Arts Visuels >> New Anish Kapoor: Turning the World Upside Down

Anish Kapoor's new installation at Kensington Gardens, on view through March 13th.

Sky Mirror, red, 2006

C-Curve, 2007

Non-Object (Spire)

Check out the video to see the effect on the pieces of the clouds moving across the sky... the photos don't capture the fact that the pieces are always in flux due to the ever-changing sky.

Must See >> Stefan Sagmeister on "What he has learned."

Renowned designer/artist Stefan Sagmeister turns the things he's learned into public installations around the world.  Wise, clever, lovely.

Arts Visuels >> Art For a Cause >> Re:Form School

Last week, redu, a movement aimed at rebuilding America's public school system, sponsored a huge collaborative arts show, called Re:Form School, aimed at raising public awareness about the need to reform our school system.

WK, one of the participating artists, created this awesome installation at a New York City public school playground using photos he took of kids at the school and drawings he collected from them.

Check out this video from WK to hear more about it...

And this one to see the photo shoot with the kids.. pretty cute.

Love that even the art world is helping focus attention on our public schools right now!

[Re:Form]

[Kitsune Noir]

I Love Maps >> More from Ball-Nogues Studio

Ball-Nogues studio, who created these awesome suspension installations, also created this map of San Diego for a new local hotel.

Not content with merely an "artistic representation" of the layout of the city, they created a geographic and topographic replica using custom-made software to transform an aerial photo in a 3-d bas relief using wood, bronze, and polymer resin.

Arts Visuels >> Claire Morgan

In the same way that people often describe experiencing the moments of a car wreck or calamitous accident as though it were in slow motion, so slow that they can recall every detail with supernatural clarity, Claire Morgan's painstakingly precise installations composed of taxidermied animanls, manmade plastics, and natural elements seem to reconstruct a freeze-frame of the metaphorical factors that collided to cause the death of the animal on display.

[Claire Morgan]

Ball Nogues Studio

 Ball-Nogues studio designs these installations of dyed twine, which they call "Suspensions," using a computer program they created, and then they hang the twine by hand.  Are you in awe??  I am!

Ball-Nogues studio is a design and fabrication studio based out of Los Angeles and is headed by Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues, who studied together at Southern California Institute of Architecture.  Represented by Edward Cella Gallery in LA, their work has been featured at P.S. 1, the Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim, and many more prestigious institutions and exhibitions.

PS- if you like these, check out these installations.. highly reminiscent!

[Ball-Nogues]

[Edward Cella]

[via Kitsune Noir]

Urban Play

Graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, in collaboration with lettering guru Jessica Hische and 150 volunteers, created this public installation in Amsterdam composed of 250,000 eurocents proclaiming, "Obsessions make my life worse and my work better."  After it was finished, the installation was left unprotected to see how the public would interact with it.

About 20 afters after it was complete, when the plaza was empty, a man came through and started picking up the coins and putting them in bags.  A neighbor, concerned that someone was "stealing the artwork," called the police, who tried to find the artist, and when they couldn't, they called a city cleaning company to bag up all the money and put it in a safe until they could reach the artist.  Ha!

More on Sagmeister's site here, including a timelapse video of the installation.

Jessica Hische website here (tons of awesome typography/graphic design stuff to explore).

An Introduction >> Jaume Plensa

Jaume Plensa's Nomade at Antibes.

By constructing figures out of letters, Plensa's work explores not only the human form, but also the role of language in the human experience.  The figures are literally made out of the building blocks through which we communicate and describe emotion, both expressing the importance of language in the human experience and giving a physical, tangible form to language. 

Many of his pieces, like Nomade, above, are built so that the viewer can walk inside of the piece.  Very different from viewing a three-dimensional sculpture from afar, the viewer is now inhabiting the piece, having his experience of the work shaped both by the shape of his physical environment and by the language it is made out of, incomprehensible though it is.

The contemplative poses of many of his figures also suggests the artist's interest in the role of language in reflection.  While true meditation may be thought of as the absence of thought, by quite literally forming shapes out of letters, Plensa seems to emphasize the importance of language in giving shape to our inner monologues.

In the Midst of Dreams, above, in which three ambiguously-gendered and race-less forms appear illuminated from within while in sleep, was described by the artist as an exploration of the centrality of dreams to the human experience and his own interest in the concept of a universal human race, democratized by common experiences like dreaming.

In Song of Songs, the artist constructed "walls" out of letters that, when read from top-to-bottom, form the classical poem of the same name, walls that guide the movement of and form "rooms" around the viewer as he experiences both his environment and the poem.  

Interestingly, the letters are suspended rather than laid against an impermeable surface, meaning that while the sheets of letters form "walls" around the viewer, the walls are transparent, allowing a visual interactivity with the entire room while the viewer reads the poem that mimics the way one also brings outside experiences and reference points to the reading of poetry in more traditional mediums.

