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• Swoon Tags The Hudson

  The artist Swoon, who we wrote about in Issue 005, set sail down the Hudson last week for her boat voyage-themed performance art piece, "Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea." A flotilla of seven waterbound art installations, each hand-crafted with different materials and manned by a hodgepodge of 40 artists and performers, will travel from Troy, NY to Queens before docking on September 7 for an opening at the Deitch Studios, and remain as part of an exhibition.
  
  It's a follow-up to her 2007 project "Miss Rockaway Armada," in which she floated down the Mississippi to New Orleans in a boat made from trash. That one seemed a little more street-artisty; this current Switchback Sea piece might be more on the "Art for Art's Sake" side, kind of like when Matthew Barney decided it'd be a good plan to traverse the entire Atlantic Ocean in a small boat and draw pictures of dead fish and waves for five months. Then again, ambushing the Hudson with art boats is just another way for her to take public space and make it her canvas.
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  • Date: Sep 05 2008
  • Posted by alexandra_m

• The Old Testament + Astrophysics = New Work By Diana Al-Hadid

  Diana Al-Hadid, a 27-year-old Syrian-born artist based in Brooklyn, opens her first major solo show in New York this week. Her large-scale sculptures are informed by classical and gothic architecture, labyrinths, science, Greek mythology, biblical lore, paintings in the school of Bruegel and Bosch, and—like her previous installations of gloriously macabre organs and staircases—"failed attempts to reach God." Here, her crux theme of God-ward ambition refers to the story of the Tower of Babel and what Al-Hadid calls "our Babel": Geneva's Large Hadron Collider, a 27km-wide machine developed to re-create matter that existed at the genesis of the universe by way of slamming particles together in a manmade Big Bang. Among other things, the work in her new exhibition Reverse Collider is informed by these seemingly disparate concepts (an Old Testament tale and a Swiss-Franco quantum physics experiment), and the parallels she's drawn between the two: working at the limits of technology, the analogous effort to explore the origins of the universe, each construction's resemblance to "an architectural telescope to reach God," and their shared impending sense of danger. Show: September 4th through October 9th, 2008 at both Perry Rubenstein gallery locations in New York City. Image: left, Bruegel, right, Al-Hadid
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  • Date: Sep 03 2008
  • Posted by alexandra_m

• PICA's Time-Based Art Festival 2008

  This Thursday, our chums over at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art kick off their sixth annual Time-Based Art Festival (or TBA:08 for the abbreviation-minded). For a week and a half (September 4-14), moderation gets the heave-ho as the festival surveys what’s happening in contemporary art’s multifarious forms—performance, dance, music, new media, visual arts projects. In fact, it's the only North American festival to examine and exalt today’s art with such breadth. The inspired programming includes 250+ artists with new, next-big-thing work, like Justin Gorman and his outsized, site-specific text displays, and 150+ performances, from the otherworldly melodies of Antony and the Johnsons to the deconstructive confrontations of artist collective Superamas.
  
  Each day is stuffed to the second with workshops, salons, performances, and, for the night owls, music and drinks at THE WORKS, the museum’s late-night spot. If you happen to reside in Portland, check out the list of events/exhibits. There are some discounted travel packages and accommodations available for out-of-towners.
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  • Date: Sep 02 2008
  • Posted by Jason Jude Chan

• Sukiyaki Western Django

  We're really excited about Sukiyaki Western Django, an English-language Western film (read: flick) by the controversial Japanese directer Takashi Miike. The thing looks stupendous—not only because it's a Japanese Western, but also because the entire cast learned its lines phonetically—well, except for Quentin Tarantino, who plays two characters.
  
  Slate has a nice take on it here; you can watch previews on the official site. Sukiyaki Western Django arrives in New York City today and in Los Angeles on September 12.
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  • Date: Aug 29 2008
  • Posted by Patrick James

• Senisign Is Senisnide

  The above sign has been offending the very same senior citizens that it was designed to protect.
  
