Over the years, we've shown you a whole array of mind-boggling manicure masterpieces, from feathered fingertips to how to make nail art strips even snazzier. Sometimes though, we can forget that not everyone is well-versed in the ways of the polish...
Our most-talked-about stories in Art, Design & Fashion, and Performing Arts, July 2-6, 2012:
— Steven Henry Madoff visited curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev's Documenta 13 and deemed it "the most important exhibition to date of the 21st century."
— Kyle Chayka spoke to Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra on the occasion of her new mid-career retrospective at the Guggenheim.
— Pace Gallery president Marc Glimcher explained the logic behind the gallery's decision to open a new London space inside the Royal Academy.
— ARTINFO marked America's national holiday on July 4 with a collection of the best U.S. flag-themed art, featuring works by Barbara Kruger, Nam June Paik, Faith Ringgold, and more.
— Shane Ferro perused the 245 seized artworks being auctioned by the U.S. Marshal Service, and picked the nine best deals.
— Ann Binlot and Nate Freeman perused the highlights from Paris's Spring 2013 men's fashion week, from man-skirts to safari shorts.
— Renzo Piano's London skyscraper the Shard debuted with negative reviews and a lackluster laser show.
— Kelly Chan cautioned bargain hunters that buying Mies van der Rohe's dirt-cheap Detroit towers comes with a catch.
— Janelle Zara looked into the recent trend towards vintage-looking gadgets and geek accessories, and picked the eight best objects with a low-tech look.
— Ann Binlot and Nate Freeman perused the highlights from Paris's Spring 2013 men's fashion week, from man-skirts to safari shorts.
— Grégory Picard visited fashion designer Henrik Vibskov's elaborate, inflated, and polka-dotted Paris installation for his spring/summer collection.
— Graham Fuller looked back on the career of Hollywood's current sweetheart, Michelle Williams, on the occasion of her latest star turn the new Sarah Polley film "Take This Waltz."
—Eric Bryant gave director Alan Gilbert credit for the New York Philharmonic's imaginative in-the-round concert at the Park Avenue Armory, despite an ill-conceived Mozart excerpt.
— Helen Mirren will star in "Hitchcock," one of two upcoming backlot films examining Alfred Hitchcock's personal and professional with his wife, editor, and screenwriting collaborator Alma Reville.
— The singer Frank Ocean, a member of horrorcore hip-hop collective Odd Future, came out in a message he posted on Tumblr.
— Movie-going monarchists got their first look at Naomi Watts as Princess Diana, while a conspiracy theory doc about her death was shelved indefinitely.
It has been a tumultuous spring in the auction world, with sales of truly spectacular artwork punctuating much mediocrity. As many have pointed out, there is something of a split in the art market, with the freshest, most sought-after blockbuster work going for record prices — as evidenced by the stellar lots populating this list — and the merely pedestrian works languishing in salesrooms at or below their low estimates or, worse, not selling at all.
In his New York Times wrap-up of the contemporary auctions in New York, Souren Melikian called it a "disconnect in the art market." Later, Georgina Adam in the Financial Times and Mike Collett-White of Reuters also noted the extremely top-heavy market. After a high buy-in rate at Sotheby's contemporary sale in London, ARTINFO's own Judd Tully wrote that it is currently "a market largely uninterested in B-class material."
Indeed, our own in-depth examination of the market this season suggested that interest for all but the most expensive works is waning. But the exorbitant prices at the top (note that this season's top 10 is a $30 million-plus club) all but make up for the middle-market woes. As the season comes to a close, and the market takes a two-month pause, the question is: For how long can a handful of splashy results buoy everything else, and what happens when the Russian oligarchs get bored?
To see the top 10 auction lots of the spring season — which notably include two works each by Yves Klein and Francis Bacon, but zero Picassos (he's an honorable mention at #11) — click on the slide show.
BEIJING — To get to the tranquil village of Huairou, where architect Li Xiaodong has built his sublime and simple Liyuan Library, you must first drive eighty kilometers from Beijing, navigating narrow roads that spiral up and down through mountain passes until a final bumpy dirt track delivers you to the Jiaojie River valley nestled in the shadow of the Great Wall.
The Liyuan Library is the latest in a series of buildings that Li, a professor of architecture at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, has designed to address the needs of China’s struggling rural communities. Previous philanthropic projects have included a school and community center built for the minority Naxi people near the far southern city of Lijiang in 2005 and the so-called “Bridge School” in the village of Xiashi in Fujian Province, which won an Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2010.
Li’s devotion to such charitable projects ultimately attracted the attention of the Luke Him Sau Charitable Trust in Hong Kong, which granted Li RMB 1 million to carry out any project he liked to pursue in rural China. It is with these funds that the Liyuan Library was built.
