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72 articles, 2016-04-29 06:03 1 7 Must-See Shows at Berlin Gallery Weekend It’s like an art fair, only way more spacious (and way less painful). 2016-04-28 20:05 6KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com
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2 ‘You Me Bum Train’ Takes the Selfie to a New Level The immersive performance experience could be set to open in New York next year. 2016-04-28 16:46 4KB wwd.com (1.00/2)
3 Wim Delvoye to Open a Gallery in Kashan, Iran Kashan, Iran. COURTESY MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY The Art Newspaper reported today that Belgian artist Wim Delvoye is in the process of restoring (1.00/2) 2016-04-28 12:49 1KB www.artnews.com
4 Unlimited Section at Art Basel in Basel to Include El Anatsui, Stan Douglas COURTESY YOUTUBE Unlimited, the Art Basel platform allotted for large-scale and (1.00/2) unconventional artworks, will be showing a record 88 projects from 2016-04-28 10:13 5KB www.artnews.com 5 Morning Links: Jeopardy Edition Must-read stories from around the art world 2016-04-28 08:35 2KB www.artnews.com
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6 Mechanical Glamour - Magazine - Art in America As the Met’s Costume Institute opens an exhibition about the interplay between handmade and mass-produced fashion, Leonardo da Vinci’s sketch for a sequin-making machine evokes a longer historical view of the topic. 2016-04-29 06:02 19KB www.artinamericamagazine.com 7 Paul Simon, Regina Spektor, Maria Popova and Matthew Weiner Pitch in at Poetry Event Paul Simon, “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner, “Brain Pickings” founder Maria Popova and Regina Spektor helped the Academy of American Poets celebrate verse at Lincoln Center… 2016-04-28 22:56 4KB wwd.com 8 Feel Like This: Sam Johnson on Luis Garay’s Maneries To spark discussion, the Walker invites Twin Cities artists and critics to write overnight reviews of our performances. The ongoing Re:View series shares a diverse array of independent voices and o... 2016-04-29 00:14 946Bytes blogs.walkerart.org 9 Cushnie et Ochs Partners with Bandier, Pamela Love The label will launch a 10-piece activewear collection with Bandier and a jewelry collaboration. 2016-04-29 00:10 2KB wwd.com 10 josé cardoso's play-doh people meld molded matter with portrait photos graphic designer and illustrator josé cardoso has completed a collection of headshots that blends classic photography and basic sculpting. 2016-04-29 00:02 1KB www.designboom.com 11 Lancel Taps Langley Fox Hemingway and Noah Mills for Spring The French leather goods maker is also celebrating its 140th anniversary with a road movie, an exhibition and a new book. 2016-04-28 23:52 1KB wwd.com 12 Royal Ascot Teams Up With Eight Milliners on Hat Collective Designers including Stephen Jones, Philip Treacy, Rachel Trevor Morgan, Edwina Ibbotson, William Chambers, Laura Apsit Livins, Lady Laura Cathcart and Harvy Santos took part creating one-of-kind-pi… 2016-04-28 22:53 2KB wwd.com 13 Amazon Posts Profits Amid New Products, Programs Amazon profits gained as the company expanded its assortment. 2016-04-28 22:51 2KB wwd.com 14 WY-TO architects' flat-pack disaster shelter for southeast asia the 'living shelter' is an affordable, collapsible unit that's easy to ship and can be assembled by small teams without tools. 2016-04-28 22:05 1KB www.designboom.com 15 Gisele Bündchen Wears Anthony Vaccarello for ‘Tonight Show’ Appearance Bündchen appeared on the show to promote the mass-edition copy of her book. 2016-04-28 22:02 1KB wwd.com 16 ‘Streetease’ Brings Mr. Brainwash and Seen to Opera Gallery Hong Kong Opera Gallery Hong Kong showcases the work of two street artists, Mr. Brainwash and Seen, in its latest exhibition, “Streetease.” 2016-04-28 20:52 2KB www.blouinartinfo.com 17 ‘Angkor Wat Soviet-Style’: Christophe Malcot on Photographing Chernobyl Commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, ARTINFO spoke to photographer Christophe Malcot, whose latest exhibitions comprises of haunting black and white images of the site. 2016-04-28 20:46 4KB www.blouinartinfo.com 18 In Which Hip-Hop Ends Up Saving Itself: On Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style Considering its status as a founding document of one of the twentieth century’s defining cultural phenomena, it would be easy to forget Wild Style’s origins in the high art ferment of New York's... 2016-04-28 19:03 933Bytes blogs.walkerart.org 19 Stay Ready: Lizzie Borden on the Post-Revolutionary Future of Born in Flames Released in 1983 during Reagan’s presidency and Ed Koch’s tenure as mayor of New York City, Lizzie Borden’s futurist, science-fiction feature Born in Flames (1983) imagines political activism t... 2016-04-29 00:14 938Bytes blogs.walkerart.org 20 snøhetta-designed SFMOMA set to open in san francisco completed by snøhetta, the expanded SFMOMA seamlessly integrates a 10-storey expansion with the original mario botta-designed building. 2016-04-28 20:25 5KB www.designboom.com 21 2016 Sovereign Asian Art Prize Nominees Announced The 30 finalists for the 2016 edition of the Sovereign Asian Art Prize, Asia’s most established arts prize has been announced. 2016-04-28 20:03 3KB www.blouinartinfo.com 22 Armory Show Head Aims to Change Up Fair— The new head of the Armory Show has unveiled his plans for changing things up at the art fair, including integrating the modern and contemporary dealers. 2016-04-28 20:01 3KB news.artnet.com
23 Call for Applicants: Walker Art Center Mildred Friedman Design Fellowship 2016–2017 The Walker is pleased to announce that its 2016-2017 Mildred Friedman Design Fellowship is now open for applications. APPLICATIONS ARE DUE: MAY 23rd Since 1980, the Walker’s Design department has... 2016-04-28 07:58 3KB blogs.walkerart.org 24 British Fashion Council, BFC Fashion Trust Partners With Farfetch The announcement was made during an event Thursday night hosted by BFC Fashion Trust co-chairs Tania Fares and Kim Hersov; José Neves, founder and chief executive officer of Farfetch; and Caroline … 2016-04-28 19:49 1KB wwd.com 25 Police Brutality in VR Proves It's a ‘Hard World for Small Things’ Filmmaker Janicza Bravo ditches dark comedy for headsets to tackle discrimination. 2016-04-28 19:40 4KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com 26 design teams re-envision downtown LA's pershing square in september 2015, pershing square renew invited design firms to submit proposals to re- envision the space as a functional and accessible town square. 2016-04-28 19:29 4KB www.designboom.com 27 Swedish Pop Singer Léon on Katy Perry, Heartbreak and Her First Tour Meet Léon, the 23-year-old Swedish pop singer with a cello background who is beloved by Katy Perry. 2016-04-28 19:27 3KB wwd.com 28 2016 American Package Design Awards Makers, sellers and marketers are challenged as never before to convey the message, promote the brand, close the deal. Think fragmented... 2016-04-28 21:52 1KB gdusa.com 29 Berlin's Most Notorious Club Gets an Acoustic-Architectural Installation Berghain will become an audiovisual playground for German record label Raster-Noton’s 20th anniversary. 2016-04-28 18:45 3KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com 30 Nasty Gal Bans Use of Angora Wool After PETA Appeal The women’s fashion retailer joined more than 120 brands, including H&M, Topshop and Forever 21, in banning angora wool. 2016-04-28 18:37 1KB wwd.com 31 Madison’s Pop-Up Play Brings Bloggers in Store The contemporary boutique chain is set to launch a blogger pop-up shop series Monday at its 3rd Street flagship with the first installation curated by Marta Pozzan. 2016-04-28 18:34 3KB wwd.com 32 The New York Times Taps Ex-Pinterest Executive David Rubin as Head of Brand Rubin will report to chief revenue officer Meredith Kopit Levien. 2016-04-28 18:30 1KB wwd.com 33 iwan baan documents MAD's harbin opera house in china MAD architects has released a new series of photos by iwan baan, documenting its harbin opera house in northeast china. 2016-04-28 18:29 3KB www.designboom.com 34 Condé Nast Entertainment Taps Maria Valero as Vice President of Business Affairs Valera comes to Condé Nast from Audible, an Amazon-owned company. 2016-04-28 18:18 1KB wwd.com 35 Rolls-Royce Rolls Out Six-Piece Luggage Collection for $46,000 The luxury carmaker tapped its Bespoke Design Studio to design the collection to “complement” its Wraith model car. 2016-04-28 18:02 2KB wwd.com 36 carsten höller slide to open at arcelormittal orbit in london tickets are on sale now for the carsten höller-designed slide at anish kapoor's arcelormittal orbit in london. 2016-04-28 17:58 2KB www.designboom.com 37 Clearing the Haze: Prologue to Postmodern Graphic Design Education through Sheila de Bretteville Author’s preface: At the outset, this project was defined as an intensive effort to examine and reassess the work of Shelia Levrant de Bretteville. The initial motivation was driven by the connectio... 2016-04-28 20:48 982Bytes blogs.walkerart.org 38 EU Campaign Dear Friends, I’m sure you are also following with horror the rightwards drift and anti-EU sentiment brewing across Europe. The Dutch referendum... 2016-04-28 20:48 2KB tillmans.co.uk 39 Music legend Prince dies at age 57 Prince, a multitalented musician who came out of the Minneapolis scene and changed the world of music forever, has died at age 57... 2016-04-28 20:48 10KB blog.thecurrent.org 40 Pratt and FIT Schedule Annual Fashion Show for Same Night Editors will have to make a choice about which fashion show they attend on May 5. 2016-04-28 17:28 1KB wwd.com 41 Nadav Kander at Flowers Gallery, New York Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday 2016-04-28 17:13 2KB www.artnews.com 42 Hannah Elless Quick Takes: Vintage Hermès, ‘Father of the Bride,’ and Allison Krauss Hannah Elless, star of Broadway’s “Bright Star,” on her Steve Martin films and her favorite bluegrass. 2016-04-28 16:55 814Bytes wwd.com 43 A Plumber Built a Hoverbike in His Garage The future's here, and it's just like 'Star Wars.' Kind of. 2016-04-28 16:55 1KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com 44 Alternate Senses of Tone and Pulse: An Interview with C. Spencer Yeh For Sound Horizon, our series of free in-gallery music performances, we’ve invited critic and Tiny Mix Tapes editor Marvin Lin to share his perspective on each installment of this three-part progr... 2016-04-28 20:48 946Bytes blogs.walkerart.org 45 fade task light by box clever leverages one piece of metal as much as possible accompanied by high performance LED system, the fade task light's intuitive dimmer and color temperature slider control on the iron base allows the light output to be precisely set to the color and luminosity. 2016-04-28 16:30 1KB www.designboom.com
46 At the Vatican, a Newly Refreshed Snapshot of Italy, Circa 1580 The Gallery of Maps – a 400-foot-long snapshot of Italy, circa 1580, with some later updates – is “a sneak peek of paradise,” the director of the Vatican Museums said on Wednesday. 2016-04-28 15:56 2KB artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com 47 Introducing the Bubbling Jewel Coffee Table Turn your living room into a mystical cave. 2016-04-28 15:20 1KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com 48 Meet the Self-Described "Sign Geeks" Keeping Neon Alive An international photography group captures the illuminated nostalgia of neon signage with their most recent show at The Museum of Neon Art. 2016-04-28 15:10 5KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com 49 Protest Group Lights Up Guggenheim's Facade The Gulf Labor Artist Coalition used light projections on the Guggenheim Museum's facade last night, in protest of recent breakdown in negotiations. 2016-04-28 14:41 2KB news.artnet.com 50 Can Visionary Art Also be Conceptual? | City of the Seekers Ed Ruscha recently called Dani Tull one of "LA's brightest new talent and truest voices," so you should be listening up. 2016-04-28 14:40 8KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com 51 Free Arts NYC Celebrates Glenn O'Brien at Richard Prince-hosted Party The fête drew guests such as Jeffrey Deitch, Annabelle Dexter-Jones, Claire Distenfeld, Nan Goldin, Rashid Johnson, Jemima Kirke, Marilyn Minter, and more. 2016-04-28 14:31 1KB www.blouinartinfo.com 52 Duke Riley on his Airborne Project for Creative Time, Starring Thousands of His Beloved Pigeons Duke Riley with his pigeons. PHOTO BY WILL STAR/COURTESY CREATIVE TIME If Duke Riley never brought ink to paper, never went to art school, and never signed 2016-04-28 14:22 8KB www.artnews.com 53 These Abstract Paintings Say, "This Is Your Brain on Data" German artist Tobias Kroeger’s new solo show ‘Playground’ examines what it means to be a “modern, digitized human.” 2016-04-28 14:10 3KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com 54 Predicting the Tony Nominations: The Actors Some very deserving performances will not be acknowledged when the nominations are announced. There are very few shoo-ins. 2016-04-28 14:08 4KB www.blouinartinfo.com 55 Adult Swim’s New Web-Toy Is Sexy, Sassy, and Starving 'Feed Frank,' or don't; not like he even cares anyway. 2016-04-28 13:45 2KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com 56 ‘An Incongruous Object’: Cornelia Parker on Her Met Commission, a Hitchcock-Inspired Barn on the Roof Installation view of "The Roof Garden Commission: Cornelia Parker, Transitional Object (PsychoBarn), 2016, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. ©2016 HYLA SKOPITZ 2016-04-28 13:32 7KB www.artnews.com 57 L3P architekten renovates house lendenmann in switzerland in regensberg, a medieval township in northern switzerland, L3P architekten has renovated a two-storey building that was in desperate need of repair. 2016-04-28 13:20 3KB www.designboom.com
58 piero lissoni's lightweight piuma chair for kartell uses material found in cars and planes piero lissoni's versatile chair design for kartell measures at a few millimeters thick and weighs only 2.2 kg. 2016-04-28 13:15 2KB www.designboom.com 59 philippe starck’s lou collection for driade expresses playful anthropomorphic qualities philippe starck’s 'lou' collection for driade was presented at salone del mobile 2016, as well as the designer's 'wow' sofa and 'cinemascope' armchair. 2016-04-28 12:44 2KB www.designboom.com 60 A New App Illuminates the Hidden Histories of Everyday Places 'Poetic Places' uses geolocation to hit you up when you happen across a place described or recorded in literature, poetry, and paintings. 2016-04-28 12:20 4KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com 61 The Man Behind the Screen: Ed Atkins at the Kitchen, New York Through May 14 2016-04-28 12:19 3KB www.artnews.com 62 NYC Manholes Just Got Way Cozier Artist Mark Reigelman moves his sculpture when cops drive by. 2016-04-28 12:15 3KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com 63 International no. 308 May 2016 We are pleased to announce that the May 2016 issue of Flash Art International is out now. Following the death of Italian novelist, semiologist and philosopher Umberto Eco, this issue takes... 2016-04-28 11:50 5KB www.flashartonline.com 64 Enter Yves Klein's Blue World on His Birthday To celebrate Yves Klein's birthday on April 28, artnet News rounded up our favorite works in blue from the artist's oeuvre. 2016-04-28 10:15 2KB news.artnet.com 65 Art Teacher Fired After Saying 'Vagina' Allison Wint says she was let go from a substitute teaching gig in Michigan for saying the word vagina while discussing Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings. 2016-04-28 10:06 2KB news.artnet.com 66 Collectors Gift $75 Million to LACMA Museum co-chair Elaine Wynn and billionaire A. Jerrold Perenchio have donated $75 million to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for its expansion. 2016-04-28 09:53 3KB news.artnet.com 67 Koki Tanaka Recreates 1985 Liverpool Strike For Koki Tanaka's commission at the 2016 Liverpool Biennial, the Japanese artist is coalescing the original members of a 10,000-strong strike in 1985. 2016-04-28 09:52 2KB news.artnet.com 68 Alison Knowles Makes a Giant Salad at Art Basel The performance art pioneer Alison Knowles will introduce her gigantic "Make A Salad" (1962) participatory work at Art Basel this summer. 2016-04-28 09:07 2KB news.artnet.com 69 Man Assaulted for Looking Like Shia LaBeouf Shia LaBeouf has reached in sympathy out to Mario Licato, the New Yorker who was assaulted in the subway by a stranger because he looked like him. 2016-04-28 08:45 2KB news.artnet.com
70 Raster Noton Launches Installation at Berghain Tonight, as an unofficial start to Berlin Gallery Weekend, the techno label co-founded by artist Carsten Nicolai marks its 20th anniversary at Berghain. 2016-04-28 08:14 5KB news.artnet.com 71 Lego Says Refusing Ai Weiwei Was a Mistake- Lego vice-chairman Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen has said that the company's controversial refusal to supply Ai Weiwei was a mistake made by a low-level employee. 2016-04-28 06:23 2KB news.artnet.com 72 Huda Lutfi Takes Viewers on a Tour Around Cairo at The Third Line Dubai’s The Third Line Gallery will host a new series of Huda Lutfi’s unconventional photocollages in their latest exhibition, “Magnetic Bodies: Imaging the Urban.” 2016-04-28 06:07 2KB www.blouinartinfo.com Articles
72 articles, 2016-04-29 06:03
1 7 Must-See Shows at Berlin Gallery Weekend (1.00/2) Aleksandra Domanović, Substances of Human Origin (2015). Photo courtesy of the Varon Collection, Monaco. One weekend each April, galleries up and down Potsdamer Straße (and beyond) collectively tap their best artists, extend their hours, and stay open on Sunday, all in the name of promoting the cooperative Berlin art market. They call it Gallery Weekend Berlin , and this year, it takes place from April 29 until May 1. International collectors and art aficionados Uber around the city for a weekend trying to see it all, since they won’t be back in Berlin until mid-September for abc art berlin contemporary , Gallery Weekend’s sister event. In true Berlin style, few of the exhibitions yet have press releases, or really any information beyond the rare photograph. So, I did my best to speculate on what seem like the most exciting and worthwhile Gallery Weekend exhibitions. Petra Cortright, Bridal Shower (2013). Photo courtesy the artist and Societé, Berlin. Societé posts very little information on their website, so there’s little to know about Petra Cortright’s show—except what her studio told us, which is that the show is called Die Rose . (In German, that means “the rose” and not “die, Rose.”) The coupling of the internet artist with what might be the most esoteric gallery in Berlin is sure to pique the interest of lovers of immaterial, logged-in works. Djordjadze is fairly well-known in Berlin, especially compared to New York, where she’s only now gotten her first solo show, at MoMA PS1. She studied under the prolific German artist Rosemarie Trockel, and has since carved a name for herself with her minimal, functional design- inspired, sometimes surreal sculpture. Tomás Saraceno, Solitary semi-social mapping of SXDF- NB1006-2 by one Nephila clavipes – one week, one Tegenaria domestica – eight weeks and a pair of Cyrtophora citricola – one week (2015). Photo courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin, © Studio Saraceno The artist’s second show with Esther Schipper, a champion gallerist of conceptual art in Berlin, Aerocene conceptually builds upon Saraceno’s earlier work, Cloud Cities , a project that imagines a utopia structured after cloud formations, soap bubbles, and spider webs. The exhibition will kick off with a spider concert to celebrate the new works, which are made of spider silk and ink on paper. The winner of the 2014/2015 ars viva prize , Domanović is interested in the de- and re- contextualization of images—like these sculptures of American celebrities in former Yugoslavian Republics. Her work also probes into the ways citizens heal from traumas of collective memory, like 2010’s 19:30 , a juxtaposition of the former Yugoslavian evening news with a different kind of collective experience: techno raves. Her Gallery Weekend show is called Bulls without Horns , and will expand on her research-based practice to look at how animals have helped to shape human understanding, “From Archaic Greece into the Anthropocene present.” KTZ’s location in a full-on, fluorescently lit office building is either an example of Berlin creatives’ ability to reuse and repurpose spaces, or the most post-internet "office aesthetic" joke ever. For Gallery Weekend, they will show American artist Rachel Harrison’s American Gothic , a sculpture made using a cast of a Native American bust she bought on e-Bay. Wolfgang Tillmans, Studio Still Life, A (2013). Photo courtesy of Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne Besides extending the hours of Between Bridges , Tillmans’ gallery turned into a forum to discuss and plan how to help the European refugee crisis. During Berlin Gallery Weekend, the artist will also have his 12th solo show at Galerie Buchholz. Entitled Studio , the show will examine the artist’s relationship with the place in which he works. Galerie Eigen + Art will present Nicolai’s reflektor distortion. The multidisciplinary artist, who produces sound under the name alva noto and founded the “archive for sound and not sound,” Raster-Noton , works scientifically to find systems of making sound visually accessible. This installation will include a rotating bowl of water hit with sound frequencies, dealing with themes of reflection, distortion, and interference. Hiwa K, This Lemon Tastes of Apple, (2011). © Hiwa KPhoto courtesy of Hiwa K and KOW, Berlin KOW is a Berlin standout for its consistently international and political focus, and for their continuous support of documentary-leaning video works. Perhaps one of the only galleries with a written, coherent, and helpful press release as of the day of writing, the gallery’s words on the joint exhibition of Tobias Zielony and Hiwa K speak for themselves: “Acting unexpectedly, becoming an unscheduled political subject, contradicting the public narratives and regimes of visibility that make some voices sound legitimate and others not—this is what KOW’s solo exhibitions of Hiwa K and Tobias Zielony are about. More specifically both artists step into moments called 'crisis,' trace places and events of political upheaval and repression, and connect to involved people, stories and bodies.” Find out more about Berlin Gallery Weekend here . Related: Virtual Pop Star Hatsune Miku Performs “Live” in Berlin The Sickest Photos from the Berlin Festival of Light The Best of Berlin Art Week 2016-04-28 20:05 Alyssa Buffenstein
2 ‘You Me Bum Train’ Takes the Selfie to a New Level (1.00/2) Tickets for this wildly successful show were released in three sell-out batches. The show’s site crashed the first time around due to the huge demand, so subsequent releases were issued via a ballot style for 49.50 pounds, about $72 at current exchange, a bargain when one considers the meticulous attention to detail put into the production by creators Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd. Tickets on eBay were fetching upwards of $200. CIA-levels of secrecy surround details of the show, which has been compared to Kafka’s “The Trial,” in which Josef K keeps turning up in situations that are unexpected but where everyone seems to expect him. The whole event is referred to as a “ride”, and everyone involved, from the audience members (called “passengers”), to the hundreds of nightly volunteers required to stage the show are required to sign lengthy non-disclosure agreements before they can take part, so there’s not a lot that reviewers can reveal about the experience itself. And, naturally, Instagramming anything in the show is verboten. When WWD approached the team about this story, it was told that press tickets had all been allocated so the best way to experience the show would be by becoming one of the 450 volunteers required to run the show each night (it has been performed on Thursday and Saturday nights during this season), with people signing up to help cast the show, peel vegetables for the catering, call and confirm other prospective volunteers, and take part as performers in various tableaux that make up the surreal event. After reporting to an unmarked doorway in London’s Soho, at a disused building formerly occupied by Foyles book shop, passengers are ticked off a list by a burly security guard, instructed by receptionists to sign the NDA, weighed (don’t ask; can’t tell), and advised that if a scene becomes too intense, they should place their hands in a “T” shape and repeat “time out” three times. They are then given a “departure time” and shown to a waiting room to await their ride. Passengers go through each of the dozens of scenes, which stretch from the surreal to the touchingly poignant, alone. Sometimes interacting with performers, and other times just witnessing the action — all without any warning of what’s coming next. The scenes have been devised to provide a snapshot from life that most people would never have the opportunity to experience. Imagine being asked to present a major ad campaign to a brand’s stakeholders or perform life-saving surgery, or give a keynote speech on metaphysics to a crowd of experts, or slide along a conveyor belt as a car part in a factory, or hide from assailants in a cold storage facility (caveat: these are imagined, not actual scenes from “You Me Bum Bum Train”). Prince Harry and Cara Delevingne have been among the celebrities to take part as passengers, as well as Benedict Cumberbatch, David Tennant, Dominic West, Stephen Fry and Jude Law. Bond and Lloyd met at art school, where the former was studying illustration and the latter was studying film. A few years after graduation, they started putting on events in the basement of a Brighton office building. Since those humble beginnings, it has grown into something of a cult, with passengers describing it as life-changing. In 2010, it won The Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award and was nominated for an Olivier Award. While “You Me Bum Bum Train” declined to confirm whether the show would open in New York, sources say that they are in talks and might be looking to open in 2017, depending on whether a suitable venue could be found. 2016-04-28 16:46 Julia Neel
3 Wim Delvoye to Open a Gallery in Kashan, Iran (1.00/2) Kashan, Iran. COURTESY MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY The Art Newspaper reported today that Belgian artist Wim Delvoye is in the process of restoring five mansions in Kashan, a city located in the Iranian desert, in order to open a 2,953-square- foot gallery in one of them. Here, he plans to show his artwork alongside exhibitions of work by international, especially Iranian, artists. Delvoye is additionally planning to relocate his studio to Iran, where he has work on view at Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art and at the Isfahan Museum of Contemporary Art. Delvoye is quoted as saying, “I’m not going to live forever. Giving back means giving something to the art world, supporting the local art scene. I buy a lot of Iranian art. I have [work by] young artists.”Delvoye has already hired over 20 people to work on the project. The article reports that that “the project could see him open a Belgian restaurant serving vegetarian cuisine” and that “Delvoye appears to be driven by some bitterness towards the Belgian tax authorities.” Delvoye’s previous attempt to open a sculpture park, which involved the purchase of a small castle near Ghent, failed after the artist was fined €45,000 ($50,900). The article brings to mind the new American travel restrictions that now require foreigners visiting Iran to obtain visas. Delvoye apparently recently asked David Hammons to visit him in Iran, to which the artist replied that he “will need some convincing.” 2016-04-28 12:49 Hannah Ghorashi
