Fun with inflation

Artist Joshua Allen Harris turns plastic bags and subway ventilation into delightfully animated street art. New York magazine tracks down Harris in the well-executed video piece below. A cursory Internet search doesn't yield any gallery affiliation for Harris. (Are you paying attention, Marianne Boesky?) But work like this deserves a much bigger, er, platform.


And last month, Conan O'Brien got into the inflatable act, albeit for more commercial – and comedic – purposes. Supposedly, the owners of 30 Rockefeller Center won't put his name on the marquee. So he borrows a tactic from car dealers around the country.

And somewhere in France inflatable tentacles are emerging from a building, courtesy of Filthy Luker and Pedro Estrellas.

London calling, Gotham answering

There’s a new way for folks in New York City and London to communicate with each other, at least through June 15. “Hardly anyone knows that a secret tunnel runs deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean. In May 2008, more than a century after it was begun, the tunnel has finally been completed. An extraordinary optical device called a Telectroscope has been installed at both ends which miraculously allows people to see right through the Earth from London to New York.” Well, that’s what the official Web site says. And the whole set-up has a definite 19th century, Jules Verne, retrotech look to it.


In reality, the installation is the work of artist Paul St. George with able assists from fiber-optic cable and the übercreative production company Artichoke. The official Telectroscope site describes St. George’s m.o.: “His practice as an artist has always been concerned with questioning the relationship between the viewer and what is being viewed. His work is also often associated with different realities, spectacle and viewer participation.”

The New York Times elaborates further: “Mr. St. George hopes that people will use his device in surprising ways — to hold dance-offs, say, or propose marriage via placards. (The Telectroscope has no audio component ‘because I thought then people would just stand still and use it like a telephone,’ he said.)” His production partner Artichoke is the supertalented bunch of people who produced the Sultan’s Elephant spectacular on the streets of London two summers ago. Grants from the British government and private-sector sponsorships are footing most of the bill, which is running about $787,000. Viewings are free in Brooklyn. But in London, where everything is always more expensive, it costs £1.

An evening with Philip Glass

Just an evening? Well, seven performances actually. The Metropolitan Opera is currently staging Glass’s opera Satyagraha, which depicts Mahatma Gandhi’s life in South Africa from 1893 to 1914. The title means “truth force” and describes Gandhi’s early efforts at non-violent resistance and civil disobedience that he would later use in India. Audio clips are a little tricky to track down, but a piano version of the finale plays here. And the Met has posted “Evening Song” here.

Like Glass’s other bio-opera, Einstein at the Beach, the narrative is incidental. And in this case, it’s actually passages from the Bhagavad Ghita – sung in Sanskrit. The production is a beautiful and surprising piece of theater filled with unexpected elements. A jail created in real time from packing tape, for example. Or a human assembly line functioning as a newspaper’s printing press.

The production is an import from the English National Opera and is directed Phelim McDermott with a big assist from designer Julian Crouch. Key to the whole production is talented troupe of performers from a group aptly called Improbable. On stage, they turned baskets into monsters and newspaper effigies into an out-of-touch elite. The New York Times provides a good look behind the scenes below.


The creative team explains their choice of media for props and scenery: “We decided we wanted to use very humble material in the making of the opera...Mostly what you'll see is baskets and newspaper and corrugated iron...We wanted to take the materials associated with poverty and turn them into something beautiful.”

Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times gives the production a generally favorable review. “Ultimately, despite its formulaic elements, “Satyagraha” emerges here as a work of nobility, seriousness, even purity.” The Guardian was more generous when reviewing the original production at the ENO last year.

Phelim McDermott's staging, undertaken in collaboration with the theatre company Improbable, is also a thing of wonder. The gods of the Hindu pantheon rub shoulders with ordinary humanity. Hope is born from deprivation as sheets of corrugated iron and vast quantities of newsprint are transformed into the symbols of a new order...[T]he whole thing serves as a monumental affirmation of human dignity at a time when many have begun to question its very existence - and for that, we must be infinitely grateful.

Glass describes the impetus for writing the opera in 1980 here. Meanwhile, a new documentary profiling the composer – Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts – is playing in New York and preparing to hit theaters in San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Minneapolis and Washington soon.

A new museum for the New Museum

“[T]he New Museum of Contemporary Art, on the Bowery at Prince Street on the Lower East Side, is the kind of building that renews your faith in New York as a place where culture is lived, not just bought and sold,” writes Nicolai Ouroussoff in The New York Times. The (recently renewed) critic points out a few architectural highlights in an interactive piece here.

The architects behind the space are Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the Tokyo-based firm SANAA. “The Bowery was very gritty when we first visited it,” the architects explain. “We were a bit shocked, but we were also impressed that a contemporary art museum wanted to be there...The New Museum is a combination of elegant and urban. We were determined to make a building that felt like that.”

Paul Goldberger of The New Yorker hearts the building, too – for the structure and how it relates to its location. “Sejima and Nishizawa have designed a building that is just right for this moment of the Bowery’s existence. It is a pile of six boxes, stacked unevenly, like a child’s blocks. Sometimes the blocks mount up in a pattern of setbacks like that of a traditional New York building; sometimes they jut out over open space in a way that suggests the architects had something more radical in mind. The building is original, but doesn’t strain to reinvent the idea of a museum.”

