Here’s an interesting opening, tomorrow night. More work below—though sorry for all the crappy images; Foster’s internet presence, and that of his gallery, RARE, is infuriating. Like 1996, but not in a good throwback way. Trust me, most of it’s better than the piece above.
So awesome: graphics ripped from b-ball t-shirts of the early Jordan era, crossed with an episode of Flash Gordon featuring wormholes and teleportation devices. More at the artist’s website. Or here:
Roberta Smith is a straight-up genius. This isn’t a genius article, but here she rounds up notable recent works of public art, and makes a seemingly obvious point: It’s finally gotten good. Her article is a good scrapbook of good shit from the last 15 years:
ART adores a vacuum. That’s why styles, genres and mediums left for dead by one generation are often revived by subsequent ones. In the 1960s and ’70s public sculpture was contemporary art’s foremost fatality — deader than painting actually. The corpse generally took the form of corporate, pseudo-Minimalist plop art. It was ignored by the general public and despised by the art world.
At the time many of the most talented emerging sculptors were making anything but sculpture. Ephemeral installations, earthworks and permanent site-specific works were in vogue, and soon the very phrase “public sculpture” had been replaced by public art, an amorphous new category in which art could be almost anything: LED signs, billboards, slide or video projections, guerrilla actions, suites of waterfalls.
But over the past 15 years public sculpture — that is, static, often figurative objects of varying sizes in outdoor public spaces — has become one of contemporary art’s more exciting areas of endeavor and certainly its most dramatically improved one
Image about is the Koons float from the Macy’s Parade a couple years ago.
An interesting article about Woods—pegged to a new show at MoMA. He’s the quintissential paper architect, who produces drawings rather than buildings. The article makes him seem valiant, rather than retarded and naive (which is where my inclination lies):
In the early 1990s this irreverent New York architect produced a series of dark and moody renderings that made him a cult figure among students and academics. Foreboding images of bombed-out cities populated by strange, parasitic structures, they seemed to portray a world in a perpetual state of war, one in which the architect’s task was to create safe houses for society’s outcasts.
Since then Mr. Woods has become his own kind of outcast.
Architecture is big business today. While most of his friends and colleagues have abandoned their imaginary cities to chase lucrative commissions, Mr. Woods has shown little interest in building. Instead he continues to work at a small drafting table in a corner of his downtown apartment, a solitary, monklike figure churning out increasingly abstract architectural fantasies, several of which are on view in the “Dreamland” show at the Museum of Modern Art.
Anyone know? More pictures here. It’s amazing—like something straight out of a Borges story. (My fave might be Tlon, but the effects of these stories build upon one another, making it hard to get the full force by reading just one.) Via ***/*
UPDATE: Thanks to Mark: I found out that it’s a “step-well” in India.
I’d never heard of Mannis before, but Fecal Face has an interview up and now I’m kind of intrigued. (Check out this amusing video.) His works seems very much in the vein of the faded psychedelia we’re seeing so much of lately.
Was never drawn to her work until I saw this stuff, which strikes me as freshly evocative of dead art movements (especially Dada, and the first thirty years of the 20th century), without being sentimental at all. The artist is one of the co-owner’s of the reliably good gallery Guild & Greyshkul. Via I Heart Photograph.
I like this clip when the gore gets going, at about 4:20 when the maid gets her hands on a chainsaw. More clips here.
A little bit late to the game on this one, but Fecal Face has an interview with Gruzis, who paints in a retro 80’s style, using ink wash that ends up looking a little bit Longo, a little bit Sugimoto. And he’s got a solo show at Deitch this October.