4 Unlimited Section at Art Basel in Basel to Include El Anatsui, Stan Douglas (1.00/2) COURTESY YOUTUBE Unlimited, the Art Basel platform allotted for large-scale and unconventional artworks, will be showing a record 88 projects from participating galleries this year. Gianni Jetzer, curator-at-large at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, is heading the section for the fifth year in a row. Highlights will include works by El Anatsui, Stan Douglas, Davide Balula, Gretchen Bender, Mithu Sen, Hans Op de Beeck, Pamela Rosenkranz, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Ariel Schlesinge, Chelpa Ferro, Tunga, Frank Stella, Robert Grosvenor, Joseph Kosuth, Martha Rosler, and Alison Knowles. Below, the full list of artists and projects. AA Bronson , Esther Schipper Ai Weiwei , neugerriemschneider Pierre Alechinsky , Galerie Lelong El Anatsui , Jack Shainman Gallery Kader Attia , Lehmann Maupin, Galerie Nagel Draxler Davide Balula , galerie frank elbaz, Gagosian Gallery Thomas Bayrle , Gavin Brown’s enterprise Bill Beckley , Galerie Hans Mayer Gretchen Bender , Metro Pictures Birdhead , ShanghART Gallery Marinus Boezem , Borzo Pablo Bronstein , Herald St, Galleria Franco Noero, Heidi Bucher , The Approach Pedro Cabrita Reis , Peter Freeman, Inc., Kewenig, Magazzino, Mai 36 Galerie Sprovieri Vlassis Caniaris , Galerie Peter Kilchmann Nina Canell , Barbara Wien Alan Charlton , A arte Invernizzi, Alfonso Artiaco, Konrad Fischer Galerie, Annely Juda Fine Art, Galerie Tschudi Chelpa Ferro , Sprovieri Cheng Ran , Galerie Urs Meile Colin Siyuan Chinnery , Bernier/Eliades Christo , Annely Juda Fine Art Ding Yi , ShanghART Gallery, Waldburger Wouters Trisha Donnelly , Air de Paris, Casey Kaplan, Galerie Eva Presenhuber Stan Douglas , Victoria Miro, David Zwirner, Elmgreen & Dragset , Galería Helga de Alvear Tracey Emin , Xavier Hufkens, Lehmann Maupin, White Cube Koji Enokura , Taka Ishii Gallery Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe , Marlborough Fine Art Isa Genzken , Hauser & Wirth Dan Graham , Lisson Gallery Robert Grosvenor , Paula Cooper Gallery, Galerie Max Hetzler Peter Halley , Galerie Thomas Archana Hande , Chemould Prescott Road, Jim Hodges , Anthony Meier Fine Arts, Gladstone Gallery, Stephen Friedman Gallery Jacqueline Humphries , Greene Naftali, Stuart Shave/Modern Art, Galerie Gisela Capitain Emilio Isgrò , Tornabuoni Art Kahlil Joseph , Bernier/Eliades Anish Kapoor , Gladstone Gallery Lisson Gallery Mike Kelley , Skarstedt Mary Kelly , Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects William Kentridge , Goodman Gallery, Marian Goodman Gallery, Lia Rumma Alison Knowles , James Fuentes Joseph Kosuth , Sean Kelly, Sprüth Magers Jannis Kounellis , Sprovieri Alicja Kwade , 303 Gallery, König Galerie kamel mennour, Louise Lawler , Blondeau & Cie Sol LeWitt , Alfonso Artiaco, Paula Cooper Gallery Konrad Fischer Galerie, Laura Lima , A Gentil Carioca, Galeria Luisa Strina, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery Rafael Lozano-Hemmer in collaboration with Krzysztof Wodiczko , Carroll Fletcher Chris Martin , Anton Kern Gallery, David Kordansky Gallery Paul McCarthy , Hauser & Wirth John McCracken , David Zwirner Lucy McKenzie , Galerie Buchholz, Cabinet Julie Mehretu , carlier gebauer Prabhavathi Meppayil , GALLERYSKE, Pace, Esther Schipper / Johnen Galerie Jonathan Monk , Meyer Riegger, Blondeau & Cie, Dvir Gallery, Lisson Gallery Ciprian Mureșan , Galeria Plan B, David Nolan Gallery Paulo Nazareth , Galleria Franco Noero, Meyer Riegger, Mendes Wood DM Hans Op de Beeck , Galleria Continua, Marianne Boesky Gallery, Galerie Krinzinger Tony Oursler , Lisson Gallery Adam Pendleton , Galeria Pedro Cera Tobias Pils , Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Galerie Gisela Capitain Steven Pippin , Gavin Brown’s enterprise Pope. L , Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gerwald Rockenschaub , Galerie Vera Munro, Mehdi Chouakri, Galerie Eva Presenhuber Tim Rollins and K. O. S. , Lehmann Maupin, Galerie Eva Presenhuber Pamela Rosenkranz , Miguel Abreu Gallery, Karma International, Sprüth Magers James Rosenquist , Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Martha Rosler , Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Galerie Nagel Draxler Dieter Roth , Hauser & Wirth Ariel Schlesinger , Galleria Massimo Minini Mithu Sen , Chemould Prescott Road, Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Galerie Krinzinger Paul Sharits , Greene Naftali Alan Shields , Van Doren Waxter Chiharu Shiota , Galerie Daniel Templon Laurie Simmons , Salon 94 Colin Siyuan Chinnery , Bernier/Eliades Frances Stark , Gavin Brown’s enterprise Frank Stella , Marianne Boesky Gallery, Dominique Lévy Gallery, Sprüth Magers Rayyane Tabet , Sfeir-Semler Gallery Antoni Tàpies , Galerie Lelong Wolfgang Tillmans , David Zwirner Tunga , Luhring Augustine, Galleria Franco Noero James Turrell , OMR Ho Tzu Nyen , STPI Haegue Yang , Kukje Gallery / Tina Kim Gallery Samson Young , team (gallery, inc.), Galerie Gisela Capitain Gilberto Zorio , Lia Rumma 2016-04-28 10:13 Hannah Ghorashi
5 Morning Links: Jeopardy Edition (1.00/2) The Broad’s category on Jeopardy. COURTESY THE BROAD/VIA TWITTER CALIFORNIA MUSEUMS: GAME SHOWS AND DONATIONS The Broad got its own category on Jeopardy two nights ago, but the players were “not touching it until practically all the other Double Jeopardy clues had been picked.” [ Artinfo ]LACMA has received two major donations. Elaine Wynn has given $50 million, while A. Jerrold Perrochio has pledged an additional $25 million. Both have been longtime supporters of the Los Angeles museum. [ The New York Times ]The Fowler Museum has received a $1 million gift from Jay and Deborah Last. They’ve also pledged an additional $14 million match donation. [ Press Release ] CHINESE MUSEUMS: OLD AND NEW Wang Wei and Liu Yiqian are opening their third museum in four years. This one will be the Chinese city of Chongqing, making it their first outside Shanghai. [ The Art Newspaper ]Meanwhile, in Shanghai, the Liu Haisu Art Museum, one of the first institutions to show contemporary art, reopened this month. [ The Art Newspaper ] NEW YORK MUSEUMS: UNCLEAR FUTURES It remains unclear what MoMA is doing with its architecture and design galleries (previous reports noted that they would disappear, but now it seems they’ll only temporarily close), yet one thing is obvious: the way museum audiences view design is changing. [ Co. Design ] REVISING ART HISTORY Hannah Rothschild, the chair of the London National Gallery’s board of trustees, picks five essential art history books. [ The Wall Street Journal ]In light of a documentary about Eva Hesse, film critic J. Hoberman discusses the sculptor’s work. “However playful, inventive, and even, to use her word, ‘ridiculous,’ Hesse’s work clearly has a darker side,” he writes. [ Tablet ] EXTRAS An interview with Michael Mahalick, who currently has a show at New York’s Canada gallery. [ Art F City ]Anna Zacharoff at Standard (Oslo). [ Contemporary Art Daily ] 2016-04-28 08:35 The Editors
6 Mechanical Glamour - Magazine - Art in America Sequined UGG boots. Advertisement Leonardo da Vinci’s unrealized design for a sequin machine is an oddity in the history of innovations that make erstwhile luxuries more accessible. Sequins are plastered on everything: flip flops, cotton T-shirts, canvas tote bags, sneakers— even Ugg boots. I became obsessed with sequined Uggs at the height of their popularity in 2011. I didn’t want to wear them, but I’d consider them from a distance. I’d stare at ads on subway platforms and admire the humorless earnestness of the high-low, pretty-ugly mashup. Did sequins camouflage the awkwardness of the Ugg boot or accentuate its simple shape? Did affixing reflective spangles to an otherwise schlumpy boot result in all-purpose, one-shoe-fits-all, budget-friendly footwear that you could wear to a black-tie event or to your local bodega? Three years later, in 2014, I stood in front of Ambrogio Bevilacqua’s mixed-medium Madonna and Child (1495) at the Sforza Castle in Milan. Mary’s dress is made of hundreds of hand- stitched sequins, some of the oldest that exist in Europe. Much of the surface is woven from gold and silver threads, including Mary’s hair; only the figures’ skin is painted. Staring at the work, I imagined the painstaking process of making those tiny disks before the task had been automated. The ubiquity of sequins today as a campy add-on to just about anything makes it hard to believe that five hundred years ago they would have been made of gilded metal and featured on a delicate work representing Jesus and Mary. The contrast between the artisanal techniques of the past and the mass production of today is the kind of distinction that provides fodder for “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology,” an exhibition opening this month at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. With over 120 pieces, the show looks back to the beginning of haute couture in the late nineteenth century, when it was a luxury alternative to clothes produced by sewing machines or in factories. As curator Andrew Bolton said at a press preview in February, haute couture depends on a binary opposition between the handmade and the mass-produced —and yet in reality the fashion industry frequently blurs those lines. “Proponents of the hand see it as symbolic of exclusivity, spontaneity, and individuality, while opponents see it as symbolic of elitism, the cult of personality, and the detrimental nostalgia for past craftsmanship,” Bolton said. “Likewise, the proponents of the machine see it as symbolic of progress, democracy, and mass production, while opponents see it as symbolic of inferiority, dehumanization, and one- dimensionality.” “Manus x Machina” presents hand and machine as partners rather than in opposition. While its focus is haute couture, the exhibition seems to offer a critical framework wherein something like glittering Uggs could be discussed alongside Bevilacqua’s sequin- encrusted Madonna and Child. The automation of sequin production has occupied me since I stumbled upon Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing for a sequin-making machine on WikiMedia Commons in late 2012. While the sketch was annotated by Leonardo as “macchina punzonatrice,” Italian historian Carlo Pedretti, who wrote extensive notes about Leonardo’s drawings, translated it as a “puncher device for the production of sequins. " 1 Sitting in my apartment in Brooklyn, I stared at the late fifteenth-century sketch on my computer screen, dumbfounded. I tried interpreting the way the pulleys and ratchet wheels would have worked, where the metal would have been fed, and how you would have cranked the mechanism to punch out the round disks. But I also wondered: Why had celebrated genius Leonardo made a sketch for a device that would produce something as seemingly insignificant as the sequin? Did people wear sequins in the fifteenth century? Was the machine ever made? Initial research seemed to indicate that Leonardo’s drawing had never been more than just a sketch. But I wanted to know more. My obsession with sequins turned into an obsession with Leonardo’s machine. If it had never been made, I wanted to make it, or a version of it. I would adapt his sketch into a sculpture to make sequins one by one, in contrast to how they’re churned out by the thousands per minute today. But I also knew I needed to learn about the sketch and the production of sequins. In 2014 I traveled to Milan, to meet with Leonardo scholars and fashion historians who I hoped would have answers to my questions. My first stop was the Biblioteca Ambrosiana. The seventeenth-century library houses the Codex Atlanticus , a bound set of drawings and writings that Leonardo produced from 1478 to 1519. It’s the largest compendium of its kind, comprising 1,119 pages in twelve volumes, with one hundred pages of writing and a total of 1,750 sketches and drawings devoted to engineering, hydraulics, optics, anatomy, architecture, geometry, and astronomy—including the sketch for the sequin-making machine. When I met him, Biblioteca Ambrosiana curator and Leonardo scholar Pietro Marani wore white gloves as he and his assistants took down a show of Leonardo’s musical instrument drawings from the Codex in a book-filled, dimly lit gallery. I asked him if a machine had ever been built based on the sketch I was researching. “We have no way of knowing,” he said. Furthermore, he explained, it isn’t known if the concept for the design was Leonardo’s own. For centuries, it was assumed that Leonardo had independently arrived at all the ideas in the Codex Atlanticus , but it’s now understood that, while some of the things depicted in the drawings were his inventions, others were copies of or improvements upon what already existed. “Leonardo always invented or modified machines according to the economy or the needs at the time,” Marani said. “He wanted to automate, to reduce the work of man.” Next, I went to Italy’s largest science and technology museum, the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, which houses around sixteen thousand historical objects in a former monastery. In the 1950s, many of Leonardo’s sketches had been translated into models—a hydraulic saw, a spinning machine, a bridge—and the matter-of-fact results were now on view at the museum. There, curator Claudio Giorgione explained that Leonardo’s status had been built up to mythic proportions over centuries. As a result, experts converting the sketches to models had been “too enthusiastic” in their attribution of every design to Leonardo. My research and conversations with several experts in Milan produced no evidence that Leonardo’s sequin machine was ever realized, and there’s probably no way of knowing for certain whether he came up with the idea on his own or duplicated or improved upon someone else’s concept. But I’m sure that Leonardo had sequins on his mind, and the experts I spoke to were confident that he sketched the machine while on retainer for the wealthy Sforza family. The House of Sforza ruled the duchy of Milan in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Duke Ludovico Sforza hired Leonardo in 1482. Leonardo’s job was to design solutions to technical problems in order to make his patrons’ lives easier or more pleasant, whether these innovations pertained to fashion or more practical concerns. Members of the Sforza family often wore sequins; historian Timothy McCall cites poetic descriptions of their sartorial choices: “According to Francesco Filelfo, [the duke] was a star emitting ‘shimmering luster’ who ‘shines brilliantly.’ . .. The ‘flashing and sparkling’ fifteen-year-old Galeazzo Maria Sforza thus seemed to be ‘shining more than the morning stars’ when he moved, according to an anonymous poet. " 2 You can even see Francesco Sforza, Ludovico’s father, wearing sequins in a fifteenth-century portrait. The brilliance of shiny ornaments was associated with fifteenth-century Italian ideals of nobility and the belief in light as a manifestation of the Divine. That’s why it’s likely that the Sforza family commissioned Leonardo’s sketch: sequins were a favored form of bling at the time because they were a symbol of power. The Sforza court in the late fifteenth century was rather like the runways of Milan Fashion Week today—it was where the trends of northern Italy emerged before being adopted by wider swaths of the population. And if Prada, Armani, and Bottega Veneta spawn countless bootlegs now, such counterfeiting occurred in the Renaissance, too, posing an annoying problem for the elite. For example, sequins (known in Italy as magete, sometimes zecchini , and very occasionally bysantini ) were made by well-respected artisans specializing in ars magietarum , or “the art of sequins.” 3 They were supposed to be either gilded or made of silver, but counterfeiters made them from cheaper materials. A 1482 petition issued by the Milanese Goldsmiths Guild denounced craftsmen who harmed the city’s reputation by producing sequins from copper and brass. 4 Makers of fraudulent sequins could be punished—a precursor to arrests and confiscations on New York’s Canal Street for peddling Gucci handbag knockoffs. The petition’s hand-wringing also indicates the high demand for sequins at the time. But even strict legislation couldn’t stop the counterfeiters. In fact, recently analyzed sequins from that period were found to be made of copper. 5 Many artisans also experimented with cheaper versions of precious stones made from tinted glass, crystals, foils, mirrors, and paste. An entire industry expanded around it. “In Milan, ‘the art of making counterfeit gems’ ( l’arte da fare geme contrafacte , according to one quattrocento document) had been practiced since the fourteenth century and received ducal protection and regulation in 1488,” McCall reports. 6 Perhaps while he was waiting for the sequin machine to be realized, Leonardo dabbled too. As McCall notes, “he was particularly interested in ingredients that would augment luster and sheen” to create shiny artificial pearls. 7 The technical innovation, experimentation, and automation we associate with Leonardo can induce knockoffs by making erstwhile luxuries easier to produce. Had Leonardo’s concept become a functioning machine, it would have become exponentially easier for aristocrats in the Sforza court to wear sequins, for better or worse. And eventually, as with everything, they would have been adapted for and worn by many others as well. Andrea Bilics, who founded Italy’s oldest sequin factory in 1946, has witnessed firsthand the technological evolution that has made sequins more accessible. I visited his facility on the outskirts of Milan on a warm day in June 2014, shortly after I’d gone to the library and museum for my research on Leonardo. In the factory’s attic, Bilics showed me the hulking hand-cranked machines that were used in the early days to punch sequins, a task which involved quite a bit of manual labor. He then walked me through a room that was thumping with the repetitive sound of the industrial hole-punchers that make sequins today. Those machines, he told me through a translator, can pump out thousands per minute in long strips or as individual disks in all colors, shapes, and sizes. Even though his company produces sequins in mass quantities, they are still purchased by high-end designers like Donna Karan and Marc Jacobs. Werner Sombart was a German economist who focused on shifts in consumer culture, especially in regard to fashion. In 1902, he wrote: It is the clerk’s greatest pride to wear the same shirts as the wealthy bon vivant, the greatest pride of the servant girl to don the same jacket as her mistress, of the butcher’s lady to own the same lush lingerie as the privy councillor’s wife. . . a trait that seems to be as old as social differentiation itself, a yearning that has never been so splendidly satisfied as in our age, an age in which technology no longer imposes any restrictions on contrefaçon , in which there is no longer so sumptuous a fabric nor so intricate a style that they cannot be imitated in pinchbeck straight away at a tenth of the original price. 8 Whether it was Leonardo’s machine or Bilics’s upgrades that made sequin production easier, these examples illustrate how the democratization of fashion is inextricably linked to mechanization. The history of the sequin exemplifies this trajectory. Thousands of years before the Renaissance, gold sequinlike disks, or coins, were sewn on King Tut’s burial garment to ensure he’d be financially secure in the afterlife. Even though sequined garments were worn during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, the King Tut discovery in the 1920s popularized them in the flapper era. Sequins were made of metal at that time, but technological innovation took off in the 1930s, when electroplated gelatin yielded a lighter version. The only problem was that they’d melt if they got wet or warm. Herbert Lieberman, owner of Algy Trimmings Co., then one of the largest sequin producers in the United States, worked with Eastman Kodak to develop acetate sequins, which reflect light beautifully but are breakable. In 1952, the DuPont company invented Mylar and Lieberman adopted it: Mylar could surround colored plastic sequins and protect them in the washing machine. Eventually, acetate was abandoned for the more durable and cost-effective, but less sparkly, option that is still in use, vinyl plastic. 9 With each innovation in production, the shiny disk became less of a prized possession and more of a commonplace thing—a shift in cultural currency. Today, fashion writer Emilia Petrarca has observed, it’s satisfying to see how sequins can toggle between mass-produced ubiquity at Old Navy and the exclusivity of runway looks by designers like Marni, Prada, and Sonia Rykiel, 10 thus disrupting any attempt at categorization. As Bolton, curator of “Manus x Machina,” said at the press preview, haute couture and ready-to- wear are increasingly embracing each other’s practices and techniques. He cited a Chanel autumn/winter 2014–15 wedding dress as a perfect encapsulation of the intersection between hand and machine. The design of its train was sketched by hand, then altered with software to make it look pixelated. The dress is made from scuba knit—a fully synthetic material—that was painted by hand, studded with rhinestones using a machine, and then embroidered by hand with pearls and gemstones. Over the 450 hours of work that went into producing the garment, hand and machine worked in tandem. Karl Lagerfeld, Bolton said, described the result as “haute couture without the couture.” The industrial reproduction of clothing created confusion about how to parse the distinctions between high and low fashion. The collision of these worlds dissolved more rigid tropes, making it harder to tell the difference between a chintzy, inexpensive prom dress from the mall and a one-of-a-kind couture gown. We’re rightly outraged when Forever 21 exploits small independent designers by stealing their work. We grimace when it knocks off a high-end design. 11 But what about when the script is flipped and Hedi Slimane trolls Forever 21 and offers up a $3,490 Saint Laurent Paris dress that’s almost identical to one already on the floor of Forever 21 for under $50? 12 Depending on who you talk to, the industry is either adapting or imploding. “Democratization [of fashion] signified a lessening of the marks of social distance, a muting of the aristocratic principle of conspicuous consumption, along with the new criteria of slenderness, youth, sex appeal, convenience, and discretion,” writes historian Gilles Lipovetsky. He goes on to say that over the last one hundred years fashion has not eliminated signs of social status, but diminished their importance by prioritizing personality. 13 Fashion is no longer about high and low, authentic or fake, but about being distinctive and alluring. Frequently, clothing is made in unsustainable, environmentally harmful and gluttonous ways. Usually it can be traced back to the automation we’ve embraced—so we should always be aware of what and how we consume. That said, greater access to all kinds of clothing is liberating. As Lipovetsky notes, when you can’t tell what’s “real” or “authentic” and what’s “fake” or a “copy,” those categories lose their power to maintain their restrictive boundries. When I walk down the street in New York, I see established hierarchies falling apart. What does it matter if your sequins are gilded copper or real silver or your mink coat is authentic or a knockoff if you like how you look? Take, for example, the clothing designer Dapper Dan and his iconic 1980s allover print Louis Vuitton and MCM outfits. Worn by music celebrities like Bobby Brown, Salt-N- Pepa, and Eric B. & Rakim, these customized pieces weren’t made by Louis Vuitton or MCM. Rather, they were inspired by the status symbols created by those designers, adapted for another audience, made to order, and eventually confiscated by order of now Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor for copyright issues. 14 Among Dapper Dan’s avid followers, his clothes wound up with more influential social currency and street cred than the status symbols that originally influenced him. Plus, his allover prints came full circle to influence those designers’ collections today. We default to thinking there’s “real” and “not real,” but there’s also a different kind of real. Dapper Dan made clothes that were derived from recognizable luxury brands. He created a new real, and with that he brought forth a fresh form of legitimacy. From where I stand, those derivatives aren’t inferior or static—they contribute equally to the conversation. And that conversation is about self-expression. It’s about non-gender-specific shape-shifting, about mixed-up invention and reinvention. It’s about not differentiating between basic and fancy. It’s about being made well and sustainably by a reliable source. It’s about amusing wearers and their friends. It’s about high mimicking low and low mimicking high in a state of cannibalism and anarchy. Like it or not, that’s where we are in 2016. As I work toward realizing Leonardo’s design for a sequin-making machine in my own way, I’ve come to hold a mythologized view of this Renaissance man. I want to believe that, even in the fifteenth century, he would have surmised the automation instigated through his sequin-making machine would bring forth a radical shift in cultural currency. I’d also like to believe that Leonardo would respect today’s stylish bricoleur who, like him, is filled with the urge to experiment, play, and cross boundaries. With the shiny disks I churn out from my yet-unrealized, Leonardo- inspired sculpture, I’ll create my own knockoff version of sequin-covered Ugg boots and wear them proudly. I think he’d be into it. “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 5–Aug. 14. 2016-04-29 06:02 by Sarah
7 Paul Simon, Regina Spektor, Maria Popova and Matthew Weiner Pitch in at Poetry Event Dusting off poetry’s bookish reputation, an impressive lineup of artists enlivened their favorite verse with instruments, musicality and commanding elocution at Wednesday’s Poetry & the Creative Mind event at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. Dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones had to raise his hand like a stop sign four times to hold off applause as he sang his way through Countee Cullen’s “Yet Do I Marvel” and other works. And the crowd’s rousing response to Regina Spektor’s musicality even waylaid her. “I didn’t write them,” she demurred. In closing the Academy of American Poets-sponsored event with an impromptu performance of “American Tune,” Paul Simon began with, “I call this feeling groovy.” Unlike the master of ceremonies Elizabeth Alexander, a professional poet, the talent that took to the stage hailed from other disciplines. “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner, actress Amy Ryan, artist Lesley Dill, “Brain Pickings” founder Maria Popova, composer Mohammed Fairouz and Ruth Reichl each did their part. Fairouz translated from Arabic a one-stanza poem by Mahmoud Darkish, named it “Lullaby” and tapped Carla Dirlikov to sing it completely unamplified. Weiner said before reading “The Moose” by Elizabeth Bishop, “It’s a little bit long. You should be prepared for that.” Such caution seemed unwarranted given the silence in the auditorium. Afterward, Spektor allowed, “I think people who love poetry just have an optimism and a desire to see the beauty in the world. They are already more inclined to be supportive people. I don’t think you’re going to find a lot of a——s who love poetry.” She added, “I grew up in the Bronx and it would make me so happy to see those poems on the subway. You read a poem and it opens you up. It kind of tunes you to a channel and then you’re more likely to notice poetic things about other things that happen to you throughout the day.” Writing and recording new songs, Spektor still finds her own poetry above ground in the city. “A lot of the time I’m writing, walking the streets. I find New York endlessly inspiring with the amount of stories unfolding around you. You’re basically always in a tempest. If you get into the right state of mind, you’re in the center of the tempest. It’s peaceful and your feet are walking so there’s a rhythm. You just naturally hear melodies and see images that make you think of words. I don’t know who writes without walking.” At work on projects for the Dutch National Opera, the Pittsburgh Opera, the Washington National Opera and a symphony for the Abu Dhabi Music Festival, Fairouz sees music as a borderless form of poetry. “All cultures have music and it’s unifying. It serves a certain utilitarian purpose – to march off to war, to serenade one’s loved ones, to mourn the dead. But what is much more organic or elemental is that the human voice is a muscle,” he said. “We never ever hear about people talking about if swimming is unique to a certain culture, or is soccer unique to a certain culture.” Fairouz continued, “The ultimate answer to any culture whether it’s in the Arab world or rural America that says our culture is at risk, is ‘No, you actually can be part of the whole and not lose any of your individual reason for being.’ If you separate a line in Bach, you can listen to it and it’s gorgeous. The thing that makes counterpoint unbelievable is that when you combine it, you prefer to listen to it combined because it’s better. That’s where the world is headed whether people like it or not.” 2016-04-28 22:56 Rosemary Feitelberg
