It’s not too early to get a start on next year’s Halloween costume: Take inspiration from this paper-crafted self-portrait-as-helmet by 3D artist Eric Testroete, inspired by “big-head mode seen in videogames” See more pictures here. (via printeresting.org)

NYC Mayor Bloomberg only narrowly won re-election — and now this. After 66 years in Manhattan, the nonprofit American Craft Council has had it with the cost of doing business there. It is quitting the New York — and following a long trail of artists to greener, more fertile, and far cheaper pastures of Minneapolis, where it will take up residence next summer.

Minneapolis artist David Rathman, who showed here in 2003, has branched out from paintings and drawings to video, with stunning results. See below — best viewed in full screen!

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Quick and the Dead lives on. Three works from the highly regarded exhibition were recently acquired by the Walker for its collection. Probably the most familiar is Pierre Huyghe’s Wind Chime (After “Dream”) (left), which became a favorite in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden over the summer. We’ll All Go Together, a sound piece by Susan Philipsz, was an oddly comforting yet slightly eery presence in the underground parking garage (where it kept company with a battered, oil-leaking Buick — a surprise artwork by Trisha Donnelly that appeared the day before the show opened). And Mark Manders’ Life-size Scene with Revealed Figure is an enigmatic work that suggests any number of functions – an alterpiece, an obsolete projector, a stationary puppet — though its ultimate purpose remains mysterious.

In anticipation of the sold out Brian Eno and Jon Hassell conversation on Sept 22, here is a gem for your pleasure.  Eno performs here with legendary Roxy Music in the early 70’s, freaking out on tambourine and, er, keyboard?  Here he is rocking his crucially dangerous “vampire peacock” look.  Check out that skullet!Click here to view the embedded video.

Also, here’s one for your desktop:

http://consequenceofsound.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/roxy_band0.jpg

Oh no, what have I started?  I had better stop now.  What are your influential images?  Post them in reply.

Marlene Dumas, Die Babe (from http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk)

A friend just send me this post from artfagcity, on images of babies in contemporary art – something we’re both interested in, being moms of toddlers ourselves. (I’d say we’re obsessed, but being moms of toddlers leaves scant time for obsessing about anything except the toddlers.) AFC’s Paddy Johnson also includes a link to this essay on motherhood and contemporary artists, from The Brooklyn Rail. While reading it, I recalled watching the uptick in strollers on the streets of Williamsburg (Brooklyn) a few years back – but at the time I wasn’t considering that many of those pushing the strollers might be working artists … Then again, isn’t Williamsburg now too expensive for working artists, with or without offspring? Circling back to artfagcity, an artistic comment on both topics.

PS – Margaret, a working artist and mom-of-toddlers and a regular here on the Walker blogs, has a number of thoughtful posts on art and parenthood.

Beuys goes "Bananas"

Or the Idol counterpart in his home country, Deutschland sucht den Superstar? (Love that title!) The shaman/sham/most brilliant artist of all time (to paraphrase an Art News profile from 1980), did take risks with his “aktions,” most famously in cohabitating with a coyote in a gallery (see documentation in Walker exhibition) – but I just learned that he also made a go of it as a pop singer. Artforum.com (via YouTube) has a video of Beuys making himself vulnerable before mainstream TV viewers, performing a protest song called “Sonne Statt Reagan” in 1982 on the German show Bananas, which also hosted acts like Depeche Mode. Artforum’s video section has a lot of other good stuff, including David Byrne talking with Jeff Koons – in 1975, Matthew Barney’s 2003 Regis Dialogue at the Walker, and an interview with Mary Heilmann in which the artist talks about “keeping the bourgeoisie happy,” among other things.

On his own blog, Eyeteeth, he’s mentioned how the “Lizard People” write-in vote on one ballot made waves last week, thanks mostly to MPR’s excellent “Challenged Ballots: You Be the Judge”, a feature that provided an all-too rare occasion for election transparency.

But more to the point at hand, in a story for the Minnesota Independent, where he works as managing editor, Schmelzer talked to photographer Paul Shambroom about capturing the mind-numbing process of (re-)counting thousands of ballots. Shambroom, whose Meetings series masterfully – even majestically – documented small-town civic proceedings across the USA, said that if he were to return to his days as a news photographer, he might try “try to embrace the boredom” of such a task.

That got me trying to think of works of art that might “try to embrace the boredom” of something. What about Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things? That ’s the “situation” by Tino Sehgal where a single person writhes slowly and soundlessly, kind of starfish-like, on the floor of an empty gallery; it played out last winter in the Walker’s Medtronic Gallery as part of Sehgal’s largest “show” to date in the first U.S.

Other examples of tedium-as-art? Send a comment below.

