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

A number of shocking sex scenes await theatre-goers in Bruce Labruce’s new play ‘The Bad Breast’ at the HAU 2 (Hebbel am Ufer, Haus 2) theatre.

From a mom-and-son couple enjoying a passionate ‘69′ embrace with their heads between each other’s legs to a woman flashing her breasts and private parts – such scenes may fascinate, surprise and repulse viewers, but is it even art?

The mother-on-son action in 'The Bad Breast' is certainly wild, but is it art?

Either way, the piece by the Canadian author, playwright and film-maker (46) certainly caught the audience off-guard with its bizarre doctor sex games when it premiered on December 10.

The story revolves around a mother who has developed an incestual relationship with her son after breast-feeding him for ten years, leading her to start seeing a psychoanalyst specializing in the female breast.

But why the need for all the pornographic scenes?

A spokesman for the theatre told BILD that Labruce comes from a film background and as an artist he often grapples with the theme of pornography.

The ‘B.Z.’ newspaper described him as “the King of homo-pornos”. He has even made a film about sex within Germany’s notorious Baader-Meinhof terrorist group which was screened at the Berlinale Film Festival.

“I am primarily an entertainer who wants to show another view of feminine sexuality. The play isn’t really pornographic, it is a farce, a satire,” Labruce told ‘B.Z.’

An actor buries his face in his colleague's nether regions - just one of the spectacles the play has to offer.

Feminine hysteria is also a theme touched on in the piece by Canadian playwright and filmmaker Bruce Labruce.

An actress during dress rehearsals on December 9.

The mother-on-son action in 'The Bad Breast' is certainly wild, but is it art?

Source: Bild.de
Photos: SABINE BRINKER plotpoint

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

Spotlight by Nick Gentry

“Over the years billions upon billions of disks and tapes have been manufactured and today they are widely regarded as junk. This makes them an affordable thing to make art with,” explains the artist of his work. “Reusing objects that would ordinarily have been sent to landfill makes a comment on the throwaway culture of today. Maybe this work can encourage people to think more creatively about the objects that are deemed to be obsolete or useless.”

Self Portrait 02 by Nick Gentry

Each portrait involves several steps to achieve the unfinished, almost industrial feel of the art. Gentry starts with preliminary sketches and then creates a grid of the images, with each component divided into disk-shaped sections.

Sonata by Nick Gentry

“Spray paint is applied to the disks using a stencil to preserve the label and metal slider. Preserving the labels is key, as the handwriting and scribbling are integral to the personality and history of each piece,” Gentry explains. “Elements of people’s lives are stored on the disks and although that data can never be accessed again I like to preserve some of that for viewing.”

After the disks are placed in tonally appropriate areas, almost like pixels, to create a collage, Gentry sketches the outline of the head and the features in pencil, with oil paint to finish the details.

Infinite Echoes by Nick Gentry

“This process is quite selective as only certain features are finished completely. I like to leave a lot unfinished as it allows the viewer to see the layers, showing how the work has been created,” he explains. “What brings the work to life is that blend of the nostalgic and familiar, together with the freshness of a new form of expression.”

Source: GreenMuze

Source: FreshHome

Ants Invade Colombian Congress in Unique Art Display

Hundreds of large black- and brown-colored fiberglass ants covered the facade, columns and windows of the Colombian Congress building in an unusual sculpture by artist Rafael Gomezbarros, who told Efe that the work symbolizes human migration.

With his work depicting an invasion of the ants, which “represent immigration, globalization and displacement, I’m trying to force a reflection on what we experience and see on a daily basis, and also to raise awareness about our monuments,” Gomezbarros said.

A total of 1,300 ants, each measuring 95 centimeters (just over three feet) in length, were mounted on the facade of the legislative headquarters.

Gomezbarros made the figures using a special resin and fiberglass and has dubbed his creation “Casatomada” (House Occupied).

The sculptor explained that the work is not political in nature, since the exhibit “does not go beyond artistic expression, and in a sense is more social than political because it seeks to call attention to monuments.”

The unique work will be mounted at the Congress building through March 26 and then two days later will be installed at the Los Heroes (Heroes) monument, located at a major intersection on the north side of the Colombian capital.

The 37-year-old Gomezbarros, who studied plastic arts in Bogota, said that in June “Casatomada” will be taken out of the country and be exhibited in Argentina, Mexico, Chile, the United States, Canada, Spain and Germany.

The sculptor told Efe that one of his dreams is for his work to “invade” Madrid’s Puerta de Alcala and other monuments in the Spanish capital.

He added, however, that before he can export his creation he will need to find one or more international firms to help him transport the fiberglass insects and display them at monuments in different parts of the world.

Source: Latin American Herald Tribune

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

Mr. Klimek was born in Poland in the year 1954 into a family with a background in arts. He went on to attain a Masters of Sciences (Engineering) degree and has ever since dedicated his life in designing and developing extremely unique pieces of art. In the year 2004, after realizing his artistic potential, Szymon Klimek decided to invent a locomotive with a coal engine in the year 2004 and further decided to keep the dimensions of his new invention to not more than 80 mm.

Ever since his dedicated interest in these miniaturized pieces of art, Mr. Klimek has created more than 100 of such magnificent pieces of art. So far he has created scaled models of various objects such as gift boxes with floral motifs, cars, stationary steam engines and locomotives.

So far, this awesome artist from Poland has not set any dedicated measurements for his miniaturized pieces of art and he states that, the most complicated step in creating his artistic marvels is the time when he begins his project on the drawing boards.

Trend Updates

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