The inspiration for the library arose from a casual visit Li made to a friend who lived in the Jiaojie River valley. Li noticed that outside every home in the village lay great piles of firewood sticks gathered from the local forest. These were used to fuel the villagers’ cooking stoves all year round and meanwhile created an accidental decorative façade for their houses. Li decided to use this firewood as the basic feature of his design
The scope of the project was dictated by the local conditions, relying on a minimal budget and the village's resources. It took the construction workers, all of whom were local villagers, six months to complete. The chosen location was a stretch of wasteland not far from the village. Li says his intention was to provide “a setting for clear thoughts, where one consciously makes the effort to head for the reading room.”
The result is a two-story, 1,880-square-feet building constructed with a gridded-glass interior shell, with square steel supports framing each section. More than 400,000 locally sourced sticks of firewood affixed within square frames then make up the facade. Viewed from outside, the building immediately reminds people of the wooden fences that exist in every courtyard of every house in the surrounding countryside, while blending in perfectly with the natural environment.
“The wooden sticks will attract birds to build their nests on the building." Li says. "With the added mud and the birds’ droppings, soon there will be plants growing out from the building, allowing its color to change with the seasons.” In this way Li hopes his building will harmonize even more naturally with its surroundings. “I do every project with a focus on creating a dialogue between modern architecture and the vernacular traditions and the regional characteristics of the place where the building is located. In that way I avoid following the mainstream trend of plagiarizing or reproducing Western architecture.” It is this philosophy that has lead Li to repeatedly choose projects in remote, rural areas rather than the city, which he believes puts too many constraints and limits on design, leading to mass-production.
Inside Li’s library visitors find a simple environment with flexible spaces for sitting, reading, and stacking books. Light filters in from all directions through the firewood exterior screens, providing a perfect ambience for reading. The façade filters the daylight and blocks out any harsh sun, while providing glimpses of the surrounding mountains and the river. Li hopes that his building will ultimately be more than just a library, providing a social and community center for the entire village.
At first, he hesitated about what kind of building would most benefit the locals, before finally deciding on a library. It now offers a selection of books, ranging from popular science to Chinese classics, all of which have been donated. Every outside visitor to the library has to donate three books when they stop by to read or borrow books. In the long run, as the library attracts more visitors from the city seeking a place for “quiet contemplation” the hope is that the local villagers can always be assured of having access to the latest publications.
Amongst Li’s next projects is a museum in Bali, where he is looking forward to making good use of the island’s abundant bamboo. His design incorporates a roof made of bamboo which he says will provide both ventilation and filtered sunlight to the building while still keeping out the rain. An impossible combination? We’ll have to wait and see.
Click on our slide show for images of the Liyuan Library in Huairou village.
This article appears on ARTINFO Hong Kong.
Denise René, whose galleries in Paris, New York, and Düsseldorf are credited with bringing canonical movements of postwar art to the public, has died at the age of 99. Over the weekend, news sources throughout France including Le Parisien have referred to her as the "Pope of Abstraction" for her close relationships with Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, and Piet Mondrian, crediting her exhibitions with the success of kinetic art and Op art, and echoing praise of her eye for pre-war sensibilities and Eastern European artists, in particular Victor Vasarely.
René was first persuaded to enter the art business after meeting Vasarely at the Café de Flore in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood in 1939. The gallery's inaugural show, "Drawings and Compositions by Vasarely" was an enormous success, and allowed her to take increasingly risky and assertive decisions as an exhibitor in years to come. This included an exhibition of work by Max Ernst in 1945, long before the German artist was broadly established, as well as the 1955 exhibition "Le Mouvement," which made a lasting contribution to the public's appreciation of kinetic art. Two years later, Le Monde notes that René orchestrated the first exhibition of work by Piet Mondrian in France — at a time when the Dutch modernist was still being avoided by museums and mainstream critics.
In 2001, the Pompidou Center in Paris exhibited "The Intrepid Denise René, A Gallery in the Adventure of Abstract Art, 1944 -1978" in recognition of René's accomplishments. Describing her as a collector and gallerist "without equal," the show highlighted her advocacy of Carlos Cruz-Diez and Heinz Mack, whose manipulable and interactive sculptures foresaw the rise of participatory art and relational aesthetics. René's contributions to "The Responsive Eye," which showed at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1965, are also described as an "apogee" of Op art in the United States. "A gallery is more than just an aesthetic conception," Jean-Paul Ameline, conservator at the Pompidou Center recently told Le Monde. "It's a way of functioning. She knew how to make collectors come, to be present there, where they needed to be."
One biopic of the late British pornography entrepreneur Paul Raymond might be worth watching – two surely seems excessive. But two are in the pipeline and Raymond will be portrayed by major talents in both. Steve Coogan is the lead in Michael Winterbottom’s version, which is backed by the broadcaster Channel 4 and is already in post-production. Tom Hiddleston (who was F. Scott Fitzgerald in “Midnight in Paris” and Loki in “Thor” and “The Avengers”) will star in “The King of Soho,” adapted from the biography written by Howard Raymond, Paul’s son, who will serve as technical advisor on the movie.
