Some great work that seems appropriate to the times. I don’t think she has any exhibitions anytime soon, but she was in the not-very-well-received “Unmonumental” show at the New Museum, and I came across her book It Ain’t Gonna Lick Itself recently. Of I Want Kids (above), Lisa Mark writes:

The figure itself vaguely resembles a Japanese gundam robot with its clunky, bottom-heavy legs and overbearing scale. Made from men’s pajama fabric stretched over a wooden framework, its torso is flat and taut like a stretched canvas … Despite the many masculine signifiers, there is also something primal and feminine about the work: without its flaccid phallus, it would appear static, but the dangling member creates a downward pull reminiscent of squatting–the preferred method of delivering babies in many non-western cultures.

Whoa:

A convict on death row in Texas has agreed to let his body be made into a work of art if his final appeal fails, The Guardian of London reported. Gene Hathorn, who was convicted of killing his father, stepmother and stepbrother in 1985, has given his consent for the Danish artist Marco Evaristti to use his body as an art installation. Mr. Evaristti said he hoped the piece would contribute to a wider project against capital punishment. He told The Art Newspaper: “My aim is to first deep freeze Gene’s body and then make fish food out of it. Visitors to my exhibition will be able to feed goldfish with it.” Mr. Evaristti said lawyers in the United States doubted whether Mr. Hathorn’s testament, which bequeaths his body to Mr. Evaristti, would be valid.

I think Evaristti is a pretty bad artist, because his work seems to shout rather than whisper, in a fairly obvious and needy sort of way. (Whispering in a needy sort of way is always more interesting, no?) In the past, he has painted an iceberg red, and fed his friends meatballs made from his own fat. For death art, much better is the unblinkingly grim Gregor Schneider.

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.

Continue Reading »

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:

Continue Reading »

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.

Continue Reading »

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