Posts Tagged ‘arTists’
Monday, July 5th, 2010
 The Eye Sculpture On the ides of June, while squinting at a cluster of threatening clouds from his perch on a grassy construction site just outside of Sparta, WI. this small city, Chicago sculptor Tony Tasset is, to use his words, totally freaking out.
“You know those reality shows?” Tasset says, a slightly uneasy smile on his face. “This is that part when the team is up against their deadline, and it looks like they’re never going to finish on time.”
Tasset’s “team” is made up of a half-dozen fiberglass workers at Sparta’s Fast Corp. (Fiberglass Animals Shapes and Trademarks), who have been assigned to construct the artist’s largest piece to date: a giant eyeball aptly named Eye, which, upon completion, will stand three stories tall and stare east from the Loop’s Pritzker Park, at State and Van Buren streets. Tasset was commissioned for the job last fall by the Chicago Loop Alliance, and Fast Corp., with which he had collaborated on prior sculptures (including a 12-foot-high eyeball), took the engineering reins earlier this year.
Source: Chicago Tribune
Tags: arT, arThou, arTists, sculptures
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Sunday, April 11th, 2010
Homeowner turns his property into a truly unique landscape
 Art work at the home of Chuck and Pilar Bahde of Rancho Santa Fe (photo by Charlie Neuman) When Chuck Bahde bought the rambling wooden house in Rancho Santa Fe, the 5-acre spread already had plenty of grass and gardens. But that wasn’t to his liking. Besides, it seemed such a waste of water to keep the lawn green. So Bahde set out to create a new landscape, filled with meandering streams, pools and waterfalls — all created with blue and green glass, hand-painted rocks and plastic.
Today dozens of artworks adorn Bahde’s expansive property, in addition to the waterless pools and rivers. Every last piece is made from recycled or found materials. Pebbles, broken bottles, computer chips, seashells, beads, railroad ties, old-fashioned glass doorknobs and even an old, 5-cent parking meter have been turned into artwork in his hands.
A solar panel from a defunct pool-heating system is now the basis for a towering sculpture called “The Wave.” Plastic CDs are put to use as sun-catchers, and warped, time-faded, wooden tennis rackets and a tiny gold trophy add to the décor surrounding the tennis courts. Every rock lining the numerous pathways was found on the property, he said.
 An untitled sculpture pointed across a walkway at the home of Chuck and Pilar Bahde of Rancho Santa Fe. “My sculptures are unusual. Some say I’m a little weird,” said Chuck Bahde, strolling past another of his sculptures, this one twisting skyward. (photo by Charlie Neuman) Bahde, 84, was an industrial architect by trade and a graduate of the Institute of Design In Chicago. Over the years he enjoyed a wide-ranging career that included everything from designing and building custom homes in the Midwest to practicing public relations in Europe, where he met his wife, Pilar, who is Swiss and Spanish.
“I was more or less a job-jumper, because I was curious,” he said.
Though he started creating art while in school, and design work was often part of his job, Bahde was never a professional artist. “My sculptures are unusual. Some say I’m a little weird,” he said with a laugh.
But few aside from family members and friends have seen his sculptures and unique landscape of art. “I just do things for myself,” he said.
A vacation in San Diego and a subsequent job offer from Convair, where Bahde worked designing airliner interiors, led the couple to settle in San Diego to raise their two children. After many years living in Point Loma and actively participating in the planning group and other community efforts, the Bahdes bought the Rancho Santa Fe property in 1974. He has been remodeling the house, and the yard, ever since.
Bahde’s landscape is ever-changing, as he continues to add to it and create newer pieces. Even more sculptures fill several garages that once housed a car collection; Bahde plans to put them on exhibit at a gallery someday.
But he is most proud of the fact that his intricate and eye-catching landscape takes very little water to maintain, other than what is needed for the macadamia trees, two coral trees and a small rose garden that were already on the property when he bought it.
In fact, the recent rains kept Bahde busy drying out the “pools,” since standing water could loosen the glue holding the mosaic-like surface together.