Until recently, Winterbottom’s films was to be named “The King of Soho,” but he and his producers relinquished the title last week after Howard Raymond sued for the right to use it. Raymond had trademarked the title, as the Daily Mail reported on Friday.
“I am delighted that Michael Winterbottom has agreed to change the name of his film as it was causing a huge amount of confusion in the media that two films were being made about my father under the same title,” Raymond said. “It is unfortunate that it proved necessary to have to resort to legal proceedings to bring this issue to a conclusion but I am pleased that they have had a change of heart and backed down.
I have never wanted or sought to prevent this rival production from making a film about my late father’s life.”
“Now I can’t wait to see Tom Hiddleston play my father in a film based on my book called ‘The King of Soho’ and which will be released in cinemas under the name ‘The King of Soho,’” Raymond emphasized, lest there should be any doubt. (He will also get to see the actor Matthew Beard play himself.)
“I don’t know what Michael Winterbottom will now call his film,” Raymond added. “That is now up to him.”
Winterbottom’s film, which spans some forty years in the history of Soho (London’s red-light district in the West End), co-stars Anna Friel as Jean Raymond, Paul Raymond’s wife, a nude model and choreographer; Imogen Poots as their daughter Debbie, who was in the process of taking over her father’s empire when she died of a heroin overdose at the age of 36 in 1992; and Tamsin Egerton as Fiona Richmond, the softcore actress and porn scribe who became Raymond’s girlfriend. “Little Britain”’s Matt Lucas plays the American drag queen Divine.
Although Raymond (1925 – 2008) was notorious for launching London’s first strip club, the Raymond Revuebar in 1958, and for deluging British newspaper shops with such “top shelf” porn magazines as Men Only, Razzle, Mayfair, and Escort, he made millions of pounds investing in property and real estate, particularly in Soho, in the 1970s. By the time of his death, he was estimated to have been worth £650 million, though in all likelihood he was a billionaire. Not bad for a former dance band drummer, dishwasher, and black marketeer.
Winterbottom’s movie was written by Matt Greenhalgh, who previously wrote the screenplay for “Control,” the film about Ian Curtis and Joy Division. Since Winterbottom’s “24 Hour Party People” also depicted Joy Division’s rise and Curtis’s suicide, the meeting of writer and director seems fated. One would expect their film about Raymond to be a social satire of a specific era in British sybaritism and amorality – with Debbie Raymond’s tragic death representing the fallout.
Read more culture coverage on Spotlight
New York will be seeing a lot of dots in the next few days. The highly-anticipated retrospective of the legendary Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama opens tomorrow at the Whitney Museum of American Art and to add to the Kusama mania, Louis Vuitton is releasing its collaboration with the artist and rolling out its first Kusama-themed pop-up shop on the same day. Just ahead of the debut, the French fashion house unveiled the capsule collection’s look book.
Kusama’s signature motif – polka dots — show up throughout the collection, marking handbags, scarves, trench coats, sunglasses, bangles, skirts, and more. The brand referenced the artist’s electric-hued wigs by giving the model showcasing the bold and vibrant line the same hairstyle. Even Kusama’s iconic pumpkin sculpture makes an appearance — as a purse dangling from a shoulder strap.
“It’s really charming. It has the essence of the spirit of her work,” Louis Vuitton creative director Marc Jacobs told WWD last May, going on to call the Louis Vuitton monogram and Kusama’s dots “timeless and endless.”
The octogenarian artist and Jacobs share a mutual admiration for one another.
“Marc Jacobs’s sincere attitude towards art is the same as my own,” Kusama told the Cut. “I respect him as a wonderful designer. Louis Vuitton understands and appreciates the nature of my art. Therefore there isn’t much difference from my process of making fashion.”
The first of seven pop-up shops dedicated to the Kusama collection across Asia, Europe, and the United States will open in New York tomorrow inside Louis Vuitton’s SoHo boutique. In addition, the brand and W magazine will host a preview at the Whitney tomorrow evening, in celebration of the artist’s exhibition at the museum.
The Yayoi Kusama for Louis Vuitton collection marks the first artist collaboration with the brand since 2008, when it revisited its 2001 Stephen Sprouse graffiti-covered line. Richard Prince and Takashi Murakami have partnered up with French luxury label in the past, with Prince marking handbags in the same style as his dreamy nurse paintings and Murakami covering them with his smiling cartoon flowers.
Click on the slide show to see the Louis Vuitton-Yayoi Kusama collection.
It’s been two weeks since Artnet Magazine came to an unceremonious end, shuttered by the ailing art services company of which it was a division. The publication, one of the first serious attempts to create an online art magazine, had been around for 16 years. Its editors and writers were given a few hours of warning before they had to leave the building.
