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The monthly art walks in downtown L.A. are hugely popular, but organizers don’t have the money to pay for extra security and cleanup. (Spencer Weiner, Los Angeles Times
The future of the Downtown Art Walk, which draws more than 20,000 people to a monthly stroll of downtown galleries and nightspots and has been credited with helping revitalize the area, was uncertain Tuesday following a dispute among its top leaders.
The dispute broke out Friday with a message on the art walk’s official website saying the walks had been canceled through the end of the year and that they would resume in 2011 as quarterly events. But then on Sunday, the organization’s board of directors sent out a release saying that the next art walk would take place Oct. 14 as previously scheduled and that the group’s executive director, Jay Lopez, had published the earlier announcement without the approval of the board.
David Ng and Deborah Vankin
Los Angeles Times
To see gargantuan steel sculptures fashioned by Richard Serra, you could visit the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, or the Dia: Beacon, 60 miles north of New York City. Or you could go to a crane yard near a heating-oil terminal in Port Morris, an industrial corner of the South Bronx.
There, amid belching smokestacks and clanging delivery trucks, sits artwork made by Mr. Serra, a secret grace note in a decidedly ungraceful block. The briny air from the river just steps away blows across the steel plates, bent in a trademark Serra arc that would be recognized on the moon — which, in the art world, Port Morris might as well be.
The piece — five plates, about one and a half stories high — is not displayed for public view or assembled as Mr. Serra intended. It stands behind a raggedy chain-link fence while a stray black-and-white cat stands watch. Cranes and falling-down sheds surround it. It has sat there for years, waiting to be delivered to its owner, said Joe Vilardi of Budco Enterprises, a Long Island rigging company that placed the steel in the Bronx lot and has long worked with Mr. Serra.
“It is parts of a sculpture that are just in storage right now,” Mr. Vilardi said.
Sam Dolnick
New York Times
Anish Kapoor in front of Sky Mirror, Red, in Kensington Gardens. Photograph: Andrew Winning/Reuters
As a blood red sun appeared to rise over the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, while a huge silver moon set over the Long Water lake, it was clear the challenge for the round-the-clock security guards will be to keep swans, dogs and children off the art, not any vandals or robbers who might be interested to learn that several million pounds worth of contemporary art has landed in the heart of London.
Anish Kapoor was almost as bewitched as the swans, even under the most Monday morningish of grey skies.
“The best site in London for a piece of art,” he said, looking across the water at the great grey stainless steel disc of his Sky Mirror, “probably in the world.”
While Kapoor’s giant pieces have been exhibited in the open air across the world and in many places in Britain, the last London saw of the Turner prize-winning sculptor was when he caused grievous bodily harm in the name of art to the Royal Academy, installing an engine forcing a giant block of crimson wax through narrow doorways, and a cannon which fired more blocks through another door until the room beyond looked like a particularly messy abattoir.
Maev Kennedy
Guardian
At an outdoor temporary pavilion in the main parking lot at the Southern California Institute of Architecture are fellow architects Peter Cook, Hernan Diaz Alonso, Eric Owen Moss and Greg Lynn, where Moss is director. (Rafael Sampaio Rocha / September 26, 2010)
Frank Gehry was on the panel. So was Thom Mayne. And fellow architects Eric Owen Moss, Peter Cook, Hernan Diaz Alonso and Greg Lynn. The subject was the “troubled relationship” between architecture and beauty. The setting, on a warm recent evening, was an outdoor pavilion in the main parking lot at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, where Moss is director. The impresario, moderator and ego-wrangler was architect Yael Reisner, Cook’s wife and the author of a new book of interviews with architects on beauty.
In the end, if the panelists didn’t exactly embrace the topic at hand — and if the uneven discussion that resulted was, itself, far from a thing of beauty — that could hardly be counted as a surprise. The group of architects Reisner asked to take part, representative of the larger group she features in the book, have always eyed beauty with wariness, if not outright hostility. There were times during the panel when it seemed the huge, standing-room-only crowd had gathered to listen to a bunch of Hatfields discuss the McCoys.
Christopher Hawthorne
Los Angeles Times
Years in the works, a planned Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem took a significant step forward this week when the Simon Wiesenthal Center unveiled new architectural designs for the structure, saying that the museum is likely to be completed in four years.
The new design, which was created by the Israeli firm Chyutin Architects, calls for a six-story structure — three stories below ground and three above — with approximately 150,000 to 160,000 square feet of space. By comparison, the Center’s main facilities in Los Angeles total about 110,000 square feet of space.
The complex is expected to feature exhibition space, a theater, an educational center as well as an outdoor sunken area in front of the building with a garden and amphitheater.
With an estimated price tag of $100 million, the new museum is significantly less expensive than the one designed by Frank Gehry, which would have cost at least $250 million, according to the Center.