Bahde credits a school coach, in part, with some of the modesty that has kept him from making his artwork public. “My first football coach told me: ‘As good as you all are, I don’t want to see you bragging. Just show people what you can do.’ ”
Written by: Leslie Wolf Branscomb, a freelance writer in San Diego
Source: SignOn San Diego
Tags: arThou, arTists, arTworks, Chuck Bahde, green arT, landscape arT, Rancho Santa Fe, sculptors, sculptures, unusual arT, unusual sculpture
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Thursday, February 25th, 2010
AMSTERDAM — Dirk Hannema was known as a brilliant art curator but a bit of a fool. He claimed he had seven Vermeers in his collection, several Van Goghs and a few Rembrandts, but no one believed him.
Now 25 years after his death it turned out he was right – about one work by Vincent van Gogh.
The painting, “Le Blute-Fin Mill,” goes on public display Wednesday in the small Museum de Fundatie in the central Dutch town of Zwolle.
 This image released by Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, Netherlands, on Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2010, shows a painting entitled "Le Blute-Fin Mill", by Vincent van Gogh. The newly authenticated Van Gogh has gone on display 35 years after an art collector bought it in Paris, convinced it was painted by the famed Dutch master but never able to prove it. Louis van Tilborgh, curator of research at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, said "Le Blute-Fin Mill" was done in 1886. He said its large human figures are unusual for a Van Gogh landscape but it has his typically bright colors. (AP Photo/Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle) Louis van Tilborgh, curator of research at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, said the painting was unusual for the 19th century impressionist, depicting large human figures in a landscape. The painting shows Parisians climbing wooden stairs to a windmill in the Montmartre district.
But the work was typical of Van Gogh’s at that time in other ways, with its bright colors lathered roughly on the canvas. Van Tilborgh said it was painted in 1886 when the artist was living in Paris. The canvas bore the stamp of an art store he was known to frequent, and used pigments that were common in other works, van Tilborgh said.
The painting “adds to his oeuvre,” the curator told The Associated Press. “You can link it to certain works of Van Gogh in that period, but not that many of them,” he said.
It is the first Van Gogh to be authenticated since 1995 and the sixth to be added to the confirmed list of the artist’s paintings since the latest edition of the standard catalog was published in 1970, van Tilborgh said.
Van Gogh painted about 900 works in his brief career. Afflicted by mental illness, he died of a self-inflicted wound in 1890 at age 37.
Hannema bought the painting in 1975 from an antique and art dealer in Paris who did not believe it was of much value. But the Dutch collector did. He paid 5,000 Dutch guilders for this and another unknown work, or about euro 2,000 ($2,700), but immediately insured the painting for 16 times what he paid.
Hannema touted the painting with “absolute certainty” as a Van Gogh, but no one was listening. He had been discredited since he bought a Vermeer in 1937 that later was shown to be a forgery.
Hannema became director of the respected Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam in 1921 at age 26. Born to a wealthy art-collecting family, he was talented, successful, good looking and supremely confident in his judgment of art, said Ralph Keuning, the director of Museum de Fundatie.
During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands he was given responsibility for all the museums in the country. After the war in 1945 he was arrested and stood trial for collaboration, but he was never convicted and was released from internment two years later.
He continued to add to his own collection, seeking out high quality work by lesser known artists and always looking for unattributed works of masters. He was mistaken nearly all the time.
“He was the laughing stock of the art world,” van Tilborgh said. “His tragedy was that he was always thinking in terms of the big names.”
In 1958 Hannema created an institute for his collection and was allowed to live in Nijenhuis Castle in the village of Heino on condition that he allow public access to the works, which included many fine classical and modern pieces. Some were on permanent display in two small buildings on the grounds, and he conducted tours by appointment of his home until his death in 1984.
Keuning said Le Blute-Fin Mill was not prominently displayed during Hannema’s lifetime. “He was more obsessed by his Vermeers,” which he believed to be authentic.
The collection formed the bulk of the Museum de Fundatie, one of the smaller institutions in this museum-rich country. It acquired another palace in the nearby town of Zwolle in 2005. More than half of the 7,000 items in its possession comes from Hannema’s collection, said museum spokesman Koen Schuurhuis.