If you want to check out more of Plensa's work, read about his Crown Fountain project in Chicago here.

[Jaume Plensa website]

A Simple Feat of Light

Sadly don't know where this is or who made it.  But I love it.  Amazing what simple votive candles can do.

[CoolHunter]

Arts Visuels >> The World's Largest Work of Art

Remember Jim Denevan, whose work I put up back here (if you didn't see it, check it out, pretty awesome)?  Well apparently back in March, he completed the "world's largest work of art," on Lake Baikal in Siberia, and there's a documentary in the works about the piece (intro below).

Denevan's large-scale earth works explore the impermanent, carving geometric shapes into element-sensitive areas, like sand and snow, that will eventually be erased by wind and water.  

This latest project in Siberia was a 9-square mile spiral of circles, along the fibonacci curve, starting at 18" and ranging up to miles in diameter. 

Jim Denevan site here.

Siberia project as featured on The Anthropologist

Sight and Sound >> Zimoun's Sound Sculptures

Above, 21 of artist Zimoun's "sound sculptures," which despite their mechanical mediums all seem to sound amazingly like different types of rain and wind, making them peaceful-sounding but faintly maniacal to watch.  I felt like I was listening to a sleep-sound-machine while slowly going insane.  

Still, check it out.  My personal faves are at about 2:24 and 7:23... I just realized I incidentally picked the two least mechanical as my favorites. Ha.

“Zimoun’s sound sculptures and installations are graceful, mechanized works of playful poetry, their structural simplicity opens like an industrial bloom to reveal a complex and intricate series of relationships, an ongoing interplay between the «artificial» and the «organic».”

[Thanks Monica!]

[Selectism]

Art in Stead

The MAK Center's project "How Many Billboards, Art in Stead" asked 21 contemporary artists to each produce a billboard to be placed around Los Angeles, giving residents a break from the generally un-stimulating clutter crowding their cityscapes.

 Wouldn't it be cool if, for some amount of time per year, billboard owners were required to give a portion of their billboards over to art instituations for projects like this, the same way tv networks have to allow ad space for PSAs?  And every once in a while you would glance at a billboard and see art instead of an ad?

Read more about the project (which is sadly over) in this NYT article.

Project website here.

In Memorandum >> The Incandescent Light Bulb

Tim Fishlock created this chandelier out of 1243 suspended incandescent light bulbs as a memorial to the light source that has served us, nearly unchanged, since its creation 130 years ago.  

 By 2011, all forms of incandescent light in the UK (where Fishlock lives) will have been phased out in the name of greenness. 

(As you probably guessed by the lack of wires, not all 1243 bulbs are functional-- there is only one actual light source at the very center.)

I'm all for greenness, but I've got to say, I'm feeling a little nostalgic already for the incandescent bulb. Or at least, I wish they'd go ahead and figure out a way to make CFL light (and their bulbs) prettier.  Will they ever be able to make a CFL bulb that looks like an old Edison filament bulb, like the below?

Toothpicks + Glue.

Sculptures made of millions (literally, up to 6 million per) and hundreds of liters of glue by Stan Murno.

via Lost at E Minor
Stan Murno website.

Flight of Fancy >> Kate MccGwire

I was stopped in my tracks by Kate MccGwire's pieces constructed out of pigeon feathers.  You might have noticed by now that I especially love installation art and art made out of bizarre mediums, so MccGwire's work definitely fits the bill.

I just love seeing materials reimagined. When it's done well, it makes you immeditately realize how different the mind of the artist is... for example, I would never in a million years have looked at a pigeon feather and imagined something so beautiful and nuanced.  But in the hands of MccGwire, something so basic and mundane is transformed and we suddenly see it through a completely different lens.

The beauty of art like this is a great example of Kant's idea that universal beauty is found in things that appear to have purpose, but not one that we can actually perceive.  In other words, it seems like it should have a purpose, but we can't tell what that purpose would be, and thus we don't desire to consume or possess it, we simply derive pleasure from experiencing it.  

MccGwire's organic forms seem independent, like they have a life of their own, a goal, a purpose, but we can't tell what it would be.

The "cage" element is pretty brilliant.  It totally changes how you view the piece.  In the one above, the mass of feathers looks like its writhing like a python, quickly growing too large for its cage, and it seems to say something about keeping birds in cages.  ...Or maybe about what kinds of birds we keep in cages and our narrow view of what's beautiful-- pigeons ordinarily wouldn't be valued enough to be kept, but with the feathers reimagined by MccGwire, the form is beautiful enough to be put on a pedestal-- or in a cage-- to be possessed.

In the one below, the glass cloche makes the "bird" seem like it's a taxidermied specimen, neatly preserved under glass for all time, and the white feathers, compared to the irridescent grey ones, seem so much more still and even peaceful, adding to the RIP connotations of the piece.

More of Kate MccGwire's work at her website here.