For this blogger, one of the most striking features was the glass curtainwall at the street level. It allows the sidewalk to extend into the museum, and outside foot traffic is visible even all the way back in the rear gallery, near the café. The narrow staircase that connects the third and fourth floors is an intriguing passageway between galleries, and even affords room for a confessional-like exhibition space. And of course the building’s stacked-box silhouette lends itself to becoming an icon, like Frank Lloyd Wright's spiraling ramp for the Guggenheim. In fact, advertising created by Droga5 for the New Museum already uses the New Museum’s distinctive profile.

UPDATE: Nishizawa and Sejima give The Japan Times an interview here. They talk about how their partnership started – at first he (Nishizawa) was working for her (Sejima). And they elaborate on how the building got its distinctive shape. “First, with a plot of land as small as that 740 sq. meters, there was no alternative but to stack the galleries on top of each other. But when you put galleries on top of each other, you end up with a high-rise building, right? ...[A]ll the floors end up the same and...the building ends up looking more like an office tower than a museum. So we decided that each floor needed to look different from the others, and to achieve that we needed to vary their sizes,” says Nishizawa.

Light fantastic

Let there be light. Some interesting things are going on with light nowadays. One technique uses flashlights and a long exposure to paint images, and it's currently being used by a few folks right now. There's an engaging, new commercial for Sprint on the air. There's the work by the Japanese performance group Pika Pika. And light illustrates the lyrics in a video by The Willowz.

Here's a behind-the-scenes look at the Sprint commercial, which was directed by Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris (of Little Miss Sunshine) and shot in L.A.'s MacArthur Park. Post house Brickyard explains what was tweaked, "The spot, shot entirely in-camera, was created from a series of still images linked together to achieve a live action effect...some compositing to bring the various layers of imagery together."

Below are several projects that Pika Pika put together in 2006 and the first couple months of 2007.

The Willowz video for "Jubilee," directed by Toben Seymour and released January 2007.

And of course, Picasso painted with light nearly 60 years ago. More images from a light graffitista in Germany here.

Meanwhile, Graffiti Research Lab brings together taggers, hackers, geeks and gawkers with open-source code and tips for light-projected graffiti on office buildings and bridges. Get the how-to here. Or just watch below.


In France, two VJs (known collectively as Uruk Videomachine) project images onto buildings and bring the architecture to life. Below is a clip from a performance they put together in Dijon. (It gets really good at 3:32 in.)

And back in Paris, Diesel used holograms in the runway show for its Spring/Summer 2008 line.

An era of Serra

How do you move the 550 tons of steel that's part of the Richard Serra retrospective at the MoMA up and into the second story of a mid-town building? Randy Kennedy of The New York Times details the choreography to do just that in this article.

"Plate by curved plate, workers from Mr. [Joe] Vilardi’s Long Island company, Budco Enterprises, hoisted each piece from an empty lot on the museum’s west side to a makeshift two-story-high platform, slowly lowering it onto three humble hunks of metal with rollers, called skates. A forklift then nudged the plate, roller-skating it into the building to its next appointment, with the gantry. Dangling from the gantry’s cross beam were cables with two crablike steel claws that grabbed the plate and hoisted it into the air. The gantry then glided down the room with the plate, which appeared strangely weightless, like a velvety orange sail being wafted by a breeze."

As Michael Kimmelman exlains in his review, "That second floor at the Modern, by the way, is the show’s tour de force. A high, huge and like so much of this museum, totally unlovable space, it was conceived for housing Mr. Serra’s sculptures." Certainly Serra's pieces just can't be parked anywhere. Frank Gehry specifically designed a space large enough to hold Serra's sculptures in the Guggenheim in Bilbao. It took an old Nabisco factory -- now the Dia Beacon -- hold more of Serra's torqued ellipses. And the Gagosian Gallery, which played host to more spiral, toruses and spheres in 2001, has to be one of the largest gallery spaces in Manhattan.

A slightly less complicated installation in the garden of the MoMA is below.


The retrospective is, of course, incredible (despite what this guy at the Washington Post says.) The newest pieces continue to engage the visitors. Some people walk the perimeter as if they were in a labyrinth while others go straight to the center of the ellipses. Two works in particular, Band and Sequence, add serpentine elements and surprise to the bending of balance and perspective that Serra does so well.

The Art Depot

Last month The Armory Show set up its tent at Pier 94 on the west side of Manhattan for a fun, eclectic, unpretentious mix of artwork. One highlight (pictured at left) was Mierle Laderman Ukeles' reflective garbage truck slash "Social Mirror." She was an artist-in-residence for the New York City sanitation department in the 1980s. More looking-glass images here.

Glenn Kaino created an oversized chess board with metal hands as pieces. Its official title? "Learn to win or you will take losing for granted." His dealer? The Project. Doug Aitken (repped by Victoria Miro) used simple letter-shaped lightboxes to communicate his message: Disappear. Aitken is fresh off his Sleepwalkers project that appeared on walls of the MoMA. The exterior walls. For a slide show from The New York Times with their picks from The Armory Show go here. Get a critical wrap-up here.