The museum had sought once before, in 1993, to have experts authenticate Le Blute-Fin Mill to prepare for an exhibition, Schuurhuis said. But the Amsterdam experts had no time, and the painting went on display as a work that Hannema “claimed” was a Van Gogh.
By: Arhur Max, The Associated Press
Source: Wahington Post
Tags: arT collecting, arThou, arTists, impressionism, Museum de Fundatie, paitings, Van Gogh
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Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
By day it’s a haven for art lovers, but by night it’s a swingers’ club!
An orgy of half naked women in leather awaits visitors to one Vienna museum, at last when the sun goes down.
And some were shocked by the exhibits in the apparently-normal museum. There’s a mirrored area, a gynecologist’s chair and a sado-masochism room!
 Two women kiss on a gynaecologist’s chair. IS IT A MUSEUM OR A NIGHTCLUB?
Visitors to Vienna’s Secession Museum are confronted by the unusual exhibit in the evenings. The lights go out in the exhibition areas and the place turns into a cesspool of lust.
There is group sex in the middle of the museum with painted women in leather. Some have more on, others wear high heels and G-strings.
One couple amuse each other in one corner, while a girl is kissed in a gynaecologist’s chair on the opposite side if the room.
‘The Association of Sociable Revellers’ moved in on February 20 – and they display sex in a very special way.
It is allegedly a cultural project from artist Christoph Büchel.
The Swiss has set up a swinger’s club for €90,000 in the same museum which displays the famous piece of art ‘Beethoven Frieze’ by Gustav Klimt.
It is supported with a cultural donation of over €10,000 from the Swiss public foundation Pro Helvetia.
Although the swingers’ club room is only open to adults during the day, politicians are up in arms.
Councilor Ursula Stenzel, who gave the project her blessing, is now less pleased: “I signed the approval only under massive protest. It was always spoken of as an art project with a nightclub, but never as a swingers’ club.
“That is monstrous.”
She described the project as a misuse of taxpayer’s money, as it has apparently been subsided by the state.
Gabi Högler, one of the club’s managers, doesn’t understand the complaints: “We want to give as many people as possible the opportunity to overcome their inhibitions and we want to offer the possibility for them to simply watch a swinger’s club for themselves.”
 Orgy in the mirror room.  Anything and everything is allowed...  ...public sex in the middle of the museum  A performance on the stage of the swingers' club by artist Christoph Büchel, directly next to 'Beethoven Frieze’, the most famous art work from Gustav Klimt.  Sexual 'art': Two guests enjoy the show.  When it's not getting so hot the guests can enjoy the atmosphere and have something to drink.  This visitor has dressed for the occasion.  The Secession Museum is the centre of the Viennese Art Nouveau movement.  Two women kiss on a gynaecologist’s chair. Source: Bild.de
Photos: TZ Österreich Fuhrich
Tags: arT, arThou, arTists, Associacion of Sociable Revellers, Christoph Büchel, cultural projecT, museum sex, Pro Helvetia, Secession Museum, sex arT, sex arTists, swinger arT, swingers club, Swiss arT, unusual arT, Vienna arT, Viennese Art Nouveau
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Sunday, February 21st, 2010
For the first time Abu Dhabi, audiences will have a first-hand look at the tremendous effort that goes into creating sculptures, which are among the most ancient artistic techniques.
 Lotus by Japan's Masahiro Hasegawa who will be participating at Adiss. The Abu Dhabi International Sculpture Symposium (Adiss), which begins on Thursday and runs until April 7, will feature the works of 17 world-renowned contemporary artists, who will be residing in Abu Dhabi for the duration of the symposium.
The six-week event has been organised by Zayed University in collaboration with Salwa Zeidan Gallery.
The finished works will then go on public display all over Abu Dhabi city. By adding 17 monumental pieces to the city, the initiative will elevate public awareness of art in general.
“The objective of the symposium is to initiate artistic and cultural co-operation between artists of different backgrounds, and promote the UAE as a new meeting place for artistic and cultural creativity. In its inaugural run, Adiss will open its doors to the world under the theme of “Bridging Societies through the Language of Art” and will bring together 17 sculptors from around the world to reveal their creativity on site from the heart of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi,” said Dr Sulaiman Al Jassim, Vice-President of Zayed University.