8 Feel Like This: Sam Johnson on Luis Garay’s Maneries To spark discussion, the Walker invites Twin Cities artists and critics to write overnight reviews of our performances. The ongoing Re:View series shares a diverse array of independent voices and opinions; it doesn’t reflect the views or opinions of the Walker or its curators. Today, performance-based artist Sam Johnson shares his perspective on Maneries by Luis Garay in the […] 2016-04-29 00:14 By
9 Cushnie et Ochs Partners with Bandier, Pamela Love More Articles By Cushnie et Ochs is expanding beyond its ready- to-wear , branching into activewear with a collection for Bandier and a limited-edition jewelry collection designed by Pamela Love. The jewelry will be available for pre-order on Monday, while the Bandier project will launch May 25 at Bandier’s five stores in New York and Dallas, and the company’s e-commerce shop, which ships globally. Branching into activewear isn’t a quantum leap for designers Carly Cushnie and Michelle Ochs, whose collection is defined by body-con dressing. The Bandier line includes 10 performance pieces — three leggings, three bra tops, two tank tops, a track pant and a jacket — made from an eight-way stretch fabric. The collection is being billed as luxury activewear, and includes double-face techniques as well as laser cut, cut-out details that tie back to Cushnie et Ochs ready-to-wear. “The realization that prompted this collaboration is that both Bandier and Cushnie et Ochs are dressing the same woman — a woman who now demands much more from her wardrobe,” said Bandier founder Jennifer Bandier. “Carly and Michelle, with their exceptional grasp of the female form, are the perfect partners to help move activewear into the fashion world.” Last year, Cushnie and Ochs sold a minority stake in their business to Farol Asset Management and a group of fashion insiders, including Gary Wassner, who is chief executive officer of industry factor Hilldun, and made a personal investment. As part of the transaction, Peter Arnold was installed as chief executive officer. At the time, Cushnie and Ochs said that they planned to use the funds to expand their brand and raise its profile. The Bandier and Love projects are the two most notable steps in that direction yet. 2016-04-29 00:10 Jessica Iredale
10 josé cardoso's play-doh people meld molded matter with portrait photos in homage to the gory visual effects found throughout artist chris cunningham and david cronenberg’s most famous films, graphic designer and illustrator josé cardoso has completed a collection of headshots that blends classic photography and basic sculpting. as a low budget tribute to old-school special effects from movies like ‘videodrome’ and ‘rubber johnny’, the porto-based artist mixes hand- sculpted play-doh with digital photographs to create strange and surreal portraits of himself, his family and his friends. these ‘faces’ bear warped and distored shapes crudely molded from malleable materials, seamlessly integrated into images of real human figures. while undeniably eerie and curiously bizarre, the images include strangely familiar facets of reality that are both recognizable and alien at the same time. 2016-04-29 00:02 Nina Azzarello
11 Lancel Taps Langley Fox Hemingway and Noah Mills for Spring Lensed by Viviane Sassen at the Villa Noailles in Hyères, the new ad is to be unveiled in an outdoor campaign in France on May 4, before hitting newsstands two days later, appearing first in Elle magazine as well as M, Le Monde’s weekly supplement. Photographed against the villa’s modernist lines, the ad features the house’s Charlie handbag, Le Huit – a bucket bag, and Le Graphic, a soft briefcase for men. Coming for fall, Hemingway and Mills will also appear in what the brand dubbed an “interactive road movie.” It is to be done with the viewers’ participation, a spokesman for the label teased, and will see the duo travel to Deauville, Paris, Lyon, Marseille and Cannes, five cities that have played a role in the brand’s history. Around the same time, a traveling exhibition is to kick off, tracing Lancel ’s past via vintage styles, photos, videos, and also some interactive games. On Sept. 14, the storied leather-goods maker is expected to publish an anniversary tome, written by Laurence Benaim with the participation of a series of artists who are to get carte blanche in portraying its history. 2016-04-28 23:52 Paulina Szmydke
12 12 Royal Ascot Teams Up With Eight Milliners on Hat Collective More Articles By Designers including Stephen Jones, Philip Treacy, Rachel Trevor Morgan, Edwina Ibbotson, William Chambers, Laura Apsit Livens, Lady Laura Cathcart and Harvy Santos took part creating one-of-kind-pieces for the annual races. “Royal Ascot is about formal daywear and that is unusual in fashion,” Jones told WWD. “The Royal Ascot style guide has rules which have returned formality to style and elegance. It’s like a ‘hatty’ Christmas, birthday, Easter all rolled into one for me.” Jones took his cue from literature with his creation, which was made with sinamay, crin and silk rosettes. It was inspired by the idea of going for a walk on the moors with the Scottish poet Robert Burns. The designer, who recently completed pieces for the Rolling Stones’ “Exhibitionism” show at Saatchi Gallery in London, added he has a book due out in November. Called “Souvenirs,” it will be published by Rizzoli. Butterflies were Cathcart’s muse, with red ones festooned onto a black woven straw base. “It evokes the spirit of the Ascot social butterfly as well as the English summer season, when bright young social butterflies spread their beautifully colored wings,” said Cathcart. “I wanted it to be feminine as well as chic and practical for watching the serious racing.” The designs are priced from 425 pounds, or $619, for a hat by Cathcart to 1,625 pounds, or $2,637, for a style by Ibbotson and are available for purchase at Fenwick of Bond Street. “Royal Ascot has always been a highlight of the racing calendar and a fashion event in the British summer season,” said Mia Fenwick, head of buying at the Fenwick department store. “This year Fenwick celebrates our 125th anniversary on Bond Street and we have always been the destination for hats, but in the last few years there has been a really exciting new energy in millinery.” 2016-04-28 22:53 Lorelei Marfil
13 Amazon Posts Profits Amid New Products, Programs More Articles By Amazon’s first-quarter profits totaled $513 million or $1.07 per diluted share, and compared with a net loss of $57 million, or 12 cents, a year ago. Net sales increased 28.2 percent to $29.1 billion, up from $22.7 billion a year earlier. The company is looking for second-quarter net sales between $28 billion and $30.5 billion, or growth of up to 32 percent. International retail sales accelerated, with increased customer engagement and customer purchases. Chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky attributed that to Prime subscribers rolls that increased “at a high clip.” He noted that last year, Prime subscriptions were up 51 percent year over year in 2015. An increase in variety on the site was another key driver, said head of investor relations Phil Hardin. “What that means for our Prime customers is that there is more they can choose from — it makes Prime more valuable. For sellers, it means they sell more.” In the past year, Amazon introduced a number of new products and initiatives, from new devices (a new Kindle and two Alexa-enabled devices) to an increasing foray into film, music and video, including “Style Code Live,” a daily live fashion and beauty show. It also expanded Prime Free Same-Day Delivery from 11 to 27 U. S. metropolitan areas and began the Amazon Payments Partner Program that enables Amazon Payments on external e-commerce sites . Although it was not discussed on today’s call with investors, Amazon in the past year also began rolling out a number of private label apparel and accessories lines , which are poised to capitalize on holes in the retail assortment and compete with basics and fast fashion retailers, which traditionally have not been widely represented on the site. Chief executive Jeff Bezos did not speak during the call, but in a release, he said that Amazon devices were the top-selling products on Amazon, and highlighted the popularity of Fire tablets, the Fire TV Stick and the Echo. “We’re building premium products at non-premium prices,” he said, “and we’re thrilled so many customers are responding to our approach.” 2016-04-28 22:51 Maghan McDowell
14 WY-TO architects' flat-pack disaster shelter for southeast asia singapore-based WY-TO architects put their expertise to the test to create a shelter solution for the asian pacific region, where a staggering 42.9% of natural disasters occur. the ‘living shelter’ is an affordable, collapsible unit that’s easy to ship and can be assembled by small teams without tools. the ‘shelter’ is naturally ventilated and doesn’t require a level surface to be built upon the ‘shelter’ is based on the kampung house, typical of southeast asia. it features openings that ensure natural ventilation, can be built on uneven ground, and all included components can be dismantled and reused post-emergency. besides privacy and security, ‘living shelter’ incorporates basic needs such as solar electricity, water collection, and multi-purpose furnishings. WY-TO architects’ design will be presented at the 2016 venice architecture biennale, and is currently seeking project funds through indiegogo here. designboom has received this project from our DIY submissions feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. see more project submissions from our readers here. 2016-04-28 22:05 www.designboom
15 Gisele Bündchen Wears Anthony Vaccarello for ‘Tonight Show’ Appearance More Articles By Gisele Bündchen walked her last runway show a year ago, but the model (and superhealthy eater) has managed to stay busy. Last night, Bündchen appeared on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” donning an outfit from Anthony Vaccarello ’s Fall 2016 collection. Bündchen is promoting the mass-market edition of her Taschen book, which is being released May 10. (At $69.99, the new edition is a steal compared to the original’s $700 price tag.) She discussed her retirement plans with Fallon, telling him that she’s focusing on “being the best mom I can be.” The model also took the chance to show off her runway walk and teach Fallon how it’s done. “First things first: with the chest forward, squeeze the belly in, stomach in, shake the hips,” she said. Easy as that. Vaccarello was recently named the newly appointed creative director for Yves Saint Laurent , and will show his first collection for the brand in September. He has put his eponymous brand on “pause” for the time being. 2016-04-28 22:02 Kristen Tauer
16 ‘Streetease’ Brings Mr. Brainwash and Seen to Opera Gallery Hong Kong Related Venues Opera Gallery Hong Kong Artists Seen UA Mr. Brainwash Opera Gallery Hong Kong showcases the work of two street artists, Mr. Brainwash and Seen, in its latest exhibition, “Streetease.” Together, these artists highlight two distinct strands of gallery-level street art, with Seen representing a history of the movement stretching back to its beginnings as a clandestine youth movement in New York in the 1970s, while Mr. Brainwash represents the post-millennium and post-Banksy movement of street art. Seen (Richard Mirando), like many of the early graffiti artists, started in the movement painting on New York City subways trains in his very early teens, becoming part of the first group of graffiti artists (alongside Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat) to start working with galleries. The Seen works appearing at Opera Gallery show the influence of another figure whose work featured in those early street art gallery shows in the 1980s, Andy Warhol. In works such as “Popeye” and “Wonder Woman,” Seen combines the obsession with American comic books that can be seen in Warhol’s early work and in series like “Myths,” 1981 with the aesthetics of the early New York graffiti movement. Mr. Brainwash (Thierry Guetta), in contrast, finds more inspiration from the more mocking and wry work that is associated with Banksy, who made a documentary on Guetta, “Exit Through the Gift Shop” (2010). Although initially dismissed as a sort of Banksy-lite, the works featuring in “Streetease” highlight the distinctive aesthetic of the artist’s work, with its splashes of brightly- colored paint and focus on mixed media works. Together, the two artist’s work offers a retrospective of current street art in miniature, the past and present of street art. 2016-04-28 20:52 Samuel Spencer
17 ‘Angkor Wat Soviet-Style’: Christophe Malcot on Photographing Chernobyl Related Venues The Private Museum The year 2016 marks the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster where three decades ago explosions and fire at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Pripyat, Ukraine, brought devastation resulting in mass evacuation and radioactive matter being spread across much of Europe. To commemorate the event, Singapore’s The Private Museum and French-born, Singapore- based photographer Christophe Malcot have collaborated on “Chernobyl Today,” an exhibition of Malcot’s photos taken in 2015 in Pripyat. On April 26, the day of the 30th anniversary of the nuclear leak disaster, ARTINFO spoke to Malcot about the exhibition and his experiences photographing a nuclear ghost town. Excerpts: When I was a kid, during the Cold War, “1984” by George Orwell was required reading. And I like architecture. Put the two together and the ex-Soviet Union becomes a treasure trove of larger-than-life hubristic and propagandist monuments and buildings, some of whose excesses can be extremely photogenic. The Duga-1 early-warning radar system (featured in the exhibition) is one such amazing structure. Beyond this, I am sensitive to the dichotomy of degeneration and regeneration. And so the fact that nature after the Chernobyl disaster has been able not just to adapt but to flourish again, made the subject much more compelling. I was a student in France. Our government famously tried to reassure the population by demonstrating with the help of scientists and weather reports that the nuclear cloud had stopped at the border. It felt like a (bad) joke but when you are 20, you feel invincible. And so I remember not being unduly worried; and totally unprepared. You cannot go to Chernobyl without preconceptions: Nuclear catastrophe, ghost city, Soviet era... My first impression though was totally unexpected: Being virtually alone in Pripyat, surrounded by unkempt vegetation, immediately brought the temples of Angkor Wat to my mind. I felt like a modern-day Henri Mouhot (the French explorer who rediscovered the temples of Angkor). I spent three days in Angkor in 1994 when live minefields and the Khmer Rouge’s low- intensity guerrilla war kept visitors away. Then, 50 visitors would have been a busy day. The vegetation had again taken the upper hand and the temples were more hidden and more mysterious than they are today. Pripyat was Angkor Wat Soviet-style. The heaviness was gone. Both conceptually and visually, Chernobyl is a subject that I believe lends itself naturally to black and white, so I was already inclined to shoot in it before heading there. It was the end of May and I was actually worried about the weather, as I did not want to shoot under bright blue skies. Luckily, when I arrived it was pretty overcast, which brought out interesting shades of gray. The other important factor is that the dominant colors in Chernobyl are white, gray, brown and green. I immediately felt vindicated shooting in black and white as I was really not losing much color- wise. I think that behind these photos of ruins and decay, there is a double message: one of humility and one of revival. The trees, plants and animals overtaking the city are proof that life ultimately wins. However bad or desperate a situation may look, there is hope. But Pripyat is also a clear reminder that man cannot play the sorcerer’s apprentice at will. As in Fukushima, we were lucky, it could have been much worse. As the world is slowly awakening to the dreadful reality of climate change, I think these photos are also a reminder of our fragility. Last but not least, everybody should remember that life is short; Pripyat was 16 years old when she was evacuated and died, so make the most of it! Live your dreams! 2016-04-28 20:46 Samuel Spencer
18 In Which Hip-Hop Ends Up Saving Itself: On Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style Considering its status as a founding document of one of the twentieth century’s defining cultural phenomena, it would be easy to forget Wild Style’s origins in the high art ferment of New York’s 1980s Downtown scene. Sampled and interpolated for decades by everyone from “conscious” rap standard bearers Black Star to commercial giants like the […] 2016-04-28 19:03 By
19 Stay Ready: Lizzie Borden on the Post- Revolutionary Future of Born in Flames Released in 1983 during Reagan’s presidency and Ed Koch’s tenure as mayor of New York City, Lizzie Borden’s futurist, science-fiction feature Born in Flames (1983) imagines political activism ten years after a “social-democratic war of liberation.” The film was shot using somewhat guerrilla documentary techniques, includes found footage from international news and is set to […] 2016-04-29 00:14 By
20 snøhetta-designed SFMOMA set to open in san francisco the new san francisco museum of modern art is set to open its doors to the public, with an official opening scheduled for may 14, 2016. completed by snøhetta, the expanded SFMOMA seamlessly integrates a 10-storey structure with the original mario botta-designed building. purpose-built to showcase the institution’s celebrated collection, the transformed museum offers three times more exhibition space, with free access to ground-floor galleries. SFMOMA is opening with 19 special exhibitions, including highlights from the renowned fisher collection, hundreds of works promised through the campaign for art, and the new pritzker center for photography inaugurate museum. throughout the project’s development, connections to the surrounding neighborhood and city were carefully considered. new pedestrian pathways and a public entrance on howard street better integrate SFMOMA within the neighborhood and activate the surrounding streetscape. the eastern façade of the snøhetta-designed expansion is inspired in part by the waters and fog of the san francisco bay. throughout the day, the movement of light and shadow naturally animates the rippled surface, which comprises more than 700 uniquely shaped FRP (fiberglass reinforced polymer) panels. the snøhetta-designed expansion of the new SFMOMA image © henrik kam, courtesy SFMOMA ‘our design seeks to create an intimate experience, welcoming a diversity of visitors to the magnificent collection, and fostering a connection between the visitor and museum for years to come,’ explains craig dykers, founding partner of snøhetta. ‘all of the senses will be engaged as part of the experience. wonderful day lit staircases lead visitors from floor to floor, the galleries create a comfortable viewing experience of the art, and terraces allow for moments of repose, to be reinvigorated by fresh air, sunlight and vistas of the city between galleries. the visitor should sense that the building is inspired by one of the great cities of the world, san francisco.’ visitors are welcomed to the new museum via two main entrances, leading to ground floor exhibition spaces that are free to all. the entrance on third street welcomes visitors to the re- imagined evelyn and walter haas, jr. atrium, where an oculus floods the space with natural light. a 27-foot-wide mobile by alexander calder draws the eye upwards, while a sculptural stairway leads visitors to the helen and charles schwab hall — the main gathering space on the second floor. alexander calder’s ‘untitled’ (1963) on view in the evelyn and walter haas, jr. atrium image © iwan baan, courtesy SFMOMA on howard street, a new museum entrance adjacent to the glass-walled roberts family gallery allows visitors to enter the museum through schwab hall. now containing richard serra’s monumental sculpture ‘sequence’ (2006), the gallery is presented to passersby, creating a visual connection between the city and the museum. a set of maple-faced roman steps provides an informal public gathering spot and seating area. diverse gallery spaces support the display of specific collections and works of various scales — ranging from intimate volumes to column-free galleries that permit temporary wall layouts. an octagonal-shaped gallery is devoted to seven works by agnes martin, while loft-like exhibition spaces on the seventh floor offer further room for contemporary artworks. terraces adjacent to many galleries are capable of displaying outdoor sculptures and offer sweeping views across san francisco. a third-floor sculpture terrace is home to the largest public living wall in the united states with more than 19,000 plants and 21 native species. the curated sequence of spaces allows visitors to enjoys artworks as well as views of the city as they circulate through the museum. the institution is one of the first in the country to employ all LED lighting throughout the gallery spaces. ‘we are so excited to open the doors and welcome the public to the new SFMOMA. we have an incredible new building, an expanded collection with thousands of new works of the highest quality, and a staff that is proud to share what they’ve been working on for the past three years. this is your SFMOMA and we can’t wait to share it with you,’ says neal benezra, the helen and charles schwab director of SFMOMA. the institution is one of the first in the country to employ all LED lighting throughout the gallery spaces image © iwan baan, courtesy SFMOMA pat and bill wilson sculpture terrace featuring alexander calder’s sculpture maquette for trois disques (three disks), formerly ‘man’ (1967) image © henrik kam, courtesy SFMOMA 2016-04-28 20:25 Philip Stevens
21 2016 Sovereign Asian Art Prize Nominees Announced Related Venues Christie's Artists Alfred & Isabel Aquilizan Baptist Coelho GARY-ROSS PASTRANA Joan Ross Rosanna Li The list of 30 finalists for the 2016 edition of The Sovereign Asian Art Prize, Asia’s most established arts prize for mid-career artists, has been announced. Following a change in rules in 2015, sculptors were eligible for the prize for the second time, and three-dimensional works - such as a sculpture made of human hair and a skull formed from spring roll paper - make up a third of the 2016 finalists. Last year, Cambodian artist Anida Yoeu Ali won the prize for her photography-cum-performance piece “Spiral Alley,” featuring the artist wearing a giant centipede-like outfit inspired by Islamic and Buddhist religious dress. This year’s nominees include Sri Lankan Pradeep Thalawatta, whose “Routine Wash” series, was previously described by ARTINFO as depicting “a man with his face covered in white lather, a form of whiteface that critiques assumptions about race and ethnicity.” Another artist shortlisted is the Philippines’ GARY-ROSS PASTRANA , whose work we described as “loaded with poetic intensity.” The works will be exhibited at The James Christie Room, Christie’s from May 9 – 12, 2016. and the Rotunda on Connaught Place from May 21 – 31, 2016, and winners will be announced, and works auctioned off, at a Sovereign Asian Art Prize Gala Dinner, which will take place at Four Seasons Hotel on June 3. The full list of nominees is: Latthapon Korkiatarkul, Thailand Sherman Ong, Singapore Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan, Philippines Bani Haykal, Singapore Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, Australia Toshiyuki Kajioka, Japan Shakila Haider, Pakistan Miti Ruangkritya, Thailand Imhathai Suwatthanasilp, Thailand Mark Salvatus, Philippines Aditya Novali, Indonesia Cha Min Young, Republic of Korea Baptist Coelho , India aaajiao, China Ong Kian Peng, Singapore Teppei Kaneuji, Japan Pradeep Thalawatta, Sri Lanka Eiji Sumi, Thailand GARY-ROSS PASTRANA , Philippines Bagus Pandega, Indonesia Joan Ross , Australia Urich Lau Wai-Yuen, Singapore Piyarat Piyapongwiwat, Thailand Rosanna W. H. Li, Hong Kong José Drummond, Macao Hanifa Alizada, Afghanistan Azizullah Hazara, Afghanistan Richard Streitmatter - Tran, Vietnam Mia Wen-Hsuan Liu, Taiwan Arin Rungjang, Thailand 2016-04-28 20:03 Samuel Spencer
22 Armory Show Head Aims to Change Up Fair— He's compared the global Art Basel fair enterprise to a generic Marriott hotel, and he's likened looking at art in a tent, as we do at Frieze art fairs, to eating chicken from a bucket. And now the new Armory Show director (and former artnet News editor-in-chief) Benjamin Genocchio has unveiled his plans to shake things up at the 22-year-old New York fair's March 2017 edition. The main change Genocchio plans is to tear down, to some extent, the wall between modern and contemporary galleries, which have for the last eight years been segregated. Contemporary dealers have set up shop on Hudson River Pier 94, while modern art dealers showing their wares on Pier 92, where foot traffic has in recent years been dramatically lower. Of the just over two hundred exhibitors at the 2016 edition, 56 were on the modern pier. A distinction between the two piers will remain, though. The main galleries section, now including both modern and contemporary offerings, will be on Pier 94, while Pier 92 will house the "Insights" section, which will be solely 20th-century works. Some of the large-scale projects will also be on Pier 92. Another step is the introduction of “Platform," a sector that will consist of large works and performances, some of them new commissions, which will take advantage of the large industrial space and will be spread across both piers. This echoes sections in other fairs international and regional, like Art Basel's “Unlimited" and Expo Chicago's “In/situ. " Some previously unused parts of the piers will be put into use, say the fair's organizers. Bid goodbye to the geographic focus of the “Focus" section next year, which the fair has devoted to a new part of the world each year for the fair's last seven editions ( Africa and Asia got the nod in recent years, for example). Instead, that section will now invite a curator to select galleries that will show “new or rarely seen artworks" by “today's most compelling artists. " While other fairs (such as Art Basel and Frieze) are set on global expansion , heightening competition for attention and top galleries, not to mention deep-pocketed visitors, Armory has remained resolutely a once-a-year, one-city affair. The previous director, Noah Horowitz , who decamped in 2015 for the position of Americas director in the Art Basel empire, strengthened the lagging fair, which its owners, Merchandise Mart Properties, had been offering for sale in 2012. The test for Genocchio is to see if he can build on Horowitz's improvements, and he has done nothing if not set the bar high. Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-04-28 20:01 Brian Boucher
