Jan Vormann in New York

Jan Vormann, who I blogged about a couple of times before, made some art interventions in New York last month in conjunction with the art fairs.

These works are a part of a series where he repairs walls using Legos:

At Wooster & Broome Streets

I think my favorite of these latest involves repairing a subway mosaic:

In Times Square subway station

DIY residencies in DIY stores

splash

tout terrain

matin d'automne

Paul Souviron and Antoine Lejolivet's Encastrable series is guerrilla art "residencies"/interventions at Paris-area megastores--mainly Home Depot like places. The artists create amusing tableaus using the materials stocked by the store.

[via WWMNA]

ASDF

ASDF is the art-making duo Mylinh Trieu Nguyen and David Horvitz. Their projects are usually involves collaborations with other artists to make work that is free and digitally-based.

For example, their For a Brief Time Only at a Location Near You:

For a Brief Time Only... is a purchasable exhibition of 24 artists available at a photo developer near you. You can find it at any store that allows file uploading via the internet (including most major US drug-stores). The image files will be sent to the closest location near you, and within minutes you will be able to walk in and pick them up as prints.

This exhibition contains 24 small 4x6 photographic prints contained within the packaging provided by each store. Also included are a contact sheet with all the artists' information, and a letter to the store employee reassuring that there is nothing wrong with the order.

No money is being made by us in this exhibition. You will purchase the show directly from the store (unless you can acquire it another way), which will probably cost around $5. We would like to make it clear that we have no intentions in promoting sales in these places, which will mostly include major US drug-stores. We think of it more as infiltrating these spaces with our games.

That "show" has closed, but the photos are still available in pdf form.

Read my earlier posting about ASDF's 100 $1 grants

Faked NYT

A faked New York Times was distributed yesterday. The fourteen page spoof was dated July 4, 2009 and announced, among other things, that the Iraq War is over.

The paper is largely being credited to The Yes Men, but according to the Associated Press (by way of NY Times's coverage of the event), it was a collaboration that extended beyond the performance artist duo:

The Associated Press reported that copies of the spoof paper were also handed out in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, and that the pranksters — who included a film promoter, three unnamed Times employees and Steven Lambert, an art professor -- financed the paper with small online contributions and created the paper to urge President-elect Barack Obama to keep his campaign promises.

Subway kinetics

The details about this sculpture aren't available... It appears to be by Mudlevel and to take place in a German-speaking country. I love how it uses the transportation systems for power and its organ-grinder look.

[via Make]

Susan Robb's "Warmth Giant Black Toobs"

Susan Robb is a Seattle-based artist whose work includes these 50' long, air-filled, sun-powered sculptures made out of garbage-can liners:

Warmth Giant Black Toobs, 2007
Susan Robb

At first the tubes seem to be moving in slow motion, but when humans enter the frame it becomes clear that the video's speed isn't manipulated.

Robb has also done some work where she creates a face out of landscape using image mirroring:

I Am A Land Animal, 2008
Susan Robb
Epson archival inkjet print, paper, glass, powder coated steel shelf
22 x 28 x 6 inches

It reminded me a bit of Anthroptic, a project I did with author Benjamin Rosenbaum in which we used facial recognition software to find faces where none exist (and tied them together using short stories):

"Citizens" from Anthroptic, 2006
Ethan Ham & Benjamin Rosenbaum
Photograph & audio

The story which goes with Citizens is one of my favorites from the series (I also particularly like The Gardeners of Rhododendrons). Click here to hear the audio read by the wonderful Vanessa Hart (or here to read the text).

Subway ventilation bag art

Taking a cue from Marilyn Monroe's famous subway grate scene in The Seven Year Itch...... Artist Joshua Allen Harris creates street art by tying plastic bag animals to subway ventilation grates.










[via Make]

Fake living statue

Living statues (where street performers pretend to be statues for tips) are hugely popular in Barcelona. A few weeks ago artist/prankster Mark Jenkins set up a real, non-kinetic sculpture that appears to be a "living sculpture."




[via BoingBoing]

Interventions with The Image Fulgurator

Julius von Bismarck's The Image Fulgurator is a reverse camera... instead of capturing images, it projects images. More specifically, it briefly projects an image when its light-detector senses the flash from another camera. The idea is that the artist can lurk around tourist sites and secretly overlay his own images onto the photographed subjects so that when the tourists look at their photos they'll find them manipulated.

From von Bismarck's site:

People's great trust in their photographic reproductions of reality was what motivated me to develop the image Fulgurator. A camera can be used as a personal memory tool, since people do not doubt the veracity of their own photographs. Hence, photos can reproduce the reality of an individual environment or public space. At sacred or popular locations, or those having a political connotation, an intervention with the Fulgurator can be particularly effective. Especially objects with a special aura or great symbolic power are good targets for this kind of manipulation. In other words, with the Fulgurator it is possible to have a lasting effect on those kinds of individual moments and events that become accessible to the masses only because they are preserved photographically.