Abeer Al Mutawa, Community Services Advisor of Municipality of Abu Dhabi City, said the initiative was in line with the body’s main strategy of affirming Abu Dhabi’s position as a truly modern city and boost the Emirate’s ambitions of building a global reputation as a top destination for the arts.
Salwa Zeidan, Director of the Selwa Zeidan Gallery, said the idea has been in development for over two years now.
“The aim here is to have Adiss take on the form of a performing art event, an open sculpture studio involving participation of both artists and the public. Art is for everybody, not only for connoisseurs and art critics,” she said at an event to launch the symposium.
“When we first made the announcement, we received an overwhelming response of more than 400 applicants from different corners of the globe. We then carefully reviewed every single entry and shortlisted a number of them based on their background and medium. Once we narrowed the numbers down, we asked each artist to submit 3 designs of sculptures that could complement the city of Abu Dhabi,” she said, explaining how the artists were selected. “The artistic concept of the submitted works ranged from abstract ideas to semi-realistic designs mainly aimed at complementing the beautiful city of Abu Dhabi, its history, and its culture.
“We also wanted to give one emerging artists who shows promising talent a chance and selected Husam Chaya from Lebanon to take part in Adiss 2010 and intend to introduce a new artist every year.”
Artists of the world participating in this first edition of Adiss and who will bring together their collective talents to create a most active and dynamic event are Billy Lee from the United Kingdom, Caroline Ramersdorfer from Austria, Ehab El Laban from Eqypt, Fabrizio Dieci from Italy, Gheorghi Filin and Petre Petrov from Bulgaria, Gregor Kregar from Slovenia, Hassan Sharif from the UAE, Hwang Seoung-Woo from Korea, Jo Kley from Germany, Jon Barlow Hudson from the US, John Gogaberishvili from Republic of Georgia, Juanjo Novella from Spain, Konstantin Dimopoulos from Australia, Masahiro Hasegawa and Yoshin Ogata from Japan.
Another area of focus is the lecture programme and workshops, which aim to advance the cultural dialogue between Abu Dhabi and the rest of the world. Topics being discussed include public art, its history and how it fits into Abu Dhabi; art in the urban scene; and art and the environment. All the sessions will take place at the Zayed University auditorium.
Source: Emirates Business
Tags: Adu Dhabi, arThou, arTists, performance arT, sculptors, sculpture
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Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
 Mr. Brainwash's designed a record cover for Madonna's greatest hits album last year. French artist and filmmaker Thierry Guetta has developed a devoted street art following under the name Mr. Brainwash. But is he serious?
“I’m like a machine, I create and create and create,” Guetta explains, standing in the center of the Meatpacking District event space he rented for a new exhibition of his art made under his unsettlingly blunt moniker. The show was set to open in a few days. Paint was splattered across his pants; canvases, many wrapped in plastic, sat around him, waiting to be hung on the walls; and at least a dozen assistants, many smoking cigarettes, scurried about, finishing pieces.
“It has been two years since my last show because when I do a show, I really do a show,” said Guetta, who looks like a scruffier, skinnier John Belushi, as he walked us through the cavernous space. He’s also been busy, designing an album cover for Madonna’s Celebration release last year (which features the singer in a paint-splattered portrait that is an unapologetic copy of Andy Warhol’s iconic Marilyn Monroe work), following street artist Bansky for the unusual street-art documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, and periodically stenciling his own pieces around Los Angeles. His origins are largely unknown. Some have speculated that in fact he is the street artist Banksy, who masks his identity even throughout the documentary, while others say he comes from a wealthy French family. (He and his representatives, on the other hand, maintain that he “mortgaged his home” and sold his belongings to pay for the current exhibition.)
 Mr. Brainwash, Yves Saint Laurent, 2010 “The definition of art is: no limits,’” Guetta said proudly as he showed the dozens of square, silkscreen portraits he has had printed with the faces of celebrities. There was a series of fashion designers printed in silver and another series of technology entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg printed in gold. “That’s the guy who founded Twitter!” said Guetta, excitedly singling out one of the works. As we walked around, a man followed us with a video camera, recording the entire interview.
