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Public Art Review Public Art Review Issue 51 • Fall/Winter 2014 • Publicartreview.Org YOKO ONO’S EARTH PEACE | MAPPING | BERT BENALLY AND AI WEIWEI IN THE DESERT ART VS. OIL | MARY JANE JACOB ON CURATION | LEXINGTON TATTOOS ITSELF Public Art Review Public Public Art Review Issue 51 • Fall/Winter 2014 • publicartreview.org Barbara Grygutis Issue 51 • JR’s Big Vision • Art vs. Oil • Artists & Fabricators • Nantes • Mapping 51 South Park Bridge Entry Monuments and Pedestrian Railing Seattle, Washington T: 520.882.5572 520.907.9443 Repurposed steel rocker arms from the historic 1930 drawbridge flank the approach. M: 3200 ft. of artist-designed railing is inset with original gears and other salvaged components. [email protected] BIG VISION JR talks about boundaries, limits, seeing barbaragrygutis.com $16 .00 USD Commissioned by 4Culture, King County Public Art Collection people, and being bold Fabrication: Jesse Engineering, Tacoma, WA Photo:Spike Mafford Grygutis South Street Bridge PAR FINAL.indd 1 10/18/14 6:34 PM BOOKSBOOKS & MEDIA Publications and reviews Fiery Passion Why do 70,000 people trek into the desert for Burning Man? It’s the art. BY SHAUNA DEE BURNING MAN: ART ON FIRE Jennifer Raiser Photography by Sidney Erthal PUBLIC ART REVIEW PUBLIC ART and Scott London Introduction by Larry Harvey New York: Race Point Publishing, September 2014 | VOL. 26 | NO. 1 Much of the focus of Burning | ISSUE 51 Man coverage in the media of | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG late has been the influx of high- end trailers with extravagant catered meals for the Silicon Valley elite. But the art at Burning Man, still the focal point of the weeklong annual festival, deserves documentation in a hardcover 86 art book filled with large, beautiful photos and compelling stories. BOOKS Burning Man: Art on Fire, by Jennifer Raiser, is just that book. Covering more than 200 works of art created by Burners in one of the most inhospitable of locations in the United States, the book provides an experience second only to being there. Through inter- views, stories, and photography, readers will witness the effort it takes to create work in this singular setting and gain a greater under- standing of artists’ motivations. In a sense, the art at Burning Man is the very essence of the festi- val, where individual works are pieces of the whole. The context of each piece is a pop-up city in the middle of Black Rock Desert in Nevada, a city with a gift economy and utopian ideals, which fosters collaboration and true participatory art. There is no clear distinction between audience and artwork here. In September 2013, the year Raiser wrote about in her book, 68,000 people attended the festival, each one a participant in the grand creation, and ultimate destruc- tion, of the Burning Man. Whether you are one of the 68,000 or not, you will appreciate the illuminating perspectives presented in Burn- ing Man: Art on Fire. Also included in the book is an artist’s perspective from Leo Villa- real, an introduction from Burning Man founder Larry Harvey, and a forward by Will Chase. SHAUNA DEE is the information and communications coordinator at Forecast Public Art. TOP: Duane Flatmo’s El Pulpo Mecanico (2011) was a crowd favorite. Ingeniously fashioned from reclaimed scrap metal and salvaged items, this charming cephalopod spewed 200 gallons of propane flame—on a good night—from its eight articulated trashcan tentacles. MIDDLE: The UK–based architectural design collective Warmbaby created The Wet Dream (2011) to bring a whimsical representation of cooling English rain to heat-soaked Black Rock City. The structure housed a canopy of umbrellas to protect from the heat of the sun during the day and a 24-hour background audio of thunder and lightning, illuminated at night with LED rope lights. BOTTOM: Over 40 feet tall and made from powder-coated steel and steel cable, Kate Raudenbush’s vision for Star Seed (2012) came almost fully All photos by Scott London. formed. “I imagined it falling from the sky and taking root, or as little rockets, filled with Burners.” BOOKS That ’70s Art A glimpse into the world of Los Angeles art and artists during a turbulent decade BY CATHY MADISON CREATING THE FUTURE: Art and Los Angeles in the 1970s Michael Fallon Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, September 2014 REVIEW PUBLIC ART Seldom does a book about art so fully capture not only | the ways in which history, / WINTERFALL 2014 culture, geography, and person- ality intersect to create art, | but also insight into how art PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG both defines and influences our society. In this well-re- searched, deftly told story of a single decade in a singular city, Michael Fallon reflects on 87 far more than what happened BOOKS in Los Angeles in the 1970s. He sets the stage—the ebullient ’60s, when the sunny promise of the California Dream colored an era of modernism, pop art, and abstract expressionism—then escorts us through the turbulence of the next decade, scarred by events