23 Call for Applicants: Walker Art Center Mildred Friedman Design Fellowship 2016–2017 The Walker is pleased to announce that its 2016- 2017 Mildred Friedman Design Fellowship is now open for applications. APPLICATIONS ARE DUE: MAY 23rd Since 1980, the Walker’s Design department has maintained a graphic design fellowship program that provides recent graduates the opportunity to work in a professional design studio environment. Selected from a highly competitive pool of applicants, fellows come from graphic design programs throughout the United States and abroad representing a diverse range of design programs, such as Art Center College of Design, California Institute of the Arts, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Eastern Michigan University, Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, NC State University, Rhode Island School of Design, Royal College of Art, Werkplaats Typografie, and Yale University, among many others. WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR: Ideal candidates will be firmly grounded in visual design principles and the print design process with some experience in interaction design. In addition to print-based projects such as exhibition identities, wayfinding, and collateral materials, this year’s fellow will also work on select online publishing initiatives. The fellow will join an accomplished team of professionals known for creating industry-leading work. Immersed in the Design department, which includes Editorial, Photography, and Videography, fellows gain a deeper understanding of design, work on projects with rich, interesting content, and are expected to produce work to the highest standards of design excellence. See samples of previous fellow’s work here and in this video highlighting 75 years of Walker design. The fellows will also be key contributors to the Design department’s blog, The Gradient —so an interest in the discourse of graphic design and contemporary culture is highly desirable. Fellows are salaried, full-time employees and are involved in all aspects of the design process, including client meetings and presentations through production and development. Duration of fellowship: September 1, 2016 – August 31, 2017 HOW TO APPLY: For consideration, submit the following materials by PDF attachments only: 1. a letter of interest; 2. a resume, including names and contact information of 3 references; 3. a PDF portfolio containing 8–10 examples of graphic design work (total file size can be no larger than 19 MB, otherwise your file will be rejected). Email application packets to [email protected]. If you do not receive an automatic confirmation of your application, please send another note to the same email address, without any attachments. No phone calls please. For more information, visit our fellowship page. Also check out the Walker’s job listing. April 23, 2016 2016-04-28 07:58 By
24 British Fashion Council, BFC Fashion Trust Partners With Farfetch Launched in 2011, the Fashion Trust is a charity initiative that offers financial aid and mentoring to selected designers. The e- commerce site will offer support by providing advice and mentoring in the digital, e-commerce and global arenas to designers, who will be awarded grants on May 24. The announcement was made during an event Thursday night hosted by BFC Fashion Trust co-chairs Tania Fares and Kim Hersov; José Neves, founder and chief executive officer of Farfetch , and Caroline Rush ceo of the British Fashion Council . Last year’s recipients included David Koma, Emilia Wickstead, Holly Fulton, Marios Schwab, Mother of Pearl, Palmer//Harding, Prism, Sibling and Sophia Webster. The designers shared the funding package, which amounted to 300,000 pounds, or $437,831. This is the latest BFC initiative in aid of emerging talent. Earlier this month, the BFC added a new scholarship to assist undergraduate fashion students. RELATED STORY: British Fashion Council Adds B. A. Scholarship, Names Winners >> 2016-04-28 19:49 Lorelei Marfil
25 Police Brutality in VR Proves It's a ‘Hard World for Small Things’ All photos courtesy of Wevr When filmmaker Janicza Bravo began researching the death of a cousin asphyxiated by Brooklyn cops in the summer of 1999, she was incensed. “I looked him up and there were two articles about the incident, one in the Daily News and one in the Post. One was a couple of paragraphs, the other was just one, but both were very much about the event. Neither was about who he was, where he came from, his life, his children, or his partner,” Bravo tells The Creators Project. “That was really heartbreaking to me, you know? That a person could live a full life and be deduced to one or two paragraphs about how they lost their life.” Bravo feeds on these feelings, tackling police brutality in her virtual reality directorial debut, Hard World for Small Things , which screened first at Sundance , then at the Tribeca Film Festival’s Virtual Arcade this year. When viewers strap on a headset, they are transported to the backseat of a convertible, cruising around Los Angeles with a group of friends who discuss their lives, dreams, and the books they have read. The film cuts to the quick by imbuing its characters with life and personality, making tragedy, when it strikes, all the more heartbreaking. A prolific young writer and director, Bravo made her filmmaking debut in 2011, with the VICE - produced comedic short Eat! , and her 2014 film Gregory Go Boom , starring Michael Cera, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. For her first foray into VR, Bravo delved into unfamiliar territory, trading her signature dark comedies for a heartfelt examination of injustice. “I have no interest in making work that makes people feel bad about who they are,” Bravo says. “It’s not what I’m interested in. But I am interested in making work that challenges perceptions of oneself. I thought the most compelling way to tell this story was to introduce the viewer to a community that I don’t think most viewers have experienced. I really thought about it as a front row seat into a community.” Anthony Batt, co-founder of Wevr and an executive producer on the film, thinks the act of witnessing is one aspect that makes Hard World for Small Things incredibly moving. “People have an elevated experience in Janicza’s piece right when they get in the car and it pulls away. When you’re immersed, it feels like watching a memory or reliving part of a dream, and something happens in the brain that elevates it. When you add a tragic element or important moment, it affects you differently than it would watching it on a screen ten feet away or on a phone at arm’s length,” he says. Bravo imbues the medium with so much heart, leveraging first-person perspective to such poignant effect that it comes as a surprise that she was averse to the idea of VR filmmaking at first. “A lot of it came from feeling like this space is very technical, cold, and lacking a heartbeat. I didn’t feel like it had as much soul as I would want,” she says. But once they started work on the piece, Bravo realized VR more closely mirrored rehearsing a play than shooting a film. The process relies on blocking and chemistry to create dynamic scenes, since in a 360-degree environment, what you see is what you get. The result is a stunning, multi-dimensional glimpse into her characters’ lives. “At its core, Hard World is essentially supposed to be more than that one paragraph. It’s supposed to be a little more meat on a full life,” Bravo says. Click here to follow Janicza Bravo on Instagram. Related: LA Exhibit Traces 25 Years of Artistic Responses to Police Brutality VR Takes Center Stage at Tribeca Film Festival 2016 "Browntourage" Takes a Stand for Female Artists of Color 2016-04-28 19:40 Kara Weisenstein
26 design teams re-envision downtown LA's pershing square design teams including morphosis and wHY re-envision downtown LA’s pershing square (above) proposal by agence ter and team all images courtesy of pershing square renew pershing square is a public park in downtown los angeles, california, one square block in size. in september 2015, pershing square renew — a non-profit collaboration between government, community, and business leaders — invited design firms from around the world to submit proposals to re-envision the space as a functional and accessible town square. according to the organizers, the aim of the contest is ‘to ensure that pershing square is an authentic reflection of downtown LA’s thriving renaissance by creating a world-class public space for those who live in, work in, visit, and love DTLA.’ the four selected teams are as follows: agence ter and team; james corner field operations with frederick fisher & partners; SWA with morphosis; and wHY with civitas. the proposed designs have now been revealed, with the winning design set to be announced in mid-may, 2016. see each of the schemes in more detail below. the scheme uses the landscape as a basis for designing the city proposal by agence ter and team for its proposal, french firm agence ter has teamed up with — among others — SALT landscape architects to present a scheme which uses the landscape as a basis for designing the city. the scheme proposes to take down the walls and flatted the lifted edges of the existing park to reconnect pershing square with its immediate context. ‘we envision a radically open part that welcomes all of los angeles without hesitation, embracing residents and visitors alike,’ says the team. the design proposes to take down the walls and flatted the lifted edges of the existing park proposal by agence ter and team the design approach seeks to recreate the ‘green garden oasis’ that characterized the original square proposal by james corner field operations with frederick fisher & partners led by james corner field operations, this design approach seeks to recreate the ‘green garden oasis’ that characterized the original square, providing generous social spaces. these areas would be used for everyday strolling, relaxation and play, as well as for special events, markets, festivals, arts and performance. the aim is to create an open space specific to downtown los angeles, capturing both its historical significance, as well as its future potential as an ever- evolving, cosmopolitan cultural centerpiece — a green platform for contemporary civic life. generous social spaces are provided proposal by james corner field operations with frederick fisher & partners the scheme seeks to capture the site’s historical significance proposal by james corner field operations with frederick fisher & partners an aerial view of the team’s ‘flexible’ proposal proposal by SWA with morphosis ‘sustainable design and flexible programming lie at the heart of our design approach,’ says the team that includes SWA and morphosis. the proposal asserts that the square will need to be many things for many people — during both day and night hours. embracing this need for versatility, the proposal forms a safe public space, a local spot with dining and art to meet and mingle, a place to play, a mobility hub. embracing a need for versatility, the proposal serves a number of different functions proposal by SWA with morphosis visitors are free to meander through the public green space proposal by SWA with morphosis the approach provides a destination for socializing and exercising proposal by wHY with civitas led by architect kulapat yantrasast and landscape architect mark johnson, design firms wHY and civitas joined together to address the challenges and opportunities of pershing square. their approach is to provide a destination for socializing, exercising, playing, learning and relaxing. ‘we envision an exemplary model for how to transform this public piece of LA into the heart of the city,’ states the team. the design provides 133% more tree canopy and shade than the current park proposal by wHY with civitas the winning submission will be announced in mid-may, 2016 proposal by wHY with civitas 2016-04-28 19:29 Philip Stevens
27 Swedish Pop Singer Léon on Katy Perry, Heartbreak and Her First Tour “I was with my family at my summer house and my manager was like, ‘ Katy Perry tweeted about you,’” says 23-year-old Swedish pop singer Léon, over the phone from the backseat of a car, freshly landed in New York. “And I was like, ‘Wait a minute.’” Léon, who released her music video for her hit single “Tired of Talking” on Thursday, has amassed 24 million worldwide streams on Spotify (the Perry fans are powerful). She’s just wrapped her first tour, playing in L. A., New York, San Francisco and Toronto. “This is my first experience with touring,” she says. “Before this I had another band and I just love performing because that’s where I feel like I can just be. So to me it’s just a very new experience to travel and play. The touring part is very new.” Before creating a solo EP, which she released on Spotify and which subsequently caught the attention of Columbia, where she is now signed, she had a jazz, soul and hip-hop band with about 10 friends. “We just played around at different venues in Stockholm but then I just felt that I wanted to do my solo thing, so yeah,” she says with an adorable nonchalance. Since creating a solo sound as Léon, she’s been claimed more as a pop artist — but she argues that a more soulful influence is in the music’s roots. “Definitely, I love jazz, I love old Motown, and I get so much inspiration from writing my own songs.” she says. “Etta James and Sam Cooke and Stevie Wonder…jazz definitely influenced me as to how you can use your voice.” She was born and raised in Stockholm, where she stills keeps an apartment, though as it goes for a pop star on the rise, she mostly finds herself in L. A. these days. While pop is where she’s making a name for herself, she grew up surrounded by classical music and played the cello for almost 15 years. “My father is a classical composer, my mom is a classical cellist, my sister does classical music, my uncle plays the violin,” she says. “I’m the only one who does pop things in my family.” She’s keeping it in the family on her record: her mother and uncle will play on a few songs on her upcoming album. “My mom was like, ‘You have to take us along, you have to have us on a song,’” she says. But Léon insists the crossover stops there. “Of course they’ve inspired me, but we do such different things,” she says. “When I come over to their house I just play a new song and they’ll say, ‘Oh that’s good’ or, ‘Oh I don’t like that one.’” The ones that they approved of, presumably, will be on her debut album, out in September. The music, entirely self-penned, is heartbreak-themed. “I had my fair share of experiencing heartbreak,” she says. “It’s kind of me really getting closure for the last time. So I would say definitely it’s my break-up anthem.” Now that the music is written, she’s having a hard time keeping it to herself. “I can’t wait until it’s out,” she says. “I just want to play live and tour, because now I got a taste of it and I’m like, ‘I want to do this every day.’” 2016-04-28 19:27 Leigh Nordstrom
28 2016 American Package Design Awards Makers, sellers and marketers are challenged as never before to convey the message, promote the brand, close the deal. Think fragmented audiences, information overload, media clutter, global competition, economic dislocation, changing practices and preferences. Package design and related disciplines are increasingly the difference makers in advancing the brand and influencing the purchasing decision. The outstanding work showcased here – from 200 elite design firms, design departments and production companies – is testimony to this phenomenon. Our annual competition celebrates attractive graphics, of course, but more importantly the power of design to forge an emotional link with the buyer at the moment of truth. Beauty + Personal Care Health + Wellness Wine, Beer + Liquor Food + Beverages Electronics + Computers Music + Entertainment Home, Garden + Industrial Sports, Toys + Games Babies + Children Animals + Pets Fashion, Apparel + Accessories Luxury Packaging Sustainable Packaging Private Label Packaging P-O-P, Posters + Signs Hangtags, Labels + Shopping Bags Logos, Identity + Branding Students Click on the name of an individual firm to see their winning projects 2016-04-28 21:52 GDUSA Staff
29 Berlin's Most Notorious Club Gets an Acoustic-Architectural Installation Screencaps by the author Berlin’s club mecca, Berghain, might be infamous for its downstairs "orgy room" and drug-fueled techno parties, but the building is equally notable for interior architecture. With 60-foot ceilings and rows of large pillars, the industrial space seems like something out of a science fiction film—a mixture of Alien and Blade Runner. For the 20th anniversary of German record label Raster-Noton , from tonight through April 30, Berghain’s acoustic- architectural space is getting transformed into an audiovisual installation called White Circle. In collaboration with the art and technology group ZKM , Raster-Noton invited four of its artists—Alva Noto, Byetone, Frank Bretchscneider, and Kangding Ray—to contribute to the development of this audiovisual composition. Each artist’s composition is an “independent, self-contained concept,” though the works will use ambient and drone as sonic reference points. Each of the works exist as visuals as rhythmic flickers in a circular array of white tubes of light, which react to each of the artists’ audio pieces. “All works will be based on the idea of ambient music, a music that wants to make (palpably) tangible the acoustic space as well as the visual stimulus,” Raster-Noton announces. “ White Circle was exclusively conceptualized for ZKM's Klangdom (Sound Dome), which is made up of 47 speakers distributed [throughout] the room. By means of the control software Zirkonium, these speakers can be played, turning sound itself into a sculptural spatial experience.” Given the post-industrial, near-cyberpunk atmosphere that is Berghain, White Circle should give an even more futuristic feel to the whole experience. The club has always been about the marriage of sound and visuals, so the installation will conceptually distill that down into a mesmerizing audiovisual experience. white circle /// raster-noton 20 anniversary /// zkm karlsruhe from Michael Wolf on Vimeo . White Circle is part of Raster-Noton's larger 20th anniversary celebration, which includes an artist showcase in the main Berghain space, and its upstairs space Panorama Bar, on April 29th. The concerts open at 7:00 PM and run through midnight with performances from Atom™, Dasha Rush, Emptyset and Grischa Lichtenberger. There will also be performances by Alva Noto, Byetone, Kangding Ray, Kyoka, Donnacha Costello, as well Marcel Dettmann, Credit 00, Magda and Nastia. Click here for tickets and information, and click here to see more of ZKM’s work. Related: A Morphing Mural Is Changing Colors in Norfolk An Interactive Installation Lets You Manipulate Time and Space Light Art Festival Bathes Blighted Baltimore in A Sea of Color 2016-04-28 18:45 DJ Pangburn
30 30 Nasty Gal Bans Use of Angora Wool After PETA Appeal PETA scored another victory in its campaign to ban angora wool in the fashion industry, revealing that Nasty Gal is dropping items made with the rabbit fur. The animal rights organization said Los Angeles-based Nasty Gal has joined more than 120 brands — including H&M, Topshop, Asos, Urban Outfitters and Forever 21 — in banning angora wool. PETA, which is based in Norfolk, Va., recently conducted an investigation of the angora wool industry, leading to allegations of harsh and inhumane conditions in which the rabbits used for angora are treated. “The future of fashion is kind, not cruel, which is exactly why retailers like Nasty Gal are lining up to join PETA’s list of angora-free brands,” said Tracy Reiman, executive vice president of the nonprofit organization formally known as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Some of the angora products Nasty Gal has sold in the past include $28 berets and $88 mock- neck sweaters from its private-label line as well as $231 cropped sweaters by Three Floor. In addition to PETA, other animal activists have been trying to convince the company to cease selling angora. One online petition from SumOfUs pointedly told the company: “Torturing bunnies for fashion is out.” Nasty Gal, which operates two stores in Southern California along with its original Web site, didn’t respond to a request for comment. 2016-04-28 18:37 Khanh T
31 Madison’s Pop-Up Play Brings Bloggers in Store More Articles By Bloggers as chief merchants? Madison Los Angeles thinks so. The ultrachic contemporary boutique retailer — with stores in Los Angeles, Brentwood, Malibu and Pacific Palisades — is set to try its hand Monday at an experiment that will bring emerging Los Angeles bloggers into a roughly 500-square- foot space of its flagship 3rd Street location for a shops-in-shop concept, curated entirely by each influencer. The pop-up shop series will swap out presentations on a monthly basis and run through the end of the year, kicking off with looks from Marta Pozzan of the blog It’s Super Fashion. The series is seen as a way of transporting much of the buzz that’s happening in the digital world to Madison as well as upping the ante on the store experience, explained owner Mark Goldstein. “Today people want an experience when they shop just like when they go into a restaurant, so having prominent L. A. bloggers put together their looks and their vibe is interesting for shoppers,” Goldstein said. “It’s a new experience.” Goldstein’s also smartly capitalizing on buzz surrounding not only L. A.-based bloggers — of which Madison was focused on “not the huge ones, just more the up-and-coming,” he explained — but also the attention being paid to the broader market. “There’s a really strong movement in L. A. at the moment both in fashion and art. I think a lot of the world’s moving to L. A. so there’s a lot of energy,” Goldstein said. Each influencer is charged with pulling looks from Madison merchandise that will be displayed in their area of the store, in addition to a window installation. Pozzan said she wanted her window display to be “very colorful, fresh, summery and pop-art inspired.” The former Vanity Fair Italy fashion editor said her selects for the store focused on a lot of bright colors. “I envisioned the girl shopping there being a girl who lives in L. A. and she’s shopping for summertime.” Her pop-up outfits will feature tops from Equipment, Marni metallic bags, Missoni scarves and plenty of platform heels of which she was in-store selecting earlier this week — a job she said took her less than an hour to complete. The window mannequin will change outfits weekly with Pozzan having selected about 20 additional looks to be featured in store. Other bloggers set to lend their style and eye to Madison’s pop-up series are Michelle Madsen of Take Aim, Tania Sarin of her namesake blog, Taye Hansberry of Stuff She Likes, stylist Angela Fink of The Fashion Sight and Elizabeth Keene of A Keene Sense of Style. It’s the first major pairing of the blog world with Madison, which had done smaller events and brunches in the past, Goldstein said. “We’ve been around a long time. I think you have to change with the times,” Goldstein said. “And I think the times are asking for an experience when you step into a shop, not just clothes. There has to be a certain vibe or experience you get so this is step one in our exploration of that.” Madison’s set for a Web site relaunch, expected in the coming months that will introduce a new design but also improved back-end functionality. As for more stores, Goldstein said “we’re sticking with what we have for now.” 2016-04-28 18:34 Kari Hamanaka
32 The New York Times Taps Ex-Pinterest Executive David Rubin as Head of Brand The New York Times Co. said Thursday that it hired David Rubin as senior vice president and head of brand. Rubin, who most recently served as head of global brand marketing at Pinterest , joined The Times on Wednesday. He is responsible for leading enterprise-wide brand strategy, development and execution, and he reports to chief revenue officer Meredith Kopit Levien. Levien offered: “How we lead and tell the story of our brand in a digital era matters more than ever. The New York Times brand is a mighty, meaningful and sometimes-overlooked asset that will play a huge role in our success, and David Rubin is exactly the right person to lead our whole enterprise to think about and act on our brand in ways that help us grow.” The Times said Rubin has marketed brands in multiple categories, from consumer products to digital media and across a spectrum of consumer segments. While at Pinterest, he led the community, marketing, brand, and research teams and was charged with expanding the appeal of the Pinterest brand with a focus on international markets. Before Pinterest, he served as marketing vice president of Unilever’s U. S. hair-care brands, including Dove, Suave, Tresemmé, Nexxus, Axe, and Just for Me. 2016-04-28 18:30 Alexandra Steigrad
33 33 iwan baan documents MAD's harbin opera house in china MAD architects has released a new series of photos documenting its harbin opera house in northeast china. taken by acclaimed architectural photographer iwan baan, the images were taken during the region’s extremely harsh winter, where temperatures can fall as low as -30°C (-22°F). the photos form part a new series of images featuring local residents alongside visitors to the sinuous structure. ‘harbin is very cold for the most of the year, so I envisioned a building that would blend into the winter landscape as a white snow dune arising from the wetlands,’ says ma yansong, principal architect and founder of MAD architects. ‘opera design normally focuses on internal space, but here we had to treat the building as part of its natural environment — one outside the urban context.’ the opera house is situated along the songhua river and is surrounded by wetland landscape image © iwan baan iwan baan sought to capture the transformative quality of the opera house during the city’s harsh winter months — the building’s sculptural form and white aluminum cladding echoes the adjacent frozen riverbank. in the images, the photographer captures tourists, dog walkers, and local ice fishers who frequent the public spaces of the harbin cultural island despite the extremely cold conditions. members of the public can access the building via hidden pathways carved into the exterior façade, allowing it to double as a public pavilion. these paths lead to an open amphitheater and observation platform offering sweeping views of both harbin and the adjacent river. a behind-the-scenes film has also been released by NOWNESS, where iwan baan explains his process for photographing the opera house. the short documentary illustrates the power of architectural photography and states how baan strives to capture the present moment of a place instead of creating a timeless scene. ‘I’m not trying to create timeless images that could be in any moment in time,’ says the photographer. ‘they should always have a strong connection to a specific place, time, people, context, or culture.’ the building took five years to complete image © iwan baan the form of the building evokes a response to the location’s natural elements image © iwan baan timber walls climb up the main stage, illuminated by the skylights above image © iwan baan interiors are clad with a combination of glass and timber image © iwan baan surfaces alternate between smooth and faceted – referencing the region’s billowing snow and ice image © iwan baan 2016-04-28 18:29 Philip Stevens
