loud paper

plate tectonics

A little late to the party, I finally checked my design sponge RSS feed and found Andrew Wagner guest blogging. Andrew's editor-in-chief of the brilliantly relaunched American Craft magazine (where, very excitingly, I recently had a cover story).

Years ago, back when he was editing at either Limn or the early Dwell days, Andrew introduced me to his friend Jed Morfit. Jed's illustrations were then, and are now, spare, but psychologically haunting, with a good dose of wit. Taken with his work, I asked Jed to contribute to loud paper, which he did, and design a tee shirt (see above). And then over the years we lost touch. So, it was really great to see Andrew link to new work by Jed in Décor/Decorum at Philadelphia's Center for Emerging Visual Artists. The reliefs on dinner plates are wonderfully refined and twisted.

"New Temptations", 2008, Plaster plates, mixed media, Dimensions Variable

"New Temptations" (detail), 2008, Plaster plates, mixed media, Dimensions variable


"The Price Of Doing Business"(detail), 2008, Plaster mounted on wall, Dimensions variable

art and fly

San Francisco-based artists Jennifer Starkweather and Amanda Hughen are working on a new collaborative project and they are soliciting volunteer photographers. The pair recently created their Market Street series, which was installed on kiosks along the SF thoroughfare. The pieces tracked Bay Area infrastructure data, such as trees, bike racks, commuters, in gouache and ink.

The current project focuses on transportation patterns at six specific airports around the country. The resulting prints will be part of an exhibition at Electric Works in San Francisco this winter.

If you are traveling to Miami, Chicago: O'Hare, Oakland, New York: JFK, or LAX airports this summer, they would love you to snap a photo of a parking garage or parking garage signage from each of these airports.

Pretty simple and, given the richness of the prints in their last project, it will surely pay off in good art.

Amanda writes:

We don't need a GOOD photo, we just need some basic information about parking garage colors in these airports (which is surprisingly difficult to obtain online or through airport public relations departments). It would involve only one simple photo of a parking garage color, whatever is most convenient for the traveler. Of course, if you are up for the challenge, the more information we can get the better. The photos can be digital, print, or even cell phone.

To volunteer, contact Amanda via her website.

trip the elastic fantastic

Big props to Archinect's Aaron Plewke who managed to wrangle reviews of MoMA's Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition out of a bunch of ne'er-do-well architects, designers, and thinkers. My contribution (an extension of wig in a box) is included among a fine bunch: Brian Moroz, Rosten Woo (who nails review with the line "...being there feels less like stuffy MoMA and more like being at a world’s fair or Expo 86"), Michael Surtees, Adam Greenfield (blessedly barbed as ever), Addie Wagenknecht, and Fred Scharmen. The exhibit is kinda great and kinda muddled. Having seven reviewers wade through it doesn't exactly create a common consensus as much as it surveys the messy territory. On the other hand, since the show feels like it springs from Internet culture, it seems homey and appropriate to have multiple posts.

Everyone's featured here.

house and home

Ben Grasso
Whatever Was Left of It, 2007
Oil on Canvas,
108" x 72"

Heads up! Supernatural is closing this weekend. The exhibition at Thierry Goldberg Projects features works by Martin Basher, Jane Benson and Ben Grasso. I am particularly struck by Grasso's explosive works. His oil paintings seem allegorical to what is going on in today's real estate market. Their vivid style also carries a windblown, Wizard of Oz quality—a tornado trope standing in for global warming?

Writes Goldberg:

The reality of the house, composed alongside its state of distress, provides an uncanny dialogue between conscious and subconscious appearance. It is the maintenance of façade that perpetuates suburban dreams, the modern American embodiment of hope and security, which Grasso repeatedly disrupts.

There is no place, no place like home.

Via Little Paper Airplanes.

Ben Grasso
Untitled (House), 2006
Oil on Canvas,
70" x 50"

whether underground

Early on in Rob Walker’s upcoming book, Buying In: the Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, he discusses the “new consumer’s” slightly irrational obsession with authenticity. He writes:

While evoked constantly, the word is seldom defined. But one can presume that the authentic symbol is grounded in some kind of empirical, provable reality—that if you burrow down behind it, you will find exactly the things that the symbol purports to represent.