Earlier this year, Gehry and the Center decided to part ways on the project in part because the Center’s board of trustees wished to downsize the museum in response to the slumping economy.
Culture Monster
Los Angeles Times
Nathalie Miebach translates astronomy, ecology and meteorology data – including parameters like land, sea and ocean temperature, tide readings, moon phases, the solar path in relation to horizon, the distance between Sun and Earth – as physical woven sculptures. Typically, each weave represents 1 hour of detailed data. Her method of translation is principally that of weaving, in particular basket weaving, as it provides for a simple yet highly effective grid through which to interpret data in 3D space. By staying true to the numbers, these woven pieces tread an uneasy divide between functioning both as sculptures in space as well as instruments that could be used in the actual environment from which the data originates.
Once she runs out of weaving, Nathalie invites musicians to create musical scores from the data. While musicians have freedom to interpret, they are asked not to change the essential relationship of the notes to ensure that what is still heard is indeed the meteorological weather data.
“Central to this work is my desire to explore the role visual aesthetics play in the translation and understanding of science information. By utilizing artistic processes and everyday materials, I am questioning and expanding boundaries through which science data has been traditionally visually translated (ex: graphs, diagrams), while at the same time provoking expectations of what kind of visual vocabulary is considered to be in the domain of ‘science’ or ‘art’.”
Melbourne gallery owner Beverly Knight does not believe MeaghanWilson-Anastasios’s argument is sustainable. Picture: Stuart McEvoy Source: The Australian
The pursuit of cultural authenticity in Aboriginal art will make it harder for young artists to enjoy the success of the old masters.
New research into the sustainability of Aboriginal art claims the market for new works is already falling away, even for sought-after artists, because some indigenous works are still being treated as ethnographic objects.
A paper by Melbourne academic Meaghan Wilson-Anastasios says major artists such as Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Rover Thomas, are promoted as Aboriginal in a way that Pablo Picasso would not be labelled Spanish.
“To secure the future of the Aboriginal art market, it needs to expand and evolve so that a new generation of artists is cultivated and they are accepted as contemporary practitioners,” she writes.
“Marketing the first generation of Aboriginal desert painters as the genuine ethnographic article has the corollary effect of initiating a spiral of redundancy that makes it increasingly difficult to promote subsequent generations of Aboriginal artists.”
Ashleigh Wilson
The Australian
Damien Hirst: once a pickler of sharks, now associated with large wads of cash. Photograph: PR
The campaign against arts cuts is gearing up, and the techniques are tried and trusted ones. If you want to get a high-profile message across, sign up some celebrity artists. That accounts for the starry cast, including Damien Hirst, that has joined a campaign against coalition attacks on arts funding.
There is, however, trouble ahead. A poll by the organisers of the Threadneedle prize, which was reported by the BBC, found that two-thirds of its sample “agree with arts funding change”; only 16% of those questioned believed the public should be the main funder of visual art. A fifth felt visual art should get no state funds at all, while 66% said the majority of visual art funding should come from corporate sponsorship and private donations.
Jonathan Jones
Guardian
Diébédo Francis Kéré’s first building was this primary school in Gando, Burkina Faso. (Siméon Duchoud/Aga Khan Trust for, © 2010 Museum of Modern Art / September 12, 2010)
Has architecture rediscovered its conscience? Or is it just critics and curators who have had a reawakening, suddenly paying attention to design work that has been going on steadily, and right under our noses, for years?
Those are among the compelling questions hovering around “Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement,” which opens Oct. 3 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition is only the latest in a string this year of museum shows to explore so-called humanitarian design, an approach to architectural practice that instead of splashy new skyscrapers or private villas concentrates on disaster relief, anti-poverty programs and affordable housing.
Christopher Hawthorne
Los Angeles Times
On an August afternoon, a shiny sports-utility vehicle pulled into a parking lot of pick-up trucks outside the only school in Cotopaxi. The artist Christo Javacheff took a deep breath and walked into the school’s gymnasium. Someone had set up a microphone under the basketball hoop, and two armed sheriff’s officers stood watch nearby. All the folding chairs planted on the rubbery court were filled, some with people wearing T-shirts that read, “Say No To Christo.”
The artist had fretted about this moment for months. “It’s our lion’s den,” he told his staff.
Known professionally by his first name, Christo is famous for draping entire buildings, valleys and New York’s Central Park in colorful fabric. Now, at age 75, he’s trying to convince a swath of southern Colorado to let him temporarily suspend flat sections of silvery fabric over a 42-mile-long stretch of the area’s Arkansas River. For two weeks, people will be able to drive alongside this mirror-like ribbon or raft underneath it, he says. He has spent $7 million and 18 years working out the logistics of the project, “Over The River,” and he is campaigning hard for the permits to pull it off.
Kelly Crow
Wall Street Journal