This video below shows an intervention at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. The manipulation is intended to make connections between the former East Germany/West Germany border and the US/Mexico border today.


A compelling & interesting project, but I wonder about the gun-fetish aesthetic. Not only does the camera have a pistol grip, but von Bismarck's video has him assembling the camera ala sniper-gun movie cliche. The pistol grip seems particularly notable since it is counter to the (presumed) desire to have the fulgurator be as innocuous as possible.

His logo (above) references the Red Army Faction's (below). I honestly wonder if he's really thinking through and taking responsibility for using this kind of imagery (or if it is just easy dramatics).



The Image Fulgurator won this year's ARS Electronica Prix's "Golden Nica" for Interactive Art.

[via Make]

Secret art exhibit on the moon

[via greg.org by way of Boing Boing]

It sounds like a hoax or conspiracy theory, but apparently there is a secret art show on the moon. Artist Forrest "Frosty" Myers managed to have a "Moon Museum" secretly installed on a hatch on a leg of the Apollo 12's Intrepid landing module. Myers had tried to arrange for the art through NASA, but when the project was rejected, he enlisted the help of an unnamed engineer at the Grumman Corporation and did it as guerrilla art (let's see you do that, Banksy!).

Myers arranged for Rauschenberg, Warhol, Oldenburg, Chamberlain, and David Novros to contribute drawings in addition to his own. The six drawings were miniaturized and baked onto an iridium-plated ceramic wafer measuring just 3/4" x 1/2" x 1/40", with the assistance of engineers at Bell Labs.

According to the Times via greg.org, the artworks are Rauschenberg's wavy line; Novros' black square bisected by thin white lines; a computer-generated drawing by Myers; a geometric mouse by Oldenburg; and a template pattern by Chamberlain. Warhol's contribution, which is obscured by the thumb above, is described as "a calligraphic squiggle made up of the initials of his signature."Actually, it's a drawing of a penis.

For those of you with NY Times subscriptions, or a willingness to spend $3.95, the New York Times has a short article from November 22, 1969 about the exhibit.

The statue of the Fallen Astronaut is better known, institutionally approved moon art.

Homeless Lamp, the Juice Sucker

This comes by way of Greg Cook's excellent The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research blog. The description of the work from the Saatchi Gallery.

Echoing the minimalist works of Dan Flavin, Ivan Navarro's light sculptures subvert the cool detachment of florescent bulbs with their arrangement into recognisable objects. In Homeless Lamp, the Juice Sucker Navarro builds a grocery cart from electric tubing. Featured in a video of a 5 hour performance, Navarro has activated the sculpture on the streets of New York's Chelsea District. In the video, two men break into a municipal power outlet, hi-jacking city energy to feed the power-sucking shopping trolley. Edited to 4 minutes, the action is set to a Mexican revolutionary song from 1905 titled Juan The Landless. As an icon of both consumerism and vagrancy, Homeless Lamp, the Juice Sucker sets a stage where the dichotomies between wealth and poverty convene as a literal and allegorical emblem of power, waste, transience, and opportunistic survival. Basking in an artificial glow, Navarro's Homeless Lamp, the Juice Sucker exudes a religious aura based in consumption, corruption, and errancy.

In case you didn't know, George Foreman Grills connected to light post outlets can serve as makeshift cookers for homeless people. NPR had a piece on this a while back:

...many immigrants, homeless people and others of limited means living in single-room occupancies (SROs) have no kitchens, no legal or official place to cook. To get a hot meal, or eat traditional foods from the countries they've left behind, they have to sneak a kind of kitchen into their places. Crock pots, hot plates, microwaves and toaster ovens hidden under the bed. And now, the latest and safest appliance, the appliance that comes in so many colors it looks like a modern piece of furniture: the George Foreman Grill. It is, quite literally, a hidden kitchen...

...Jeffry learned to cook from his grandmother. He feels an urge to cook, especially for other people -- under the overpass on Chicago's Wacker Drive; on a George Foreman Grill plugged into a power pole; with a hot clothing iron to toast a grilled cheese sandwich.

I haven't seen Navarro’s video or the sculpture in-person, but I do like the idea of the cart being lit up in the city streets and passerbys unexpectedly coming upon it.

[citation needed]

Citation needed is a link added to Wikipedia articles when someone thinks a particular statement needs a third party source to back it up (or someone just wants to imply a statement is false).

Matt at biphenyl.org created citation needed stickers to add to posters that make dubious claims. Read about it here.

Update: PO8 pointed out that this idea was borrowed from xkcd