Off Center

In his 1995 film Telephones, artist Christian Marclay spliced together snippets of actors from Hollywood films answering phones. Apple contacted Marclay, he says, to get permission to use the concept for a new iPhone ad (above) that debuted during the Oscars.

He refused. They took the idea anyway.

“The way they dealt with the whole thing is pretty sleazy,” Marclay says. He talked to a lawyer about taking legal action over the ripoff, but was told “there’s nothing I can do about it. They have the right to get inspired.”

Contemporary art, of course, is often about appropriation and recontextualizing material, but the brazenness of Apple’s move is too bad. Still, Marclay isn’t keen on going to court.

“This culture’s so much about suing each other that if we want to have anything that’s more of an open exchange of ideas, one has to stop this mentality. I’m just honored that they thought my work was interesting enough that they felt they could just rip it off.”

The following mini-documentary on Marclay’s work included Telephones about 3:40 in.

Via Kottke.

In her story on the expansion of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the New York Times‘ Carol Vogel leads with a discussion of its bathrooms and the man who paid “in the six figures” to get naming rights for all four of them. "I'm 83," said Jerome Stern, a retired venture capitalist whose name will appear with his wife Ellen’s, "and I thought it would be nice to see my name in a place where I'm going to spend a lot of time."

Here at the Walker, naming rights for restrooms go back a bit further, to our 2005 expansion. Henry Kohring, son of Walker director Kathy Halbreich, is the namesake of one of the employee restrooms in the new Herzog & de Meuron wing. As Halbreich said when she announced her decision to leave the Walker, Henry was two years old when she began work here 16 years ago; he’s now a college student in Michigan. Like Stern, but in an entirely different sense, Henry has spent a lot of time at the Center.

The price for the naming rights: “In the three figures.”

iPotty: Restroom Ratings gives high marks to the Walker’s facilities and their "Apple-meets-World Dryer Corp" aesthetic.

• What makes a good photo? That’s what photographer Jörg Colberg asked his fellow tradesmen and women on his blog, and the replies that came back — including some by Minnesota-based artists Alec Soth and Paul Shambroom and “Chicagraphers” Brian Ulrich and Jonathan Gitleson — are engrossing. The answer I like best, which references Joel Sternfeld’s 1978 shot of a burning farmhouse in rural Virginia (above, left) foregrounded by a roadside stand selling blaze-orange pumpkins (and a fireman helping himself to one), suggests the role chance plays in amazing photography. The image, writes Jason Lazarus, “at once fails to show the quiet pleasure of a photographer always looking, yet reveals the fruit of stumbling upon a moment so iconic it will outlive its creator by generations.”

• Dinky Thinker: Auguste Rodin’s 1880 sculpture The Thinker, which has already appeared everywhere from t-shirt fronts to a campaign commercial for then-candidate Jesse “The Thinker” Ventura. So, why not the head of a pin? Korean scientists using lasers have created a mini-thinker twice the height of a red blood cell — or 93,000 times smaller than Rodin’s approximately 6-foot original — in three dimensions. The technology will hopefully be useful in helping develop biosensing devices and other highly complicated microscopic machines.

• Street-Level Art: The year-old Nasher Museum on Duke University’s campus is opening a fantastic show Thursday night. Street-Level will include works by South Africa’s Robin Rhode (whose first show in the U.S. was the Walker’s Latitudes), Los Angeles’ Mark Bradford, and William Cordova (Lima/New York), three artists whose work “explores the ways that cultural territory is defined and space is transformed in urban environments.” Read an interview with exhibition curator Trevor Schoonmaker.

As you’ve likely heard, Kathy Halbreich is stepping down as director of the Walker Art Center on November 1. Drop by the Visual Arts blog to read media perspectives on her departure and leave a comment for her, as colleagues locally and across the country have started doing.

• Her name is Yoshimi. She was a showgirl… The Flaming Lips are working on a Broadway-musical version of their 2002 album Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots. They’re reportedly collaborating with Aaron “West Wing” Sorkin, who’ll write the screenplay.

• Being Stanley Kubrick: In the upcoming movie Colour Me Kubrick, John Malkovichi plays Alan Conway, the man who in the 1990s masqueraded as Stanley Kubrick to get freebies from London theater and fashion types. Of Conway, he says, “I don't think he had any clear idea or even an interest in Kubrick's character--although he had lots of insight into the people who wanted to meet Kubrick, or work with Kubrick, or mooch off Kubrick, or bask in his glow.”

• Balanced Light: Kiki Smith contributed an artwork to the New York Times Op-Art column on Monday to commemorate the vernal equinox.

• Take McJob and shove it: McDonald’s, arguing that their jobs aren’t sweaty, low-paying paths to nowhere, has implored the Oxford English Dictionary to remove the word “McJob” from its pages. The word and definition — “An unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector.” -- have been in the OED since 2001, 15 years after it reportedly appeared in the Washington Post. The company kicks off a campaign to delete “McJob” in May. My question: Does the etymology refer to the quality of McDonald’s employment -- or the perception that some of its food, like certain jobs, is less than life-sustaining?

• Eatock rocks (back on his chair): To open his Insights lecture at the Walker a few weeks ago, designer Daniel Eatock balanced for what seemed like an eternity on the back legs of a specifically procured Robin Day Polyprop chair to the strains of vintage Nirvana, before launching into a witty talk than included a pecha kucha-style presentation of his clever ideas and further thoughts on graphic, environmental, and product design. Watch it at the Walker Channel. (Insights concludes Tuesday night with BUTT magazine founder Jop van Bennekom.)