34 34 Condé Nast Entertainment Taps Maria Valero as Vice President of Business Affairs More Articles By Condé Nast Entertainment has hired Maria Valero for the new role of vice president of business affairs. Valero will be responsible for leading all business affairs and legal matters pertaining to digital video, including content production, distribution and advertising relationships. “Maria is a digital content expert,” said CNE executive vice president and general manager of digital video Joy Marcus . “Her experience will be invaluable as we continue to grow CNE’s distribution strategy and bring our award-winning digital video content to all screens.” Valero comes to Condé Nast from Audible, an Amazon company, where she served as vice president of business affairs and content. In that role, she led strategic deal making, managed partner relationships and oversaw the teams responsible for the acquisition of digital audiobooks, content marketing and operations for ACX, Audible’s self-publishing platform, CNE said. Before that, the executive held the role of vice president of business and legal affairs at Sony Music Entertainment’s Global Digital Business Group where she led strategic deal negotiations for the distribution of digital music content and managed key partner relationships. At Sony, she worked with clients such as Apple, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Nokia. Valero began her career as a corporate associate at Rosenman & Colin. She holds a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center. 2016-04-28 18:18 Alexandra Steigrad
35 Rolls-Royce Rolls Out Six-Piece Luggage Collection for $46,000 More Articles By Rolls-Royce Motor Cars tapped its Bespoke Design Studio to launch a six-piece luggage collection to “complement” its Wraith model car. And while the Wraith Luggage Collection was created by its own design team, the functional aspects were informed by the people who likely will handle it as much as the owners themselves: butlers and luggage handlers. The collection was created by Rolls-Royce Bespoke designer Michael Bryden and designed in the Rolls-Royce Bespoke Design Studio, which is led by Giles Taylor, director of design. The collection includes two “Grand Tourer” valises and three “Long Weekender” bags as well as a “Garment Carrier.” The collection is “meticulously designed to be housed in the luggage compartment of a Rolls-Royce Wraith,” the company said. “Like every Rolls-Royce motor car, they can be commissioned to the customer’s exacting specifications.” The six-piece set has a price point of $45,854. Bryden said the collection “consists of six pieces, each carefully considered to reflect the unparalleled design aesthetics of Rolls-Royce motor cars. The latest technologies and materials are blended with traditional crafts and techniques, leading to an elegantly executed and thoroughly contemporary luggage collection, designed exclusively for Wraith, the ultimate gentleman’s gran turismo.” The luxury carmaker said that “counsel was sought from experts accustomed to handling discerning individuals’ luggage. The design team conversed with head butlers from some of the world’s most illustrious hotels, who offered insight into the interaction between guests and their belongings.” “Luggage is not only seen as an expression of style, but also as a wardrobe from home, increasingly important as entrepreneurs and captains of industry adopt a more transient lifestyle,” the company said adding that the handles on the pieces “have been designed to ensure an even weight distribution, meaning no undue pressure is placed on the hand. An invisible stitch, a skill honed in the world of Haute Couture and used on the steering wheel of Wraith, has been applied to ensure a perfectly smooth and tactile finish.” The Rolls-Royce leather used in the collection is hand-stitched “using the same color thread as featured in the owner’s motor car and lined with a monogrammed lining discreetly featuring the Rolls-Royce emblem.” The Wraith Luggage Collection is available from Rolls-Royce dealerships. 2016-04-28 18:02 Arthur Zaczkiewicz
36 carsten höller slide to open at arcelormittal orbit in london tickets are now on sale for the carsten höller- designed slide at the arcelormittal orbit — part of the queen elizabeth olympic park in stratford, london. earlier this year, it was announced that the UK’s tallest public artwork — realized by anish kapoor back in 2012 — would host a 178 meter (584 feet) tunnel slide, wrapping around the steep curves of the sculpture. with an opening date now set for june 24, 2016, visitors can ready themselves for the 40-second trip down the arcelormittal, orbiting the structure 12 times and observing panoramic views of london’s dramatic cityscape. as they pass through light and dark sections of the tube, participants funnel through a tight corkscrew section named the ‘bettfeder’ (after the german word for ‘bedspring’), which ends with a 15 storey straight run back down to earth. construction and planning on the project is overseen by london-based firm bblur architecture. following the recent reveal of its opening date, arcelormittal orbit has released a behind-the- scenes look at the building work being carried out as the tunnel slide nears completion. see the video below. the slide orbits the structure 12 times and offers panoramic views of london’s cityscape image courtesy of arcelormittal orbit a 178 meter (584 feet) tunnel slide wraps around the steep curves of the anish kapoor-designed sculpture image courtesy of arcelormittal orbit a tight corkscrew section named the ‘bettfeder’ ends with a 15 story straight run back down to earth image courtesy of arcelormittal orbit behind the scenes at the construction of the slide at the arcelormittal orbit video courtesy of queen elizabeth olympic park construction work begins on the slide at the arcelormittal orbit image courtesy of queen elizabeth olympic park an opening date for the tunnel slide has now been set for june 24, 2016 images courtesy of queen elizabeth olympic park 2016-04-28 17:58 Nina Azzarello
37 Clearing the Haze: Prologue to Postmodern Graphic Design Education through Sheila de Bretteville Author’s preface: At the outset, this project was defined as an intensive effort to examine and reassess the work of Shelia Levrant de Bretteville. The initial motivation was driven by the connection of the rise of feminist voices in design, the Woman’s Building, postmodern design, and experimental pedagogy. We recognize that many female designers worked […] 2016-04-28 20:48 By and
38 EU Campaign Dear Friends, I’m sure you are also following with horror the rightwards drift and anti-EU sentiment brewing across Europe. The Dutch referendum should be the final wake-up call, alerting people to the real risk of the UK’s EU referendum resulting in a victory for Leave. The official ‘Remain’ campaign feels lame and is lacking in passion. It also lacks an active drive to get voters registered – and with the deadline already falling two weeks before the referendum, this should be an urgent priority. I want to get involved and actively campaign. In particular, I want to work towards maximizing turnout among younger voters by focusing on the first, crucial step: voter registration – the deadline for which is June 7! So anyone who hasn’t registered before this date has no chance of having a say, no matter how strongly they feel about the issue. So the really crucial date is June 7. Everyone’s grannies registered their vote long ago, but students no longer get automatically registered by their unis. This is because of a new law brought in by the Conservatives that makes it possible for them to disenfranchise up to 800,000 students, who as a group tend to move around a lot more and so drop off the voter register easily. I feel that we have reached a critical moment that could prove to be a turning point for Europe as we know and enjoy it – one that might result in a cascade of problematic consequences and political fall-out. Firstly, the weakening of the EU is a goal being actively pursued by strongmen like Vladimir Putin and European parties on the far-right. Brexit could effectively spell the end of the EU. It’s a flawed and problematic institution, but on the whole it stands for a democratic worldview, human rights and favours cooperation over confrontation. It could prove to be a one-in-a-generation moment. Can you imagine the years of renegotiations for undoing treaties, and all the negativity that would surround that. In the past weeks myself and assistants at my London and Berlin studios and Between Bridges worked on these texts and designs. Please feel free to share these posters, they work as print your own PDFs, or on social media, or in any other way you can think of. I consider them open- source, you can take my name tag off if more appropriate. Let’s hope for the best - but hope may not be enough Wolfgang download all posters as .pdf for home-printing HERE download all posters as .zip for social media sharing link to share this site on social media: http://tillmans.co.uk/campaign-eu 2016-04-28 20:48 Wolfgang Tillmans
39 Music legend Prince dies at age 57 Prince, a multitalented musician who came out of the Minneapolis scene and changed the world of music forever, has died at age 57. According to a statement from Carver County Sheriff Jim Olson, “on April 21, 2016, at about 9:43 am, sheriff’s deputies responded to a medical call at Paisley Park Studios in Chanhassen. When deputies and medical personnel arrived, they found an unresponsive adult male in the elevator. First responders attempted to provide lifesaving CPR, but were unable to revive the victim. He was pronounced deceased at 10:07 am. He has been identified as Prince Rogers Nelson (57) of Chanhassen.” We are continuing to follow this story and will add updates as they become available. One of the greatest stars in rock history, Prince bridged rock and R&B to fuse a “Minneapolis Sound” that helped define the music of the 1980s. With over 100 million albums sold worldwide, Prince is one of the best-selling artists of all time, widely cited as an influence by artists from the worlds of pop, R&B, rock, hip-hop, and beyond. Born Prince Rogers Nelson in Minneapolis in 1958, Prince remained a lifelong Minnesotan and had a profound impact on the community here. With the hit movie and soundtrack Purple Rain , he turned First Avenue from a hot local club to an international music landmark. Artists including Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis went from Prince collaborations to performing and producing chart- topping hits that spread the “Minneapolis Sound” across the musical landscape. Prince’s genius seemed to arrive fully formed, almost as if by magic: he released his debut album ( For You , 1978) at the age of 19, and its eponymous follow-up, released the following year, made him a breakout success with instant classics like “I Wanna Be Your Lover” and “I Feel For You.” He wrote, played, sang, and produced the entire collection himself, adding to the sense that somehow lightning had struck in Minneapolis. It had, but recently released compilations like Purple Snow: Forecasting the Minneapolis Sound (Numero Group) and Twin Cities Funk & Soul (Secret Stash Records) shone a long-overdue spotlight on the small but tight-knit and inventive local R&B scene that spawned Prince. Once Prince was out of the gate, there was no stopping him. Prince was made for the ’80s, and the ’80s were made for him. Seriously funky but also pop-friendly, Prince was at the forefront of artists who deployed synthesizers and samplers in conjunction with traditional rock instrumentation to create music that felt completely liberated — sexy and fun. “Sexy” was part of Prince’s playbook from day one: he knew how to tease his fans into a frenzy on record, on stage, and, crucially, on screen. His provocative antics earned priceless condemnation from the voices of conventional morality (“Darling Nikki” inspired Tipper Gore to found the PMRC ), and Prince — dressing as flamboyantly as the decade demanded, with a regal flair he might have learned from James Brown — played his bad-boy/pretty-boy role to the hilt. Purple Rain represented Prince in full flower. While some fans and critics argue that Sign “O” the Times (1987) represents an even greater artistic triumph, Purple Rain ‘s vast commercial success was not incidental to its epochal achievement. “When Doves Cry” epitomized the unique power of Prince; at decade’s end, critic Dave Marsh wrote that it “may have been the most influential single record of the 80s.” A stripped-down, percussive track with a vocal that’s so understated it’s sometimes half-spoken and — to the astonishment of music insiders who thought they knew how to make a record — no bass track, “When Doves Cry” seemed to break all the rules of pop songcraft, and yet Prince turned it into such an intoxicating single that it shot to number one for five weeks, holding even Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” at bay. Simultaneously, Albert Magnoli’s gloriously shameless film defined Prince’s personal mythology and made him one of the greatest pop icons of a decade that had more than its share. Set in Minneapolis, the film depicted First Avenue as a hot spot on the order of Studio 54; instead of driving along Highway 1 as they might have done in an L. A. movie, Prince and his costar Apollonia hopped on a purple motorcycle and cruised out into the Minneapolis suburbs to get “purified in the waters of Lake Minnetonka.” To this day, touring acts are visibly thrilled to discover that First Ave actually is a great club, that it actually does look like that (okay, not the dressing rooms), and that it remains the center of a thriving music scene. Though he never had another smash album as big as the Purple Rain soundtrack, Prince remained a dominant commercial force throughout the ’80s and early ’90s, producing #1 hits ranging from the hard-flirting “Kiss” (1986) to the novelty “Batdance” (1989) to the sparkling “Cream” (1991) while cycling through various band configurations and sounds. The early ’90s marked a crucial point of transition in Prince’s career. He formed a fresh band — the New Power Generation — and released music that increasingly delved into hip-hop, meeting with a mixed reception. If some fans started to sense an identity crisis, they were affirmed by Prince’s 1993 decision to change his name to the unpronounceable glyph (“Love Symbol #2”) that had served as the title to the 1992 album ironically containing the single “My Name is Prince.” The 1993 release of a two-disc greatest hits collection also served to cap a remarkable run on the charts that ended with 1994’s #3 hit “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,” Prince’s last single to date to crack the American top ten. The mid-90s marked the end of Prince’s relationship with his label Warner Bros. — after releasing a quick series of low-selling albums to fulfill his contractual obligations, he broke from the label in 1996 — and the beginning of his famously tumultuous relationship with the Internet. The iconoclastic perfectionist saw the Internet’s potential as a tool to allow him to independently manage his own fandom and distribute his own music, but he also grew increasingly concerned about the danger of having his material freely bootlegged. Prince was the first major artist to release an album on the Internet (1997’s Crystal Ball ) and from 2001-2006 ran the pioneering NPG Music Club to sell his music online by membership; but following the closure of that site, he became increasingly negative about the Internet, complaining that other sites (notably, YouTube) were benefiting by unauthorized circulation of his material. In an infamous 2010 statement, the online pioneer declared that “the Internet’s completely over.” Releasing music both independently and through various short-term deals with major labels, in the late 90s and the first decade of the 2000s Prince released a flood of new material ranging from the obscure (the instrumental N. E. W. S. in 2003) to the consciously commercial (1999’s Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic and 2006’s 3121 ). He reclaimed his given name when his Warner Bros. publishing contract ended in 2000, and his widely-praised Super Bowl halftime show in 2007 proved to the largest possible audience that he was still a fiery live performer. In the 2010s, Prince stepped back into the public eye in a way rarely seen since the ’90s. He formed another new band — the all-female 3RDEYEGIRL — and played rapturously reviewed shows with them at venues ranging from Minnesota casinos to London living rooms. He “took over” an entire episode of Arsenio Hall’s talk show , and duetted with Zooey Deschanel on a new song he premiered on a post-Super-Bowl episode of New Girl. Perhaps most surprisingly, Prince re-signed with Warner Bros. Media coverage of the deal focused on the promised new music and Purple Rain reissue, but a telling detail of the press release is that the deal gave Prince ownership of his Warner Bros. masters. The artist who wore the word SLAVE on his cheek during a 1993 legal battle with his label was a free man. Most recently, Prince released a pair of HITNRUN albums recorded at Paisley Park, and was performing solo “Piano & a Microphone” shows at venues around the world. He debuted the format with two intimate performances at Paisley Park in January. “I forgot,” he said as he momentarily became overcome at one show, “that sometimes music is emotional.” He was writing a memoir , which was expected to be published next fall. Artists associated with Prince are still active. Revolution drummer Bobby Z holds an annual benefit concert at First Avenue, childhood friend and collaborator André Cymone just released his first new music in decades , NPG drummer Michael Bland is a busy performer and producer…the list goes on. A new generation of local performers are exemplifying the ’80s-era spirit of cross-genre fertilization and collaboration, now with a strong and adventurous hip-hop scene that’s produced the area’s best-known current artists. Prince remained aware and supportive of what’s going on. In a classic Prince moment, he showed up backstage when the local supergroup GAYNGS played First Ave in 2010. Prince picked up a guitar and played a little, but ultimately declined to take the stage; some reported hearing him make a comment to the effect of, “Looks like they’ve got it under control.” Prince’s legacy in Minnesota is multilayered — from his early collaborations with neighborhood bands, to his towering hits that put Minneapolis on the world’s music map, to the venues he founded (Paisley Park and the former downtown club Glam Slam), to the enduring contributions of musicians he played with, to the example the Minneapolis Sound set for the dynamic scene of today. Perhaps most importantly, though, Prince’s music is evidence — to the world, and to Minnesotans ourselves — of the diversity of our state, and of our music. When you listen to Prince, you hear the influences of all the artists he grew up with: black, white, funky, rocking, groovy, prickly. It’s not the sound of Minnesota’s lonesome prairie, it’s the sound of our dense cities. This utopian artist proved that music truly can break barriers — if u want it 2. Portions of this article were previously published here . We’re gathering your thoughts: What do Prince and his music mean to you? Visit this page to send us your thoughts and memories of Prince . 2016-04-28 20:48 Jay Gabler
40 Pratt and FIT Schedule Annual Fashion Show for Same Night Pratt’s 117th runway show will spotlight student designs from graduating seniors and honor Harold Koda with the Pratt Institute Fashion Award for Lifetime Achievement. Simon Doonan, Barneys New York’s creative ambassador-at-large will be presenting the award to Koda. The runway show and awards ceremony kick off at 6 p.m. (it goes until 7:30 p.m.) at Spring Studios at 50 Varick Street, with a cocktail reception afterward. An ambitious editor could conceivably hail a cab and get to FIT (27th Street and Seventh Avenue) and catch FIT ’s “The Future of Fashion” runway show, which will be hosted by Leandra Medine. The festivities start at 7 p.m. The show will feature looks created by FIT’s top graduating students, including the Critics’ Award and People’s Choice Award-winning looks in sportswear, special occasion, knitwear, intimate apparel and children’s wear. Ladies and gentlemen, pick your school. 2016-04-28 17:28 Lisa Lockwood
41 Nadav Kander at Flowers Gallery, New York Nadav Kander, The Polygon Nuclear Test Site XII (Dust To Dust), Kazakhstan , 2011, C-print. COURTESY FLOWERS GALLERY Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday. Today’s show: “Nadav Kander: Dust” is on view at Flowers Gallery in New York through Saturday, May 7. The solo exhibition presents the latest series by the Israeli artist, which “explores the vestiges of the Cold War through the radioactive ruins of secret cities on the border between Kazakhstan and Russia,” according to the press release. Nadav Kander, The Polygon Nuclear Test Site XII (Dust To Dust), Kazakhstan , 2011, C-print. COURTESY FLOWERS GALLERY Nadav Kander, The Polygon Nuclear Test Site VII, Kazakhstan , 2011, C-print. COURTESY FLOWERS GALLERY Nadav Kander, Kurchatov VII (Ashes To Ashes), Kazakhstan , 2011, C-print. COURTESY FLOWERS GALLERY Nadav Kander, The Aral Sea III (Fishing Trawler), Kazakhstan , 2011, C-print. COURTESY FLOWERS GALLERY Nadav Kander, The Aral Sea I (Officers Housing), Kazakhstan 2011 , C-print. COURTESY FLOWERS GALLERY Nadav Kander, The Aral Sea Diptych (Sea Bed), Kazakhstan , 2011, C-print. COURTESY FLOWERS GALLERY Nadav Kander, Priozersk XVI (Reeds), Kazakhstan , 2011, C-print. COURTESY FLOWERS GALLERY Nadav Kander, Priozersk XIV (I Was Told She Once Held An Oar), Kazakhstan , 2011, C-print. COURTESY FLOWERS GALLERY Nadav Kander, Priozersk I (Military Housing), Kazakhstan , 2011, C-print. COURTESY FLOWERS GALLERY Nadav Kander, Kurchatov I (Scientific Research Facility), Kazakhstan , 2011, C-print. COURTESY FLOWERS GALLERY Nadav Kander, Graveyard near Kurchatov, Kazakhstan , 2011, C-print. COURTESY FLOWERS GALLERY 2016-04-28 17:13 The Editors
42 Hannah Elless Quick Takes: Vintage Hermès, ‘Father of the Bride,’ and Allison Krauss Hannah Elless , 29, is currently starring on Broadway in the Steve Martin-penned bluegrass musical “Bright Star,” which is set in the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Twenties and Forties. Here, the Michigan native talks vintage finds, her favorite bluegrass, and her most “New York” moment. 2016-04-28 16:55 Leigh Nordstrom
43 A Plumber Built a Hoverbike in His Garage GIF via Colin Furze , the UK's favorite plumber-turned- garage inventor, has just built his own working hoverbike. A couple years back we were pumped to show you the military-grade hoverbike built by LA engineering firm Aero-X, which promised to bring Star Wars speederbike thrills at an expected $85k cost on the open market. Now that it's 2016, some guy just made one in his back yard through trial-and-error. "That is the most outrageous thing I have ever ridden," says Furze, who's also created and driven a motorized drift trike , a jet-powered go-kart , and the world's fastest toilet throughout his illustrious YouTube career. The vehicle looks unwieldy, and can only be controlled by leaning the body in the desired direction, but it's still a working hoverbike made with the materials available to your everyday YouTube star. At the end, he completes the illusion of a straight-up Star Wars speeder bike, with obligatory neon lights and firework launchers. Put on John Williams' score for the speeder bike chase scene in Return of the Jedi for maximum effect. See how Colin Furze made his hoverbike here , and check out more of his work on YouTube . Related: Yes, They Finally Built A Working Hoverbike Colin Furze Demos His DIY Thermite Launcher Motorcycle + Toy Horse = MOTORHORSE This Jet-Powered Go-Kart Is Basically Mario Kart IRL 2016-04-28 16:55 Beckett Mufson
44 Alternate Senses of Tone and Pulse: An Interview with C. Spencer Yeh For Sound Horizon, our series of free in-gallery music performances, we’ve invited critic and Tiny Mix Tapes editor Marvin Lin to share his perspective on each installment of this three-part program. While his first two pieces were informed responses to work by musicians Mary Halvorson and Vicky Chow / Tristan Perich, he concludes with an in-person […] 2016-04-28 20:48 By
45 fade task light by box clever leverages one piece of metal as much as possible
fade task light by box clever leverages one piece of metal as much as possible fade task light by box clever leverages one piece of metal as much as possible all images courtesy of box clever designed by san francisco based firm box clever, the ‘fade task light’ works in an environment with it’s fluid and adaptable articulated arm. accompanied by high performance LED system, the intuitive dimmer and color temperature slider control on the iron base allows the light output to be precisely set to the color and luminosity. at the rear an integrated USB port in the base keeps mobile devices charged and ready to go. the ‘fade task light’ is available in four unique color and die cut pattern configurations. the deceiving single piece of metal has two bend points the slim profile comes in four different colors the bends hide the necessary cables to power the LED 2016-04-28 16:30 Piotr Boruslawski
46 At the Vatican, a Newly Refreshed Snapshot of Italy, Circa 1580 VATICAN CITY — According to the director of the Vatican Museums, the best way to appreciate the newly restored Gallery of Maps – a 400-foot-long snapshot of Italy, circa 1580, with some later updates – is to stroll through the corridor at sunset during a summer afternoon, “when the light is honey-colored” and the scent of flowers wafts from adjacent gardens through open windows. “It’s a sneak peek of paradise,” the director, Antonio Paolucci, told reporters at the official presentation of the work on Wednesday evening. “A long and complex restoration,” as he described it, has refreshed the maps’ colors and brought lost details into focus. The restoration, which was completed this month, had become a necessity as the maps, painted in fresco with details added “a secco” – or after the fresco had dried — were gradually detaching from the walls, in part because of the flow of tourists passing through the gallery on the way to the Sistine Chapel, said Arnold Nesselrath, a chief curator at the Vatican Museums. Some of the maps were cracked, scratched and blotchy, while dust had settled in the cornices and stucco. Restorers and decorators worked for nearly four years both on the maps and on the ceiling, a mélange of stucco reliefs and paintings. The gallery, on the west side of the Belvedere Courtyard, was commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII in 1580, according to the Vatican, and the overall plan was entrusted to Ignazio Danti, a Dominican friar who was the papal cosmographer and mathematician. Artists who worked on the project under Danti included Girolamo Muziano, Cesara Nebbia and the Flemish Bril brothers. The gallery is a “historical archive” that catalogs church property and narrates battles and other scenes, said Maria Ludmila Pustka, the director of the painting restoration laboratory at the Vatican Museums. “Danti was precise, there is nothing arbitrary” to the layout, she said. Some of the maps were reworked over the years, including under Pope Pius IX in 1851. Glazes and glue that had been applied in these modifications were removed under the restoration. 2016-04-28 15:56 By