]]> http://blogs.walkerart.org/offcenter/2008/11/24/what-does-boredom-look-like/feed/ 0 http://blogs.walkerart.org/offcenter/2008/07/30/ingenious-clever-marketing/ http://blogs.walkerart.org/offcenter/2008/07/30/ingenious-clever-marketing/#comments Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:30:19 +0000 matt peiken http://blogs.walkerart.org/offcenter/2008/07/30/ingenious-and-clever-marketing/ We’re all about interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, corporal-disciplinary art at the Walker, and that ethos stretches to the individual programming departments. When we crafted our Year of Trisha, folks in our visual arts and performing arts departments, otherwise separated by off-white walls, colored chiffon curtains and preferences in footwear, joined flavors in a melange of dance and charcoal — like a contemporary art Reese’s peanut butter cup.

The good will has continued. With Angus Fairhurst’s The Birth of Consistency (2004) insisting upon spending the summer outside — and really, who’s going to argue with a gorilla? — visual arts curators saw the empty space in the Dolly Fiterman Garden Gallery as a chance not only to clean up after our bronzed primate (don’t ask!), but also promote a performing arts program — by exhibiting a giant plaster seashell by Robert Gober (Untitled, 1982).

What, you may ask, does this sculpture have to do with the performing arts? Place your ear to the opening of a seashell — what do you hear? No, silly Lima bean — that’s actually the sound of the blood rushing through your brain. But much like your lingering, senseless faith in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Minnesota Vikings, you believe you’re listening to the ocean, its sonic waves embedded for the ages in this wayward remnant from the sea. I won’t rid you of that belief. Quite the contrary, we’re counting on it.

It just so happens the Walker is preparing to sail an Ocean of a different kind — of Merce Cunningham’s and John Cage’s creation — September 11-13 at the Rainbow granite quarry near St. Cloud. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime production and we want people to see it. Most of our marketing tells you just that — it’s unique, it’s cool, it’s an experience, etc. Leave it to our thoughtful curators for taking the highroad and crediting our visitors with the wits to make this connection. Of course, we don’t want you to actually place your ear to this seashell. If the foreboding rope in front of the piece doesn’t deter you, our judo-trained guards will. Just look at the seashell, let it rekindle your memories of the ocean, step back down to the box office, and buy a ticket.

Progressive political candidates should reach out more to the deep pool of world-class artists already down, at least in spirit, with the cause. It would probably take one phone call to get Eddie Vedder to write an entire album of tunes implicitly, if not explicitly, pointing the way to Obama. One artist didn’t wait for the phone to ring. Celebrated street artist Shepard Fairey, known chiefly for his Obey Giant guerilla public plastering efforts, approached the Obama campaign earlier this year about “appealing to a younger, apathetic audience” through a new series of posters. Fairey got the go-ahead. Here’s a point-by-point detail about what he went for in his design.

Still, as with the Berlin poster, some saw something more insidious. Meghan Daum of the Los Angeles Times opined: “There’s an unequivocal sense of idol worship about the image, a half-artsy, half-creepy genuflection that suggests the subject is (a) a Third World dictator whose rule is enmeshed in a seductive cult of personality; (b) a controversial American figure who’s been assassinated; or (c) one of those people from a Warhol silkscreen that you don’t recognize but assume to be important in an abstruse way.”

For his part, Obama seemed pleased. In a personal letter to Fairey, Obama wrote: “I would like to thank you for using your talent in support of my campaign. The political messages involved in your work have encouraged Americans to believe they can help change the status quo. Your images have a profound effect on people, whether seen in a gallery or on a stop sign.“

Americans for the Arts asked the presidential candidates to provide their positions on the arts and culture in America. Barack Obama provided three: A list of legislation he sponsored or co-authored in support of the arts, a list of policy positions on arts issues, and a proposal to create a National Arts Policy Committee.

The Obama campaign’s policy initiatives include: Reinvest in arts education, expand public/private partnerships between schools and arts organizations, create an Artist Corps (a la the Peace Corps), publicly champion the importance of arts education, support increased funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, promote cultural diplomacy, attract foreign talent, provide health care to artists, and ensure tax fairness for artists. You can download details on these policy positions here.

John McCain has yet to provide any position statements to Americans for the Arts, but he could do worse than follow the lead of President Bush. McCain’s voting record in the U.S. Senate shows he’s not opposed to doing so. During a presidency many label the most disastrous in this country’s history, Bush has been somewhat of a friend to the arts. The Fiscal Year 2008 omnibus appropriations bill includes $144.7 million for the NEA — the highest level of NEA funding since 1995. The $20.2 million increase in support from the previous year represents the largest dollar increase in the NEA’s appropriations since 1979. The NEA reached its peak funding in 1992, at $176 million.

The Presidential election is yet another way you can Vote Yes to the arts, November 4.

Carpenter, quoted in Flower Blog, says “Kahlo may have also been drawn to flowers because she was fascinated with the theme of fertility, which reinforced her conviction of the unity of all things–human beings, flower and plants, animals, the earth, the sun and moon, and the universe. This idea of interconnectedness prompted her to paint several hybrids that combine plant and animal forms with human anatomy. This fascination with fertility may also have come in part from Kahlo’s thwarted wish to have a child.”