Yinka Shonibare on Art:21

Watch the full episode. See more ART:21.

For some reason, the desk area of Kristin's house keeps me sneezing every five minutes. So rather than Google Reader-ing, I re-watched the Yinka Shonibare episode of Art:21. Here is the first section of his portion of the episode "Transformation," which also features Cindy Sherman and Paul McCarthy. In this portion he talks about his film work, which I'm always interested in hearing more about since his textile installations have been curatorialy beaten to death.

Justine Khamara

Cut and collage photography from Justine Khamara:

via I'm Revolting

Allandale House | William O’Brien Jr

The Allandale House by the architect William O'Brien Jr

"aims to undermine the seeming limitations of a triangular section by augmenting and revealing the extreme proportion in the vertical direction, and utilizing the acutely angled corners meeting the floor as moments for thickened walls, telescopic apertures and built-in storage."

Right. I don't often post about architecture here because the words to do so are often beyond me, but images of this two story building are striking. And look at those bookshelves!

via Arte

pop-out painting

Alexa Meade, despite her problematic views concerning identity politics, creates nifty "pop-out" works that involves painting people to look like paintings. Here is a clip that will have you looking twice:

via Hard Feelings

Work by Jamie Isenstein

New York based artist Jamie Isenstein creates "pop-up performances" that involve the merging of her body into designed objects. These performances are informed by theoretical discourses of sculpture (think of the way sculptures treat the space around them as both presence and absence), and are created through contortion of magician-like proportions.

via rebel:art

For this last piece, Dancing Pop-Up Fishing Sculpture, Ms. Isenstein lived inside "a large papier-mache ball, covered in a patchwork of colorful fabric, that appears to have grown human limbs." The sign-message, dangled from the protruding arm, makes one wonder if ephemeral art can stand the test of time.

museums are watching you

"The Museum is Watching You: Galleries Quietly Study What People Like, or Skip, to Decide What Hangs Where" reports that museums, in an effort to reach out to the public , are now taking marketing to the "next level" by literally standing behind viewers and recording their every move. The Wall Street Journal article profiles Matt Sikora, the "Evaluation Director" of the Detroit Institute of Arts on his quest to attempt to get inside the mind of museum-goer. Like a hunter on the prowl, Sikora spies on unsuspecting patrons to record demographics, time spent in a particular room, whether they read the wall text, and which paintings they looked at (or didn't). This is all recorded on a hand-held device that these hunters carry with them when observing their prey. Sikora and other experts predict that results will not be available until 2012.

Nevermind the more heavy issue of treating art by the numbers, it's a little bit laugh out loud that museums are just catching on to the fact they should be observing the people they have committed to serve in their mission statements.

internet distractions

I have been attempting to make a list of graduate schools and to research potential programs, but the internet has been providing some distractions. Here's one of them, a slightly cynical quote fitting for this gray day of late afternoon coffee drinking:

'Art cannot change the world' are words spoken nonchalantly day in and day out, and the agency of the arts and culture production industry is comfortably reduced to the mere fetishism of a few privileged practitioners. Discussions of the seminal role of funding agendas, curatorial policies both of private and public institutions, production values, etcetera, are simply engulfed by the standardization machinery. And for those not so easy to appease, well they can chat, complain and theorize about “representation,” and there is funding for that too. And of course, the machinery of standardization also provides the margins for this debate: post-colonialism, exoticism, Orientalism, regionalism and so on.

--Mai Abu Eldahab, "Global Epidemic Art in the Age of Globalization"

"Scanner" | Matej Kren

A couple of weeks ago, I had posted book art by Jonathan Callan. This installation by artist Matej Kren takes on quite a different recycled meaning by being used as architectural work. Here, "bound things with words and pictures define space, indoors and out."

These images are from "Scanner," now on display at the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna, Italy. The interior of the piece is lined with mirrors, to visually enlarge what is actually a narrow tunnel-space. A book, generally considered palm sized, has become one of several thousand pieces that are stacked like bricks. The installation is to reportedly challenge one's ideas on spatial perception, but I also wonder to what extent a viewer is made to feel physically impotent in the face of so much knowledge stacked up against them.

via A Daily Dose of Architecture

Installation work by Chicharu Shiota

Chicharu Shiota creates site-specific installations using window frames. Each piece is gallery sized, and her materials are used to create her own kind of artistic architecture. I'll let you imagine your own metaphor for the paradox that comes with representing both enclosure and openness.

via Kitsune Noir

african art and museums in the press

Some good and bad.

There have been articles posted here, and here, on El Anatsui's retrospective now at the Royal Ontario Museum. There also have been articles on "Dynasty and Divinity" posted here and here. This artwork will travel to the Museum for African Art in New York when it opens next year.

But there also has been an article posted here about art objects that won't be traveling to their African locations, as previously promised.

"Silent World" | Michael Kenna

Captivating black and white photography from Michael Kenna:

via TRIANGULATION

Brooklyn Museum back in the NYTimes

I think it's silly that the NYTimes is still reporting on the Brooklyn Museum's marketing strategies, asking experts to weigh in on the museum's apparent "populist" mission. I'm not really interested in debates that argue for or against the mission statement, as much as I am interested in the simple fact that the Brooklyn Museum makes horrible use of their space. The grotesque lobby aside, I have always found the galleries almost impossible to navigate, a museum visitor turned into a mouse in a maze. Similarly, their African and Pacific galleries are thinly made up of lonely, floating vitrines, making one wonder if there is a secret life to museum store rooms, and if the disappearance of objects indicates that storage is the place to go to really see the art. These constantly-under-renovation galleries are the best examples, but it also applies to their collection of European paintings.

First Saturdays, Indie-Rock bands, stellar short-term exhibitions, and diverse membership are important and significant improvements. Without a doubt, the museum makes the best use of social networking tools. But if the permanent collections are not subject to rotation and updating, who the fuck cares? And who is the museum serving if they deprive people of the huge collection of art that they actually have?

I will only consent to a Ziggy Stardust dance party if I can see the art first, damn it!

"Indoor Desert" | Alvaro Sanchez-Montañes

These are incredible images of abandoned gold mines in Namibia from Spanish photographer Alvaro Sanchez-Montañes. The artist photographed the aftermath of a small town called Kolmanskop. Abandoned after resources were exhausted in 1908, homes and public buildings were left to be filled with sand from the winds of the Namib desert. From the series "Indoor Desert," these poignant photographs are completely documentary with no post-processing. Still, they are rather surreal.

Street art by Hyuro

Wall murals by Spanish street artist Hyuro:

via Unurth