Ann Hamilton: Oliver Ranch Tower

Awarded to Ann Hamilton by the AIA, San Francisco 2008 Merit Award for Excellence in Architecture:

” The tower is the most recent addition to a collection of artworks designed and installed at the Oliver Ranch. Designed by the renowned artist Ann Hamilton in collaboration with Jensen Architects, the 78 foot tower is an elegant monument that is neither about views nor prominence in the landscape. Fundamentally conceived as a performance space, double helix stairs both separate and connect the performers and audience while openings in the tower allow occupants to inhabit the massive walls in various positions–sitting, standing, or laying horizontal— without giving views of the surrounding landscape. ”

Architecture Lab

Dia Returns to NYC

Dia Beacon (Photo: AIA Architect Network)

The Dia Art Foundation is a unique thing, a non-profit that collects a limited roster of artists in depth, especially Minimalists and Conceptual artists, and gives them the kind of long term exhibition space their work requires. This can get tricky when you’re talking about something like Walter de Maria’s New York Earth Room, a big spanking white room covered in about two feet of soil, an installation they’ve supported for decades in SoHo.

In the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, Dia was a force to be reckoned with, and generally a force for good. In the hubble-bubble of the New York art world, they represented the values of the long duration. But in 2003 they opened a big new exhibition space in a converted Nabisco box factory in Beacon, N.Y., on the banks of the Hudson River about a hour north of New York. Around the same time they also shut down their headquarters in the Chelsea neighborhood of lower Manhattan, where they did changing exhibitions. Beacon is a great place, but gradually Dia faded from view in New York. Now they’re finally coming back.

More

Richard Lacayo
Time Magazine

Read more: http://lookingaround.blogs.time.com/2009/11/05/the-dia-comes-home-to-new-york/#ixzz0W75LeYQ4

Culture and Biology

Culture, not just genes, can drive evolutionary outcomes, according to a study released Wednesday that compares individualist and group-oriented societies across the globe.

Bridging a rarely-crossed border between natural and social sciences, the study looks at the interplay across 29 countries of two sets of data, one genetic and the other cultural.

The researchers found that most people in countries widely described as collectivist have a specific mutation within a gene regulating the transport of serotonin, a neurochemical known to profoundly affect mood.

In China and other east Asian nations, for example, up to 80 percent of the population carry this so-called “short” allele, or variant, of a stretch of DNA known as 5-HTTLPR.

Earlier research has shown the S allele to be strongly linked with a range of negative emotions, including anxiety and depression.

Critically, it is also associated with the impulse to stay out of harm’s way.

By contrast, in countries of European origin that prize self-expression and the pursuit of individual over group goals, the long or “L” allele dominates, with only 40 percent of people carrying the “S” variant.

More

Marlowe Hood
Discovery Channel

“Under the Radar” Architecture in New York

Rescue Company 3, the Bronx (Photo: Jeff Goldberg/Esto for Polshek Partnership)

The map of Michael Bloomberg’s New York bears the scars of vast, unfinished dreams of renewal. Hudson Yards, Atlantic Yards, Coney Island, Willets Point, ground zero, Governors Island, the Gowanus Canal—all those glittering megaplans, derailed, deferred, or debased. Yet the Bloomberg administration can claim triumphs at a tiny scale: Station house by station house, library by library, the city has been doggedly smuggling high-level architecture to the neighborhoods that need it most.

More including slide show

Justin Davidson
New York Magazine

The Curiosity Cure

Todd Kashdan has a deep appreciation of anxiety, which makes his engaging book “Curious?” unique among the comfort-promising volumes in the self-help section.

For most of us, anxiety is a decidedly unpleasant emotion — one we strive to avert, either by avoiding situations that provoke apprehension, latching onto false but comforting certainties, or (my personal favorite) numbing out via our addiction of choice. Pointing out anxiety’s usefulness is akin to putting in a good word for pain.

But of course, it’s not the anxiety itself that causes problems but those dysfunctional coping mechanisms. As the George Mason University psychologist [Todd Kashdan] notes, anxiety is in fact one-half of a quite useful yin-yang process. Rather than resist it, he argues, we should acknowledge its existence and turn up the volume on the other side of the equation: the impulse that pulls us toward challenge and exploration.

That is to say, we need to cultivate curiosity.

“Our curiosity and threat detection systems evolved together, and they function to ensure optimal decisions are made in an unpredictable, uncertain world,” he writes. “We are all motivated by the pull toward safety and seek to avoid danger, but we also possess a fundamental motivation to expand and grow as human beings.”

More

Tom Jacobs
Miller-McCune

Ofili, at the Frieze Art Fair

‘Going through a phase of experiment and transition’ … Chris Ofili. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

There was one thing I liked at the Frieze art fair, one thing which stayed with me: a tiny painting by Chris Ofili, all blue and dreamlike and strange, almost gothic – a fragment of a fantasy, a tentative trying out of something.