I was reading an advance copy of Rob’s book on the train up to Columbia on Monday night, so it was still resonating in my head as took my seat for Ant Farm: Radical Hardware, a panel discussion featuring Ant Farm members, Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier, and moderated by professors Felicity Scott and Mark Wasiuta. Ant Farm’s the kind of countercultural, prankster, media-savvy, architecturally off-the-wall group for whom I always have a soft spot. The sixties/seventies work is great, but also kind of awful: equal parts spectacle, pop, psychedelia, hi-tech, and Krazy Kat. A postcard of their piece, Media Burn (1975), where they drove a tricked-out Cadillac into a wall of burning TVs used to hang above my desk. If anyone was looking to latch onto something authentic, this was it.

Ant Farm’s been on the university circuit before, but what were these former radicals doing this time around in an academic institution, aside from helping Scott promote her new book on their work? Were they not there as authentic symbols of a history rapidly being embraced by architecture historians, even as they were brushed off when contemporary? Introducing the panel, Dean Mark Wigley, who likes to stir the pot a bit, remarked that Ant Farm’s appearance and exhibition at the Buell Center was not nostalgic, but all about the future.

And yes, in some ways it is. Scott and Wasiuta awkwardly attempted to mine the seventies oil crisis, environmental architecture, and communal living scene for its present day resonances, but seemed more comfortable in the past, focusing on the pre-Media Burn work. By contrast, Lord and Schreier, as working artists/architects fully versed in television and web 2.0, and with new installations in the works, made fluid leaps into today. Their easy demeanor was real, yet somehow dismissible (or dismissed) within the lecture auditorium context.

Lord summed it up best in a quip: “How to make subversion suitable for the institution? Add time.”

parched

Ian Baguskas, Two Structures, Death Valley, California, 2007 30x38.3" C-print

Jen Bekman sends word that Sweet Water, an exhibition of new work by photographer Ian Baguskas, opens tomorrow evening at her Spring Street gallery. Baguskas's images are full of bleak, bleached out light and represent failed utopias in the landscape—moments where all the spry optimism of modern America just gives up the ghost. The photographs resonate with current economic fears, and realities—manifested in tent cities outside of LA (Thanks, Kazys). Our own contemporary aspirations gone tragically wrong.

From the press release:

Sweet Water presents us with striking images of vast land and open skies, lying in contrast to artificial, isolated structures, portraying a landscape fractured by modern aspirations’ collisions with the formidable, often unbeatable powers of nature. While journeying from one end of California to the other, Baguskas documented the remains of human attempts to transform untamable landscapes into personal utopias. The resulting images are at once archaeological, anthropological and aesthetically beautiful.

The show runs through April 26.

Rincon Artificial Island and Pipeline, Ventura, California, 2007 40x51" C-print


Luxury Homes, Provo, Utah, 2006. 30x38" Chromira C-print

it's a gas

Eric Paulos, Ergo

CO2, CH4, N2O, NOx, SO2, or  O3?

I am not sure that this is the party for smokers, SUV drivers, or people who struggle with body odor, but Berkeley-based architect and all around character Jordan Geiger sends word of Vapor, the new show at San Francisco's Southern Exposure gallery which opens tonight. Geiger and co-curator Alison Sant have assembled a group of artists, architects, and designers preoccupied with air quality, an illusive medium at best. The works are varied, some object-driven, some conceptual, some techy, all with a whiff of the political. The exhibition features: Amy Balkin, Futurefarmers, Natalie Jeremijenko, The Living, Eric Paulos, and Preemptive Media.

The curators write:

Vapor is a survey of new art, architecture and design that takes our declining air quality as subject matter, medium and metaphor.

Often inspired by forms of activism, the works react to the sources of climate change through the use of technologies—sensors, databases, and communications equipment— that are only recently accessible outside a lab. In this sense, the show's title also refers to the growing means by which this art is being produced, in addition to the ubiquity of greenhouse gases and other air conditions that serve as this art's medium. Vapor proposes new ways of modeling, testing and finding solutions to the problems of air quality and greenhouse gas emissions.

The curators have also put together an impressive line up of public events and lectures, as well the Vapor Symposium, co-sponsored by and hosted at the California College of the Arts, will take place April 19, 2008. Who doesn’t want to tour Jeremijenko’s One Trees Project? (Which involves biking around to some of the piece’s 1,000 cloned trees.) There is a catch: “Participants will also help to render air pollution evident by wearing Clear Skies Facemasks that visualize urban air quality.” Breathe deep.

virtual seduction

Thomas Wilfred at Clavilux keyboard

This afternoon I met up with Molly Steenson, Enrique Ramirez, and John Szot to hash out just what we are going to cover on our Meet the Architects panel at SXSW Interactive. Amped on good coffee and thick slices of grilled pita bread, we dashed from tangent to tangent. Somewhere in there, John, an architect who works for the media firm Digital Foundry in Brooklyn, noted that these days it is easy to get so caught up in what is flashing on the screen, and calling it architecture, that actual buildings become an afterthought.