I worked there as associate editor for five years, between 2005 and 2010. For most of that time, there was very little pressure on the magazine. It just floated there as a kind of hood ornament on the company, a way to catch the eye of the various segments of the art world that it was trying to sell things to. "It is a particular characteristic of art that both its monetary and its symbolic value are merged inseparably together," the company wrote in its 2007 letter to investors. "We take this into account with the artnet magazines... This aspect is tremendously important for the business." In 2008, the powers-that-were even expanded it to include an independent French-language edition. The magazine was certainly the best-known part of the site.
Then there was some kind of technical change in how expenditures were reported. Suddenly, the investors in Germany were looking at it as an unprofitable product rather than as a defensible form of PR for the site as a whole. There were patience-trying conversations about ways to reorient it. The stress that came out of those discussions was part of why I left.
In the last year, something called Skate’s Art Market Research has issued a series of scathing reports on Artnet, hammering the company for its stagnation. The reports contain very few positives. "Frankly, we are at loss to see how artnet’s management can reverse the trend" is the phrase that stands out. Its sole actionable idea, repeated hypnotically, was the need to shutter Artnet Magazine to make a statement.
Despite its generally bleak perspective on the company’s future, two months ago Skate’s was retained by an investor in Artnet, and, at the earliest possible juncture — literally moments after long-time boss Hans Neuendorf stepped down — it seems to have contrived to put its one idea into effect, offering support in return for an unsparing focus on the bottom line. The moneymen, it seems, were determined to prove that they were as murderously unsentimental as serious business requires.
Artnet Magazine was very, very good to me. Walter Robinson, the editor, was and is an important mentor. Occasionally, my writing has been complemented for its clarity, and for that I owe a debt to Walter. He can be a finicky editor, but his agenda is not difficult to understand. He likes personality, he likes to mix it up and stir the pot — but first of all he likes clear and clean descriptions, and he does not like writing that feels like it is talking down to you.
Reporting on the closure, the L.A. Times said that the site "published reported stories, commentary and reviews, all geared generally toward the buying and selling of art," which is not at all a fair or accurate assessment. It is true that its news reports were careful to mention prices, and I can’t say that there wasn't a convergence of interests, but in fact this focus — which at a certain moment in art writing was even novel — is more a function of Walter’s personal take on art. He worked at Art in America alongside Craig Owens and Hal Foster, and, as a working painter, reacted against their disdainful academic formalism, their allergic reaction to the commercial side of art. (Andrew Russeth's extensive Walter Robinson profile gives a feel.)
Once I had to pinch hit for Walter on a panel at SVA about small art publications. What I emphasized then, and would emphasize now, is that the editorial agenda of Artnet Magazine was Walter's agenda, which reflected something of an East Village sensibility. By which I mean, like the '80s East Village art scene, it was programmatically eclectic, more about a variety of personalities than an overall aesthetic, though it did treasure the offbeat. Walter insisted on spelling "aesthetic" as "esthetic;" "it's good to have your quirks," he explained. While I was there we serialized Donald Kuspit’s dense psychoanalytic tome, "A Critical History of 20th-Century Art," and Peter Plagens's novel of midlife male writer angst, "The Art Critic" (whose glimpse at the humiliations of writing art criticism for a mainstream publication now seem to me to be worth rereading), as well as Tom Hoving's boisterous memoir, "Artful Tom." None of these were "geared generally toward the buying and selling of art."
There are criticisms of Artnet Magazine, some of which are legitimate. People say that it was slow to change (there was no real appetite to invest in a redesign, and all management's recent impulses were towards hiding it more and more in the weeds of the site’s inexplicable "Knowledge and News" section), that it was insular, that it published indefensible things by Charlie Finch.
What I'd say, though, is that such criticisms are in part the flip side of what made it a positive place for me to work. We had a lot of autonomy, which could be used to publish things that were probably indefensible from any sort of reasonable publishing perspective. I once spent some weeks writing a nearly 4,000-word piece on the history of Iraqi art, pegged only tenuously to a show by an unknown painter at a nonprofit SoHo space. I'm proud of what I wrote while I was at Artnet; I have a lot of personal investment in those essays. I am at a loss to think of another situation where I might have been able to develop a voice and an audience in quite the same way.
In art, discourse logically comes first. It is what inspires and shapes works of art. Without some kind of idea about it, there is nothing to frame works of art as more than just random emissions, starting and ending nowhere, the one as interesting as the next. Yet the way things stand today, discourse comes last. First you have an artist who makes something; then a dealer who sells it and a collector who buys it. Finally, maybe, you have a critic who comes along afterwards to explain why this whole process happened. Discourse appears as an afterthought. A footnote. A waste of resources.
From this perspective, the moneymen are right, I guess. Artnet Magazine was not particularly the best at justifying itself against the unsparing logic of business. If you close your eyes and think about what kind of publication an art services company like Artnet might support, you’d expect something a lot more like Skate’s Art Market Research — cold-blooded, ruthlessly uninterested in art as anything other than something that makes money — and a lot less like the odd creature it actually was.
