"LEGO-- The last 50 years the Danish building industry has been exclusively devoted to prefabrication. Denmark has become a country built from LEGO bricks. Rather than seeing the modular mania as a straightjacket, this project is a homage to Danish building industry. By turning the site in to a modular matrix of 12X12ft we created an elastic field of peaks and valleys. A thousand plateaus ascending and descending, separating and merging to form a fluid space of private and public plateaus. Combining the rigorous and the adventurous. The box and the blob. "

This is part of CPH Experiments, "an exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, NYC thru Nov 24 2007. BIG is a Copenhagen based group of over 80 architects, designers, builders and thinkers operating within the fields of architecture, urbanism, research and development. BIG’s architecture emerges out of a careful analysis of how contemporary life constantly evolves and changes. In their projects, BIG tests the effects of size and the balance of programmatic mixtures on the triple bottom line of the social, economical and ecological outcome. Like a form of programmatic alchemy, they create architecture by mixing conventional ingredients such as living, leisure, working, and shopping."

ICA at Penn

Exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia thru December 16th

Ensemble

"A group exhibition of works that make sound, guest curated by artist and musician Christian Marclay. ...Likening his approach to that of a composer, Marclay has chosen a variety of sculpture and installations based on their sound quality and compatibility to sonically inhabit the same large first floor gallery. Visitors are invited to interact with some of the works, others are triggered by motion detectors, or set on timers. The installation will create an ambient sound environment, intermittently producing a wide range of sounds, from the very quiet notes of a music box to the loud ringing of a bronze bell."

"Participating artists include: Terry Adkins, Doug Aitken, Darren Almond, John M. Armleder, Fia Backström, Harry Bertoia, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Angela Bulloch, Martin Creed, David Ellis, Mineko Grimmer, Tim Hawkinson, Jim Hodges, Evan Holloway, Pierre Huyghe, Paul Ramirez-Jonas, Nina Katchadourian, Martin Kersels, Jon Kessler, Katja Kölle, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Carolee Schneemann, Noah Sheldon, Yoshi Wada and Angela White, among others

Eileen Neff: Between Us

"This exhibition of over thirty photographs by the Philadelphia artist Eileen Neff will be on view in the second floor gallery from September 7-December 16, 2007. Focusing on the past ten years, the exhibition traces a fascinating and critical shift from the camera to the computer."

Project Space: Jay Heikes
"For his first museum show, Jay Heikes will produce a unique installation in the Project Space which may include the following elements: a cement and brass "bed of nails," a digital cuckoo clock, a freezer wall, drawings and a stylized rat trap. These elements are among the "props" used to activate stories, puns, and a kind of deadpan humor that have appeared in past iterations of an ongoing work inspired by a rather arcane joke."

Ramp Project: Taalman Koch, Fly Thru

"This is the 13th commission in ICA's Ramp Project Series and is also the first to invite architects to address this challenging space: the Los Angeles team of Linda Taalman and Alan Koch."

Two thru the 13th

Ryan Trecartin at Elizabeth Dee Gallery.

"The debut of Ryan Trecartin's new video, ''I-Be Area,'' is the best thing that could have happened to the New York fall art season. Almost any slice of its 100-minute running time radiates more new-feeling energy than a dozen shows in the surrounding blocks. Painting, sculpture, installation, performance -- ''I-Be Area'' has it all, as well as language: a fictional but real language of murderous non sequiturs buried in sitcom teenage prattle. " New York Times Review.

and T.J. Wilcox at Metro Pictures.

"T. J. Wilcox's short films weave cinematic, personal and historical material into uniformly grainy, flea-market documentaries. (Mr. Wilcox films in Super-8 from a television monitor, transferring the footage to digital video for editing and finally to 16 millimeter for projection). In his third solo at the gallery, his films range from shallow glamour shots to a dreamlike re-enactment of a powerful childhood experience." New York Times Review.

Two from the Times

Two articles from the New York Times...

In Finding Your Way Around the Rembrandts, Holland Cotter guides us through the exhibition "The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art."

and in A Collector's Keen Eye for Modernists, Roberta Smith reviews "Abstract Expressionism and Other Modern Works," also on view at the Met.

Turner and Schama

Simon Schama profiles J.M.W. Turner in the New Yorker .