The exhibition spills across the two floors of the warehouse-like gallery. One whole wall is devoted to prints of Kate Moss, which have been splashed lightly with neon paint. They are near-identical copies of Andy Warhol’s silkscreens, but Guetta acts offended at that suggestion. “Andy Warhol didn’t do a portrait of Kate Moss!” he said. “If I wait until Andy Warhol does it, I’m never going to see it. Just because Andy Warhol painted portraits, does that mean I can’t do it?”
There are also huge mock spray cans, some as big as ten feet tall, scattered about, bearing labels for Hershey’s chocolate, Pepto-Bismol, and Campbell’s Soup. “These things bring you memories,” he said of the brands. “They touch your heart.” Elsewhere, a taxi cab was parked inside gigantic plastic toy packaging, like a Matchbox car. Other work in the show was even more remorselessly banal. There was a portrait of Benjamin Franklin wearing large headphones and a vest emblazoned with Louis Vuitton buttons — “I just try to be kind of funny, with no limits,” Guetta said — and a portrait of the band Kiss made out of broken shards of vinyl records. Guetta does not hide the fact that most of his work is fabricated by his assistants, with his role limited to occasionally doing quality-control touchups, for instance adding an extra bit of vinyl for a Kiss member’s eye. However, he declines to go into detail about his operation. “I don’t want to explain it,” Guetta says. “It’s like cooking. If you go to a famous chef, he might let you taste his famous sauce, but he will not tell you how he made it.”
The artist motioned to a large, wooden paint can, perhaps ten feet in diameter. “When I build installations, why do I do it?” he asked. “It’s not going to make me money.” Is it for sale? “It’s not for sale, but if someone wants to buy it, why not?” Asked to pick his favorite piece in the show, Guetta demurred. “Each one is my favorite when I’m working on it,” he said, before finally settling on a larger portrait of Charlie Chaplin, emblazoned with a pink heart. “I want positivity in everything I do,” he said. He noted that his proudest work was an earlier painting that featured Einstein holding a sign that read “Love is the answer.” Says Guetta: “I think that was a big statement for me.”
Much of Guetta’s work is so unredeemably shallow that it has led some to suggest that the Mr. Brainwash persona is part of an elaborate performance art project, a cynical conceptual experiment to see if, with the right friends (Shepard Fairey has provided a guarded endorsement: “Not all the work was magnificent, but it improved steadily…”) and the right marketing (the Brainwash show is being promoted by Nadine Johnson Inc., one of New York’s most formidable public relations companies) it is possible to sell anything.
At the packed opening a few days later, with a crowd that was more fashion than art-heavy (and which featured a bevy of strikingly tall, afro-bewigged models dispensing vodka drinks), that question seemed to have been answered. Red dots popping up next to works in the show suggested people were buying. According to Clemence, Guetta’s young, omnipresent assistant — “She’s like my mother,” he said during the interview, “she wakes me up and tells me to do more interviews” — the portraits were priced from ten to forty thousand dollars, and rumors abounded that some of the largest installations had sold for as much as $120,000.
Mr. Brainwash represents, in a sense, an art critic’s worst nightmare: a complete leveling of culture, with every exhibition celebrated with a round of cheap applause and a fresh infusion of cash — the more derivative the work, the better. His art embodies the old fear that Duchamp’s readymade will be read not an aesthetic challenge — to make meaningful art when all things are suddenly allowed — but a license for complete triviality: it’s art because someone says it is, and it’s all equally wonderful.
These are not concerns for Mr. Brainwash, though. “Art is not something difficult to do,” he explained nonchalantly, when asked why he did his work. “You just need to pick up a brush and do it.”
