Off Center

• “Through humor and human drama, to questions about the way we live” — Huffington Post has a short post about No Impact Man, with links to several other influential pieces that brought Colin Beavan to international recognition. No Impact Man is screening at the Walker next week.
• Bad at Sports has a fun and informative interview with Madeleine Grynsztejn, new director at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Grynsztejn co-curated the Chuck Close show that opened at the Walker in 2005.
• “Deep moral truths” — Cathleen Falsani has a fascinating discussion with Minnesota Public Radio on the spirituality and morality in the Coen Brothers films.
• Lebowski Fest Minneapolis happens this weekend. Get ready.

• “An ingenious amalgam of painting and printmaking techniques” – mnartists.org’s Susannah Schouweiler shares a review of Carolyn Swiszcz’s work in Innovation Road, a show at Franklin Artworks. Swiszcz was half of the husband and wife team behind the an unforgettable song, created for the Worlds Away Exhibition, and the call for art for The UnConvention’s I Approve This Message.
• “Not your basic draw a line here draw a line there architects” – rolu. links up several images and videos of Best, the failed big box retailer, whose iconic buildings were designed by SITE. This video was also featured in Worlds Away. The designs never cease to amaze me. 
• A bit eyebrow raising - Perhaps in the 2009 British Television and Advertising Awards?
• Fishing pole photography - MNKiteman added a couple photos to the Walker Art Center pool on flickr, both from a high angle. How he did it is almost as intersting as the photos: “My camera was mounted on the end of a fishing pole and triggered using an infrared device. You can do a search using PAP for the tag to see more pole aerial photography photos.” His other photos of the Art Shanties are worth checking out. 

• Potty Art again: The New York Times’ City Room blog takes a seat and looks at some art museum toilets by way of The Art Museum Toilet of Museum Art. The name is a mouthful and I think the joke is on us. The Walker isn’t part of the museum, but our restrooms are rated highly and named lovingly.
• 2010 Whitney Biennial curators named: Francesco Bonami will be the curator, working with the Whitney’s Gary Carrion-Murayari as associate curator. Bonami curated Unfinished History in 1998 and was an contributing curator on Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972 in 2001, both at the Walker.
• Money and Art: Giant Robot is making money from art, having a print sale. Included in the Giant Robot print sale is the work of Mike Perry, has been mentioned on this blog before, resulting in some, uhh, interesting search terms. Mike’s latest book, Over & Over, full of hand-drawn patterns is excellent. Rirkrit Tiravanija is making art on money.  Rirkrit created untitled, better known as the stage, in 2006’s Open Ended exhibition and has several works in the Walker’s collection. [via]
• Two things beautiful: Manhole art from the streets of Japan and Miquel Barceló’s ceiling installation at the UN’s palace of nations in Geneva.

The politics edition:

• Presidential art policy: CultureGrrl Lee Rosenbaum dug up Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s art policy, noting that, at just four sentences long, it’d be more accurate to “call that an education policy, not an arts policy.” (Update: LACMA’s new blog Unframed apparently found it first, according to the LA Times’ Christopher Knight). Democrat Barack Obama’s version, which is much more substantial. Noteworthy is his support of the Artist-Museum Partnership Act, which allows “artists to deduct the fair market value of their work, rather than just the costs of the materials, when they make charitable contributions.” Obama’s community blog has much more.

• Cast your vote in the People’s Design Awards: Both Barack Obama and John McCain have campaign logos in the running for the Cooper-Hewitt People’s Design Award, although only Obama’s is among the top vote-getters. Entries, as the name suggests, are submitted and voted on by visitors to the contest website. Vote now through Oct. 23. (Minnesota has two entries.)

