one piece

Kandinsky at the Guggenheim

The Russian avant-gardist Wassily Kandinsky - who dressed like the college professor he had trained to be and sounded like a mystic when he wasn't thinking like a scientist - is the central god in the Guggenheim pantheon of genius myth. The museum owns more of his work than of any other major Modernist and mounts some form of full-dress Kandinsky show like clockwork every 20 years or so.

It's that time again. The Guggenheims last excursion into Kandinsky occurred in the early 1980s with three context heavy exhibitions that examined his activities in all mediums. This one  takes the opposite tack. It distills Kandinsky's momentous career to about 100 paintings, with a large side order of works on paper displayed in a adjacent gallery. The canvases and almost nothing else fill Frank Lloyds Wright great rotunda from bottom to top, sometimes at the magisterial rate of one painting per bay.

The show offers an unencumbered view of Kandinsky's painting career and style that he adjusted with every change of setting. Tending toward constructivism in Moscow, toward Klee at the Bauhaus and toward a surrealist-tinged biomorphism - for which he had laid the ground work 20 years earlier - in Paris. Not surprisingly, he bristled at the suggestion that he had been influenced by Arp and Miro.

via: "The Angel in the Architecture" 

By Roberta Smith 

 The New York Times

Shooting Craters Around the World

Stan Gaz’s big black-and-white aerial photographs of meteor-impact sites in Namibia, Australia, South Africa, and elsewhere appear prehistoric; with the exception of a crater in Arizona and its attendant industrial sprawl, there are no signs of human habitation. Or maybe these images anticipate the end of history, a time when the earth returns to moonlike desolation, its skies black and its barren surface gouged. Gaz’s decidedly lunar landscapes may not be sci-fi fantasies — he took them hanging out of a hovering helicopter — but they’re almost unrecognizable as our home planet. Magnificent and frightening, they suggest an abrupt beginning and a shattering end.

Vince Aletti 

 The New Yorker Magazine

Sites of Impact 

Meteorite Craters Around the World.

Philip Glass 1979 segment The Geometry of Circles for Sesame Street.

Naming Names

 

 

Today few people are proficient in the ordering and naming of life. There are the dwindling professional taxonomists, and fast-declining peoples like the Tzeltal Maya of Mexico, among whom a 2-year-old can name more than 30 different plants and whose 4-year-olds can recognize nearly 100. Things were different once. In Linnaeus’s day, it was a matter of aristocratic pride to have a wonderful and wonderfully curated collection of wild organisms, both dead and alive. Darwin (who gained fame first as the world’s foremost barnacle taxonomist) might have expected any dinner-party conversation to turn taxonomic, after an afternoon of beetle-hunting or wildflower study. Most of us claim and enjoy no such expertise.

No wonder so few of us can really see what is out there. Even when scads of insistent wildlife appear with a flourish right in front of us, and there is such life always — hawks migrating over the parking lot, great colorful moths banging up against the window at night — we barely seem to notice. We are so disconnected from the living world that we can live in the midst of a mass extinction, of the rapid invasion everywhere of new and noxious species, entirely unaware that anything is happening. 

Happily, changing all this turns out to be easy. Just find an organism, any organism, small, large, gaudy, subtle — anywhere, and they are everywhere — and get a sense of it, its shape, color, size, feel, smell, sound.Then find a name for it. Learn science’s name, one of countless folk names, or make up your own. To do so is to change everything, including yourself. Because once you start noticing organisms, once you have a name for particular beasts, birds and flowers, you can’t help seeing life and the order in it, just where it has always been, all around you.

link: Reviving the Lost Art of Naming the World, By Carol Kaesuk Yoon -- The New York Times

"Ichthyo: The Architecture of Fish"

The stark X-ray images of the ichthyological specimens of the Smithsonian Institution, intricate and delicate, offer an unusual combination of art and science. 

The X-rays are first presented in black-and-white splendor, followed by a visual directory with each specimen's Latin and common names, location, order, family, and collection date. Jean-Michel Cousteau provides one of the three brief introductions, but the true focus of the book is the amazing images.

