Off Center

• “Top Travel Destination.” Frommer’s has included Minneapolis in its list of “the most unique and enticing destinations” for 2007 travel. Thanks to our “cutting-edge design boom,” which includes the Walker expansion and Jean Nouvel’s Guthrie Theater, we made the global list along with Ethiopia, British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, Krakow, Tokyo and a handful of others.

• MNdirt. Anyone taking Frommer’s advice might want to check out one of these unauthorized and cheesily designed keepsakes (top right)–a plastic-encased pinch of genuine Minnesota dirt, by the looks of it dug from Minneapolis Sculpture Garden turf.

• Vlogging mnartists: NYC videoblog Rocketboom has picked up the next installment of Chuck Olsen’s mnartists.org series on area artists. Featured this time around, animatronic toymaker and sculptor Anastasia Ward.

• Ikearchitecture? Ikea recently announced plans to construct 500 identical modernist homes in the UK each year. The exterior colors? Lingonberry, I presume.

• On NEED: Stephanie Kinnunen went from doing a catering gig with Wolfgang Puck for the Walker grand opening to being the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the beautifully designed Minneapolis-based magazine NEED, a LIFE-meets-COLORS quarterly focused on humanitarian success stories. Read my interview with Kinnunen here or today’s City Pages story here.

Using a computer-modeled wireframe head from a previous project, artist Bert Simons “cloned” himself, making a cut-out replica of his noggin to keep around the house. He even provides a pdf so you can build your own. Final version above, beta version below.

Via PlaceboKatz.

It was a matter of time: awhile back we wrote about Artstar, art by big-name Japanese artists made available for Apple’s iPod. Now Artnode has gone ‘em one better–ARTpod is offering free mp4 video files of works by artists including Jesper Just for viewing on video iPods. Works by eight artists are available for download or viewing on Artnode’s site.

One question: how did Artnode escape the wrath of Apple? The company has been sending out cease-and-desist letters to companies that use its apparently proprietary term “pod.”

Via Guerrilla Innovation.

Like the name might imply Zine Machine is a vending machine selling zines, books and minicomics with prices from $1 to $10. It’s located in the University of Iowa’s Library, but you might spot them at a zine workshop or conference near you. The machine has an open submission policy that could get your zines distributed right in the heart of the USA.

The project began as Book Drop, a book vending machine showing the value of hand binding by selling individual kits of book parts. It picked up it’s more contemporary mission earlier this year.

The vending theme similar to the Art-o-Mat project, but focussed more specifically on DIY literature.

• Altman passes: Robert Altman, director of M*A*S*H, the locally filmed A Prairie Home Companion, and scores of others, has died at age 81. The filmmaker was here in 1992 for a dialogue and retrospective; read “Robert Altman: An American Maverick,” an essay by Film Art author and University of Wisconsin professor David Bordwell commissioned for that occasion. Shreveport Times critic (and former Walker intern) Alex Kent thanks Altman for getting Minnesotans right in PHC–”We're a pensive people… we're constantly aware we're going to die, but we nevertheless love the wait.”

• New soup for you: Barney’s New York is offering limited edition cans of Cambell’s soup packaged with Andy Warhol-designed labels.

• Alienated: The ICA London just opened Alien Nation–which includes our Yinka Shonibare piece Dysfunctional Family–a show featuring 12 artists who deal with “‘otherness’ and ‘difference’ through the language and iconography of sci-fi.”

• Crate Update: Whenever a Walker-organized show goes on tour, Program Services staff design custom stencils for the shipping crates. Four new ones to add to our ongoing list (top to bottom): Some Assembly Required: Contemporary Prefabricated Houses (now on view at Yale); Chuck Close, Self-Portraits, 1967-2005 (no longer touring); ANDY WARHOL/SUPERNOVA: Stars, Deaths, and Disasters, 1962-1964 (no longer touring); and Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005 (on view at the Whitney).

• Artist news: Tacita Dean won the 2006 Hugo Boss Prize, while Damien Hirst, putting his net worth at “more like £100m,” curates from his own collection.

• Baldessari and bowler hats: Puffy blue clouds painted on the floors, museum guards wearing bowler hats, a Vija Celmins comb sculpture paired with Rene Magritte’s painting of a giant comb: that’s what LACMA got when they asked John Baldessari to design the exhibition Magritte and Contemporary Art.

• Inflatable studio: Rocketboom interviews Huong Ngo in her pop-up art studio atop an NYC rooftop.

• Civic Studio: The “civic studio” project takes Ngo’s notion an additional step, offering groups of 8 to 12 artists temporary space in public to facilitate lectures, artmaking, and demonstrations, with the aim of engaging “in the study and cration of civic forms through visual means.” (Via Free Soil.)

• How to Make a Sock Monkey: Plans here; inspiration here.

From the meat dress mentioned here to the sock monkey dress here, I’m going to keep the craft theme alive with a look at the new book By Hand: The Use of Craft in Contemporary Art. In the catalogue for the UK Crafts Council’s 2004 exhibition Boys Who Sew, curator Janice Jeffries defines the term ” to craft”:

As a verb, though, “to craft” seemingly means to participate in some small-scale process. This implies several things. First, it affirms the results of involved work. This is not some kind of detached activity… To craft is to care… [It] implies working on a personal scale–acting locally in reaction to anonymous, globalized, industrial production…

Artists that come to mind immediately are Robert Gober, who hand-makes replicas of everything from a kitchen sink to tissue boxes, and Kiki Smith, who’s featured in By Hand. That book, inspired in party by Jeffries’ definition, features innovative and unexpected uses of craft in contemporary art, accompanied by first-person statements by each artist. One such artist is Rob Conger whose art–latch-hook rugs like the ones he made as a youth–focuses frequently on the mediated dreams of money: he’s done yarn homages to lottery lines, The Price is Right, and Alan Greenspan, to name a few. (”We confuse our desire for beauty with our desire for money,” he writes.)

Rob Conger’s The Big Wheel, woven acrylic thread on quarter-inch mesh, 1999

Rob Conger, Powerball Line, woven acrylic yarn on quarter-inch canvas mesh, 1998

Not unlike Kara Walker’s transformation of the stately craft of black-paper silhouettes into shocking exposes on race and gender, Kent Hendricksen takes found tapestries and embroiders in ropes and hoods “turning light-hearted
innocence into dark vignettes of sadism and emotional aggression.”

Kent Henricksen, Lady Lovers (The Secret), embroidery thread on woven fabric mounted on wood, 2004

Robyn Love, whose guerrilla knitting projects have included a gravestone cozy, created a Memorials project, in which she knit what she felt were missing elements of objects and structures like a bus shelter and World War I statue. “My cozies were intended to obscure the thing that was already obscuring the original person or event.”

Memorial: The Doughboy (installed in Doughboy Plaza, Woodside, NY), knit wool, 1999

The Walker/McKnight site mnartists.org is a treasure trove of weird and well-produced art. Case in point, the curious couture of Northeast Minneapolis’ Rebecca Yaker. An artist and entrepeneur (and Minnesota Rollergirl), her portfolio includes an un-Prom dress made from sock monkeys, an entire outfit crafted from “toy foods (tomatoes, cheese slices, roast beef, white bread, bologna, hamburgers, and lettuce), clear vinyl, and plastic coated metal,” and this sweet Fruit Roll-Up Western Shirt:

This shirt is constructed entirely out of various fruit roll-ups–strawberry, tropical fruit, and electric blue (not really a recognizable favor, but it’s tasty)–finished with rhinestone snaps up the center placket. It was nearly impossible not to eat my supplies, but somehow I managed not to.