By Andrew Russeth
Source: ARTINFO
Tags: arT exhibition, arT installtions, arThou, arTists, conceptual arT, culture, filmmakers, Mr. Brainwash, paintings, portraits, street arTists, Thierry Guetta, unusual arT
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Thursday, November 26th, 2009
 arT and the Subway During the recent Bay Bridge closure, there was much talk about how San Francisco Bay Area residents needed to become less car-dependent. Overlooked was the fact that the region’s many transportation systems collectively provide neither the 24-hour coverage nor geographic breadth to enable people to give up cars. In other words, the Bay Area’s public transit system is not in the same league as New York City’s legendary subway system, whose cultural and artistic significance is the subject of Tracy Fitzpatrick’s recent book, Art and the Subway: New York Underground. Fitzpatrick traces the subway from its opening in 1904 to the present, revealing how artists, writers, photographers and other cultural workers took advantage of the subway’s public and democratic milieu to forge their visions of society. She uncovers many surprising facts, such as the long history of subway graffiti, the use of guards to cram people into packed trains, and the ways in which artists captured the racial contradictions among a subway ridership that confounded traditional assumptions about the Melting Pot.
Although the New York City subway has entranced the public for over 100 years, Tracy Fitzpatrick’s book provides many new insights into its cultural and artistic significance. These insights begin with the fact that the system was originally designed under the elaborate City Beautiful architectural style, but soon took on a much different appearance when the far more simpler Arts and Craft style became dominant. I was also very surprised to learn that much of the subway was constructed underground while street traffic continued; the book contains photos showing how this was done.
The 1920’s and 30’s: The Golden Age of Subway Art
While Fitzpatrick traces subway art through Keith Haring and the graffiti writers of the 1980’s, I found the subway’s cultural contributions in the 1920’s and 1930’s the most compelling. Reginald Marsh, best known for his paintings of working-class visitors to Coney Island, also created cartoons and paintings for a newspaper series, “Subway Sunbeams.” Fitzpatrick reproduces many of Marsh’s cartoons, which address such issues as the extreme crowding which typified subways in the 1920’s – hence the guards to jam people in – and the often suppressed racial dynamic. In an era when immigrants were said to be “melting” their foreign backgrounds and becoming new Americans, Marsh showed that African-Americans stood out from other riders, not being allowed to “assimilate” into the crowd with fellow riders.
Fitzpatrick also shows the “Topsy Transit” pamphlets handed out by the Women’s City Club of New York (WCCNY) in 1937 as part of the ultimately successful campaign to unify all of the city’s three transit systems. Topsy Transit was a stereotyped black girl based on an Uncle Tom’s Cabin character described as a “pikaninny;” her wild and unkempt hair was put forth as symbolic of an out of control transit system needing unity. The fact that such strongly racist stereotypes would be openly used in New York City at that time is less surprising than their distribution by an organization that was far ahead of its time in advocating for child labor laws, juvenile justice and women’s rights.
These decades also saw painters like Max Weber, Joseph Stella and the Italian Futurist Fortunato Depero transform the subway into a subject of serious art. This would continue through the Federal Art Project of the New Deal, though a dramatic program for a full-scale subway arts program that emerged in 1936 ultimately failed. Part of the reason was opposition to public art from the precursors of today’s right-wing; one New York City Councilman argued that “the only other city with murals in its subway was Moscow,” while another feared that murals “might be used to plant un-American ideals.”
The “Happenings” of the 1960’s and 70’s
While many only know Yoko Ono as Beatle John Lennon’s wife, she was a key figure in the Fluxus art movement that emerged in the 1960’s and continued in one form or another for decades. Artists associated with Fluxus were the first to engage in performance art in the subway, with Ono holding a thirteen-day event in the Canal Street Station in 1966.
Through such acts as walking through a subway train in flippers, mask and full scuba diving attire, or wearing clothes soaked for a week in vinegar, performance artist pursued their investigations into human behavior. And the fact that the subway was the arena reflects its status as the most public and democratic of spaces in this increasingly privatized age.
The Graffiti of the 1980’
While photos of graffiti-dominated subway cars are common, few may be aware that as far back as the 1930’s there was talk about the “subway Rembrandts” who “paint mustaches on the girls on advertising posters.” Such doctoring of ads was so pervasive that by 1961 the authorities placed posters of blank human heads with instructions to the public, “Please, if you mark something – use these.”