I bring up the conversation not to (re)start any paper architecture debate, but because with this discussion in mind I came across a paper written in 1947 by inventor and light artist Thomas Wilfred.

Wilfred’s work has fallen into obscurity of late. Ranging from the surreal to the psychedelic, his career stretched from the 1920s until his death in 1968. His medium was light, manipulated into dreamlike compositions of varying colors and intensities. A practice he called lumina, it falls somewhere between music, painting, and sculpture. Trained as a musician, he would build complex contraptions, Clavilux, to play his works.

Describing this “new art form” he wrote:

The lumia artist conceives his idea as a three-dimensional drama unfolding in infinite space.

In order to share his vision with others he must materialize it. This he may do by executing it as a two-dimensional sequence, projected on a flat white screen by means of a specially constructed projection instrument controlled from a keyboard.Seated before the keyboard he may, by manipulation of sliding keys, release white light, mold the light into form, add color and imbue the result with motion and change. But the original vision—the three-dimensional drama in space—is constantly before him and he strives to add, by optical means, an illusion of the missing third dimension to his flat screen image, and to perform it so convincingly in a spatial way that the screen creates the illusion of a large window opening on infinity, and the spectator imagines he is witnessing a radiant drama in deep space.

A couple visuals here.

I came across this article because a friend recently gave me a DVD of Wilfred’s work to check out. While I was dubious at first, picturing lava lamps and Sparkletts’ Dancing Waters, but then the jadedness washed away. Here was something proto-digital, which without bits or bytes and certainly not filmic, created space on screen. While I think the projections are pretty groovy, the projectors fascinate me. Unlike sleek laptops, the Clavilux were clunky boxes full of gears: objects desperate to escape the physical, but ultimately tied to their bulk.

For more images, the Yale University Library has an archive of ephemera related to the artist and the majority of Wilfred’s work is privately conserved by the Epstein Collection. 

wig in a box

Meret Oppenheim. (Swiss, 1913-1985). Object. Paris 1936. Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon, cup 4 3/8" (10.9 cm) in diameter; saucer 9 3/8" (23.7 cm) in diameter; spoon 8" (20.2 cm) long, overall height 2 7/8" (7.3 cm). Purchase. © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Pro Litteris, Zurich

Object (1936), Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon, is a beacon. Before I moved to New York City, I used to visit the Dada artwork like an old friend. The piece puzzled me when I was a kid, taken to MoMA because of my precocious interest in art, but I liked it. Deep into an undergraduate Dada phase, I felt empowered by its perverse feminine wiles. Later, with the opening of the new building, it was heartening to find the seventy-year old object still winking in the design section. So it was really no surprise that when furry and hairy pieces showed up in Design and the Elastic Mind, MoMA’s very strong, science fair roundup of geek designs, the artwork quickly sprung to mind.

Curators Paula Antonelli and Patricia Juncosa Vecchierini are clearly interested in the body, or at the very least, the human scale. The show, which opens on the 24th, is broken into sections by scale: nano, human, and global. While the nano section features Rules of Six, a nice installation by it-boys Aranda Lasch, and various data mapping projects are represented in the global section, it is the human scale that dominates with a cheeky, fleshy attitude.

I snapped a few pics at yesterday's press preview:

Epidermits Interactive Pet from the Cautionary Visions project, model, 2006, Stuart Karten Design

Necklace, 1995 and Chocolate Nipples, 1995-2003, Ana Mir, Emiliana Design Studio

Chest Hair Curler from the Accessories for Lonely Men Project, 2001, Noam Toran

Hair Alarm Clock from the Accessories for Lonely Men Project, 2001, Noam Toran

…And a couple more hirsute things which I need to go back and identify.

I heart agriculture culture

Via Pedal Tractors

When Work AC’s project Public Farm 1 was named the winner of the Young Architects Program at P.S.1, it made me think that agriculture would be the next big architectural meme. (A theme that’s been working through the art world for a some time now. In 2006, I wrote on artist/farmer Matthew Moore.)

Clearly, farming is in the air. This week the wise folk at CUP staged a discussion between Futurefarmer Amy Franceschini (archived loud paper interview here) and Michael Hurwitz, director of New York’s Greenmarket program. Today Pruned has a great round up of aggie-inspired art and architecture. Included is Edible Estates, the project by architect and artist Fritz Haeg that replaces the domestic front lawn with victory gardens.  I look out at the vacant lot outside my window and dream of summer tomatoes.