"Poor old Turner: one minute the critics were singing his praises, the next they were berating him for being senile or infantile, or both. No great painter suffered as much from excesses of adulation and execration, sometimes for the same painting. “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon Coming On” had, on its appearance at the Royal Academy, in 1840, been mocked by the reviewers as “the contents of a spittoon,” a “gross outrage to nature,” and so on. The critic of the Times thought the seven pictures—including “Slavers”—that Turner sent to the Royal Academy that year were such “detestable absurdities” that “it is surprising the [selection] committee have suffered their walls to be disgraced with the dotage of his experiments.” John Ruskin, who had been given “Slavers” by his father and had appointed himself Turner’s paladin, not only went overboard in praise of his hero but drowned in the ocean of his own hyperbole. In the first edition of “Modern Painters” (1843), Ruskin, then all of twenty-four, sternly informed the hacks that “their duty is not to pronounce opinions upon the work of a man who has walked with nature threescore years; but to impress upon the public the respect with which they [the works] are to be received.” Read more here.

Duchamp of the Muscle Car

The New York Times profiles Richard Prince, who's "Mr. Prince’s dark, funny, enigmatic work will be the subject of a 30-year retrospective... at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan. And though he did not make the clay car, he seriously considered putting it front and center in the show. In the end his reasons for changing his mind had more to do with humility than originality: he thought the car was too powerful a work of art in its own right. Read the rest here.

Roberta Smith reviews the show here.

Back to the Figure

Peter Doig, Dana Schutz, Barnaby Furnas, Neo Rauch, Katherine Lee and Elizabeth Neel are all profiled in Back to the Figure from the October issue of Smithsonian Magazine.

James Turrell

"Standing on the rim of an ancient volcanic crater in northern Arizona, with the Painted Desert as a spectacular backdrop, James Turrell surveys all he has wrought. For a quarter of a century, this 60-year-old artist has been transforming the crater into an immense naked-eye observatory." Read more.

Gordon Matta-Clark

Check out Dwell Magazine's profile of Gordon Matta-Clark.

"His presence in the art world was brief, but Gordon Matta-Clark’s site-specific “cuttings”are some of the 20th century’s most engaging explorations of architecture—and they’re not even standing. "

Eyebeam.org

"Eyebeam is an art and technology center that provides a fertile context and state-of-the-art tools for digital research and experimentation. It is a lively incubator of creativity and thought, where artists and technologists actively engage with culture, addressing the issues and concerns of our time. Eyebeam challenges convention, celebrates the hack, educates the next generation, encourages collaboration, freely offers its contributions to the community, and invites the public to share in a spirit of openness: open source, open content and open distribution.

The atelier model is fundamental to the concept of Eyebeam. The studio/workspace environment, in which the energies of artistic production, education and curatorial practice fuse, provides a unique, stimulating and vital working context for creating art. This tremendous energy, along with the dialogue exchanged between curators, artists and students of various practices and stages of development, can inform and inspire the creation of artworks that may not previously been imagined or produced."

UpcomingWorkshops and Events: This Fall's To-Do list
New from our Labs
Inside Outside: Eyebeam fellows strut their stuff in the Jersey City artist tour
Hip-Hop Pop-Up: Rap visuals in real time
Bocce Drift: Come Out and Play turns the city into a bocce course
Closed due to evaluation: Steve Lambert closes McDonald's for a dayApply now! Eyebeam's Winter 2008 Call for Residents extended
Eyebeam Community
Stephanie Rothenberg up North: The School of Perpetual Training and Mobile City
McKenzie Wark: 50 Years of Recuperation at The Buell Evening Lecture
LoVid features: Per Square Foot, Electric Lab

Caspar Stracke, urban particle supercollider, 2007
Interference: Exhibition opening party and performance this Thursday! Artist operatives tackle collective intelligence
September 27 – November 10, 2007Opening 6PM Thursday, September 27: 8PM VJ Performance by Caspar Stracke, Benton-C Bainbridge, and Angie Eng.

Artists: Forays, Angie Eng, Jill Magid, Carrie Dashow, Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg, Trevor Paglen, IAA, neuroTransmitter, Robert Ransick, Yury Gitman, Carlos J. Gómez de Llarena, Graffiti Research Lab, Caspar Stracke, Eyebeam R&D Lab, Michael Frumin, Jonah Peretti

Interference is the second of three exhibitions celebrating 10 years of Eyebeam support for artists experimenting with new technologies. Employing a diverse array of media and strategies, which includes data visualization, performance, community engagement and public intervention, the artists and collectives featured in Interference probe ideas of access and autonomy.
From the very public, but deliberately obscured, satellite surveillance data recorded in Paglen and IAA’s work tracking CIA aircraft, to the intimacy of Magid’s collaboration with a local NYC police officer; from Forays’ engagement with local community gardeners, to GRL, Gómez de Llarena and Gitman’s tools for communication, the projects in Interference ask us to seriously consider concepts of communal space in an increasingly privatized public sphere. – Amanda McDonald Crowley, Executive Director

Minister of Fear

The New York Times Magazine profiles "controversial" film director Michael Haneke (The Piano Teacher, Cache) in Minister of Fear.