Fitzpatrick does not question that much of the graffiti that often filled every space on the outside of a subway car is art, but she does show how by defacing subway maps, some of these writers undermined public safety and the system’s operation. The ability of writers to deface subways coincided with other increasing system problems in the 1970’s and 1980’s, and it was really not until 1990 that graffiti was eliminated and the subway system became safer and more reliable.
As might be expected from a book with “art” in its title, Fitzpatrick offers readers an extraordinary collection of illustrations to support her text. Many, like the Marsh cartoons, are rarely seen. The book’s visuals more than compensate for its unusual structure, with there being often little connection between chapters. Fitzpatrick chose to proceed thematically rather than chronologically, which left me wondering, for example, why Yiddish plays of the 1920’s set in the subway, or King Vidor’s 1928 film The Crowd were discussed in the book’s next to last chapter. The book’s origins as a dissertation likely explains its discussion of some obscure artists whose minimal contributions to subway culture could have been bypassed.
This is a book for people who love the subway and want to learn more about its cultural legacy. Fitzpatrick has retrieved long missing components of the subway’s historic role, offering even longtime riders a new perspective on their means of getting around.
Source: BeyondChron
Tags: arT, arThou, arTists, historical arT, New Yoork grafitti, New York arTists, NY arT, paintings, subway arT, underground arT, vintage arT, working class arT
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Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
It has nearly vanished from the American landscape. Some teenagers have never even seen one before.
But the once ever-present telephone booth has popped up on a street corner in this southwest Ohio village as part of an unusual art project and a statement about private communications in the let-everybody-know-what-I’m-doing age of Twitter and MySpace.
The project is the brainchild of Tokyo-born artist Migiwa Orimo, who had to search high and low for a phone booth before finding one in the Windy City.
“It was really in bad condition,” Orimo said. “The whole thing was black, pitted from Chicago weather on the street.”
Orimo polished up the metal structure, replaced its broken panes of glass and installed a mustard-colored telephone with a black rotary dial.
But it’s not a working phone booth. It’s a living interactive sculpture that will serve as a stage for poetry readings, light shows and dance performances over the next year.
Beginning Saturday, people will be able to walk into the phone booth, pick up the receiver and listen to a recorded rendition of the Spoon River Anthology, a collection of short poems published in 1915 that describe the life of a fictional small town. Seventy actors and others with ties to Yellow Springs were recruited to read the poetry.
“I like the intimate performance space,” said Rani Deighe Crowe, who came up with the poetry project. “You listen to this over the phone, which gives it that extra personal confessional quality.”
Crowe said she rejects the notion of trying to reach the largest possible audience, opting instead for a performance that can only be delivered to one person at a time.
“I’ve been really interested in trying to reach the smallest possible audience,” she said.
Orimo said she is trying to break the traditional boundary between the artist and audience, where people taking in the performance at the phone booth also become part of the art.
Orimo said the project is her reaction to Twitter, MySpace, surveillance cameras and other technologies designed to enable people to view and be viewed by others.
“Knowingly or unknowingly we do that every second of our lives nowadays,” she said. “But it’s all in a different kind of sphere — a virtual sphere. I wanted to sort of bring that question once again to the physical level by letting people see this piece on the street corner, which is not going to move anywhere.”
Kathy Thorne stopped to take a look at the phone booth earlier this week. She acknowledged that she is a bit overwhelmed by high-tech communication and yearns for the past.
“I wish I’d get letters from people from the mail instead of stupid e-mail,” said Thorne, of Sarasota, Fla.
U.S. pay phones — including telephone booths — numbered 2.6 million at their height in 1998, according to AT&T. The decline in pay phone usage was in part due to the growth of other communications channels such as cell phones.
While the Yellow Springs phone booth had a nostalgic effect on people old enough to remember them, it was a mystery to young people who passed by. One teen didn’t know how to open the folding door. Others commented that they remember rotary dials only from visiting their grandparents.
But Orimo has made a concession to the Twitter generation.
Inside the booth above the telephone is a digital clock/calendar. Orimo hopes that those who experience the phone booth art will record their thoughts on a log inside the booth. She plans to document what effect the phone booth has on the community over the next year.
