Everyone’s favorite metaphysicist has a new show at David Zwirner opening on Sept. 11:

My own work has puzzled me-especially as it relates to the plank. I kept wondering if I was being habitual or obsessive or responding to demand, or if there was more to this plank form than I consciously realized. I wondered if they were a life form from somewhere that was channeling through me and it didn’t make any difference if I understood them or not. It worried me a bit-I believe in being intuitive but not being unconscious. I started to realize that these were figurative things that are both in the world and out of it. Because it leans at an angle, when you put a plank in a room, it kind of screws things up-it can be a little disturbing, but I found I liked that. When you set things vertically they go with everything but when you set them at an angle then you have something that shifts away from our reality. It’s partly in the world and partly out of the world. It’s like a visit. … I do try to make things that look like they come from somewhere else-from a UFO or a futuristic environment or another dimension. That things exist in more than one dimension at one time is something that’s more than a fascination for me, it’s relevant to the human world. I think that humans exist in more than one dimension at once.

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earthworks and permanent site-specific works were in vogue, and soon the very phrase “public sculpture” had been replaced by public art, an amorphous new category in which art could be almost anything: LED signs, billboards, slide or video projections, guerrilla actions, suites of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.

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.

A series of video projects from James Elliot (Ateleia) and Sadek Bazaraa, who first started collaborating at the end of 2004 for the Netmage digital arts festival in Italy. Glacial, in a good way.

via GHava{Blog}

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.

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Awesomely lo-tech, no? Via Hatena::Diary.

Via Artforum:

A giant inflatable dog turd created by the artist Paul McCarthy was blown from its moorings at the Paul Klee Center in Bern, Switzerland, bringing down a power line and breaking a window before landing on the grounds of a children’s home, reports The Guardian’s Jenny Percival. The work, titled Complex Shit, is the size of a house. It has a safety system that is supposed to deflate it in bad weather, but it did not work on this occasion. Juri Steiner, the director of the center, told Agence France-Presse that a sudden gust of wind carried it 650 feet before it fell to the ground, landing in the yard of the children’s home. The accident happened on July 31, but the details only emerged yesterday. Steiner said McCarthy had not yet been contacted and the museum was not sure whether the piece would be put back on display. The installation is part of an exhibition called “East of Eden: A Garden Show.” The exhibition opened in May and is due to run until October.

Margot Quan Knight seems to be taking a cue from Charlie White in her CG-assisted neo-surrealistic photography.

Make the jump for a few more images. or Visit her site.

Via: i heart photograph

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New show up at Mori, her first solo exhibition in Japan. Above photo via erdalito.

A still from this beautiful video by Martijn Hendriks. Beautiful. Via Today and Tomorrow.