Still, personally, I don’t think that the art world is particularly lovable without its odd creatures. In fact, it is quite hateable. Now, the word on the street is that Artnet may be looking to retain a good "art PR" company. Good luck with that, guys.
Wil Fry is an artist based out of New York City and Sydney, Australia who makes T-shirts with T-shirts on them. Sometimes it’s a Givenchy print that he appropriates; sometimes it’s a plain black shirt. Most famously, he took the Marc Jacobs pink T that featured the designer’s vandalized store — the $689 joke based on the damage done by graffito Kidult — and put it on his own T-shirt. Pretty clever.
A few weeks later came another gem from Fry, this time called “Expensive T-Shirt,” which consisted of a lot of random tags from high-fashion brands such as Chanel, Comme des Garcons, Dior, and Jil Sander. It was sold on his Web site for $30, and like the Marc Jacobs parody, it sold out.
But Fry put a new item on sale today. “Limited T-Shirt” (only one exists) is a piece covered entirely with tiny renderings of the Air Yeezy II sneakers, Kanye West’s extremely in-demand shoe that he designed for Nike. It is a really great shirt. One drawback: it costs $90,300, the same price that a pair of Air Yeezy II kicks went for on eBay.
We called Fry at his office, where he works at his day job as a graphic designer, to talk briefly about his new shirt. He has an Australian accent.
Anyone go for the $90,000 price tag yet?
Not yet. The last time I looked on eBay there were two offers, but they were both under $100. I’m not really expecting anyone to pay the full price.
And are you going to make any more of the Air Yeezy shirts?
No, this will be the only one.
I read online that you’ve gotten in trouble for your previous shirt-on-shirts, like the Marc Jacobs and the Givenchy. Have you had any cease and desist notices?
Nope! I didn’t actually make very many of them so I haven’t had any negative experiences yet. Crossing my fingers.
If you made more, do you think they would shut you down?
I’m sure that would happen. At the moment I think people appreciate that it’s tongue in cheek. I’m not trying to make a profit, I’m not trying to mass produce the shirts. It’s a response to high fashion and I’m just trying to have a bit of fun.
What’s next — more meta-shirts?
Yeah, I’ve got some more designs coming. At the moment I’m having fun with the fashion theme and the fashion world. There’s so much material!
During the career of an exceptional architect, there comes a point where he crosses the line into starchitect territory, and suddenly he's entitled to make certain demands. That's the current status of Santiago Calatrava, the renowned Spanish architect behind Valencia's City of Arts and Sciences known for his lavishly detailed style of building — and unapologetically lavish fees. His work is the subject of the Hermitage's first architectural retrospective, "Santiago Calatrava: The Quest for Movement," on view now through September 30. It's an expansive show, both in scope and size, that seems to be as much about his ego as his art.
"Quest for Movement" features models of his most recognizable works — in addition to his masterpiece in Valencia, there's the Milwaukee Art Museum; his forthcoming World Trade Center transit hub; and bridges from Dublin, Dallas, and Venice, to name a few. The Hermitage is also attempting to position the architect as an artist, paying equal attention to his sculptural and painted works, as Calatrava himself insisted. His other demand, that his work be shown in the museum's sprawling Winter Palace, has resulted in a 20,000-square-foot show, ten times larger than the Metropolitan Museum of Art's tepidly received 2005 "Santiago Calatrava: Sculpture Into Architecture."
"The pieces did not breathe because they were so close together," Cristina Carillo de Albornoz said of that exhibtion, "but here, every piece has a lot of space, and it's a true retrospective because it's 30 years of his career." She, alongside Ksenia Malich, curated the exhibition from Calatrava's personal collections based in both New York and Zurich. She told ARTINFO her aim was to represent the the diversity of his work, and she pulled painting and sculpture from the entire course of his career, which stretches back into the '80s when he began sculpting in Paris. Her choices show the evolution of his sculptural work as it transformed from from cubist shapes to more organic forms, like "Infinite Spirit," a sculpture of sharp spokes that looks like the bones of a bird's wing fixed in a circle. "For him, an architect is an artist. He doesn’t have the conception that an architect is something different."
There are critics who disagree. In the past, they've called Calatrava's sculptures too derivative of Brancusi, and based on what we've seen, his paintings appear to project an underwhelming flatness. It was his architecture that drew the attention of Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky, who pursued the show despite Calatrava's not having built anything in Russia. Piotrovsky linked the innovative spirit of Calatrava's bridges, with their unique suspensions and twisting forms, to the city of St. Petersburg, which boasts more than 300 bridges of its own. It will likely be the architectural models that will best reward Calatrava fans; built around hinges and powered by little engines, they actually move — open, close, rise, and fall — demonstrating the delicate elegance of their real-world counterparts. "Sometimes I see the models like very, very serious toys," Carillo de Albornoz told ARTINFO. "Matisse always used to say you can have a lot of joy and pleasure in art, and it is exactly the same with models."