Oh, have we got lakes. According to Minnesota’s license plates, we’ve got 10,000 of them, but the Department of Natural Resources says there are far more, 11,842 to be precise, and that only counts lakes 10 acres or bigger.

Likewise, Minnesota has 10,000 artists — at least. Here’s how we know: mnartists.org, the free online arts community co-created by the Walker and the McKnight Foundation, just signed up its 10,000th artist, Matthew Malette, a painter and mixed-media artist living in St. Louis Park. He says he joined mnartists.org to both show his work and connect with other artists. “It didn’t hurt,” he adds, “that mnartists.org is free, well-designed, and associated with the Walker Art Center.”

To commemorate this splendid occasion, Matthew has agreed to participate in a Q&A (including one A where, it so happens, a lake factors heavily).

Meet the 10,000th artist…

Who is your favorite villain of fiction?

I would have to go with Destro, of G.I. Joe fame. Who wouldn’t want a well cared for chrome head?

What global issue most excites or angers you?

Modern Slavery.

If you could throw a dinner party for anyone in the world, who would you invite?

Bono, Barack Obama, Marcel Dzama, R.T. Rybak, the Arcade Fire, Anne Lamott, Dog the Bounty Hunter, Spike Lee, Wes Anderson, Rob Bell, Ammie Mann, Jasper Johns, Bob Dylan, Kate Winslet, John McCain, Jon Favreau, Beck, Thom Yorke, Cornel West, James Turrell, Krista Tippett, and Andy Goldsworthy, and of course my wife and friends. And all of you. Join us, won’t you?

What's your favorite place to people-watch?

The CC Club on Lyndale would be my choice.

What's your most prized possession, and why do you prize it so?

A leather jacket that is full of character marks and creases. It was left at a deli where I was gainfully employed and while I did not make a whole lot of money there, I was given the jacket.

How do you like to unwind/relax?

I like to run or play ultimate Frisbee… or both.

What is one of the most unexpected influences on your art?

Lake Superior. There’s a good chance I may have never been born were it not for the big lake. My parents took a late honeymoon sailing adventure around a majority of L. Superior. I also grew up in the the Keweenaw Peninsula, which is part of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. So for 18 years, I was surrounded by Superior. I suppose it effects my art because it effects my psyche in some way — it is vast, haunting, violent, and yet pure.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

In Minnesota, I could use a couple inches in height. The average height in the US is 5′ 10″, whereas in Minnesota it has got to be about 6′2″.

What three items can always be found in your refrigerator?

An egg, a vanilla yogurt, and a beer.

If you could have any career, what would you choose?

So far, I think I am going to stick with the one I have: Art Teacher. Or, I guess, Electric Sports Car tester.

Joseph Beuys’ project 7000 Oaks was begun in 1982 with the intent of planting 7,000 trees of various types throughout the city of Kassel, Germany, each beside a basalt monolith (or stele). “The solid stone form beside the ever-changing tree symbolically represents a basic concept in Beuys’ philosophy, that these two natural and yet oppositional qualities are complementary and coexist harmoniously,” explains the website for the Walker’s exhibition Joseph Beuys: Multiples.

Beuys, who died in 1986, didn’t live to see the project’s completion, but just as the work juxtaposes permanence (death/stone) with ethereal dynamism (life/tree), the project has lived on, spawning others, like the Walker’s tree-planting effort in 1997 and, more recently, a re-enactment in the online game Second Life.

On March 16, exactly 25 years after Beuys planted his first tree, artists Eva and Franco Mattes (a.k.a. 0100101110101101.ORG) began a virtual re-enactment of 7000 Oaks. The pair began stacking basalt on the island they own in the game, Cosmos Island. The pair’s website reads:

The diminishing pile of virtual stones will indicate the progress of the project, which will go on until all 7000 oaks and stones will be placed. Second Life inhabitants will have the chance to take part to the performance, placing stones and trees in their lands.

Via networked_performance.

• Get dotty: Anyone wanting to relive the polka-dotted splendor of our 1999 Yayoi Kusama exhibition should check out the Queensland Art Gallery’s kids’ web game, Kusama’s World of Dots, where you can plaster dots over every surface of a virtual room.

• Movies about paintings: Thomas “Painter of Light” Kinkade’s painting “The Christmas Cottage” as a movie? Tyler Green’s got a better idea: here’s his list of five paintings that actually merit Hollywood’s attention.

• Oiticica’s “American” art: Ever since the Walker’s 1993-94 Helio Oiticica exhibition, the term “American art” has been more generously applied to artists from the span of the Americas. Roberta Smith, reviewing the Museum of Fine Art Houston’s Helio Oitica: The Body of Color, writes that the show and the late Brazilian artist’s work is like “a large stone dropped into the calm waters of European-American art history.” (Pictured: Oiticica’s 1958 work Metaesquema.)

• Guerrilla prude: A guerrilla censor clandestinely (and strategically) covered bodily bits exposed on statues in Oslo’s Vigeland Sculpture Park recently, leaving this note: “There is too much nudity in newspapers and magazines, so here on the bridge the limit has been reached!”

• And… don’t forget about our blog survey.