while informing us that we share in it. For those tired of contemporary art’s cynicism and the market and spectacle-driven antics that dominate the circus, McElheny’s exhibition is a welcome respite and a reiteration of what visual art could possibly mean, and has meant in the past, for its audience.

Josiah McElheny’s “Some thoughts about the abstract body” runs through June 30 at Andrea Rosen gallery. To see highlights from the exhibition, click on the slide show. 

The ethereal, elegiac paintings of Marc Desgrandchamps might bring to mind the legendary fresco scene in Fellini’s "Roma," 1972. Amid frantic subway excavations a wall is penetrated, admitting a group of observers into a long-buried 1st-century villa replete with sensuous carvings and exquisite frescoes. As one character says, they look as if they could have been painted yesterday. But the very act of discovery spells doom. The air whistling behind the intruders’ ears sucks the pigment out of the murals right before their eyes. The experience is literally exhilarating: It’s not the gaze that the figures in the paintings return but the breath.

Freshness and decay. Stasis and transience. Classical and modern. Despite a lack of overt tension, a general mood, indeed, of luxe, calme et volupté, Desgrandchamps’s paintings are characterized by dualities, by inherent contradictions. These, of course, are what make them contemporary. In a characteristically post-postmodern way, a lack of anxiety is what makes these anxious objects, instilling in the viewer a precarious sense of the condition of painting. A kind of dustiness in the palette, a distressed, bleached-out quality to the surfaces, a tendency of one form to peek through another, lends these newly minted works a ready-made disintegration. (In knowing violation of the rules of good painting, Desgrandchamps likes to paint thin over thick to achieve this effect, a kind of transparency as much his own as layered filigree was Francis Picabia’s.) Fade in Desgrandchamps is a signifier of feyness, as if the paintings themselves are stressing at the fate of their medium.

And yet there is robustness in his painterly touch that can equally impart the opposite impression. As much as he loves fade and overlap, drip is another popular means of conveying image instability. But whereas transparency suggests disintegration, drip — with its connotations of urgency and presence — implies coming into being, which is the opposite.

This odd cohabitation of confidence and doubt in Desgrandchamps imparts an ambiguous authorial presence. His hand and his command of image are at once cool and vulnerable, invested and blithe, reflexive and reactive. The mood can be intensely connected and yet, at the same time, somehow nonchalant: Distended forms and dissipated brushstrokes exude a fin de siècle equivalent of a “whatever” kind of adolescent shrug.

Desgrandchamps, who was born in 1960, is widely hailed as one of the most significant painters of his generation in France, and one of remarkably few breathing new life into a national tradition. In the literature about the artist, references to the Fontainebleau school, Nicolas Poussin, and Aristide Maillol abound. Unusually for him, a painting in this exhibition, his second solo show in New York, quotes directly from another painting, Degas’s "Young Spartans Exercising," circa 1860. His midcareer retrospective at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris was a rare instance in which a contemporary artist’s works flowed naturally from historic collections hanging in proximity — particularly those interwar artists like André Derain or Carlo Carrà whose turn toward tradition exudes a delicately awkward primitivism.

His translucent figures are at once airy and grounded, chimerical and solid — matter-of-factly in the here and now. The setting in a typical Desgrandchamps is outdoors, a desert or beach scene. The figures — mostly stocky, earthy, statuesque women but occasional lithe fashion-model types and men, too — are self-absorbed in low-energy recreational activities. His pictures are always untitled and rarely characterized by significant or memorable activity. This forces anyone coming to terms with his work to think of it on a continuum rather than as a set of specific images, a tendency bolstered by a consistent palette of gently pervasive blue for sea and sky and subdued earth tones. There can be repetition of a very closely similar motif with subtle variations from one canvas to another, and the same scene is often viewed twice within a diptych with a marginal sense of dislocation of time in almost cinematic terms, as if from one frame to the next.

Cinema provides another paradigm within which to view Desgrandchamps, a complement, or maybe a riposte, to that of painting-in-distress. Movies are his most fecund source of imagery, or, as he puts it, of “image opportunities.” Desgrandchamps favors scenes that can be characterized as anti-iconic. He grabs stills from DVDs, his most popular sources being Italian neorealism and French New Wave. Movies often deliberately climax with a still-worthy image that resembles the Renaissance theorist Leon Battista Alberti’s pictorial moment that encapsulates all aspects of the narrative and its symbolism. But the moments before or after such visual climax, when frozen, generate a casualness more conducive to the ambiguity these paintings favor. True to the character of cinema, Desgrandchamps prefers what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze characterized as “any-instant-whatevers” to “privileged instants” in the frames he freezes as ways to generate an image.

Typically in Desgrandchamps, figures or motifs elide rather than confront one another. Overlapping or layered forms seem more to cross-fade than to collide. They are like misregistered projections from different sources. The latest body of paintings shown here also includes a pair of figures in classical garb that function almost as witnesses, at some distance from more contemporary protagonists. But they are more like a Greek chorus than like supernatural intruders: Their intervention is dramaturgic rather than dramatic.

The classicism of Desgrandchamps — the evocation of statuary, the timeless garb of some of his figures, the Mediterranean light, the sense of frescoes fading, and his special affinity with Poussin — might put him on the side of the privileged instant. But his preference for self-absorbed figures, often alienated from other characters and indifferent to their surroundings and situation, suggest that as the composer of the image, Desgrandchamps is checking in with a narrative under way rather than posing his figures meaningfully: His role is passive and casual, in other words. Tellingly, in the Degas transcription, he collapses the space between his selectively isolated foreground and middle-ground figures to complicate the neat compression of space and time in Degas’s classical composition — as well as to induce a dreamy, cinematically distended narrative flow.

Rather than as an event, therefore, it is better to think of a Desgrandchamps composition as a passage. The lack of titles and ubiquity of palette that I mentioned earlier create a sensation, in any gathering of his works, of being inside one continuous painting. The individual canvases are, in movie terms, frames. Correspondingly, when one is actually viewing a single work there is a sense of other images — before and after images — present within it, making the canvas, metaphorically, less a frame of film than part of the action of several frames spooling.

Desgrandchamps paints a moving image. More than that, he paints the very sensation of image movement. And yet, his paintings impart a grave, calm sense of order, solid and durable, like the art of the museums. He fixes flow.

To see images from Marc Desgrandchamps at Zürcher Studio, click on the slide show.

This review appears in the July/August 2012 issue of Modern Painters.

The quest for originality in mainstream film and fiction in the last few years has led to the relaxation of borders between genres, resulting in increasingly absurd mash-ups and sacrilegious assaults on classic literature and historical figures. Among the victims are Shakespeare (the movie thriller “Anonymous”), Jane Austen (the novels “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” and “Mr. Darcy, Vampyre”), and the 16^th president of the United States (the novel and movie “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”). Read the full post on Spotlight.