Traces of Light

Vera Lutter's photography focuses on architectural or industrial landmarks and places with iconic resonance, from the abandoned Pepsi Cola Factory in Long Island City to the now defunct Battersea Power Station in London. Her depiction of these structures emphasizes their formidable stature while personifying their melancholic solitude and isolation. A haunting quality and ethereal tones dominate Lutter's images, reflecting the passing of time and signifying both the transient and the perpetual.

Vera Lutter 

July 24 - September 12, 2009

Gagosian Gallery (Beverly Hills)

" At first I thought, "That's it -

now I will die from this."

After that, many people encouraged me to get medications to take. With health, I can still live with my wife and my son. I can still live with my wife and my son and my parents. But if I die, I don't know what my wife and child will do. How will they live? If they are infected, they won't know how to get the medications and take them. They'll die just like me. So I try to live."

__Duong Van Tutyen (Thai Nguyen Province), shortly before he died in December 2007.

Quote from the book "Access to Life" in which eight of the world’s leading photojournalists, all members of Magnum Photos, follow 30 individuals in nine countries before and four months after they began the antiretroviral treatment, documenting the transformative effect on their bodies, their lives, and the lives of their families. Here are the faces, voices, and stories representing millions of people who would otherwise  be dead if not for access to free life-saving drugs.But there are also the stories of those individuals for whom treatment came too late—showing how the fight to bring access to AIDS treatment is still a difficult one. The Access to Life campaign which includes an international traveling exhibition functions as an axis for artistic, educational, and political responses to AIDS treatment. The exhibition will travel to Mexico City, Paris, Berlin, and Rome in 2009 and 2010.

'Endless Forms'

 'Endless forms': Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts at the Yale Center for British Arts, is an exhibition exploring, for the first time, the impact of Darwin’s theories on the visual arts. From the very start, it demonstrates just how important it was for Darwin to learn to see. Some of his earliest inspirations were images of exploration that he came upon as a child and student, which are on display here. 

Darwin referred to the “endless forms” that nature can produce without any pre-existing design: a vision that has turned out to be just as compelling for modernity as the notion of a preordained order was in earlier eras. But in this exhibition we find not the existential despair or cynicism we might expect following the dethroning of old beliefs, but an extravagant celebration of sense and sensation.

link:

'Darwin's Wake Splashed Artists, Too' By Edward Rothstein, The New York Times

"Imagining The Unknown And The Unknowable"

There will be many, many changes for art and artists in the years ahead. Trying to predict them is like trying to forecast the economy. You can only ask questions. The 21st century will almost certainly see consciousness-altering changes in digital access to knowledge and in the shaping of visual culture. 

What will artists do with this? Will the art industry continue to cling to art’s traditional analog status, to insist that the material, buyable object is the only truly legitimate form of art, which is what the painting revival of the last few years has really been about? 

Will contemporary art continue to be, as it is now, a fancyish Fortunoff’s, a party supply shop for the Love Boat crew? Or will artists — and teachers, and critics — jump ship, swim for land that is still hard to locate on existing maps and make it their home and workplace? I’m not talking about creating ’60s-style utopias; all those notions are dead and gone and weren’t so great to begin with. 

I’m talking about carving out a place in the larger culture where a condition of abnormality can be sustained, where imagining the unknown and the unknowable — impossible to buy or sell — is the primary enterprise. Crazy! says anyone with an ounce of business sense. Right. 

Exactly. Crazy. 

link:The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art!

 By Holland Cotter

The New York Times

“An Iconography of Contagion”

The exhibition “An Iconography of Contagion,” features work from numerous countries on an array of diseases, among them syphilis, malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS. The posters are on display at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington through Dec. 19.

Much of the exhibition suggests a mash-up of advertising and public health. The posters tried to convey the danger of disease and get people to change their behavior, said the curator, Michael Sappol, a historian at the library of medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health.

But “they’re also about the pleasure of the image,” he continued, adding, “There have been some very sexy, colorful, playful posters about some very serious diseases.”

The visual world underwent rapid changes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Newspapers featured larger headlines and more drawings and photographs. The advertising industry integrated text and images, and it turned to behavioral science to sharpen its pitches.