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Cai Guo-Qiang, Black Rainbow: Explosion Project for Valencia at IVAM
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Sign up for Summer School, where Salon takes on Tolstoy, Bronte, and other great writers you meant to read — but never did.
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English Architect Redesigns the Heartland
(New York Times, July 30)
London-based David Chipperfield, whose neo-minimalist aesthetic integrates architectural space with its surroundings, has recently set up shop in the American Midwest. Intrigued by the chance to effect real urban change in medium-sized locales such as Davenport, Iowa, Chipperfield agreed to design the Figge Art Museum, a $42.1 million project overlooking the Mississippi River. He has also designed the new Des Moines Central Library. Chipperfield's moderately scaled buildings do not conform to the current wave of "starchitecture," but they have received high accolades.
Live Painting Hits San Francisco
(San Francisco Chronicle, July 22)
Bay Area visual artists are turning to painting in public in order to supplement more conventional activities such as gallery shows and design jobs. While compensation for live painting, which often takes place at clubs and is set to music, is minimal, artists find inspiration from the interactive environment. Ezra Li, who has been live painting for over ten years, connects the movement to renewed interest in graffiti art, while Yerba Buena Center for the Arts curator René de Guzman suggests it is part of a broader trend toward socially conscious expression.
Robert Storr, in Australia, Talks Venice
(The Australian, July 26)
Robert Storr, perhaps the most influential curator of contemporary art today, was recently named sole curator of the 2007 Venice Biennale. Visiting Australia to speak at the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art, he refrained from outlining his plans for the world's premier international exhibition. However, Storr's comments suggest the direction he may take: He is dissatisfied with the current, booming art market and expressed admiration for innovative, political artists such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
Guerilla Art Storms the Shopping Aisles
(CNN, July 20)
"Shop dropping," a new movement inspired by street art, has brought art to the shopping aisles. Ryan Watkins-Hughes, a Brooklyn-based photographer, is among the pioneers of the new genre. He replaces labeling on canned goods with original photographs and then reinserts these modified products back into supermarkets. Building on momentum from early progenitors such as the Barbie Liberation Organization, the movement is gaining recognition, with San Francisco's Pond Gallery hosting a shop-dropping exhibition earlier this year. In related developments, media corporations such as Saatchi & Saatchi and Time magazine continue to appropriate guerilla art's renegade identity for marketing campaigns.
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Philippe Vergne returns to Walker Art Center in new role » more
Austrian museum hosts nude gallery event » more
Picasso family releases unseen paintings for Istanbul museum show » more
"Stuffy" Scottish arts organization exhibits scandalous side » more
Jeanne-Claude and Christo plan Colorado river wrapping » more
Stirling Prize shortlist features European architecture's heavy hitters » more
German artist's TV terror ploy creates media sensation » more
Benedikt Taschen celebrates 25 years of art, porn, and publishing » more
Gallery director fired after Daily Show appearance » more
Artist's Antarctic ice project melts into thin air » more
Note: Some online publications require registration to access the articles. If you encounter a registration screen, try akreader1 as the username and password.
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[ Ambassador of Chinese Art ] |
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Zhang Xiaogang / Sun Yuan / Fang Lijun / Wang Jin
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Lately, it seems that every newspaper headline has been heralding a new age of expansion in booming China. Uli Sigg, the first European businessman to build a joint venture with China in 1980 and Switzerland's ambassador to Beijing in the '90s, has witnessed firsthand the country's sweeping social and economic changes while keeping his finger on the pulse of the Chinese avant-garde art movement. The result is an unparalleled exhibition from his personal collection of 1,200 works, titled Mahjong, a traditional game of chance.
Questioning the place of the individual within modern society, Zhang Xiaogang's series Bloodline: The Big Family paints a fine red line between portraits to symbolize relationships between the post-1979, one-child families and the greater socialist family. Individual identity is also probed in Zhang Huan's Family Tree, a series of photographs in which the artist's face progressively disappears under the black-ink calligraphy describing his family history.
Traditional techniques are often applied in new contexts, evoking China's legendary past. For example, Wang Jin's The Dream of China is an imperial robe made entirely from polyvinyl that's intricately embroidered with nylon fishing thread. In Obsessive Memories, Liu Jianhua's delicate, porcelain figurines in customary Chinese dress are missing arms and heads and are contorted into provocative positions.
Newly unleashed capitalist reforms have created a newfound fascination with consumerism, a theme present in many works. Wang Guangyi's Great Criticism series juxtaposes figures from Communist propaganda posters with Western brands, including Disney and Chanel, and Ai Weiwei transforms a Han-dynasty urn with a painted Coca-Cola logo.