47 Introducing the Bubbling Jewel Coffee Table Screencap via Ever wanted your living room to feel like a mystical cave? Well, now you can, thanks to the Kihou bubbling light coffee table by Tangent. The UK design firm makes lamps and furniture that that move and change over time, including the Kihou series which resembles liquid jewels. We showed you Tangent's Kihou lamps last year, but the firm has kept busy, creating a clockwork installation at Milan Design Week, and a series of lamps that looks like a glowing rice paddy. Designers Hideki Yoshimoto and Edward Slater spearheaded the project, programming the seemingly chaotic bubbling to immitate the natural world. "The bubbles appear at random in the beginning and slowly repeat a pattern of synchronisation and desynchronisation, which mimics synchronization seen in nature, such as fireflies," they write in the product's description. Check out modern furniture design's answer to fireflies in the video demonstration below. See more from Tangent on their website . Related: River Runs Through These Marble & Resin Tables Broken Skateboards Are Transformed into Designer Tables This High Tech Table Is Straight Out of 'Minority Report' 2016-04-28 15:20 Beckett Mufson
48 Meet the Self-Described "Sign Geeks" Keeping Neon Alive Carlos Vargas “Saints and Sinners” Española, New Mexico. Image courtesy of #SignGeeks No matter what era you were born into, the alluring warmth and flickering glow of vintage neon signage is undeniable. Our attraction to these bent and illuminated glass tubes is due, perhaps, to an appreciation for a craft that seems inaccessible to most—they're science meets design meets applied urbanism. While the existence of classic neon signs is slowly disappearing, self-described "sign geeks," with the intent to document and share these beautifully crafted pieces of art, are keeping the glow alive. The international photography group exists primarily in the digital realm, aiming to capture these historical neon works in their natural habitats, to share amongst themselves and enthusiasts alike. Marc Shur “El Ray” Reno, Nevada. Image courtesy of #SignGeeks The Creators Project caught up with Sharlynn Vee, one of the members of Instagram's #SignGeeks to talk about their most recent group exhibition at The Museum of Neon Art (MONA) in Glendale, CA, and how the social media group is formed. “#SignGeeks came together through appreciating for each other’s work in the early days of Instagram, sometime in mid-2011,” Vee tells us. “We had a small group of friends who were vintage sign obsessed and by interacting with each other on Instagram daily, we got to know each other. Lennie Locken suggested that we start our own hashtag because we’re all such geeks about signs, and #signgeeks was born.” Sharlynn Vee “Western Appliance” San Jose, California. Image courtesy of #SignGeeks “Popularity has never been our goal.” Vee tells The Creators Project, “Our hashtag was initially a means to keep track of our close friends’ posts, but #signgeeks has become a popular hashtag. The hashtag is a helpful tool in locating cool shots of vintage signs, but now you may have to spend a little more time filtering out unrelated images and porn. There are a lot of people on Instagram who post photos of vintage signs, but not everyone is cut out for our group. There are currently 79 members in the #SignGeeks group.” Mercedes Mancillas “The Palms” Portland, Oregon. Image courtesy of #SignGeeks While their focus is mainly on vintage neon signs, Vee admits that sometimes it's difficult to deny some of gorgeous, psychedelic lettering and design of plastic or crafted signs from the 60s and 70s, even if they aren’t shaped out of neon glass tubing. “We come from all walks of life, ages, and nationalities.” Vee explains, “Photographing vintage signs is what brought us together… The worst feeling for a Sign Geek is to arrive at a location to shoot a beautiful sign and that sign has been removed or replaced with a hunk of poorly designed backlit plastic. Maintaining neon is expensive, so we always praise business owners who keep up their signs.” The relationship with the MONA goes back to 2014, when the Sign Geeks had a show at SPACE Gallery in Pomona. Shortly after, Vee tells us that Museum director Kim Koga had approached her to put on a collaborative show with MONA soon after the museum’s grand opening. “I immediately contacted Marc Shur, was the design genius behind our Pomona show and also the genius art director and design wizard behind our current MONA exhibit, and we started having brainstorming,” Vee explains. “Marc Shur, Carlos Vargas, and [I] accepted submissions and made the selections that are now hanging in the exhibit. The process took about seven months from beginning to end.” Steve Spiegel “Blue Spruce Lodge” Gallup, New Mexico. Image courtesy of #SignGeeks “Seeing our group’s work hanging in MONA, along with all those beautiful glowing pieces of history, feels amazing,” Vee says. “We even have our own #SignGeeks neon sign at the entrance of the exhibit, crafted by my favorite neon artist in the world, Michael Flechtner. This experience has been the ultimate dream come true and the response has been incredible. Over 300 people attended our opening reception, and it was the largest attended #SignGeeks group event in our history. About 85% of our exhibitors flew in from all over the U. S. and abroad to attend and to spend the weekend shooting signs all over the L. A. area in organized group outings. It was truly a memorable and emotional experience for us all.” Tim Anderson “OK Used Cars” Kingman, Arizona. Image courtesy of #SignGeeks The Sign Geeks' exhibition is on view at the MONA until June 19th, 2016 Click here to visit #Signgeeks on Instagram Related: Hong Kong's Farewell to Thousands of Neon Signs Iconic Movie Posters Reinterpreted As Neon Signs Neon Retrospective Asks "Have You Read the Writing on the Wall? " 2016-04-28 15:10 Hannah Stouffer
49 Protest Group Lights Up Guggenheim's Facade On Wednesday evening, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York hosted a series of projections on its facade. However, the message was not its own. Earlier this month, the museum suspended talks with the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition , a group that has taken issue with the reported substandard living conditions of the workers planning the construction of the museum's satellite location in Abu Dhabi . From a makeshift control center assembled in a van outside the museum, the coalition's affiliate group Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G. U. L. F.) projected a series of messages on the outside of the building. "You broke trust," one of their complaints declared. "1%," read another. Later that night, the group wheeled their installation to the Park Avenue residence of William L. Mack, chairman of the Guggenheim's board. In a blog post on G. U. L. F.'s website , the group cites this move as a "clear message to the trustees of the Guggenheim Foundation," stating that the "cynical marriage of ultra-luxury art and ultra-low wages is null and void. " Among the images the group projected were layered headshots of the museum's trustees, which included Mack, and former president Jennifer Blei Stockman, among others. Tina Vaz, a spokesperson for the Guggenheim, told artnet News in a phone interview that, after six years of negotiations, "this latest action by GULF labor is another example of their willingness to attack the Guggenheim for easy publicity versus pursuing a program of thoughtful advocacy. " She continued, "Their demands are not only beyond the Guggenheim's direct line of influence but beyond the influence of any single arts institution. We are leveraging our advocacy and our influence to its fullest, but these issues that they are focused on, such as recruitment fees, living wages, and the right to organize, are highly complex and involve many players at the highest levels of the governments—not only in the UAE, but also from countries workers are migrating from. Resolving these issues are beyond the scope of influence of any one institution. " Vaz emphasized that the group "refuses to acknowledge the progress that has been made" in the past six years, saying, "We truly believe that our presence in the region has made a difference. " See more images below. Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-04-28 14:41 Rain Embuscado
50 Can Visionary Art Also be Conceptual? | City of the Seekers Installation view of Odyssey (transcendental object at the end of time), 2015, Monofilament, viscous oil, plastic tubing, tinted glass mirror, wood, mixed material, dimensions variable In the late 19th century, Southern California attracted misfits, idealists, and entrepreneurs with few ties to anyone or anything. Swamis, spiritualists, and other self-proclaimed religious authorities quickly made their way out West to forge new faiths. Independent book publishers, motivational speakers, and metaphysical- minded artists and writers then became part of the Los Angeles landscape. From yogis, to psychics, to witches, City of the Seekers examines how creative freedom enables LA-based artists to make spiritual work as part of their practices. On the surface, visionary and conceptual art are very different. The first seems more organic, while the latter requires a certain amount of intellectual deliberation. But as artist Dani Tull shows, visionary and conceptual art are actually quite similar. In conceptualism, the presented idea can strive to be more important than the product, while the visionary process of practicing spirituality through art can be more important than the actual object, too. In this way, Tull converges two superficially separate modalities—the conceptual and the experiential— revealing that any genre of art can be visionary, and vice-versa. But Tull isn't fond of the term "visionary art" or any other self-identifying labels he believes overly stylize and fetishize their own cultures. Feeder (houndstooth), 2015, Oil on linen, 60"x48" (All images courtesy of the artist) "Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an art snob. I participate in and position myself in the contemporary art business fully aware of how shady it can be," he says. "But I would take the sanctity of a well- lit white room to experience a work of art over the hoopla of the dusty Burning Man playa any day. " That's not something you'd expect to hear from most mystically-minded artists in Los Angeles, but thankfully, Tull has shattered the stereotype with art that reflects the true complexity of someone brought up in the SoCal sprawl. Sunnsett Triipp (for Olivia), 2015, Oil on linen, 60” x 48” With an MFA from Stanford University and a BFA from The San Francisco Art Institute, Tull was recently singled out by in Wallpaper. In 2009, Tull curated Aspects of the Archaic Revival , a group show featuring international artists inspired by allegories, psychedelics, and magic. Its title was inspired by Terence McKenna's 1992 book, The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History. But over the course of the last two decades, Tull's art has been conceptually-based, though he's always worked from a place of personal experience. Lately, he's aimed to create work that transcends that, though, examining areas of consciousness that are beyond the limits of identity. "The path and process of my work has never been linear," Tull says. "I used to worry about it, because there’s a general desire to brand artists, but for the most part, I have chosen to follow my interests as they unfold. Now, with some years behind me, I’ve got a better view [...] and see the way past bodies of work and ideas circle around and are in fact interconnected in elegant and unexpected ways. " Untitled (Convergence view), 2012, 38”x42”x42” carved wood, encaustic wax, inlaid enamel, oil paint, aqua resin Right now, Tull is working on several different projects including a series of sculptures called Convergences —tripodal forms constructed from carved cast acrylic and wood panels, joined together to create an axis. These forms appeared to Tull in his "liminal zones," or within the periphery of his field of perception. "For a few years I just kind of felt the presence of this thing while bringing it closer into focus," he says. "When I could finally see what it was, I spent a lot of time thinking about it. It felt familiar and connected to nature and natural processes. I recognized it as an archetypal form, but not one in the common lexicon of archetypes. I sensed this form was articulating some complex ideas in a nonlinguistic way and that it could make the leap physically as a sculptural form. I began to build these sculptures by hand while trying not to overthink their meaning. As exotic as their arrival might seem, I kept the process engaged with formal and aesthetic concerns while keeping a footing in historical context. This is really interesting to me, navigating through and straddling that place where mystical experience intersects with formalism and contemporary art issues. " Untitled (Convergence view), 2012, 38”x42”x42”, carved wood, encaustic wax, inlaid enamel, oil paint, aqua resin. Throughout his life, Tull has had a variety of mystical experiences. As a youth, they were tied to typical SoCal pursuits such as skateboarding, surfing, and playing in bands. "They brought my awareness to the theatrics of ritual and ceremony; something I am still very aware of both my participation in the current spiritual renaissance of LA as well as the pomp of the art world. " More recently, however, Tull has participated in community gatherings for consciousness explorers that have a strong correlation to indigenous and Amazonian traditions. "The experiences are extraordinary and deeply profound," he says. "But as much as I am in pursuit of authentic spiritual experiences, I am equally interested in the histories and mechanics of fringe spiritual movements and 'guru' personality cults. I like where the lines get blurred from total theatrics to something real or at least real enough: it confirms my belief that creativity and imagination are viable and legitimate tools for accessing mystical states and to transmute energy. " Though Tull says he enjoys drifting between being an atheist/agnostic and a theosophist/gnostic, he's ultimately anti-dogmatic, with a strong allegiance to nature. "But it’s funny, somehow people seem to think that I have a disciplined spiritual practice, and I don’t," he says. "If anything, my practice is my art, and I have total devotion to making my work. Outside of that, I might be a dabbler of self-curated esoteric pursuits. " Standing here, we are leaning beyond the edge realms (Convergence), 2015, Encaustic wax on carved cast acrylic, wood pedestal 38” x38” x33” In terms of a connection between LA and visionary art, Tull says there's the danger of a stigma that arises from the so-called New Age movement, which can be kitschy. He prefers to pay attention to the actual geography of Los Angeles and California, which he believes is literally and spiritually on the fringe. "For artists, the city’s geographical spread fosters a maverick sensibility and meditative space," he says. "For artists, I think LA is the most interesting city in the world at possibly the most interesting and important time in human history. Something is stirring here and it’s kicking up some of LA’s eccentric histories—it’s soupy and iridescent, a vortex of shifting gradients, cross-pollinating our creativity and dreams in unexpected ways, like a hazy cosmic jive. "And while California has long been a hotbed for consciousness exploration and fringe spiritual movements that have intersected with the arts, I believe the current global state of embedded technologies, hyper-connectivity and information-driven culture is evoking a deeper subtext that can be seen as an impulsive return to analogue systems: the handmade, abstraction, mystical experience, and an exploration of esoteric modalities. I see my work as both an interface and agitator within the interplay of these analogous fields. " >>>> 2016-04-28 14:40 Tanja M
51 Free Arts NYC Celebrates Glenn O'Brien at Richard Prince-hosted Party Related Artists Richard Prince Marilyn Minter Rashid Johnson Dustin Yellin Glenn O’Brien, an art, music and fashion writer who was once a member of Andy Warhol's Factory, was honored on April 27 at Free Arts NYC ’s 17th Annual Art Auction in New York. Richard Prince hosted the fête, which drew guests such as Jeffrey Deitch, Annabelle Dexter- Jones, Claire Distenfeld, Nan Goldin, Rashid Johnson , Jemima Kirke, Tali Lennox, MARILYN MINTER , Stella Schnabel, Christy Turlington, Dustin Yellin , Olivier Zahm and many more. The evening included a live auction led by Paddle8’s Alexander Gilkes, where Tony Shafrazi picked up a piece by Richard Prince , while a bidding war over a Jonas Wood work culminated in it going for $57,000. Proceeds from the evening will go toward benefiting Free Arts NYC’s educational arts mentoring programs for underserved youth and families. To view pictures from the party, click on the slideshow. 2016-04-28 14:31 Michelle Tay
52 Duke Riley on his Airborne Project for Creative Time, Starring Thousands of His Beloved Pigeons Duke Riley with his pigeons. PHOTO BY WILL STAR/COURTESY CREATIVE TIME If Duke Riley never brought ink to paper, never went to art school, and never signed with a Chelsea gallery, he would still be known as one of the reigning outlaw party-throwers and provocateurs in New York. There was The Dead Horse Inn in 2005, an installation for which Riley led a group of revelers to Plumb Island, a remote part of Brooklyn abandoned since Robert Moses ran a highway across from it in the 1930s. With boxing matches taking place in the middle of a raucous party and ten-cent whiskeys being sold behind a makeshift bar, it was an evening that hearkened back to a time when homesteaders declared the island free from the reaches of the New York City government and pursued activities not welcomed in the boroughs. There was The Battle of Brooklyn in 2007, in which Riley attempted to conjure the spirit of ‘76 by building a Revolutionary War-era submarine and floating it up to the Queen Mary II, then docked at the Red Hook cruise ship terminal—a protest against post-9/11 paranoia and the remaking of Riley’s beloved working-class waterfront into a place tourists sailed by on their way to Manhattan. And then there was 2009’s Those About To Die Salute You , a performance for which Riley filled up a vacant pool at the Queens Museum with water and had staffers from local museums battle it out in boats made of hay, t-shirts, and cardboard while onlookers flung tomatoes and dodged fireworks. The name alluded to the violent spectacles Roman emperors would hold to placate the masses in times of economic difficulty, much as the recession was then rocking the art world and other New York industries. Riley, dressed as Caesar, presided over all. For his latest, Riley is turning his attention to something far less grandiose: the humble pigeon. By using this ubiquitous creature in an installation, Riley is hoping make a statement about the way urban life is seemingly both determined to drive us to distraction and and intent on stamping out anything uncontrolled and wild.“They are misunderstood, they really are,” Riley said of his beloved pigeons. “They are this animal that exists in pretty much every city in the world, but were brought here by people and for a long time served some kind of purpose. They are resilient. And we have a relationship and a responsibility to them.”Riley was standing onboard The Baylander , a Vietnam War-era 131-foot aircraft carrier once used to train helicopter pilots that’s now docked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Riley has commandeered the flight deck and built pigeon coops— enough to house over 2,000 birds—and during six successive weekends beginning in early May, he will unleash Fly By Night, a Creative Time-backed production in which, at twilight, those birds will be released into the air above Wallabout Bay. As the sun settles over the city, viewers will come to see that tiny LED lights have been attached to the pigeons, creating a massive, moving, low-flying constellation that then returns back to the boat on Riley’s call after a half hour or so. It is, in part, a tribute to a vanishing New York City pastime.“There was a time when practically every rooftop in Manhattan had a pigeon coop on it,” said Riley, who still sounds like he plies his trade on the Boston fish piers where he worked as a kid. “Now there’s probably 100 people in the five boroughs that keep pigeons. It was this shared social activity that is now almost completely disappeared.”Riley still keep pigeons on the roof of his Red Hook home. Some have been transferred to the Navy Yard in order to take part in the art, but pigeon-keeping is a fragile and sometimes frustrating pastime. One group is there because their owners’ building was sold and the new landlord wanted nothing to do with the filthy creatures. Another was told that his large coops looked too much like an illegal addition, and a building inspector insisted that it come down or Riley would face a heavy fine. Riley, who lived in a pigeon coop when he first moved to New York City, attributes the loss of pigeon-keeping as a hobby to that perennial New York City plague: rising property values. Rooftops where pigeon-keepers once put on a show for the street below have been converted to private decks, which New Yorkers prefer to the far less civilized hangout spot of old, the front stoop. Pigeons, as Riley sees it, are the embodied projection of all of our urban sins. If they are dirty, it is because of the gunk we have let clog our air and streets. If they are diseased, it is because of the processed food we have left on the ground that they have been forced to clean up. If they are un-pretty, it is because we have lost the capacity to properly see. (In 2007, the New York City Council went so far as to suggest a ban on pigeon feeding and the institution of a pesticide that would serve as birth control.)At Creative Time, the hope is that Fly By Night will become as big a phenomenon as Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, the sugar Sphinx sculpture that had visitors lined up around the block at the Domino Sugar Factory (which has since been demolished) in 2014.“This is an artist’s dream project,” said Katie Hollander, the executive director of Creative Time. “Duke has been dreaming about this for years.”Creative Time curated Riley’s previous foray into pigeon-related works, Trading With The Enemy, in which he trained 50 pigeons to fly from Cuba to Key West carrying Cuban cigars.“Duke is an explorer and old soul and that comes out in his work,” said Hollander. “He does a lot of research and he is very knowledgeable about the sites he is working on, the history of the subject matter. Because his projects are very much about telling a story and dealing with subject matter that we all have a relationship with, they are something we all resonate with in one way or another.”“I think he is someone who is all about pushing the envelope,” said Dara Metz, who co-owns Magnan Metz Gallery in Chelsea and who began representing Riley when he was still in graduate school. “Once he gets the green light, or if he doesn’t get the green light, it is all about adding more and more to the mix and seeing what you can get away with.”In the months that Riley has been preparing for Fly By Night , his corner of the Navy Yard has becoming something of a hangout for the city’s remaining pigeon-keepers. Jose, who showed a video he keeps on his phone of the pigeons he keeps on his roof in Bushwick —“This is like therapy for me,” he said—grilled hamburgers and sausages while Riley and his crew of assistants and volunteers drank beer out of cans and talked about how to keep the birds in good-enough condition for the performance. As dusk fell, Riley climbed back up to the boat. The pigeons were released into the sky, thousands of them. Some just decamped to a nearby roof, but others stuck together in a handful of clusters, eddying and swirling above the bay. Riley stayed on the deck, waving a black flag stuck to a large wooden pole in order to keep the birds from coming home too early. Only a few had lights attached to them—the lights were still being constructed in a nearby facility—but the sight was oddly moving, with the birds looking like brushstrokes across the sky, gliding over cars making their way home over the Williamsburg Bridge.“The relationship of water to the city keeps surfacing in my work,” Riley says. “I have this need to personally seek out that space and use that space. Here you have this city of 8 million people and then all of sudden you go out there and there are a million creatures above and below you and you are all alone.” 2016-04-28 14:22 David Freedlander
53 These Abstract Paintings Say, "This Is Your Brain on Data" New Master (2015). 60x80cm. Images courtesy the artist Like many a fellow international contemporary artist, Tobias Kroeger got his start in graffiti. Influenced by the New York scene, the German began his graffito career at the tender age of 12 back in 1990, then switched to life as a freelance graphic artist in 1997. A few years ago, Kroeger shifted again from graphic design and public murals to canvas and contemporary art, creating “fictional portraits” composed of data fragments and machine parts, exploring what it means to be human in a digital world. The results evoke both Cubism and Futurism, but look very much of our times. While his concerns are digital, Kroeger’s technique and processes are more traditional. He paints with both oil and acrylic, while attempting to fuse fine art with graffiti in new and interesting ways. At his new solo show Playground , currently on at Hugo 45 Gallery in Braunschweig, Germany, Kroeger presents more works that represent humans as beings increasingly governed by digital realms. Twins (2015). 60x50cm “The show Playground is dedicated to the representation of the modern, digitized human and how you can represent this painting even by the traditional means,” Kroeger says. “It is very difficult to find a contemporary form for this. It has become for me a search for a position between figuration and abstraction but also the attempt to create a kind of new iconography.” In his paintings, Kroeger is always after a new way of handling the human figure—near enough to be reminded of the model, but also far enough away that the human becomes abstracted. To do this, Kroger combines geometric, angular forms with anthropomorphic forms. How to Disappear (2016). 60x80cm “A key aspect of the exhibition is my new way of dealing with colors,” he explains. “I use intense colors such as yellow, orange, blue and pink, which I try to capture always with shades of gray. Previously, my works were kept in monochromatic color schemes, but I always knew that I eventually would arrive at such results with colors.” Each painting starts with a sketch. This allows Kroeger to create new forms and combinations, which he can then freely interpret on canvas. Breathe (2015). 30x40cm “I currently paint in acrylic and vinyl since the graphical aspect is important to me and the short drying phase is also helpful,” he says. “I like the brilliance of the colors that I apply in a multilayered, paste-like way, so the viewer gets a completely different impression in the gallery as opposed to looking at my work on the Internet.” “I like the idea of experiencing the images in reality.” Playground installation shot Click here to see more of Tobias Kroeger’s work. Related: Painting’s Evolution in the Digital Age Milk and Oil Dance in 'Memories of Painting' Neon-Streaked Pictures Blurs Boundaries Between Painting and Digital Art 2016-04-28 14:10 DJ Pangburn