To see more works on view at "Santiago Calatrava: The Quest for Movement," click the slide show.
New York-based designer Steven Gambrel's new 14-piece collection for the Urban Electric Co. is a hybrid of aesthetics. The visible hardware, along with the sheer scale of each piece, is a nod to utilitarian industrial design, the kind found aboard ships or inside factories. Gambrel's Boxbridge lamp, twin cylindrical lanterns encased in a metal framework, for example, is three feet wide and weighs in at 125 pounds. And the 17-inch-long glass orb of his hanging Grayfox lamp, inspired by giant laboratory bell jars, was a challenge to the resident glassblower at Urban Electric, where everything is crafted by hand.
Despite their girth, his pieces look more sophisticated than gritty. There are no rough edges here, only polished exteriors with elegant sheens. But like their industrial inspirations, each lamp eschews extraneous embellishments. The small details, like the baroque clasps and elaborate joinery, exist strictly to fulfill a function — although they also add a nice touch.
Researching an art history paper is about to get a whole lot easier. A joint effort to catalogue and publish online an archive of curator and Serpentine Gallery co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist’s interviews is kicking off this weekend in Los Angeles. Once complete, the searchable Web site will feature 2,500 hours of recorded interviews and talks between the legendary curator and hundreds of luminaries in the fields of art, architecture, literature, and science.
The project, grandly called the Institute of the 21st Century, makes its official public debut the weekend of July 29 and will be in development for two to three years. Over that weekend, Obrist will conduct public interviews with artist John Baldessari and computer engineer Danny Hillis. Both interviews — the former held at LACMA’s Art Catalogues store on July 29 and the latter held at the arts organization ForYourArt on July 30 — will center around the concept of time. (This theme will be particularly interesting for Hillis, who may be most famous for his “Clock of Long Now” — a monumental clock intended to function for more than 10 millenia.) Ultimately, the idea is that these two interviews, along with hundreds of others Obrist has recorded since 1985, will be made accessible to the public online and free of charge.
“People say that Hans Ulrich is always in a rush and moving from place to place, but when he’s interviewing someone, he’s completely present,” ForYourArt founder Bettina Korek told ARTINFO. “He talks about how interviews liberate time in a way. It’s his passion.” Along with colleague Karen Marta, Korek is leading the Institute of the 21st Century’s archive initiative.
The first phase of the project involves cataloguing the thousands of hours of tapes currently stored in Berlin and London. The Institute of the 21st Century team expects to load the interviews onto the Web site in stages, and then make them searchable. “This is really a new idea of what an archive can be,” Korek enthused. The first segment, expected to go live on the Web site within a month, is a collection of interviews Obrist conducted with over 40 architects in a six-day interview marathon at the 2010 Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy.
Other projects that will eventually find their way into the archive include Obrist’s extensive interview series with enigmatic architect Cedric Price (turned into a book published in 2010); the exchanges that he and architect Rem Koolhaas’s had with the Metabolist group, a small team of Japanese architects active in the 1950s; and unpublished interviews with the late artists Mike Kelley and Jason Rhoades.
“There are a lot of great thinkers who aren’t already on YouTube,” said Korek. “There are a lot of people who are no longer with us in the archive, and Hans Ulrich considered them a chain reaction. When an artist mentioned an influence from the past, he would track that person down and interview them, too.”
The result, its creators hope, will be a kind of cerebral, slowed-down audio Wikipedia exposing the hearts and minds of cultural titans of the 20th and 21st centuries. “This process is exciting because of the new points of access it creates for audiences," said Korek, "who may come to it through their interest in a writer, an engineer, or composer and find their way to an artist.”