From Qi Zhilong's politically charged femmes fatales to Hong Hao's color photographs composed of hundreds of digital scans to Sun Yuan's controversial sculptures made from corpses and human fat, Sigg has a taste for bold art. This is contemporary art influenced by a society in flux. New art in China is thriving and Sigg's intriguing collection makes us eager to know what shape it will take in the coming years. (MS)
Mahjong – Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection is on view at the Kunstmuseum Bern through October 16, 2005 and travels to the Hamburger Kunsthalle in autumn 2006. A comprehensive catalog has been published by Hatje Cantz Verlag.
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Barry McGee: One More Thing
New York
Deitch Projects
Now through August 13
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In the 1980s, when graffiti's crossover from dingy streets to white cubes was as exhilarating and dangerous as skirting the third rail, Barry McGee — the San Francisco-based bomber known as Twist — was just beginning to make his mark. Having spent so much time outside the box, McGee has more recently been bringing the streets inside. One More Thing is a mixed-media phantasmagoria of overturned vans and semi-trucks, life-sized animatronics throwing up tags, and the lacerating smell of paint from discarded spray cans. McGee says his work echoes "the overload of the senses that one might feel walking down the street of any one of our fine American cities." The carefully controlled environment approximates anarchy, fashioning a chaotic haven from the detritus of urban hell. (SRP)
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Francis Alÿs: Walking Distance from the Studio
Barcelona
Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Now through August 29
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Capturing the rhythm of everyday life in his art, Belgian artist Francis Alÿs turns the 10-block radius surrounding his studio in the historic center of Mexico City into a poetic goldmine, rich in simple visual pleasures. The situations he encounters as a flaneur become the subjects for his videos, slide shows, drawings, and paintings. "The city provokes an urge to react," says Alÿs. Like a perpetual tourist, he snaps up the urban drama, from dogs sleeping in the midday sun to a man pushing a block of ice until it melts. The slide series Ambulantes (Pushing and Pulling), shot between 1992 and 2002 and fully reproduced in the catalog, shows ordinary people conveying a variety of parcels through city streets - actions that, when multiplied, provoke a curious grin. (PL)
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Nancy Rubins
Dijon
FRAC Bourgogne
Now through September 10
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American sculptor and installation artist Nancy Rubins breaks the rules. Her obscenely labor-intensive drawing process involves applying graphite to paper until the surface shines like metal. Rubins primly sidesteps any notions of drawing's supposed intimacy, and her recent works on paper — three of which are on display here — carry a gestural physicality that results in sprawling, eruptive clusters. The exhibition also showcases her rarely exhibited 1993 masterpiece Table and Airplane Parts, a genre- and gravity-defying stack of mangled, steel aircraft remains whose improbably flamboyant towers are equally inspired by (and dismissive of) her subject's sometimes violent relationship to the laws of physics. As with Rubins' drawings, the objects transcend the traditional boundaries of their materials, revealing a dizzying range of formal possibilities. (SND)
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Rirkrit Tiravanija
London
Serpentine Gallery
Now through August 21
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In a culture saturated with reality television and tell-all autobiographies, it's not surprising that many artists eschew the imaginary in favor of veracity. Rirkrit Tiravanija, for one, presents the facts of life — his life — in two full-scale reproductions of his spartan New York apartment. Gallery visitors can fix lunch in the Argentine-born
expat's kitchen, take a nap in his bed, or even brush their teeth in his bathroom. Adding a splash of fantasy into the real-world setting, the artist invites spectators to become characters in a weekly radio serial that will be broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM, "London's first radio-art station." By simultaneously simulating and rethinking the mundane, Tiravanija shows us that living is an art in itself. (AK)
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Margaret Kilgallen: In the Sweet Bye & Bye
Los Angeles
Gallery at REDCAT
Now through August 21
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Derelicts, hula-hoopers, dog shacks, and lighthouses are all featured in the paintings and sculptures of Margaret Kilgallen, who perhaps drew inspiration from the coastal, small-town malaise of John Steinbeck's Cannery Row — the author's hometown of Salinas, CA, even figures in her small, painted panels. The late artist's calligraphic, confident line, displayed in her signature Gold Rush-era-style signage and intuitively collaged boards, offer up elegant portraits of a bygone era. This exhibition is the first survey of Kilgallen's work, and the nearly 100 pieces are affecting observations on Americana, handsomely rewarding viewers with their unsentimental poignancy. (ML)
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[ Wang Qingsong ] |
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Wang Qingsong
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The kids are not alright. With the incredible social and economic upheaval China is currently undergoing, Beijing-based artist Wang Qingsong asserts there is more to be concerned with than overexerted thumbs suffering from too much text messaging. Like fellow photographer Liu Zheng, interventionist Zhang Dali, and filmmaker Jia Zhangke, Wang addresses the role of the individual in a country threatened by cultural bankruptcy, a disregard for history, and overzealous urban development.
In his most famous work, Night Revels of Lao Li (2000), Wang reinterprets a 10th-century painting depicting a luxurious banquet hosted by the scholar Han Xizai. Trading flowing robes and teapots for slacks and soda bottles, Wang collapses past intrigues with modern concerns, and his photograph is informed by the style of traditional scroll painting.