such as the Manson murders, the Kent State shootings, and Watergate, but enhanced by revolutionary art that presages the future. Los Angeles, long considered a remote art outpost by New York insiders, “had a penchant for merging and connecting diverse culture influences” and became “home to advancing pockets of cultural activity, many of which were connected to the churning local streets and its indigenous street-based cultures,” Fallon writes. Highway underpasses and bridge pylons inspired Chicano artists to embrace their muralist forebears. Women united in the feminist art movement. Happenings and performance art made news. Desolate industrial stretches became art parks; graffiti, surfboards, and hot rods became art. Fallon depicts the scene by profiling its artists, most of whom came from somewhere else. We see how their art sprang not only from their diverse backgrounds, but also from the unique, sprawl- ing amalgam of L.A. itself. Time and place can’t be divorced from their art; neither can their art be overlooked as a significant influ- ence on both. TOP: At Burning Man, the suits Dadara’s “bankers” wore for the installation Transformoney Tree (2012) gradually shifted from dark blue pinstripe into painter’s overalls. BOTTOM: The Flaming Lotus Girls’ Serpent Mother (2006) was a 168-foot-long sculpture of a skeletal dragon-like serpent coiled around her steel egg, creating a protective circle inside which 100 people could gather. Most of Serpent Mother’s 50 vertebrae spouted six-foot-high propane-fueled jets of flame that could be activated in various patterns by participants at four separate locations, or activated at once by the artists using the “Wow” button. CATHY MADISON is a writer who lives in Minneapolis and Los Angeles. BOOKS Painting the Town A Brazilian film explores street-art conflicts in São Paolo GREY CITY (CIDADE CINZA) Sala12 Filmes Directed by Marcelo Mesquita and Guilherme Valiengo PUBLIC ART REVIEW PUBLIC ART In São Paulo, Brazil, large-scale murals have a formidable presence around the city, where thousands of artists display their artistic talent in public spaces. Grey City gives viewers a close-up look at one influential street-art crew (including OSGEMEOS, Nunca, Nina, Ise, Finok, and Zefix) as they worked in 2007 to re-create a large work that had been painted | VOL. 26 over by the city. The Clean City Law was in effect, with a small team deployed to deter- | mine which graffiti works were aesthetically pleasing and to paint over the rest with grey. NO. 1 The film succeeds in addressing the tension that exists in cities with active street-art scenes | ISSUE 51 about who determines what is art, and what should be erased, while exhibiting the process | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG of immensely talented artists following their passion of creating art for their community. —Shauna Dee 88 BOOKS Photos © Marcelo Mesquita and Guilherme Valiengo. TOP LEFT: DVD cover of Grey City. BOTTOM LEFT: Scene from the movie. ABOVE: Scene from the movie. PUBLIC ART thrives in KANSAS CITY, Mo. WWW. KCMO.GOV/ generalservices/ municipal-art- commission EGAWA + ZBRYK, HOLUP, HUETHER, ZWEIG + EL DORADO INC., HARRIES + HEDER, Barnacles The River Ambit Prairie Logic Terpsichore for Kansas City BOOKS Crossing Boundaries Though the artist is forbidden to leave China, Ai Weiwei’s works transcend international (and artistic) lines BY JESSICA FIALA AI WEIWEI, SPATIAL MATTERS: Art, Architecture, and Activism Ai Weiwei and Anthony Pins, eds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014 REVIEW PUBLIC ART Ai Weiwei, Spatial Matters: Art, Architecture, and | Activism approaches the work / WINTERFALL 2014 of contemporary artist Ai Weiwei through broadening | levels of scale. The essays PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG begin by investigating single gallery installations, then expand outward to explore Ai’s architectural projects, video works that document 89 and map Beijing, and the global reach of his Internet-based activism. BOOKS As the scope of projects grows, the collection becomes increasingly intimate, resting finally in the online comingling of personal and public. Ai has become known internationally for ambitious projects and defiant gestures—installing 100 million handcrafted porcelain sunflower seeds at the Tate Modern, dipping Neolithic vases in vibrant industrial paint, and photographing himself flipping the bird at monuments around the world. He has designed dozens of architecture projects and consulted on the “Bird’s Nest” stadium for the Beijing Olympic Games. Since 2006, Ai has cultivated a considerable online following, drawing the attention of the Chinese government, who shut down his blog in 2009 and imprisoned him for 81 days in 2011. Although restricted from leaving the country, his reach continues to expand online and through exhibitions organized remotely. His current exhibition, for example, which is not included in the book, is @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, which runs through April 2015.
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