• Kruger’s “Brain”: Among her many accolades, artist Barbara Kruger can add another: Last week she won three prizes, including “Cover of the Year” in the Magazine Publishers of America Best Magazine Covers contest for her trademark alteration of a New York cover image of former Gov. Eliot Spitzer. For the top honor, judges wrote:

Artist Barbara Kruger’s graphic interpretation on Henry Leutwyler’s photograph—the word “BRAIN” in a bright-red box with an arrow pointing to the area of Spitzer’s anatomy that seemed to have been thinking for him—was quickly selected, thanks to its directness, humor, and simplicity. The cover required no headlines. The image succeeded powerfully all by itself.

• AIGA GOTV: Last month the AIGA created a series of juried get-out-the-vote posters for distribution and download. Among the 24 posters, which were printed and dropped off for display in storefronts and kiosks, is AIGA Minnesota’s Brad D. Norr. Pictured above: Agustín Garza, AIGA Los Angeles.

• Flagging the arts: This week Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes is asking curators to share their favorite contemporary artwork featuring an American flag. First up, a selection by David S. Rubin, curator of contemporary art at the San Antonio Museum of Art: Sam Wiener’s Those Who Fail to Remember the Past are Condemned to Repeat It (1970).  He writes:

Created at the time when Minimalism was still in vogue, this sculpture takes the form of a simple cube on its exterior. But looks are deceptive here, as Wiener infused a Minimalist form with significant and timely social commentary. As viewers peer through slats along the sculpture’s upper edges, we see endless rows of flag-draped coffins, an effect created by a mirrored interior.

• “Democracy is merry”: Get your free button this Thursday.

• Object-based new media: Former Walker visual arts curatorial fellow Sarah Cook is interviewed by Rhizome about Untethered, the show she curated for Eyebeam. “I was tiring of new media exhibitions that rely on video documentation, screens, text, and proof-of-concept, and I wanted to question one of the assumptions that the art world has about new media, namely that it isn’t an object,” she says. Fittingly then, Untethered, which closes Oct. 25,  is about hacked objects. It’s described as “a sculpture garden of everyday objects deprogrammed of their original function, embedded with new intelligence, and transformed into surrealist and surprising readymades, including a photocopier that reads the night sky; a PDA turned guitar; and a piano that plays the Internet. The exhibition features pieces by 15 artists working at the intersection of art and technology, including current and former Eyebeam residents and fellows, as well as leading international artists.” See exhibition images here, including Michael de Broin’s Dead Star (pictured above, in detail).

• Deerhoof interview: Culture Bully, my go-to source for Deerhoof news, interviews Greg Saunier, drummer for the Bay Area art-rock band, on the new album Offend Maggie, its cover art and his Oct. 14 show at Minneapolis’ First Avenue. Deerhoof also makes today’s Art Fag City post on the top-10 music videos made by contemporary artists for a video by Martha Colburn.

• Found Barney: Culture Pundits directs our attention to CremasterFanatic.com, which catalogues found “field emblems” from Matthew Barney’s film series.

• Lydia Fong speaks: “I needed to become another person — to be in a different persona to make that work,” says Barry McGee in a KQED video interview as Lydia Fong, his artistic alter ego.

• Banksy continues to spread his work across the US, this time opening a new enterprise in New York, the Village Pet Store And Charcoal Grill. Wooster has the details:
  

  A clear departure form last year’s behemoth show in Los Angeles, Banksy’s first ever show in New York City (the others have been fakes) is being held in a tiny storefront that’s less than 300 square feet and can’t hold more than 20 people at any one time.

• The Milwaukee Art Musuem (in my humble hometown) has opened a new show called Act/React, an that demands visitor participation. Artists included are Janet Cardiff, Brian Knep, Liz Phillips, Daniel Rozin, Scott Snibbe, and Camille Utterback. Former Walker New Media curator Steve Dietz is giving a talk at MAM on Oct. 16. MAM has also been blogging the show. I plan to visit when I’m home for the holidays.
• Dietz is also running a symposium, Experimenting with Art in Public Places, this weekend in Minneapolis, as part of Northern Lights’ Art(ists) on the Verge program.
  

  Friday evening, there will be a keynote presentation by Seattle phenoms SuttonBeersCuller. Saturday will be a day of Pecha Kucha presentations and panel discussions.