  Given that it makes us snicker a bit, it probably is kind of offensive. However, to be fair, it might also be a pretty effective caution prompt.
  
  Via Coudal.
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  • Date: Aug 28 2008
  • Posted by Patrick James

• Intermission

  
  
  Our Intermission posts tend to be moving images, but this photoshopped editorial cartoon by Atley Kasky and Nicolas McConnell was too awesome to pass up. In recent weeks, McCain has responded to questions about the (large) number of houses he owns, and allegations he had an advantage at the Saddleback forum, by referencing his experiences in Vietnam. We won't ruin the subtle genius of this cartoon by saying any more.
  
  By the way, why is the editorial cartoon still stuck in the pen-and-ink medium? Yeah, there are tons of people photoshopping stuff online, but "real publications" haven't embraced the digital editorial cartoon.
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  • Date: Aug 28 2008
  • Posted by Andrew Price

• The Unbearable Lightness Of Being

  There’s nothing like some wondrous photography to sate your anticipation between DNC bulletins. PSFK points us to the absolutely awesome work of Cenci Goepel and Jens Warnecke. For their Lightmark series, the two gallivant across the globe to shoot some sublime photographs, enhanced by their expert use of light drawing. Drawing with light requires a long exposure and a focused, luminous light to cut an ethereal shape through air. With dark, artificial-looking skies as backdrops, the impossibly gorgeous lights appear to be captured seconds before they vanish into the eerie environs.
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  • Date: Aug 26 2008
  • Posted by Jason Jude Chan

• The Art Form Of The 20th Century

  Collage, Donald Barthelme believed, was THE art form of the 20th century—well, according to the play and film Six Degrees of Separation, that is.
  
  Anyway, Bjorn Copeland is making some compelling collages in the 21st century. He's clearly indebted to the bright, plastic flatness of collages that have come before him, but that doesn't diminish his work's potency for us: The twisted-pop-sensationalism-on-the-brink-of-explosion thing is working. Respect. You can check out much more of his stuff at Aesthetic Poet.
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  • Date: Aug 27 2008
  • Posted by Patrick James

• Magic Busted

  Oh man, this thing is sweet. Can you imagine driving through Baja in it, pulling up to an empty point break and just disappearing for a few days? Well, you'll have to. The Westfalia Verdier Solar Power vehicle (or the Magic Bus) still doesn't exist. Perchance, to dream...
  
  Can you think of any other amazing ideas/concepts/inventions that never came into being? Flying cars, perhaps?
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  • Date: Aug 26 2008
  • Posted by Patrick James

• Say 'Cheese'... All Ten Thousand Of You

  Art FYI: Spencer Tunick is a photographer with a pretty novel hook—thousands of people, naked. He's been at it for several years now, gathering huge crowds to either pile or pose, usually in public places, and the results are often riveting. And, he occasionally gets arrested. Aside from the visual effect of several hundred naked bodies, say, on a glacier, the scale of his endeavor is what many find really charming.
  
  But before Tunick there were the "living photographs" of Arthur Mole. His set-ups incorporated as many as 30,000 people. Without modern-day technology, he had to arrange his subjects so that from whatever fixed point where he stood with his camera, perspective would make the images (the Liberty Bell, the Statue of Liberty, Woodrow Wilson's head...) intelligible.
  
  President Wilson's head required somewhere between 18,000 and 21,000 soldiers, all assembled at Camp Sherman in Chillicothe, Ohio in 1918, in uniform, in the summer heat. Tens of thousands of people. Stood there. In the shape of Woodrow Wilson's head. Depending on how you feel about the Federal Reserve System or America's governance during World War I, this composition is arguably hotter than Tunick's mass nudes.
  
  Tunick has an exhibition coming up in London. For more on the late Mole, try this great Cabinet article or visit Oddee.
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  • Date: Aug 19 2008
  • Posted by alexandra_m