54 Predicting the Tony Nominations: The Actors Related Events Tony Awards 2016 When you see Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s virtuoso turn playing dozens of characters in the solo comedy, “Fully Committed,” you leave the theater assured that he will get a Tony nomination for his performance. And then you start considering his competition for one of the five slots: Frank Langella (“The Father”), Gabriel Byrne (“Long Day’s Journey into Night”), James Earl Jones (“The Gin Game”), Jeff Daniels (“Blackbird”), Mark Strong (“A View from the Bridge”), Clive Owen (“Old Times”), Tim Pigott-Smith (‘King Charles III”), and Sam Rockwell (“Fool for Love”). And that doesn’t even include Jim Parsons (“Act of God”), Al Pacino (“China Doll”), and Bruce Willis (“Misery”) who are not as likely to make the cut. As Elaine Stritch so succinctly put it: “There’s so much fucking talent in this town.” True enough. That means, of course, that some very deserving performances will not be acknowledged when the nominations are announced. There are very few shoo-ins. Indeed, there are probably only two when it comes to lead actor in a play: Langella and Strong are probably assured of a spot. The rest of the above will hope the theatrical gods are on their side. That’s also true among the actresses in dramas who are under consideration, only one of whom could be considered a near-lock for a nomination: Lupita Nyong’o, the Oscar-winning actress (“12 Years A Slave”) who has made a stirring Broadway debut in “Eclipsed,” Danai Gurira’s drama about female captives in war-torn Liberia. Among those who have a good chance to join her company are Jessica Lange (“Long Day’s Journey into Night”), Laurie Metcalf (“Misery”), Michelle Williams (“Blackbird”), Sophie Okoneda (“The Crucible”), Nicola Walker (“A View from the Bridge”), and Andrea Martin (“Noises Off!”). In such a strong field, one surmises there’s won’t be room for Linda Lavin (“Our Mother’s Brief Affair”), Cicely Tyson (“The Gin Game”), or Keira Knightly (“Therese Raquin”). The musical categories are a bit less competitive. Both Lin-Manuel Miranda and Leslie Odom, Jr. are sure bets for “Hamilton.” It would be surprising if Benjamin Walker (“American Psycho”), Alex Brightman (“School of Rock”), and Danny Burstein (“Fiddler on the Roof”) were left off the list. So that leaves Zachary Levi (“She Loves Me”), Andrew Keenan-Bolger (“Tuck Everlasting”), and Josh Young (“Amazing Grace”) to usurp one of those places. And what to do with the male stars of “Shuffle Along,” which includes Brian Stokes Mitchell, Joshua Henry, Billy Porter, and Brandon Victor Dixon? The Tony administration committee has yet to rule on their categorization. The competition becomes even fiercer among the women vying for nods. There are two probable nominees: British newcomer Cynthia Erivo who is also considered the front-runner for her triumphant debut in “The Color Purple,” and Philippa Soo, who plays the staunch spouse in “Hamilton.” Audra McDonald, who holds the record for the most Tony wins at six, is also likely to be nominated yet again for “Shuffle Along.” And the season also yielded especially strong performances from Jessie Mueller (“Waitress”), Laura Benanti (“She Loves Me”), Carmen Cusack (“Bright Star”), Sarah Charles Lewis (“Tuck Everlasting”), and Ana Villafañe, whose Gloria Estefan in “On Your Feet!” invariably brings the audience to do just that. Stritch had it right. That makes difficult the job of the Tony nominators, a group made up of about 40 professionals drawn from realms of theater and academia. The secret and weighted balloting for the nominees will take place on Monday night, May 2. Then the Tony voters, a pool of 846, will have their turn at determining the winners, to be announced on June 12. 2016-04-28 14:08 Patrick Pacheco
55 Adult Swim’s New Web-Toy Is Sexy, Sassy, and Starving Screencaps via Frank kind of seems like the Jabba the Hutt of the internet. He needs you to feed him, but he won’t just accept anything you give him, and he’ll toy with you all the way in between. The interactive media experience “ FEED FRANK ” asks users to paint a picture using a touch-sensitive heat map and “bits” of emojis—all to feed the powerful and mysterious Frank. The creators, Kristel Brinshot, Ricky Jonsson Jr, and Peter Javidpour acknowledge, "Feed frank is kinda weird, we admit its a little creepy but it begs to ask us what and WHO are we really feeding in our cyber lives? " [ sic ] A valid question, as the digital environment we live in continues to grow everyday. The artists behind FEED FRANK have previously worked on other VR experiences such as Muscle Coach , under the moniker The Great Nordic Sword Fights. This “web-toy” is unique, however, because it requires both your smartphone and your computer for optimal usage. As you draw, “Frank” will flirt with you under an interactive chat interface, and coax you to add more “bits” to your drawing. If you want to paint your own food for Frank and see if he likes it, log on to feedfrank.sexy on both your computer and your iPhone and watch the magic happen. Related: Dalí, Escher, and Magritte Inspire a Stunning Video Game Play The Interactive Music Video Game For QVALIA's "Sound The Alarm" Walk, Run, and Fly Through Vincent Morisset's New Interactive Film 2016-04-28 13:45 Annie Armstrong
56 56 ‘An Incongruous Object’: Cornelia Parker on Her Met Commission, a Hitchcock-Inspired Barn on the Roof Installation view of “The Roof Garden Commission: Cornelia Parker, Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) , 2016, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. ©2016 HYLA SKOPITZ, THE PHOTOGRAPH STUDIO, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART E nglish artist Cornelia Parker’s Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) , currently installed on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is a genre-busting showstopper. Parker has modestly called her 28-foot-tall sculpture, which is visible from pathways in Central Park, “an incongruous object.” A site-specific work, it’s based on the house occupied by the proprietors of the Bates Motel in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho —a house that was itself inspired by Edward Hopper’s House by the Railroad ( at the Museum of Modern of Art ), painted in 1925. With an impressive sleight-of-hand, Parker had a team of industrial fabricators construct her faux residence with materials from a barn dismantled in rural upstate New York. Simply put, Transitional Object , whose title borrows a psychological term for things like stuffed animals, security blankets, and such, is based on a two-sided structure from a movie set that was based on a mansion in a painting. But that’s a somewhat deceptive description. When you walk to the rear of Parker’s makeshift building, you discover a profusion of pipes forming scaffolding, large metal drums filled with water for ballast, and other elements that anchor her work so that it can withstand 100-miles-per-hour winds, a code requirement. Visually, this makes Transitional Object an engaging abstract sculpture. Speaking with the press, Parker has emphasized that the back of her work is as important as its front. For Parker, this mélange of sources and inspirations could not be situated in a better place. After all, as she pointed out to me, as we sat and talked on a bench on the roof on an exceptionally sunny, warm morning last week, “the Met is filled with all this culture from around the world.” Cornelia Parker. JACKIE NEALE/©2015 MMA Cornelia Parker started out as a provincial farm girl. Born in 1956 in rural Cheshire, England, she grew up more familiar with barns than museums. Accustomed to “manual labor,” she milked the family’s cows by hand, baled hay, and had little time left over for anything else. However, when Parker was 15, her art teachers, a married couple, brought her class to London for a week to look at great art. “I had never been in a museum,” she said the other day. At the National Gallery, she was bowled over by the Old Masters and, in her words, “a cacophony of different styles of work: Italianate paintings, Rubens, Murillo.” Back then, the strapping teenager found that “all sculpture seemed to be on plinths and made of marble.” Parker became the first girl from her school to study art. After attending the Gloucestershire College of Art and Design in 1974, she enrolled at Wolverhampton Polytechnic “because,” she admitted a while ago, “I couldn’t get into any of the better schools.” Since then, she’s taught at the places that turned her down. Living in East London during the early 1980s, Parker was astonished, she told me, “to move into an area that was full of creative, like-minded people, composers and theater people as well as artists. It was a quantum leap for me.” Shortly after that, in 1984, she spent a stimulating few months in a place on Avenue A, near Tompkins Square Park in New York. She remembers the East Village as being “electric and vibrant.” Parker continues to make extended visits to Manhattan. She was married on the Brooklyn Bridge, and her wedding photograph shows her and her husband, Jeff McMillan, an artist from Texas, getting hitched with the World Trade Center in the background. The mayor should make her an honorary New Yorker. Installation view of “The Roof Garden Commission: Cornelia Parker, Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) , 2016, in progress. ©2016 THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART N ow 60 years old, Parker, who is tall, has brown eyes, and wears her auburn hair cut in a modified Lulu bob, noted that she was caught between two generations of English sculptors. She’s slightly younger than Richard Deacon, Richard Wentworth, and Tony Cragg, and slightly older than the YBAs, who met one another at Goldsmiths. Said Parker, “I’m a bit more of a maverick.” As a deconstructionist, she’s taken cues from Wentworth, who is even less well known in the U. S. than he is in the U. K., the flotsam-and-jetsam period of Tony Cragg, and Arte Povera. She’s made installations from garden sheds she’s blown up, silver-plated serving pieces she’s steamrolled, and house bricks she beachcombed beneath the White Cliffs of Dover. When Parker was pregnant with her daughter and about to show work in Turin, she discovered she could purchase, at a benefit auction, Mia Farrow’s blue nightgown from Rosemary’s Baby. “Because I was pregnant at the time,” she said to me, “I realized everything could have been in Mia Farrow’s character’s head. That meant it was a psychological story, not something scary.” In Turin, she displayed her newly acquired nightgown in a case as if it were Veronica’s Veil, a local relic. Parker is a huge movie fan. “We,” she said, referring to Europeans and her fellow countrymen, “know America from the movies.” Mentioning films made in New York, from Duck Soup to Ghostbusters , she explained that’s how she learned to love water towers, steam rising from the street, and the billboards of Times Square. She is also deeply knowledgeable about the golden ages of black-and-white British movies, and we talked about Room at the Top , Saturday Night and Sunday Morning , Look Back in Anger , and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner —which returns us to Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) and Alfred Hitchcock. For ten years, Parker lived in an area of London that Hitchcock, one of her favorite directors, once called home. She’s watched his movies over and over again. “Because he cut his teeth on silent films,” she said, “he could project all sorts of things without resorting to dialogue.” She admires the way that his “great visual eye” lets “you feel every moment of a scene.” Is it any wonder Parker was inspired by the house in Psycho? View of the dismantling of the barn in Scoharie, New York, which served as the source material for Parker’s Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) , 2016. ALEX FRADKIN/COURTESY THE ARTIST Parker outlined how Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) “encapsulates” many of the themes and interests she has addressed during her three-and-a-half-decade career, referring to oppositions such as a work having a front and a back, being concerned with good and evil, and being deconstructed and then re-constructed. She also mentioned her use of found color. These days, however, Parker’s attitude regarding site-specific sculpture has changed. She now feels the specificity resides in her work regardless of where it is located. For Parker, both Psycho and the barn are “inside” Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) , and its meaning is the same “if you put the work at Balmoral Palace in Scotland or somewhere in Australia. Wherever you put it, the site goes with it.”I, for one, can’t wait to see where the work goes next, but I will miss it when it leaves the roof of the Met after Halloween. It has become a welcome addition to the New York skyline. 2016-04-28 13:32 Phyllis Tuchman
57 L3P architekten renovates house lendenmann in switzerland L3P architekten renovates house lendenmann in switzerland with contrasting façades all images by sabrina scheja in regensberg, a medieval township in northern switzerland, L3P architekten has renovated a two-storey building that was in desperate need of repair. owing to structural damage and numerous makeshift interventions, a simple overhaul of ‘house ledenmann’ was no longer possible. therefore, working in close cooperation with local authorities, the design team decided to partially demolish the house and restore its original volume. the distinctive new elevation presents sweeping views across the picturesque landscape two half-timbered elevations and a vaulted cellar have been preserved, while three sculptural multi-family houses have been constructed behind the building’s historic northern façade. however, the characteristics of the three apartments have been established through the distinctive new elevation to the south, which presents sweeping views across the picturesque landscape. the contrast between the opposing façades made it possible to develop a dynamic interplay of proportion, light and materiality. multi-family houses have been constructed behind the building’s historic northern façade the new intervention consists of grey spruce wood that wraps around the new building — incorporating the preserved façade, and reshaping the original volume. the semi-transparent wooden sheeting is covered with irregular ornaments, dissolving into a delicate envelope that lends the scheme a playful collaboration between light and shadow. furthermore, a light-guiding fireplace in the attic, a cantilevered bay window, and sliding doors incorporate vernacular elements and restructure the dwelling’s outer skin. a series of large white spaces welcome external views through large openings internally, small wooden paneled chambers establish a peaceful and serene atmosphere while forging a strong connection with the area’s history. surrounding these chambers are large white spaces that welcome external views through generous openings. simultaneously, a variation in levels and ceiling heights turns the sequential perspective of building into a three-dimensional journey with ever-changing sightlines. a variation in levels and ceiling heights turns the building into a ‘three-dimensional journey’ a light-guiding fireplace is found at the uppermost storey deep red tiling has been used in the bathroom generously proportioned living spaces are found throughout the design a vaulted cellar has been preserved as part of the renovation 2016-04-28 13:20 Philip Stevens
58 piero lissoni's lightweight piuma chair for kartell uses material found in cars and planes piero lissoni's lightweight piuma chair for kartell uses material found in cars and planes piero lissoni’s lightweight piuma chair for kartell uses material found in cars and planes the ‘piuma’ project by italian architect piero lissoni is one of the latest chairs presented by kartell at salone del mobile that marries the company’s innovative use in technology and materials. the result of two years of intensive research, the final design is based on unusual material needed to create piuma’s basic design: a carbon-led thermoplastic polymer compound that gives the structure greater mechanical rigidity and its reduced weight. this compound is taken from completely contrasting sectors of the industry, including automotive and aeronautics. the chair took two years to develop fabricated by applying injection moulding techniques in a sophisticated method designed especially for this material, kartell has developed a chair that measures just a few millimeters thick (2 mm maximum) and weighs 2.2 kg. the introduction of a material containing carbon fiber which is injection moulded is a first of its kind. the versatile ‘piuma chair’ is available in a combination of materials; defined by its lightness and slender frame, which is suitable foldable and suitable for outdoor use. the body of the chair measures at a few millimeters thick and weighs 2.2 kg the chair is made from a thermoplastic polymer compound explored in car and aeronautics industries the ‘piuma chair’ on display at the kartell stand during salone del mobile image © designboom the product is available in a wide range of colors and is suitable for outdoor use image © designboom 2016-04-28 13:15 Shuhei Senda
59 philippe starck’s lou collection for driade expresses playful anthropomorphic qualities the ‘lou’ family is a seating collection defined by its sculptural shapes and protruding arms. ‘lou eat’ and ‘lou think’ which are upholstered in leather or pony, are an extension of philippe starck’s earlier ‘lou read’ chair for driade. both designs draw upon the original framework, which contains an anthropomorphic outline. ‘lou eat’ and ‘lou think’ are an extension of philippe starck’s earlier ‘lou read’ chair for driade ‘lou eat’ is a small armchair that was conceived as a dinning room seat. it expresses a similar form to ‘lou read’ but uses softer lines, making it the most versatile option within the series. the protruding arms however look to hungrily invite the spectator to sit within its enveloping structure. starck looks to subvert the design’s original intention by declaring that ‘lou eat is not a chair, it is an animal-like sculpture that could eat you.’ ‘lou think’ takes on a similar experimental approach, using an elongated backrest and rounded hooded roof, that acts as light shade. the bizarre nature of the design aims to challenge the boundaries of ones preconceived notion of what a chair can be. philippe starck has also designed two other furniture pieces including the cinemascope which he claims is an ‘armchair that can save the world… if all presidents and kings in the world had an exceptionally comfortable armchair like cinemascope, can you imagine how their ideas, conversations and decisions would change?’. the chair contains a wide intimate seat that stands on a stainless steel swivel base, which has a swinging mechanism. the ‘wow’ sofa builds upon this idea of comfort, by introducing a a luxurious modular system that includes chaise longues and corner elements conceived to define multiple layouts. the protruding arms look to hungrily invite the spectator starck states that ‘one night I had a dream or, rather, a memory surfaced in my mind. I recall the delightful times when sofas were comfortable, and we shouted ‘wow,’ while leaping on them. I felt nostalgic for the past. and I thought that it was not bad after all, so I created ‘wow’, the sofa that embraces you.‘ the ‘lou’ collection as well as the ‘cinemascope’ armchair and ‘wow’ sofa were all debuted at salone del mobile 2016. the ‘cinemascope’ contains a wide intimate seat that stands on a stainless steel swivel base the ‘wow’ sofa can be arranged in various formats image © designboom 2016-04-28 12:44 Shuhei Senda
60 A New App Illuminates the Hidden Histories of Everyday Places Images via Poetic Places Walk around any city and you'll find indications of its past, be they buildings, place names, or other markers. But a lot of its stories, both historic and in fiction, will be hidden. A new app called Poetic Places , by Sarah Cole in collaboration with the British Library , helps people discover the locations that inhabit various poems, paintings, and works of literature. The app uses GPS and push notifications to let people know when they've happened upon a space of significance. They can then view archive material, information, and paintings associated with it. "I’m really interested in how content—be it art, writing or something else entirely—can reach people when they’re not expecting it, rather than them having to seek it out," Cole explains to The Creators Project. "Tours can be great experiences, for example, but we have to set aside time for them whereas I wanted to explore serendipitous discovery with minimal effort from the users. I was also intrigued by narratives of place and how we access them. There might be numerous depictions of any given place, both visual and written, but how might we discover them whilst there, and how might they change our perception of that place? " All the material and content in the app, which currently only works in London, was sourced from open archives, collections, museum websites and their Flickr accounts, anything that could be used freely under Creative Commons licenses. Choices of places to include were also swayed by items that were out of copyright, due to both the practicality and expense of clearing them, but also to highlight the vast amount of information in the public domain that can be used creatively. Cole says that part of the aim of the app, as well as helping people discover histories they might not know, was also to create a "replicable project. " "I wanted to demystify apps for others and demonstrate what can be achieved with only a little time and money. " "Building an app from scratch obviously has its benefits but can require substantial resources and technical expertise. As such, I decided to see if could utilise a DIY app-building platform to make Poetic Places myself," Cole notes. John S. Muller, ca. 1715–1792, German, active in Britain, Vauxhall Gardens shewing the Grand Walk at the Entrance of the Garden and the Orchestra with the Music Playing, after 1751, Etching and engraving, hand-colored, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection After trying various platforms Cole found GoodBarber gave her what she needed without being to difficult to negotiate or too expensive. "By combining maps, entires, and triggering I was able to create something that works on both iOS and Android devices, looks good, might survive OS updates, and works the way I want. And I didn’t have to code anything to do it. " Cole has added content to the app outside of London and plans to go worldwide, too. And, although at the moment it's mainly historical, is also looking to include contemporary poets and writings. So, if you're heading out for a psychogeographical drift around London, Poetic Places can help augment the experience and point out some of the fictions the spaces you're journeying through inhabited. It not only brings some revelations to bear on where you are, it's also an exercise in what can be achieved working with free resources and a limited budget. You can meet Sarah Cole and have a Poetic Places demo at the Creativeworks London Festival on Friday, April 29 at Kings College. Book your free place here. Related: You Can Get Followed for a Day in This Privacy-Shattering Performance Robots Reveal the Most Popular Art on Instagram This Museum Displays Stolen Artworks in Augmented Reality 2016-04-28 12:20 Kevin Holmes
61 The Man Behind the Screen: Ed Atkins at the Kitchen, New York Installation view of Ed Atkins’s video Performance Capture , 2015–16. JASON MANDELLA/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GAVIN BROWN’S ENTERPRISE A ndy Serkis may be the only actor whose career has been defined by roles in which his image never appeared onscreen. When Serkis played King Kong and Gollum, his body was transposed onto a digital character using motion-capture technology. He received critical acclaim for the naturalness of his performances, which is strange. Most people probably wouldn’t even recognize his face. It’s not surprising that Serkis comes up in Ed Atkins’s Performance Capture (2015–16), a video now on view at the Kitchen. (Atkins has been extending it since its premiere last year at the Manchester International Festival, and will continue to do so.) In it, a computer- generated man with stubble spews poetry about roses pushing up through tarmac and about police brutality. At one point, his metaphorical gibberish becomes lucid. “Behind the scenes: Andy Serkis,” he says. And then: “Pathos was the only revelation / to materialize / behind the scenes. Through that curtain there, / behind the scenes.” In other words, the only way to understand the people who use digital technology is to see them in person—their avatars are not real. For the past few years, Atkins has made videos that feature almost solely sad, babbling computer-generated men. Performance Capture is a logical, powerful continuation of Atkins’s central question: Is it possible to relate to another human through digital pictures? With this video, the British artist turns his attention toward special-effects technology and empathy, and the results are by turns affecting and creepy. Performance Capture feels like a behind-the- scenes look at a blockbuster, almost as though Atkins were presenting special-effects B-roll. Over the course of the video, the avatar floats through flat, grayish space, his image sometimes getting doubled or going out of focus in the process. There’s no plot to speak of—Atkins skips transitions between scenes and ideas. As we discover over the course of the video, there are many voices for this character, most of which don’t belong to men. This is because, in order to construct this bruised guy, Atkins recorded images of more than 100 people acting out a soliloquy and then transplanted their gestures onto a disembodied head and arms. In the past, I’ve had problems with the white masculinity of Atkins’s work, but Performance Capture resolves this issue. Masses of people’s images coalesce into a single avatar, making this, in a way, a video about how identity disappears through computer-generated images. Humans inside and outside technology are two very different things, and the performance program that goes with the video drives that point home. When Atkins himself did readings alongside Performance Capture , it became clear that the avatar looked nothing like the artist. Although the CG man looks at viewers head-on, it really is hard to imagine he’s real—he’s simply a digital copy of someone else. ABOVE Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise 2016-04-28 12:19 Alex Greenberger
