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Such a fascinating project. Here’s what Paul Chan had to tell us about it recently.
(Source: newedge)
“Meet the Schoenherrs: This Woodbury, Minn., family has been selected as hosts for Fritz Haeg’s 15th and final Edible Estate, a project that transforms suburban front lawns into abundant organic vegetable gardens. Challenging the symbolism of the display yard, Edible Estates “questions the essence of what the American Dream is,” says Haeg. “Ultimately, the project is really way beyond lawn and way beyond food and gardens and the environment. It penetrates to the core of ‘How do you want to live?’”
Gear up for barbecue season! George Maciunas’ Stomach Anatomy Apron (1967/1973)
A poster for Flux Vehicle Day, May 19, 1973, featuring George Maciunas’ design for the Multicycle, a “multi-tandem-bike.”
Now through December 20 only, the Walker Art Center is streaming Seoul-based artist Kim Beom’s Yellow Scream (2012), which takes its inspiration from Bob Ross-style painting shows:
After discussing his assembled materials—a primed canvas, oil paint mixed with turpentine, a size-3 flat hog-bristle brush—the video’s instructor begins: “The technique to this painting is to incorporate the sound of screams into the brush strokes.” Dressed in a pressed gray dress shirt and pleated pants, he explains to the camera, “A brush stroke done with screaming is very different from a normal one. … The effect of the screams is recorded with the brush strokes.” He then dips his brush in a dab of lemon yellow paint, leans into the canvas, and lets out an anguished wail as he makes his first stroke: “Aaaaaaaaagh!”
From Untitled (Blog):
“My work has been about negative space, in some respects: The overlooked, the void, emptiness,” said artist Mungo Thomson during a September visit to Minneapolis. “I had this idea to take that literally and make negative images of outer space.”
The result is the Walker’s new acquisition, the 93-foot-long mural Negative Space, recently installed outside the Vineland Place entrance. The piece reflects Thomson’s interest in what he calls “the dumb idea”–something simple blown up to grand proportions. In this case, he found a public domain photo taken by NASA’s Hubble telescope and using a basic Photoshop command inverted it. “Just click Apple-I,” he said of the work that’ll be on view for the next six months. “It takes two fingers.”
Claire Fontaine’s neon sign installation at Manifesta appropriating street signage once visible outside the Chernobyl nuclear power plant that called for “energy self-sufficiency.”
Warhol walked a tightrope over the gorge of frigid documentation, but his selection of background colors and balancing of negative space saved him from falling. The background color became a kind of beautiful screen, mitigating the harshness of the subject matter, transforming the images into dreamlike visions rather than documents. Whether motivated by cynicism or some mysterious philosophical bent, Warhol grasped the possibility that history and its tragedy are nothing but wallpaper for our identities and souls.
—Francesco Bonami in “PAINTINGSLAUGHTER: How Andy Warhol Did Not Murder Painting but Masterminded the Killing of Content”
Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco at the Walker Art Center, 1992, from a reflection by former performing arts curator John Killacky on performance during the ’80s and ’90s culture wars.
In my presentation about the Walker website at the National Museum Publishing Seminar in Chicago two weeks ago, I mentioned our Friday Cat Break feature (which today brings us Russian museum-guard cats!) as one of the voices—from quirky and light to scholarly and serious—we present online. Afterwards, an audience member approached me with a gift: this packet of gum dedicated to the “breading cats” meme.