"Making waves...is what Haneke has become famous for. Over the last two decades, the director has developed a reputation for stark, often brutal films that place the viewer -- sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly -- in the uncomfortable role of accomplice to the crimes playing out on-screen. This approach has made Haneke one of contemporary cinema's most reviled and revered figures, earning him everything from accusations of obscenity to a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art next month. ''Funny Games,'' the movie Haneke was shooting in New York and Long Island, is the American remake of a highly controversial film by the same name that he directed in 1997. It was from its beginnings targeted at the American moviegoing public -- and no other word but ''targeted'' will do. ''Funny Games'' is a direct assault on the conventions of cinematic violence in the United States, and the new version of the film, with its English-speaking cast and unmistakably American production design, makes this excruciatingly clear. More surprising still, Haneke remade this attack on the Hollywood thriller for a major Hollywood studio, Warner Independent Pictures, and refused to alter the original film's story in the slightest. "

Artists Space

Current shows at Artists Space

In the Main Space: On Being an Exhibition

October 12-December 8, 2007

Opening Reception: October 11th, 6-8pm

Curated by Joseph del Pesco
Artists Include BGL, Conrad Bakker, Beth Campbell, Germaine Koh, Valerie Hegarty, Isola and Norzi, Chadwick Rantanen, Derek Sullivan, Jackie Sumell, Anne Walsh/Chris Kubick, Lee Walton, Laurel Woodcock

CAMPARI Project Space: Judit Kurtág Episode

Architecture and Design Space: Jackie Sumell / Herman Wallace The House That Herman Built

Re-engineering Engineering

"WHEN NONENGINEERS THINK ABOUT ENGINEERING, it’s usually because something has gone wrong: collapsing levees in New Orleans, the loss of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003. In the follow-up investigations, it comes out that some of the engineers involved knew something was wrong. But too few spoke up or pushed back — and those who did were ignored. This professional deficiency is something the new, tuition-free Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering wants to fix. At its tiny campus in Needham, Mass., outside Boston, Olin is trying to design a new kind of engineer. Most engineering schools stress subjects like differential calculus and physics, and their graduates tend to end up narrowly focused and likely to fit the stereotype of a socially awkward clock-puncher. Richard K. Miller, the president of the school, likes to share a professional joke: “How can you tell an extroverted engineer? He’s the one who looks at your shoes when he talks to you.” Olin came into being, Miller told me last spring in his office on campus, to make engineers “comfortable as citizens and not just calculating machines.” Olin is stressing creativity, teamwork and entrepreneurship — and, in no small part, courage. “I don’t see how you can make a positive difference in the world,” he emphasized, “if you’re not motivated to take a tough stand and do the right thing.”

Read the rest here.

Weather Report: Art & Climate Change

SEPTEMBER 14 - DECEMBER 21, 2007 -- "Weather Report: Art and Climate Change" is an exhibition curated by internationally renowned critic, art historian, and writer Lucy R. Lippard. It is a collaboration between the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and EcoArts.

“We have the highest density of climate scientists in the world in the Boulder-to-Broomfield corridor,” said Marda Kirn, who runs EcoArts, an interdisciplinary arts organization here. Her group is a driving force behind “Weather Report: Art and Climate Change,” an ambitious new art show at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. “We have buildings full of climate scientists,” she added, as if climatology Ph.D.’s were stacked like rolls of paper towels at Costco.

For the show dozens of artists, including Agnes Denes, Mary Miss, Subhankar Banaejee, Andrea Polli, Joel Sternfeld, Iain Baxter and Chris Jordan, were asked to join with scientists to create pieces about climate change. Some of the artists had been collaborating with scientists for years; Ms. Kirn matched other artists with scientists from the Boulder area. “The artists had to be very specific about the questions they wanted to ask and the research they were doing,” she said. “Matching them with scientists was almost like setting up dates.”

Her idea — to create an interdisciplinary show on global warming — enticed the art critic Lucy Lippard to step into the curator’s role for the first time in 15 years. “It’s a killer — it’s the hottest topic, so to speak,” said Ms. Lippard, 70, who in her long career has championed Conceptual Art, public art and feminism in books including “The Pink Glass Swan” and “The Lure of the Local.”

Read the rest here.

What the Beats were about.

Read Louis Menand's New Yorker article called Drive, He Wrote. It's a meditation on the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac's On The Road.