  Speakers include Walker curator Doryun Chong, mnartists.org Director Scott Stulen, and artist Wing Young Huie, among others.

• “Obsessions make my life worse and my work better” — Stefan Sagmeister. Sagmeister enlisted a group of students to lay out those words in euro-pennies on the ground of a plaza in Amsterdam:
  

  The design is created using four different shades of pennies. We first sort them by color, then lay them out on the tiles. After the piece is completely set up we will leave it alone, on the street. We expect the piece to slowly dissolve as people take coins, play with them, alter the design. All coins have been painted on the back with a bright blue permanent color.

  There’s an extensive blog documenting the process. The conclusion is something that is straight out of the standard operating procedure of the US department of homeland security.

I was hesitant to call this Centerpoints 10.0, because Paul has been promising to make a mind-blowing 10.0 post. I must remind Paul that every mac user knows the 10.0 release was no good and we had to wait until 10.1 to get anything to work.

The science of decay: Part Sally Mann’s What Remains, part Corpse Farm, our friends at the Science Museum of Minnesota are liveblogging the decomposition of a pig — all in the name of science. By Day 8, I’ve got to add: Gross-out alert!

Kitundu on NPR: A few days ago, NPR interviewed MacArthur “genius” grant winner and former Walker Performing Arts residency coordinator Walter Kitundu. Listen here as he describes how the phonoharp he invented works, how “trial and terror” experimentations lead to a few exploded turntables, and more.

Military “Muse”: Artworks from Suzane Opton’s “Soldier’s Face” billboard project are now on view at LA’s Stephen Cohen Gallery. The series was scheduled to appear in the Twin Cities to coincide with the Republican National Convention, but the local billboard company pulled the plug, fearing viewers might think the boards show dead soldiers (my colleague Chris Steller reports that one version was ultimately produced here). The LA Times‘ Christopher Knight offers an (ahem) dead-on explanation of the vulnerable, horizontal heads Opton features: They derive from Brancusi’s emblematic “Sleeping Muse” sculptures. Beautifully, Knight writes that Opton’s “vulnerable images depict the always shocking youth of soldiers who, like the Greek Titan who stole fire from the gods in Brancusi’s title, have witnessed devastating power up close. They seem almost shell-shocked, caught between the fragile beauty of youth and the desperate gravity of adulthood.”

Free form: Deerhoof (SM&M 2003 and last fall’s Walker concert) offers a free mp3 of its new single “Fresh Born” — and an invitation for fans to download the song’s sheet music, modify it, upload it to fans’ blogs and link to it on their site More than 30 people have already done so. Culture Bully has the “Fresh Born” video.

“Everything must go! Sofa-sized oils!” Twin Cities-based painter (and 2006 Whitney Biennial artist) Todd Norsten’s having a “massive inventory reduction sale and funfest,” tomorrow evening in St. Paul. Download the invite.

Seeds of discontent: Minneapolis-based painter (and onetime Walker employee) Rich Barlow touches on a topic near and dear: political seed art — something I once dubbed “agit-crop” — at the Minnesota State Fair and how this year’s offerings, perhaps due to the Republican National Convention hosted just a few miles away, had a sharper sense of urgency.

Ominous: I missed the irony of this when it happened: As the U.S. was seeing history’s biggest bankruptcy, that of Lehman Brothers, last week, Damien Hirst’s The Golden Calf, a biblical symbol of false idolatry, sold for 10.3 million pounds at auction, a new record for Hirst.

KAWS queried: In a recent New York Times Q&A, Brooklyn artist KAWS reveals an affection for the music Bonnie Prince Billy — who’s coming to the Walker in March — and the late great H.C. Westerman.

Emin’s bronze sparrow flies off (again): Who keeps swiping the bronze sparrow atop Tracy Emin’s Liverpool sculpture The Roman Standard? The bird was taken and returned twice in three months.