– Chinese Artist Sues Taiwanese President: Outspoken Chinese expat artist Weiming Chen has sued Taiwanese president Ying-jeou Ma for backing out of a plan to mount his 32-meter high "Statue of Democracy" — a recreation of a sculpture made by protestors in Tiananmen Square in 1989 — on an island facing mainland China. The president, the artist claims, caved to pressure from the Communist nation, which he memorably brands "a thugocratic regime of Satanic totalitarianism." The artist, who has on a number of previous occasions said that political pressure affected showings of the project, is seeking a whopping $22 million in punitive damages, as well as the right to erect his artwork. [Courthouse News]
– Philly's Renovated Rodin Museum Reopening: Following more than three years of renovations during which it remained only partially open, Philadelphia's Rodin Museum will reopen on Friday. Its $9.1-million overhaul aimed to recreate the original vision of architect Paul Crét and his landscape architect Jacques Gréber. "This is what you would have seen when it opened in 1929," says the museum's senior curator Joseph J. Rishel. [Philadelphia Inquirer]
– Astronomical Tax Bill Stalls MONA Expansion: In Australia, quirky art collector and professional gambler David Walsh is in hot water over a backdated tax bill to the tune of over $40 million. While Walsh denies that his personal finances will force the closure of his private museum, Tasmania's Museum of Old and New Art, he acknowledged that a planned expansion, which has already cost him $180 million, will have to be put on hold. [Sydney Morning Herald]
– Diving Instructor Discovers Medusa Sarcophagus: Hakan Gulec, a diving school teacher in southern Turkey, turned up an unusual find during a recent dip underwater: an incredibly well-conserved sarcophagus that had been mostly buried beneath the sand, and which is adorned with Medusa heads, cherubs, and other bas-relief figures. Yasar Yildiz, director of the Alanya Museum — which will house the object — confirmed that the sarcophagus is from the Roman period, but could not explain how it ended up where it was found. [TAN]
– Delaware Museum Launches State-Wide Pop-up Program: Since November, the Delaware Art Museum has been celebrating its centennial, and this summer it's taking the celebrations on the road for a series of pop-up exhibitions in outdoor spaces and along Main Streets all over the second-smallest state. The July 17-October 1 program, dubbed "Art is Everywhere," will feature 15 reproductions of the most treasured pieces from the DAM's permanent collection, including paintings by Edward Hopper, Winslow Homer, and Ford Maddox Brown. [Press Release]
– Yvon Lambert Donates Collection to France (Again): The French gallerist and collector Yvon Lambert has successfully donated his contemporary art collection — estimated to be worth upwards of €90 million, and including everyone from Basquiat, Twombly, and Kiefer to LeWitt, Goldin, and Serrano — to France after an attempt to do so last year failed. "In France, donating a collection is not an easy thing," Lambert said. "Examples of missed rendez-vous between the state and major donors plague our art history." [AFP]
– EU Bans Art Exports to Syria: As part of a new series of sanctions targeted at Syria's first couple, the European Union has placed an embargo on luxury goods exports to the conflict-wracked Middle Eastern country, whose president Bashar Al-Assad and his wife Asma continue to spend large sums on artworks and designer goods. Many see the ban as a deterrent to cultural development. "Sooner or later, Assad will be gone," says the founder of a Cairo-based art advisory group, Fatenn Mostafa. "In the long term, cultural exchange is one thing we really shouldn’t be cutting off." [TAN]
– Met's Voice Pulls Back to Focus on Abe Lincoln: Harold Holzer, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's senior vice president for external affairs, will dial back some of his duties to focus on his work as a Civil War historian and writer. Though he will remain in charge of the institution's government affairs and audience development, he will cease overseeing external and internal communications. Journalists, say your goodbyes now! [NYT]
– Billionaire Needs a Sewer to Show His Art Collection: After 30 years of quiet acquisitions, a reclusive billionaire outside Washington, D.C. wants to open his collection of postwar artworks by the likes of Calder, Matisse, and Rothko to the public. But to do that, Mitchell Rales must expand his private gallery — and he can't do it without a hookup to the county's sewer system, currently forbidden by state law. The county council will begin a review of the issue this week. [WaPo]
– Getty Funds Rubens Restoration at the Prado: The Getty Foundation has donated close to $390,000 to the Prado Museum in Madrid to help finance the conservation of "Triumph of the Eucharist," a 17th century masterpiece by Dutch artist Peter Paul Rubens. The gift is part of the Getty's Panel Paintings Initiative, which has also helped fund the conservation of Albrecht Dürer's "Adam and Eve," also located at the Prado. [LAT]
VIDEO OF THE DAY
A 2009 Fox News segment about Chinese artist Weiming Chen's "Sculpture of Democracy" project
ALSO ON ARTINFO:
Thoughts on the End of Artnet Magazine, From Someone Who Worked There
See Louis Vuitton Get Spotty With Yayoi Kusama’s Iconic Polka Dots
How Munch is Too Munch? The 10 Most Expensive Lots From the Recent Spring Auctions
Santiago Calatrava Takes the Hermitage Museum's Winter Palace With His Sprawling Retrospective
For more breaking art news throughout the day,
check ARTINFO's In the Air blog.
LONDON — The history of Land Art has been a predominantly male affair, as if the 1960s' reinvention of art's relationship to nature had been shaped exclusively by the likes of Robert Smithson, Walter de Maria, and Richard Long. But Nancy Holt was also a key member of this group of artists, and in a rich body of photographs, sculptures, earthworks, and pieces of public art she has tirelessly investigated the place of people within the environment. Holt's 1976 "Sun Tunnels" — four large concrete tubes pierced with holes reproducing star constellations, built in Utah's Great Basin Desert — is on par with Smithson's "Spiral Jetty," yet it's only now that Holt's contribution to a period she rightly described as a "new paradigm" is getting the attention it deserves. A major Holt retrospective curated by Alena J. Williams is currently touring the U.S., and her first U.K. solo show opened last month at London's Haunch of Venison. Nancy Holt sat down with ARTINFO UK to talk about her first visit to the American West, site-specificity, and the need to be practical.