“It redefines the notion of what an art space can be, while appropriating an everyday public facility as a place for intimate contemplation and even inspiration,” said Anne Pasternak, director of Creative Time Inc., a New York City-based organization that commissions and presents public arts projects.
Other artists have used phone booths to make statements.
Last year, Dylan Mortimer installed phone booths in New York City, Jackson, Tenn., and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that were designed to resemble confessionals. Outfitted with flip-down kneelers, the booths were aimed at sparking dialogue about prayer.
The Yellow Springs phone booth sits on a downtown corner next to an ice cream shop and an array of wooden cafe tables. And even though it’s only been on the street for a few weeks, the phone booth has already made a splash.
Someone put a helium balloon inside the booth. And a cardboard robot appeared there last week and then vanished as quickly as it came.
“People are already finding a relationship with it,” Orimo said.
More at: www.telephoneboothproject.blogspot.com
Written by: James Hannah, The Associated Press
Source: www.daytondailynews.com
Tags: arT project, arThou, arTists, Migiwa Orimo, Ohio arT, phone booth projecT, street arT, Tokyo arTisT, unusual arT
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Sunday, October 18th, 2009
 Tom Deininger's incredible recycled art First impressions aren’t always what they seem. Take this cute little bunny. It looks like a cuddly companion for a small child, but closer inspection reveals that this furry friend might be more appropriate for the smoker in your life instead. In fact, those who smoke may be the only ones who can appreciate both the rabbit’s appearance and its distinct perfume, a tobacco stench made possible by fur made from old cigarette filters.
Artist Tom Deininger collected discarded smokes from beach parking lots to create the above rabbit – which his website says “reeks of tobacco”.
 Tom Deininger’s incredible recycled art Perhaps the most incredible piece is this portrait created from recycled materials. It may look photoshopped in to place. But you’re in for a shock when you watch the following video.
Source: derrenbrown.co.uk
Tags: arT, arThou, arTists, controversial arT, meaningful arT, unusual arT
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Sunday, September 27th, 2009
 Man and beast, the connection was made physical by Charles Darwin in his theory of evolution in the mid-19th century.
Since then zoologists and wildlife documentaries have further drawn our relationship to animals, and a slew of artists have been pondering the same; and an exhibition at the UC Riverside’s Sweeney Art Gallery, “Intelligent Design: Interspecies Art” (through 28), has gathered some provocative of their projects. “In the past, art dealing with animals usually addressed issues of representation,” says Tyler Stallings, gallery director. “I wanted to expand beyond that.” And so, he points out, this being the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth made it seemed especially timely for such a show.
Stallings invited Rachel Mayeri, an associate professor of media studies at Harvey Mudd College who is well known for her interest in “soft science” and is an artist, herself to help co-curate the show. “I’m interested in art as a way of exploring science,” says Mayeri, also an artist. “Artists can think about biological issues through their work and make them more concrete.” Eventually, they selected 20 artists, mostly from California, encompassing video, photography, painting and sculpture. “We were looking for artists with a long-term commitment to trying to understand a different mentality, to appreciating what it means to be human,” Mayeri says.
Sam Easterson focuses on the animal’s point of view quite literally, by attaching minicams to creatures ranging from including armadillos, to falcons, from scorpions to and sheep, and letting them go on their way. The resulting clips end when the cam falls off, and are shown without narrative. Other artists get that subjectivity more obliquely, such as Catherine Chalmers’ video simulation of a cockroach moving through fauna and flora in “Safari” or Alison Ruttan’s video of a man mimicking a prowling cat in “Impersonator.”
The most controversial work in the show may be the reworked taxidermy of Carl Fernandez. Ten years ago, when considering additional uses for dead animals, she visited taxidermy shops and bought seven former-animals bodies. She re-created each as a piece of luggage, with openings and cavities. On exhibit will be two — “7100-Goat” is a goat reworked into a wheeled bag, its two horns projecting from the sides, and “7200-Buffalo” is a buffalo whose woolly head has been split open, presenting itself for packing one’s belongings. “Some people find the work disgusting,” Fernandez says, “but then they go out and have a steak dinner.”
For more images and details click here.
Tags: animals, arT, arT gallery, arThou, arTists, nature arT, soft science
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