In his latest work, Wang switches to more recent iconography, appropriating imagery and text from advertisements to create elaborate tableaux that rival the work of Jeff Wall and Thomas Demand. The oversized photograph Competition (2004) is a dizzying display of polyglot bills and posters that dwarf the crowd loitering below. Tramp (2004) gives new meaning to branding by showing a vagabond couple resting in a nest of FedEx boxes and Coca-Cola cartons — a makeshift shelter against corporate onslaught. (CYL)
A catalog of the artist's work, Wang Qingsong: Romantique, has recently been published by Timezone 8 and the Courtyard Gallery.
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[ Cai Guo-Qiang ] |
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Cai Guo-Qiang
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| Paul Laster interviews Cai Guo-Qiang, one of the most dynamic international artists working today, about recent projects. |
AK: What do your explosive Black Rainbow projects symbolize?
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CGQ: Black Rainbow: Explosion Project for Valencia was conceived for IVAM in Valencia, Spain (exploded May 22, 2005 at 12:05pm) to illustrate the uneasiness and fear that people in modern society live with today, even in the daytime, after the bombings in Madrid. For the recent Edinburgh project (July 29, 2005 at 7pm), I learned about the dark history of ghosts and spirits that haunt the city when I first visited and went on several famous ghost tours. I thought a black rainbow would be appropriate for Edinburgh because the black fireworks are a kind of communication with the unseen spirits. In the black rainbow projects I pose three questions: Why are there fireworks during the day? Why are the fireworks black? Why is it a black rainbow? Because of the recent events in London, some people drew a link between the black rainbow and the bombings there. The black rainbow in Edinburgh thus has another meaning in addition to its original spiritual one. It was made for Life Beneath the Shadow, a solo exhibition currently at the Fruitmarket Gallery and Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Another black-firework explosion project to commemorate the first anniversary of last year's devastating tsunami is planned for the end of December in Phuket.
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AK: What inspired the exploding Red Flag project at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in June?
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CGQ: Red Flag was an explosion project addressing the socialist ideals and beliefs of creating a paradise, goals that have not been accomplished. The Paradise installation in the same museum also explores this subject. Cradles, gently rocking, are covered with the flags of past and present Communist countries. The cradles seem peaceful, but they also visually resemble coffins. Electric fans blow kites with iconic images of socialist figures or events, creating a childlike, innocent atmosphere in the gallery, but these iconic images also have heavy connotations. The exhibition includes a gunpowder drawing as well, also titled Red Flag, and two videos on the making of the gunpowder drawing, and a selection of my past explosion projects.
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AK: Earlier this year, you were reunited with Jan Hoet, a supporter of your work when he was director of the S.M.A.K. in Ghent who is now the artistic director of MARTa Herford, a new museum designed by Frank Gehry. What did you contribute to his inaugural exhibition at MARTa Herford?
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CGQ: Jan Hoet and I have collaborated about 10 times, and each time we face new challenges and are inspired by new thoughts. This time at MARTa Herford, I created a flying carpet with penetrating arrows. The arrows look like wings for the carpet, but they also inflict pain and add weight to it. The work expresses the conflict and pain that a lot of Arabic traditions are facing today. The exhibition also included an explosion project, Auto-Destruct, in which a car drove by the front of the museum and exploded while in motion.
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AK: You used automobiles for a massive installation at MASS MoCA. What illusion did you want to create there?
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Lui Zheng: The Chinese
Liu Zheng, Christopher Phillips, and Gu Zheng
Steidl/ICP
Decomposed corpses, beggars, transvestites, strippers, and nuns: the cast of characters populating Liu Zheng's The Chinese is a far cry from the propagandist imagery traditionally associated with Chinese publications. A former newspaper photojournalist, the artist shot these black-and-white images between 1994 and 2002, and the collection is a startling reality check for those who only associate China with teeming cities and new money. Zheng's deliberate compositions are arrayed on facing pages, telling sobering stories about marginalized souls. On one memorable spread, a dead farmer in his coffin is paired with a boy holding a bouquet of flowers. The farmer's eyes are sealed, the boy's wide open. (YRC)
Note: An exhibition of photographs from the book is on view at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York through August 26, 2005.
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Cai Guo-Qiang
Black Rainbow: Explosion Project for Valencia, 2005
IVAM - Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Valencià, Spain (May 22, 2005)
14 in. black smoke shells
Photo by Juan Garcia Rosell, IVAM, and J.C. Pestano
Courtesy of Cai Studio
All Rights Reserved
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Editors
Paul Laster
Andrew Maerkle
Shana Nys Dambrot
Shiraz Randeria
Melissa Lo
Greg Zinman
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Mark Barry
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Production
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Mailer Design
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