Artist iGoogle Museum
Two weeks ago, you might have noticed Jeff Koons’ giant metallic tulips decorating your Google homepage. The search engine giant invited international artists and innovators to create custom page layouts to introduce new iGoogle themes. Users can choose from Jeff Koons, Todd Oldham, Beasties, and more to decorate their iGoogle homepage for free, and the layouts change throughout the day. Apparently the geniuses at Google also launched iGoogle ArtCafes with exhibitions in Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills and blog. Virtual Japanese retailer zozo then launched an Artist iGoogle Museum. Rather than paying each artist, Google made donations to charity. My iGoogle homepage is currently set to ‘Shepard Fairey,’ who is having his first major museum show of early stencils, guerilla street art campaigns and new work at The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston in February 2009. Find out what really happens when great art mixes with the Google homepage.
Dialog:City in Denver
Later this summer, from August 22-29, the Denver metro area will host Dialog:City, a convergence of education, art and democracy. Slated as an exhibition and cultural event that “catalyzes civic discourse by inviting internationally renowned artists and designers to create participatory, interactive, and dialogical site-specific works in neighborhoods across the city.”
Taking place concurrently in Denver with the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Dialog:City has invited ten artists including R. Luke Dubois, Sharon Hayes, Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, and Art:21 artists Ann Hamilton (Season 1) and Krzysztof Wodiczko (Season 3). Most of the artists will present site-specific installations that are simultaneous collaborations and initiatives with local schools and community groups to address topics such as “greening” and “what democracy means to you.”
Matthew Ritchie at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie’s The Hierarchy Problem (2003) and The Fine Constant (2003) are on view at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao as part of Installations: Selections from the Guggenheim Collections, an exhibition curated by Nat Trotman and which just opened a couple of days ago. Together with three more pieces by artists David Altmejd (The University 2, 2004), Rirkrit Tiravanija (Untitled 2002 - he promised-, 2002) and Javier Pérez (Mask of Seduction, 1997), Ritchie’s multipart installation completes the selection of works that look to envelop audiences in the total experiences provided by their installations, which gain their full meaning through interaction and participation. Viewers are encouraged to dive into the pieces and explore architectural constructions and spaces through painting, sound, sculpture and a variety of different media.
In a playful game of space and physics, The Hierarchy Problem and The Fine Constant create relationships between different objects (a mural, a painting, a carpet, a light box and a sculpture), materializing the visual connections that exist in space between these objects and thus turning what we usually cannot see (the space between things in the vastness of the material universe) into a physical reality. The system of symbols used in Ritchie’s murals has a very particular beauty and appeal to the eye. Their black over white curving shapes seem to form almost an alphabet where our gaze is lost when trying to decipher its meaning.
For more information and other related materials on installations visit http://www.guggenheim-bilbao.es
Jenny Holzer on Twitter
Current Jenny Holzer (Season 4) Twitter message:
INHERITANCE MUST BE ABOLISHED
To see more of the artist’s aphorisms on the social networking site, click here.
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.
James Turrell Skyspace at Pomona College
Pomona College alumnus James Turrell (Season 1) has produced a Skyspace for his alma mater in the Draper Courtyard of the campus, realized in collaboration with consulting architects Marmol Radziner + Associates AIA. It is the first Skyspace regularly accessible to the public in Southern California.
Skyspace takes the form of an architectural optical illusion that heightens the viewer’s perception of light and space, whereby a seemingly paper-thin ceiling opens a rectangular frame “into” the sky above. For Pomona, Turrell has created an artificial transitioning keyed to sunrise and sunset using a floating metal canopy with sensors programmed to change in intensity and hue on the underside. Directly beneath, a shallow pool echoes the changing light and time.
Turrell studied mathematics and perceptual psychology at Pomona in the early 1980s. Appropriately, the new Skyspace is situated among the buildings housing the academic disciplines related to the science of mind –psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science– as well as the earth sciences of geology and environmental analysis.
In addition to the new Skyspace, the Pomona College Museum of Art is presenting James Turrell at Pomona College, an exhibition uniting the various threads of Turrell’s artistic practice. The exhibition continues through May 17, 2008. For further information, please visit www.pomona.edu/museum.