Ofili is clearly going through a phase of experiment and transition – an anxious, difficult phase by the looks of this painting – and some might see it as a moment of weakness and failure. In fact, another Ofili painting, equally odd and different and hesitant, has been one of my few lasting memories of last year’s Frieze.

This rambling event is fun, I am not denying that – if that’s your idea of fun. But why is there so little art at Frieze which is truly outstanding? There was a Picasso drawing at the Waddington’s stall, and some beautiful photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans, but the claim of this art fair to define the new seems questionable if it cannot give us any knock-out discoveries.”

More

Jonathan Jones
Guardian

Recycled Homes

Dan Phillips builds houses out of salvaged items, like frame samples, which he used on a ceiling. (Photo: Michael Stravato for The New York Times)

Among the traditional brick and clapboard structures that line the streets of this sleepy East Texas town, 70 miles north of Houston, a few houses stand out: their roofs are made of license plates, and their windows of crystal platters.

They are the creations of Dan Phillips, 64, who has had an astonishingly varied life, working as an intelligence officer in the Army, a college dance instructor, an antiques dealer and a syndicated cryptogram puzzle maker. About 12 years ago, Mr. Phillips began his latest career: building low-income housing out of trash.

More

Kate Murphy
New York Times

To view the slideshow of images, click here.

Art and Meaning: Right On, Jonathan Jones

Off message … Bob Dylan in 1962. Photograph: John Cohen/Hulton Archive/Getty

Art doesn’t have to be about anything to be good. In fact, the easier it is to say what a work is about, the less interesting that work becomes. The greatest art takes a lifetime to understand; the slightest takes a moment. And if it really is reducible to an explicit message, is it actually art at all?

I love the scene in DA Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary Dont Look Back, where the young Bob Dylan is interviewed by a journalist who demands to know what his message is. “Walk tall and always carry a lightbulb,” he replies.

Of course, Dylan didn’t have a message – or so he explains in Martin Scorsese’s 2005 film No Direction Home – and the reason he changed his music and lyrics so profoundly in the mid-60s, from the agitprop of his early folk songs to the tumbled words of Desolation Row, was precisely to escape from people who thought they understood him. It was a self-conscious defence of the idea of art.

Visual artists today have a lot to learn from Dylan – or from Mark Rothko, or Wassily Kandinsky, or frankly anyone who has created real art with real art’s difficulties. Yet they could also learn from, say, an 18th-century furniture designer, for beauty is better than a big idea.

The most deadening influence on art in our time is the belief that content matters more than style. If you look back on the artists who have won the Turner prize since the 1980s, or the artists most often mentioned in the media these days, what they have in common is a message. Artists like Marc Quinn, Antony Gormley and Tracey Emin – all have very clear points to make. Once you’ve understood them, what’s left to say?

Real art doesn’t have a message, doesn’t necessarily say anything. It is an arrangement of shapes, a pattern of words. If you want an antidote to this idea of art, watch Bob Dylan manically arranging and rearranging words on a shop sign he and the band spotted one day. That is art.

Jonathan Jones
Guardian

Sara Ramo as Magician

Celestial sorcery … Sara Ramo’s Invasion of Everything That Was Restrained (2005). Photograph: Sara Ramo/Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

The artist Sara Ramo is also something of a magician. In Movable Planes, a tantalising show of the young Spanish-Brazilian’s photography and video at London’s Photographers’ Gallery, a screwed-up piece of newspaper becomes a meteor, a leftover balloon a black hole. Her technique is simple: she photographs her objects in series, and transforms them simply by relabelling them. Thus, an image of spilt milk in the corner of the room becomes the Milky Way. In a stop-motion animation, her bedroom mutates from a scene of domestic harmony to one of total disarray, destroyed by the hand of an unseen sorcerer’s apprentice. Ramo’s cosmic gestures are enchantingly humble: she uses whatever is at her fingertips to achieve a delightful tension between the known world and the less predictable one of our imagination.

More

Skye Sherwin
Guardian

Who Knew? Warhol Gift Refused by MOMA

Hats off today to New York’s Museum of Modern Art for its ability to have a chuckle at its own expense. The institution has tweeted a recent blog post featuring a rejection letter that the museum sent to Andy Warhol in 1956.

In the letter, the museum notifies Warhol that its collections committee has decided to turn down the drawing “Shoe,” which the artist had offered as a gift.

“I regret that I must report to you that the Committee decided, after careful consideration, that they ought not to accept it for our Collection,” wrote the museum’s Alfred H. Barr Jr.

“Let me explain that because of our severely limited gallery and storage space we must turn down many gifts offered, since we feel it is not fair to accept as a gift a work which may be shown only infrequently.”

At the bottom of the correspondence is a postscript: “P.S. The drawing may be picked up from the Museum at your convenience.”

More

David Ng
Culture Monster