62 NYC Manholes Just Got Way Cozier Images courtesy the artist If you've spotted a small grey house in the middle of a New York City street, only to have it disappear minutes later, you're not hallucinating. You've likely seen a new project from Brooklyn- based artist Mark Reigelman II , entitled Smökers. Part-sculpture and part-performance art, it's a tiny cabin on wheels that the artist has been rolling over New York City's steaming manholes. This creates the unexpected illusion of a mini hearth sending smoke up the house's little chimney right in the middle of major Manhattan throughways. "As the installation was not sanctioned or permitted the installation durations vary from 30 seconds to three hours depending on location and time," Reigelman tells The Creators Project. In a video of the work in action, he and partner Aaron Fleury can be seen quickly moving the 350-lb sculpture off the road as a police car approaches. "This created a beautiful ephemerality to the work, a sense of the fleeting, echoing the nature of the steam itself," he continues. The name Smökers comes from a German toy, also called a räuchermann , that burns incense and jets the smoke from a man's mouth, a house's chimney, etc. Reigelman thought of them when looking at the large orange cones that channel New York City's emerging steam "These tubular chimneys offer some sense of spectacle and mystery, but for the most part are one more obstacle in traversing the city," he says. By placing Smökers in the city, Reigelman theorizes that he "forces spectators to reconsider the framework of a city’s infrastructure, and redress the functionality and activation of public space. " Reigelman spent four weeks building the 6’ wide x 8’ long by 8’ tall mobile installation with carpenter Andrin Widmer, designing a metal chimney inside the house to protect its wood construction from the steam. He has so far installed on Broadway and Grand St. in Soho, 1st Ave. and 12th St. in the East Village, and Park Ave. and 27th St. in Midtown. The fact that it can show up anywhere, anytime, and disappear before the cops come and take it away, creates "a beautiful ephemerality to the work, a sense of the fleeting, echoing the nature of the steam itself," Reigelman says. See more of Mark Reigelman's work on his website . Related: New York City Takes Public Art to the Digital Realm [NSFW] New York Graffiti Artist Speed-Hacks City Wi-Fi 'Projection Napping' Puts Sleeping Giants on NYC Buildings 'On Broadway' Is a Stunning, Data-Driven Portrait of Life in New York 2016-04-28 12:15 Beckett Mufson
63 International no. 308 May 2016 We are pleased to announce that the May 2016 issue of Flash Art International is out now. Following the death of Italian novelist, semiologist and philosopher Umberto Eco, this issue takes as its point of departure questions posed by Eco’s eponymous theory of the “ open work .” Eco’s collection of essays Opera Aperta [The Open Work] was published in 1962, when chance operations and indeterminacy became constitutive elements of the creative process. In today’s cultural climate, Eco’s thinking on “openness” remains relevant to art practice and criticism, providing “an urgent, irksome protest against the organization and management of all which lives,” as British artist Cally Spooner writes in this issue’s “Macro” essay. The newly introduced “Micro” essay, placed at the end of the issue, responds to “Macro” from the perspective of Italian art, earnestly bringing into the conversation the creative panorama from which this magazine was born. Here, Michele D’Aurizio finds echoes of Eco’s theory of the “open work” in the phenomenon of Italian Radical Design. Envisioning “objects that assume shapes that become whatever the users want them to be,” Radical Design is probably the most successful but understudied embodiment of “openness” ever born on Italian soil. The question of “openness” — and its valences — resonates throughout the entire issue, above all in our cover story devoted to American artist David Hammons. Conceived as a series of “open” questions, posed by a Wattis Institute research group under the guidance of Anthony Huberman , this feature riffs on an uncommonly raw, spiritual and politically charged art practice. Like a jazz musician, Hammons reinterprets art-making procedures in ways that result in unexpected, free-form resonances. But, as Huberman reminds us to ask: “What’s the relationship between improvisation and control? Isn’t it similar to that of a needle and thread?” Also in this issue: Tatiana De Pahlen talks with Bret Easton Ellis and Alex Israel about their collaborative text paintings and the centrality of Los Angeles’s landscape in both their practices. “In Los Angeles you only think that you’re coming here to reinvent yourself. While, what actually happens is that the city forces you to become who you really are.” — Bret Easton Ellis Myriam Ben Salah discusses the tension between individuality and community in Mélanie Matranga ’s environmental installations, objects and videos. “By giving space to the intimate and allowing singularities to blossom, Matranga creates situations that are saturated with emotion.” — Myriam Ben Salah Matthew Evans talks with Bill Kouligas about the role Kouligas’s Berlin-based record label PAN plays in documenting the growing significance of music and art crossovers. “It’s important for me to accommodate all these types of people who can’t really participate in the really specific, genre-type labels.” — Bill Kouligas åyr elaborates on the themes behind their upcoming installations on walls and orbs, to take place at the 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art and at the British Pavilion of the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale. Eli Diner explores Martine Syms ’s inquiries into representations of blackness. “Syms draws her fragments from the vast store of images of black figures. She reifies them, animates them, presents momentary specificity, and each fragment, in turn, slips back into generality. Remember that hers is a show about nowhere.” — Eli Diner In “Time Machine”: In a late-in-life interview with Alan Jones , from Flash Art International no. 140, May–June 1988, William N. Copley discusses his inspirations and working methods. “Had I taken painting seriously I don’t think I would have had the freedom that I started with. If you know what art isn’t , the whole world is before you.” — William N. Copley In “Reviews”: Fischli and Weiss at the Guggenheim, New York; Adam McEwen at Petzel, New York; Olivia Erlanger at What Pipeline, Detroit; Mathieu Malouf at Jenny’s, Los Angeles; Nathaniel Mellors at The Box, Los Angeles; Jorge Macchi at MALBA, Buenos Aires; Das Institut at Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London; Jesse Darling at Arcadia Missa, London; Elif Erkan at Weiss Berlin; Ceal Floyer at the Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau; “The Playground Project” at the Kunsthalle Zurich; Oscar Tuazon at Chantal Crousel, Paris; Guy de Cointet at Culturgest, Lisbon; Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio at T293, Rome; Evgeny Granilshchikov at the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow; Hemali Bhuta at Project 88, Mumbai; “Digging a Hole in China” at OCAT Shenzhen; Miho Dohi at Hagiwara Projects, Tokyo. Flash Art will be part of the “Reading Room” at the next edition of Frieze New York (May 5–8). Frieze New York 2016-04-28 11:50 www.flashartonline
64 Enter Yves Klein's Blue World on His Birthday Yves Klein made one thing clear in his 34 brief years on this Earth: Blue was his everything. "Blue has no dimensions," the French artist, who was born on April 28, 1928, once declared. "It is beyond dimensions. " Such was Klein's enchantment with the color that he would develop his very own hue along the spectrum: International Klein Blue (IKB). The art world is forever indebted to his artistic pursuits. His "Anthropometry" series, for instance—paintings born out of elaborate shows involving a live orchestra, an audience, and nude women painted in blue, which he called "living brushes"—is considered a prototype of performance art. His early work as a monochrome painter also lent much to the Minimalist art movement. But not everybody was a fan of Klein, so the artist drafted an essay called " Chelsea Hotel Manifesto " just a year before he passed away in 1962. Klein's essay addressed his critics, writing, "An artist always feels uneasy when called upon to speak of this own work. It should speak for itself, particularly when it is valid. " Love him or hate him, Klein's legacy persists today. His work is now the subject of a shared exhibition with Albert Giacometti at Gagosian London , which opened April 27 and runs through June 11. But among his contributions to the realm of art, Klein's works in blue remain the most memorable—a thread that runs across his timeline from his early days as a monochromist painter to his final years coating Greco-Roman busts with his special IKB pigment. To celebrate his birthday, artnet News rounded up some favorites below. Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-04-28 10:15 Rain Embuscado
65 Art Teacher Fired After Saying 'Vagina' Everyone knows that Georgia O'Keeffe 's flower paintings are highly suggestive, often resembling vulvas. And now everyone knows that you apparently cannot talk about that if you're a middle-school substitute art teacher in Michigan, thanks to national attention to a controversy roiling the school system in Harper Creek, near the city of Battle Creek. Allison Wint, 24, tells the Detroit Free Press that she was fired after repeatedly invoking the female sexual anatomy in a lecture on controversy that she delivered to a class of eighth-graders. She had been teaching at the school since January. According to the paper, Wint recalls her lecture going a little something like this: “Imagine walking into a gallery when [O'Keeffe] was first showing her pieces, and thinking, ‘Am I actually seeing vaginas here, am I a pervert? I'm either a pervert or this woman was a pervert.'" Wint says that her own little vagina monologue got her terminated the next day. Not so fast, says Harper Creek Middle School superintendent Rob Ridgeway, who insists that Wint was let go not so much for the content of the lecture as for departing from the set curriculum without informing the school beforehand. But seriously, Wint herself says that she used the word vagina “maybe ten times. " "She was not terminated due to uttering the word 'vagina,'" Ridgeway told the Free Press. On the other hand, the paper quotes school principal Kim Thayer, saying she confronted Wint the day after the controversy-themed presentation, saying that she had used the offending word “without previous approval. " Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-04-28 10:06 Brian Boucher
66 Collectors Gift $75 Million to LACMA The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has received a major boost to its fundraising efforts for its proposed $600 million expansion project , in the form of a combined $75 million gift from art collector and museum co-chair Elaine Wynn and Los Angeles billionaire collector A. Jerrold Perenchio. Related: This Is How LACMA Buys Art The donations, $50 million from Wynn and $25 million from Perenchio, bring LACMA close to the half-way point in its fundraising efforts. Their generosity will go a long ways toward silencing the doubts of those who thought the museum's goal was unachievable. To date, the museum has financial commitments totaling $275 million, including $125 million from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. The rest is expected to come from private donations. "There has been quite a bit of work to get the project to this point," LACMA director and chief executive Michael Govan told the New York Times. "These two gifts together are the largest single pledge to a cultural institution in LA. " Related: Leonardo DiCaprio to Donate John Gerrard's Massive Installation to LACMA With her ex-husband, art collector Steve Wynn, Elaine Wynn co-founded the Mirage and Wynn Resorts. She has been a LACMA board member since 2011, and its co-chair since 2015. The promised gift from Perenchio, a former Univision chairman who helped launch Elton John's career, follows his November 2014 pledge to donate $500 million in art to the museum. "Everything that is new and fun and earth-shattering is happening in LA, and we want to be the bellwether of all that energy," Wynn told the Los Angeles Times. She credits Perenchio's initial donation for inspiring her to give: "He was the first one to have the guts and nerve to make the commitment. He deserves all the credit. " Other recent gifts to the institution, which turned 50 last year, include Jane and Marc Nathanson's estimated $50 million gift of eight modern and contemporary works of art by the likes of Damien Hirst , Roy Lichtenstein , Julian Schnabel , Frank Stella , and Andy Warhol , and four paintings donated by Lynda and Stewart Resnick. Related: Thelma Golden, LACMA's Newest Board Member, Extends Her Influence to the West Coast The museum's Peter Zumthor-designed building plan, which was previously revamped to avoid affecting the nearby La Brea Tar Pits , will replace four of the museum's seven buildings. Work is slated to begin in mid-to-late 2018, but must first receive public approval and pass an environmental review, scheduled for this summer. Wynn and Perenchio's pledges are contingent on the expansion getting the final go-ahead from the city. If this happens, the finished project could welcome visitors in 2023. Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-04-28 09:53 Sarah Cascone
67 Koki Tanaka Recreates 1985 Liverpool Strike One school day in April 1985, thousands of children skipped class to hit the streets in protest of the Conservative government's ineffective Youth Training Scheme (YTS), a botched attempt at redressing record lows in youth unemployment in the UK. Japanese artist Koki Tanaka is heading to the 2016 Liverpool Biennial with a participatory performance piece that recreates the 10,000- person strike that took place in the city over 30 years ago. This June, the artist hopes to bring together as many of the original participants of the 1985 demonstration, as well as their children, for a walk that retraces the protest route. In an interview with the Guardian , Tanaka said that he's determined to reach out to as many of the original marchers as possible. "I wanted to see how these kids have grown up… [and] what they think about the present situation. " The artist plans on leading them from the St. George's Hall to the Pier Head, and hopes to facilitate interviews between the protesters and their children. Tanaka is known for taking an interest in individual and collective behavior. His video piece in the Japanese Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale , for instance, delved into the possibilities and challenges of collaboration through footage of five potters working on one piece of pottery. More recently, in his first major solo exhibition in Japan at Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito , which opened last February and runs through this May, Tanaka offers up video works that document a six-day lodging experience of strangers living under one roof. At the Liverpool Biennial, the United Kingdom's largest contemporary art festival, Tanaka will be just one of 42 artists commissioned to install works throughout the city. An additional 10 associate artists working in the north of England will be featured in a special showcase. Participants hail from the UK, Australia, Belgium, China, France, Greece, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Palestine, Portugal, Russia, and Taiwan. The Liverpool Biennial is on view at various sites across the city, July 9–October 16, 2016. Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-04-28 09:52 Rain Embuscado
68 Alison Knowles Makes a Giant Salad at Art Basel This summer, Alison Knowles is making a salad —and she needs your help. The legendary performance artist will be performing her seminal Make A Salad (1962) at Art Basel. However this is no ordinary meal. Performers will prepare various salad ingredients before emptying the contents onto a large tarp. Fair visitors and onlookers can participate by helping to toss the salad high into the air, before it is served. "In a nutshell, what Alison does is [she] prepares and chops vegetables, mixes dressing, and basically makes a salad for the audience or participants in this performance," Knowles' gallerist James Fuentes explained in a telephone interview with artnet News. "Alison is a pioneer in performance art, and this food-related performance is sometimes cited as being a precursor of performances that we're familiar within relational aesthetics," he said. "Alison was at the forefront of these things and we're really excited that she's going to have the opportunity to present a very important work within her oeuvre within the context of Art Basel. " The 82-year-old artist's work will be performed in "Unlimited," a platform which gives galleries and artists to display works that transcend the traditional art fair stand, such as large-scale sculptures, video projections, installations, or performance art. Gianni Jetzer, a curator-at-large for the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, is curating "Unlimited" for the fifth consecutive year. Aside from Knowles' performance, "Unlimited" will also included works by artists such as Ai Weiwei , El Anatsui , Elmgreen & Dragset , Tracey Emin , Isa Genzken , Mike Kelley , William Kentridge , Pamela Rosenkranz , and many others. Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-04-28 09:07 Henri Neuendorf
69 Man Assaulted for Looking Like Shia LaBeouf Sometimes, looking like a celebrity comes at a price. Art director Mario Licato was sucker punched on his way out of the subway at the Delancey Street station in New York last weekend because of his physical similarity to the Hollywood actor and sometime performance artist Shia LaBeouf. “This is because you look exactly like Shia LaBeouf," the attacker reportedly shouted, before running away. "I was walking up the stairs," Licato told Gothamist. "I had my head down—there were people in front of me—just to make sure I wasn't going to fall. " "I literally just saw a fist for a split second," he told the New York Daily News. http://instagram.com/p/BEm0LV6Idse/?taken-by=mariolicato Licato came to with blood all over his face, before an ambulance arrived to attend to his bruises, which have spread into a black eye. On hearing of the unfortunate event to befall his doppelganger, LaBeouf got his hands on Licato's number and left him a heartfelt voicemail, SFGate reports. "I'm so sorry. But I get it. It's happened to me before," LaBeouf told Licato before leaving his number, offering support. "I wish I was in New York. I'd come bring you soup […]. We could chat. Let's giggle over this. Maybe there's a silver lining in all this. " Licato's attacker, described onlookers as a "6-foot to 6-foot-3 white frat boy," has not been found. http://instagram.com/p/BEtHYbrodqY/?taken-by=mariolicato On being asked whether he had been mistaken for the Transformers actor before, Licato confessed it is indeed a regular occurrence. "[…] That's why I knew I wasn't that crazy," Licato told Gothamist . “I got it three years ago. I've been stopped on the street before, at least 10 times in my life. " "I wanna know what Shia LaBeouf did to him," Licato exclaimed, rightfully mystified, before receiving the call from LaBeouf. "What did Shia LaBeouf do to him that he punched somebody that looks like him? He must have did something so mean. Did he steal his girlfriend? Did he just see his last performance art piece? " Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-04-28 08:45 Amah-Rose
70 Raster Noton Launches Installation at Berghain Raster Noton, the Chemnitz and Berlin-based electronic music label founded by artist Carsten Nicolai , Olaf Bender, and Frank Brettschneider is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a touring showcase that is making its way to Berlin tonight. Known for its unifying approach to dance music, scientific aesthetics, and art, the label's collaborative White Circle light and sound installation kicked off the celebration (and Gallery Weekend) with an intimate preview last night at the Halle am Berghain, a vast concrete space within the Berghain complex often reserved for large scale art and music events. And for Nicolai, size mattered. While the installation was specifically designed for and previously shown in the 47-speaker “sounddome" system at the ZKM in Karlsruhe this past March, the artist was eager to see its effect in a larger space. “The dimensions at the Halle fit to the installation, particularly in regards to being able to experience it from both the inside and outside. " The “inside" here is a circle, some 4 meters in diameter, with a perimeter defined by dozens of evenly spaced vertical white fluorescent lights. Behind them, some sixteen speakers and four subwoofers played different pieces by the label founders plus label veteran Kangding Ray on multiple channels, triggering the lights and their intensity. The sounds ranged from the buzzing, scraping bursts of modular synth noise to syncopated arpeggios and the ultra-precise abstract techno the label is also known for. The effect, after a few minutes in the center of the circle, is that the visual and the auditory change places, with the lights defining the experienced rhythm and the sound defining the physical space. Music becomes the installation's architecture, and the glow its pace of change. Occasionally, the combination of location and the installation's more techno-oriented pieces seemed to imply an experimental dance floor, synesthetically re-imagined. There's long been a connection between German electronic music and the art world, beginning with members of Kraftwerk and Can studying under the likes of Joseph Beuys and Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, and continuing through today's house and techno artists doubling and sometimes tripling as musicians, gallerists, and label owners. Some of the most famous examples include Cologne's Kompakt label, headed by ambient techno meister Wolfgang Voigt, who, as we reported last October , recently collaborated on an installation with Albert Oehlen at the Jablonka Gallery 's Böhm Chapel. Kompakt's cover art has also featured portraits by painter Matthias Schaufler,whose brother Aksel Schaufler is better known as producer Superpitcher. Further north in the port city of Hamburg, artist and owner of New York and Berlin based Mathew gallery, David Lieske (producer name Carsten Jost), founded Dial Records together with Peter M. Kersten aka Lawrence in 1999. Since then the label has consistently released some of the most celebrated melodic, Chicago-inspired post-minimal house releases this side of the Atlantic. Meanwhile in Berlin, Berghain's long-standing relationship with artists such as Piotr Nathan, Wolfgang Tillmans , and Norbert Bisky has seen the art-filled club host multiple exhibitions and release a book on the art it has inspired. The club's Ostgut Ton imprint also has featured Tillmans-designed cover art for more than a decade. “I suppose the difference between us and these other labels is that we do was never just anchored in the club," says Nicolai. Indeed, Raster Noton's holistic approach to its musical releases, visuals, and installations stands apart. Technology and futurism make up the foundation of seemingly everything it's ever produced, and in that sense, “techno" for the label was never merely a genre but a kind of aesthetic (and vaguely political) manifesto: the glitchy, occasionally pounding minimalist sounds of cybernetic systems controlling our daily lives. Much of the label's penchant for white noise and piercing highs, translated to precise light installations, owe arguably as much to strobing dance floors as they do to the late Tony Conrad's "Flicker" films and drones. It's a sound and vision that has consistently spanned Raster Noton's 20-year existence. While it's not new, it remains powerful. And if it ain't broke, that's a good enough reason to dance to it at extremely high volumes—which you can do tonight at Berghain, with live performances and DJ sets by Nicolai himself, aka Alva Noto, Byetone, Frank Brettschneider, Grischa Lichtenberger, Dasha Rush, Atom TM and more. If you're not deaf and blind after that, you can also check out Nicolai's smaller light installation reflektor distortion at EIGEN + ART, which is officially part of Berlin Gallery Weekend . Raster-Noton's White Circle installationis on view at the Halle Am Berghain from April 28 – 30 "Carsten Nicolai, reflektor distortion" is on view at Galerie EIGEN + ART Berlin from April 21 – May 28 Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-04-28 08:14 A.
71 Lego Says Refusing Ai Weiwei Was a Mistake- Lego vice-chairman Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen has said that the company's refusal to supply Ai Weiwei with a bulk order last year was a mistake. “It was an internal mistake," Kristiansen told the Wall Street Journal , adding that the decision to refuse the order was taken by a low level employee, who took the company's policy too literally, and that the board was not involved. “It is a typical example of what can go wrong in a big company," said Thomas Kirk Kristiansen, son and successor of Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen. Last year, the Chinese activist and artist accused the Danish toy company of censorship, after it refused to fill a bulk order by the artist for his exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, posting the following statement via his Instagram account: “In September Lego refused Ai Weiwei studio's request for a bulk order of Legos to create artwork to be shown at the National Gallery of Victoria, as ‘they cannot approve the use of Legos for political works'. " In response, thousands of people around the world sent Ai millions of pieces of Lego in order to allow him to complete the work , with collection points set up in globally , including China, Australia, and the UK. Ai compared the company's rigid company policy to that of the Chinese government. He accused Lego of refusing to supply him to protect its business interests, as the company was due to open a factory in China in 2017, an accusation that has been denied by Kristiansen. Thomas Kirk went on to tell WSJ that political neutrality was still of core importance to Lego, although conceded that the company's refusal to supply the Ai could also be considered a political act. In January of this year, Lego changed its policy of asking why people were purchasing large amounts of their products before agreeing to supply them. The only stipulation for those now wishing to create public projects using large amounts of the product will be to make it clear that they have not been endorsed by the Danish company. Ai told WSJ that he was pleased Lego had changed their company line but added that the change came "a bit too late. " Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-04-28 06:23 Amah-Rose
72 Huda Lutfi Takes Viewers on a Tour Around Cairo at The Third Line Related Venues The Third Line Dubai’s The Third Line Gallery is presenting a new series of Egyptian artist Huda Lutfi’s unconventional photocollages in its latest exhibition, “Magnetic Bodies: Imaging the Urban.” Perhaps best known for her found object sculptures that use objects from perfume bottles and bottles to critique gender stereotypes, the majority of the work in “Magnetic Bodies,” which comes to Dubai from Cairo, consists of photocollages, full of images that could only come from an artist like Lutfi, educated as a cultural feminist historian. In works like “Inside the Box,” 2015, a mixed media piece featuring a multi-limbed eggplant within a Francis Bacon-like cube, Lutfi combines the often hilarious feminist photocollaging of artists like Hannah Höch or Linder Sterling with a modern sensibility influenced by contemporary sexual politics and even emojis. In addition to these works, the most prominent in the exhibition are the artist’s photocollage portrait of her hometown, Cairo. In this work, “The City Goes Pop,” 2015, the artist represents Cairo as she sees it, combining her own photography with images past and present from the city and its artistic heritage. The result are dense, layered portraits that provide a unique viewpoint of the Egyptian capital. Although these images do connect to Lutfi’s past work, with images of mannequins continuing to appear in her work as they have over the past decade, a new drive towards documentary is prominent in the artist’s work since the Egyptian Revolution in 2011. Perhaps this was because the city (and the country in general) became itself more like a photocollage, with the history of the country being written or pasted over with a new history. Speculations aside, Lutfi’s work here provides the artist’s unique view of the city. 2016-04-28 06:07 Samuel Spencer
Total 72 articles. Created at 2016-04-29 06:03