McElheny, Mies, & Modernism

In this week’s Art:21 video and interview The Alpine Cathedral and the City-Crown, artist Josiah McElheny references a number of modernist figures and projects, from architects Bruno Taut and Mies van der Rohe to the failed Chicago housing project Cabrini-Green. See what he’s talking about in these videos on YouTube:

VIDEO | Josiah McElheny presenting at MoMA
The lecture that Josiah McElheny gave at MoMA on the topic of “Artists and Models” is a condensed overview, with the artist riffing on Isamu Noguchi, Buckminster Fuller, and other modernist icons.

VIDEO | Farnsworth House
This all access tour of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House illustrates some of what Josiah McElheny means when he says about Modernist architecture that “you have to live like the building tells you to live.”

VIDEO | Mies on Architecture Island
Did it take virtual reality to realize the utopian ideals of modernism? Take a Second Life tour of Mies van der Rohe’s Fansworth House on Architecture Island (The Homestead).

VIDEO | Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
Art:21 artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Season 4) brings a sinister edge to modern architecture in Climate (2000), filmed in Mies van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago.

VIDEO | Cabrini Green: Past and Present
Josiah McElheny’s question “how do you both believe in utopia…and at the same time keep it within limits?” can be felt in this homemade video when the narrator states that Chicago’s Cabrini-Green “started out as a place where poor people had hope.”

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle | “Oppenheimer”

EXCLUSIVE: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s film Oppenheimer (2003) and mural Time (2003) installed at the Rochester Art Center, Minnesota.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s technologically sophisticated works use natural forms such as clouds, icebergs, and DNA as metaphors for understanding social issues such as immigration, gun violence, and human cloning. The artist´s strategy of representing nature through information leads to an investigation of the underlying forces that shape the planet as well as points of human interaction and interference with the environment.

SEE: More images, videos, and news for Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle.

LEARN: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Ecology of the Art:21 — Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.

DISCUSS: What do you think about this video? Leave a comment!

PHOTO | Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, details of (Left) Oppenheimer, 2003 and (Right) Time, 2003. Courtesy the artist and Max Protetch, New York.

VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Mark Falstad. Sound: Heidi Hesse. Editor: Steven Wechsler. Artwork courtesy: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle. Thanks: Rochester Contemporary Art Center.

Art21 artists in “TRANSactions” in Atlanta

TRANSactions: Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art, a group show which opened on March 15 at the High Museum in Atlanta features work from three Art21 artists. Alfredo Jaar, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle (both Season 4), and Gabriel Orozco (Season 2) have contributed work to this exhibition which explores the boundaries of cultural identity while celebrating universal themes. The show contains work from artists in eight countries, and surveys the rich variety of methods and concerns of contemporary Latinos, dispelling the myth that they are a homogeneous cultural group.

You can find the press release for this traveling show here.

Spotlight on Ecology: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle was born in Madrid, Spain in 1961, and was raised in Bogotá, Colombia and Chicago, Illinois. He earned a BA in art and art history, and a BA in Latin American and Spanish literature, from Williams College (1983), and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1989). Manglano-Ovalle’s technologically sophisticated sculptures and video installations use natural forms such as clouds, icebergs, and DNA as metaphors for understanding social issues such as immigration, gun violence, and human cloning. In collaboration with astrophysicists, meteorologists, and medical ethicists, Manglano-Ovalle harnesses extraterrestrial radio signals, weather patterns, and biological code, transforming pure data into digital video projections and sculptures realized through computer rendering. His strategy of representing nature through information leads to an investigation of the underlying forces that shape the planet as well as points of human interaction and interference with the environment. Manglano-Ovalle’s work is attentive to points of intersection between local and global communities, emphasizing the intricate nature of ecosystems. He has received many awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award (2001) and a Media Arts Award from the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (1997‚Äì2001), as well as a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1995). He has had major exhibitions at the Rochester Art Center, Minnesota (2006); Art Institute of Chicago (2005); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico (2003); Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Ohio (2002); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1997). Manglano-Ovalle lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.

Watch a clip from Manglano-Ovalle’s Art:21 segment:

“Sometimes I think that people mistake my interest in science, thinking that I’m delving into science for its technology and its research. Really, I’m going through the back door. I’m interested in science as part of culture, as a cultural manifestation. I think of art as not necessarily being made in the studio, but through many conversations, interruptions, and different types of inputs so that one can’t discern if one made the work oneself or if so much has penetrated the process that the work (it’s authorship) is exploded and unlocatable. I also think that is part of science…People think that art fits solely in culture, and that science is not culture. I’m interested in science generated as a cultural necessity.”

(excerpted from the companion book Art in the Twenty-First Century 4, p. 35).

Read more about his work and watch additional clips on his Art:21 webpage here.

Have you experienced Manglano-Ovalle’s work in person, or did you have an opportunity to view his segment in one of the hundreds of Art21 Access ‘07 events that have been taking place all month? Share your thoughts on Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle by leaving a comment below.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s Phantom Truck at Documenta 12

Season Four featured artist, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, has a new installation on view at Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany.

Manglano-Ovalle, a MacArthur Fellow from 2001 through 2005, presents Phantom Truck, a real scale reproduction of a mobile biological weapons lab as described by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell when addressing the U.N. Security Council, prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The sculpture is a hybrid of renderings used by Colin Powell and photographs of actual truck trailers found by Kurdish and U.S. Military forces after the invasion. The trailers found and photographed in Iraq after the U.S. invasion were later determined not to be capable of biological weapons production. Manglano-Ovalle has produced a platonic idealization of the mobile lab, giving reality to this ‘phantom truck’, only to conceal it again within the confines of a darkened space hidden within the exhibition.

The work is on view at Documenta from June 16 - September 23, 2007

Originally published in Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s web site.

See more images of this work on Flickr.
Read the press release here.