Why did you decide to focus exclusively on photographs for this show?
They are very important to the development of my art. I did some of them in the 1960s, and it helped form my eye. When you look at a series like the graveyard series ("Western Graveyards," 1968) — I was very taken: we have all this vastness in the West, we have songs about "don’t fence me in," and yet, when people died, they wanted their little plot of ground, and they wanted it clearly delineated. That desire, in the vastness, for human scale and for a rootedness in the earth is a very strong element in my sculpture. I build works that encompass people and give them a sense of scale, and a sense of orientation in the landscape.
You did photographs before you did earthworks. Do you think it was photography that led you to the landscape?
Absolutely. Here, I did a [photographic] series called "Trail Markers" (1969) in Dartmoor [South Devon], on a moor, following the orange dots leading me on trail. You know that others have been there before, some feet have made that track. I did an early work of a woman ("Over the Hill," 1968), who happens to be Joan Jonas. I said: "I want you to walk up the sand hill and just disappear behind it." So I took those photographs, and I have another set, where she's coming down. Later on I did a film called "Pine Barrens," so I put my own footprints in the films. It's leaving that trace in the landscape, and also the sense of enclosure, having a refuge, or a place to peer from.
It works both ways: through photography, you started looking at the landscape and that led to some your most famous earthworks, but photography also intervened at a later stage, when you took pictures of the "Sun Tunnels," for example.
They sort of built on one another. The photographs of my sculptures are art in themselves. I do all my own photography, and I spend a lot of time doing that. I'm always trying to catch the sun at just the right moment, and it often means having to be around for days. So I end up living around my sculpture sites. The photographs are my way of letting people know the works exist, because often they are in remote places. Sometimes they are in cities, but even then, you need to let people know if they ever are near that city, to go and look at the work.
Framing the gaze is a key strand in your practice. How and when did you first isolate this idea? Was it with the "locators"?
The locators were the first sculptures I did like that: a sculpture to be looked through. I'm currently building a circle of locators at the University of Avignon, France. It's eight locators, on the eight points of the compass. They look at each other, it's self-referential, and they also look at whatever can be seen. What I like is that a couple of them are looking onto an ancient wall. When I did locators in New York in galleries, I had them looking out of windows, and frequently what you saw through them was a brick wall, the building across, or part of a window, or a flue, but often it was just a brick wall. So here, we are looking at this important old structure, so that's interesting to me.
Your "Sun Tunnels" are like huge locators.
Yes, it got big. It's framing the view on a larger scale. These ideas developed. I did "Rock Rings," (1977-78) which is a big stone masonry piece. There you have four layers of holes that you are looking through.
In an interview with James Meyer, you talked about visiting the West for the first time in 1968 with Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson, and of a moment when you felt completely overwhelmed by the nature, at one with the landscape.
It was more than a moment, it lasted quite a while! Something happened to me that was lasting, and it's hard to describe but it changed me essentially. I never saw the world again like I had previously. It was all like a fresh new vision of the world, an opening to reality. You can spend a lot of time resisting reality — and culture helps you resist it — and suddenly in a desert setting like that, the environment itself sets the stage for something else to happen.
Were the others, Heizer and Smithson, feeling the same thing or did you each have a very individual experience?
I think on some level, we were all having the same experience, and each of us brought to it different talents.
Has your understanding of "site specificity" changed over the decades?
"Site specific" to me means that you work with the given site, and your ideas for whatever you are doing will be affected by the site itself. From the very beginning until now, that's been the case. I don't see that changing. I worked in cities, I worked in university campuses, and deserts. When I go to the site, I always allow myself to absorb it, I don't have any preconceptions, and then certain ideas will come to me. Also, before I have the idea, I gather any pertinent facts: how big a site is it? Are there any parameters, pipes underneath that mean I have to dig in certain spots? Do I have to worry about some rules or regulations? I usually find all that out because I don't want to come up with an idea that I can't actually make.
Do you work the same way if you are in the middle of the desert or on the middle of a roundabout?
I would say there is a lot of similarity in how I would approach any site.
It's about being open?
Being open, and also... being practical.
There is trend in public art of resisting permanent artworks. But permanence is something you fully embrace.
I'm particularly interested in permanence — even in the 1970s, when some of my colleagues where building wood pieces. I would be invited to be in the same exhibitions, and I would put in concrete foundations, and I would build these things so strong that after the show they couldn't get rid of them! So I've got pieces everywhere. The other art is long gone, and mine is still there, they have to live with it! Why build something that's going to disappear? Although I also did do plenty of indoor installations that were just up for the time of the show.
The idea of something potentially lasting for eternity doesn't worry you.
I like giving it a shot to build something that would last forever. Why not, you know. Give it a shot!
"Nancy Holt : Photoworks" is on view Haunch of Venison, London, until August 25. To see images from the exhibition, click on the slide show.
This article also appears on ARTINFO UK.