File under: Flaccid vagaries disguised as intellectual engagement: Regina Hackett offers proof that artspeak is alive and well in a gallery press release that discusses how an artist’s “structural examination of totalities and their constituent fragments — particularly viewed as kindred — is amplified by the presence of several works with family roots.”

Best headline: “They gave me a Pritzker and all I got was this lousy toilet.” Via C-Monster, who keeps the theme going with links to bathroom graffiti, a musing on the theme of feces in art, and a link to a review in which Jerry Saltz calls Andres Serrano’s Shit “crap.”

Hamilton’s Heinz: Ann Hamilton (whose long history with the Walker most recently includes her June 2008 collaboration with Meredith Monk) has won a prestigious Heinz Award. Created by Teresa Heinz to “celebrate the accomplishments and spirit of [her late husband, Sen. John Heinz] by recognizing the extraordinary achievements of individuals in the areas of greatest importance to him,” the prize awards a medallion and $250,000 in unrestricted funds. Via art:21.

Two to see: San Francisco’s Ratio 3 is now showing A Moment for Reflection: new work by Lydia Fong — an unannounced show by Barry McGee, through October 18. Rirkrit Tiravanija’s commissioned “Demonstration Drawings” — straightforward renderings of protest imagery from the International Herald Tribune, created by commissioned Thai artists — is on view at The Drawing Center through election day.

Kureishi on the battle for America: Pakistani English novelist/screenwriter Hanif Kureishi, subject of a 2001 Regis Dialogue and Retrospective, recently discussed sex, old age and politics with NPR. A Londoner visiting the US, he weighed in on the American elections: “I have to say that, having been in America for less than a week, it’s fascinating and absolutely riveting for someone like me to come and see what a struggle there is going on, really, for the soul of the United States. After all, the United States that I loved in the post-war period was really the United States of Jimi Hendrix and of Dylan and of Kerouc and of Ginsberg and so on. On the other hand, there’s a very small-town, kind of narrow-minded religious gun-toting America, too. And to come here and to see what a conflict there is now, represented between Obama and Sarah Palin — and to see how heavy and serious it is– is really fascinating for us outsiders to see.”

GOP togs: Thank you local blogger Karl Pearson-Cater for showing me these Vans-style McCain-Palin shoes — as well as these: 1, 2, 3 — a followup to his post on Obama sneakers.

Creative climate: Culture Bully is running an interview with M.anifest, the Twin Cities-based Ghanaian emcee who performed at this year’s Music & Movies series. Here’s his reply when asked how Minnesota’s climate — culturally and otherwise — affects his work: “Music has a lot to do with vibes and energies – the unseen. The cold affects my social movements and my movements at different moments inform what I write. I tend to be more introspective and nostalgic in the winter. I have way more references/punchlines about the weather than I ever expected – it’s probably part of my adjustment process; talking about it that is.”

Can you say that in a dance review? In an article about last night’s dress rehearsal of the Walker-cosponsored performance Ocean by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, journalist Jeff Severns Guntzel colorfully sets the scene for a modern dance work performed in a granite quarry. Instructed not to review the performance, he says only, “Dance transfixed and reigned in the quarry last night until it didn’t.” (He’s attending Saturday night and will hopefully write up a review.) His essay may offer a historic first — the use of the terms “butt crack” and “thong” in a piece on modern dance.

Reflecting on 9/11: Dwell magazine’s blog commemorates today’s 9/11 anniversary with a look at the memorial and museum now in construction at Ground Zero. Reflecting Absence, by architect Michael Arad and landscape architect Peter Walker, is “a sobering reflection for sure: Two massive square-shaped pools are set within the footprints of the Twin Towers, into which the largest man-made waterfalls in the country will cascade with meditation-inducing power.” Here’s a video of the project, which should be completed by the tenth anniversary of the attacks.

A YouTube Pulitzer? YouTube and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting are teaming up to award $10,000 to a videomaker covering under-reported stories of global importance. Begun Sept. 8, the contest will give its winner funds for travel, production aid from the Pulitzer Center, high-end equipment and distribution on YouTube.