Sikander and Barney in concurrent shows at MIT’s List Center
Matthew Barney and Shahzia Sikander, both Season 1 artists, currently have exhibitions at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center in Boston. Barney is best known for his work in sculpture and video, but his printmaking practice is an interesting and unexplored part of his body of work. As a result Photogravure Prints from Drawing Restraint 9 will have a lot to offer those attempting to keep up with the ever-expansive Barney mythology. Drawing Restraint 9, the latest in Barney’s ongoing metaphorical investigation of creativity, takes place on a Japanese whaling ship, and shows Barney, his life partner Bj√∂rk, and the ship’s crew ritualistically recreating his field emblem image with petroleum jelly. The prints in this exhibit are from production stills showing this sequence.
Shahzia Sikander’s Pursuit Curve is a digital animation with accompanying music by composer David Abir. Sikander uses the pursuit curve, a mathematical function which describes the progress of a chase, as a visual starting point from which to investigate the way culture, identity, and iconography interact. These brightly colored sequences, which contain suggestions of bomb blasts, fireworks, and turbans, resist easy interpretation, and challenge viewers to name what they’re seeing. The animation is currently playing continuously throughout the day at the Media Test Wall. You can find more information about the exhibition here.
Laurie Anderson takes “Homeland” on tour
Multimedia artist Laurie Anderson (Season 1) will be taking her new politico-musical on global tour starting March 26th with a kick-off at Carnegie Hall. As previously mentioned by Art21 guest blogger Seth Curcio, Homeland is composed of a series of narratives and songs that harvest everything from Greek drama to global warming, surveillance culture, the machinations of corporate America, Tuvan throat singing, technology, the Patriot Act, and even prostitution in Beverly Hills.
The full-length piece marks a return to subject matter than Anderson explored 25 years ago with United States: Parts I-IV, a work that established the artist as an innovator with a penchant for analyzing the collective psyche. Focused through the lens of technology, Anderson’s early vision of America intersected music, film, performance, electronics, and gesture-driven movement using images of telephone answering machines, televisions, and gadgetry that unmasked the human condition and ultimately heralded the age of the Internet.
Homeland ‚Äúcomes full circle with her perpetual analysis of America’s rarely talked-about inner psyche‚ĶTo watch Anderson perform is to revel in her honesty. She imparts natural truths encoded in our DNA, whether soliloquizing a narrative based on folklore or reminiscing about a trip to the laundromat in a dream. Anderson’s music and monologues are rapturous temples dedicated to our everyday existence, revealing our own insecurities‚Äù (Randy Nordschow, Playbill Arts).
An accompanying album to Homeland will be released in early 2009 on Nonesuch. For a complete listing of cities and dates for Homeland, please visit Pitchfork Media’s website.
James Turrell at Aspen’s Baldwin Gallery
If you are lucky enough to be in Aspen, check out Season 2 artist James Turrell’s Light Works 2002-2007 exhibition before it closes this Sunday at the Baldwin Gallery. Renowned for his complex explorations into perception, light, and space, Turrell is showing sixteen “hologram” installations. Placing the viewer in a realm of “pure experience,” each work is a one of a kind dichromate reflection hologram developed by the artist himself. By recording light waves on a handmade transparent emulsion applied to glass, the resulting images appear to have depth from almost any perspective.
Like many of his other works, the illusion of Holograms is realized only with the audience’s interaction. Turrell’s optical trickery persuades the viewer to forgo conscious analysis of the phenomenon and look more completely at the meditative act of transformation.
For gallery hours and further information, please visit the Baldwin Gallery website.
Baldwin Gallery
209 South Galena Street
Aspen, CO 81611
Mark Dion talk at the Ulrich Museum in Wichita
Tomorrow at 6:00pm, the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, KS (a Season 4 mini-grant partner) presents a talk by Season 4 artist Mark Dion. Dion’s interest in the natural world takes him around the globe as he probes the scientific practices that develop and construct our knowledge of the environment. Adopting scientific modes of investigation and display, the artist’s resulting installations often question and upend these traditional methods.
For more information, please contact the Ulrich Museum (316-978-3664/ulrich@wichita.edu).
Wichita State University
School of Art and Design
210 McKnight Art Center West
1845 Fairmount Street
Wichita, KS 67260
