SUPERFLEX, Modern Times Forever
 will be showing May 7 to June 19, daily beginning at 7pm
 - HIGH LINE CHANNEL 14, on the High Line at the 14th Street Passage, NYC.

Modern Times Forever is a 240 hour film about what would happen to Alvar Aalto's Stora Enso building as an architectural and ideological symbol over the next few thousands of years, if only time would affect the building.

LACMA9 Art + Film Lab, in residence in nine Los Angeles and San Bernardino County communities, offers a participatory program series for adults interested in the moving image. All programs are free and open to area residents. Offerings include film workshops, an oral history project, outdoor film screenings, plus a day of free admission to LACMA. Presented in collaboration with city parks, universities, and community colleges, LACMA9 Art + Film Lab spends five weeks in each community. An inviting mobile building—designed by celebrated artist Jorge Pardo—houses the Lab.

Model Lily Cole strips off for former Turner Prize nominee Fiona Banner, who is writing a new chapter in the history of nude art. Famous for her use of text to 'paint' the female form, Banner writes a description of Lily's body onto canvas in paint, before asking the art graduate to read it back.

Famous for her obsessive use of words, Banner reveals why she focuses her unique form of art on subjects that make her feel uncomfortable, namely sex, war and money. Showing Lily around her studio and printing press, she showcases one of her career highlights, NAM, 1,000 pages of continuous text describing Vietnam war films Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Hamburger Hill and The Deer Hunter in minute detail.

Revealing herself as witty and down to earth, the Liverpudlian artist also takes Lily inside A Room For London, the small boat perched on top of the South Bank's Queen Elizabeth Hall. Designed by her in collaboration with David Kohn Architects, the one bedroom vessel, accessible by crane, has become London's most coveted hotel room.

Datascape: what you see may not be what you get*


27 April 2013 - 01 September 2013

Artists: Burak Arıkan, Angela Bulloch, David Claerbout, Ryoji Ikeda, Michael Najjar, Enrique Radigales, Thomas Ruff, Karin Sander, Charles Sandison, Pablo Valbuena



From realistic renderings to imagined environments, painters have - for centuries - made the landscape their subject, or used it as a backdrop for portraiture. The artists who participate in this exhibition somehow perpetuate this tradition of depicting our environment – whether real or enhanced by imagination. In doing so, they also reflect upon the intricate blend of visual information and the data enhancement that has modified our perception of the world. Each take a different approach, and reveal various aspects of the shifts brought by technology to the landscape. 


A new exhibition, Prima Materia, will be on view in Venice from May 30, 2013, to December 31, 2014, at Punta della Dogana. François Pinault has appointed Caroline Bourgeois and Michael Govan as the curators.

Prima Materia brings together almost 80 works from the last 50 years by approximately thirty artists from the Pinault Collection. The exhibition establishes a dialogue between important historical movements, such as Mono-Ha and Arte Povera, as well as in-depth monographic presentations of works by artists such as Llyn Foulkes, Mark Grotjahn, and Marlene Dumas. Prima Materia will include a selection of ambitious installations that have been reconceived for Punta della Dogana by artists such as Diana Thater and Ryan Trecartin & Lizzie Fitch, as well as new commissions by Theaster Gates, Loris Gréaud, and Philippe Parreno.

Also opening on May 30, 2013, the Teatrino of Palazzo Grassi, a new auditorium of 225 seats restored by Tadao Ando, will present a program of three films by artists from the François Pinault Collection: Philippe Parreno, Loris Gréaud and Anri Sala.

The Jewish Museum has just unveiled a star-studded lineup of talks, lectures, and panels to accompany its upcoming Jack Goldstein retrospective, which opens May 10, titled "The What, Where, How and Who of Jack Goldstein" and featuring the likes of Robert Longo, James Welling, R. H. Quaytman, Douglas Crimp, and Goldstein's instructor at CalArts — where he was in the first graduating class — John Baldessari.

The program begins on May 18 with "What is Jack Goldstein?", an exhibition walk-through with Jens Hoffmann, the Museum's deputy director of exhibitions, discussing Goldstein's distinguished status among the Pictures Generation artists. On May 23rd, in "Where is Jack Goldstein?", Hoffman will discuss Goldstein's work with Crimp, who curated the now-famous 1977 Artists Space exhibition "Pictures."

On June 25, in the event titled "How is Jack Goldstein?", Baldessari will offer his thoughts and remembrances on Goldstein's college days. The series concludes on September 22 with the four-hour symposium "Who is Jack Goldstein?" tracking the influence he and other Pictures Generation artists have had on contemporary artists since.

100 Artists | Jessica Stockholder
100 Artists is a yearlong celebration of the 100 artists who have appeared to date in Art21′s award-winning film series Art in the Twenty-First Century.

Jessica Stockholder is most readily known as a sculptor, but she brings a complex history and distinct approach to the discipline. Her remarkable sensitivity to color combined with her attention to pictorial space are in many ways very painterly, and in fact she began her artistic career as a painter at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Eventually her work crept off the canvas, across the wall, over the floor and then finally, in some instances, out of the exhibition space altogether.

Her creative process embraces chance, humor, and imaginative problem solving, and the work itself embodies these things. Stockholder feels her art "is indexical of the process of coming to knowledge and understanding," and in many ways the art's physicality remains an integral aspect of its ultimate meaning.

In both her sculpture and installation, Stockholder relishes destabilizing the dichotomies between dynamic and static; tangible and immaterial; and ephemeral and fixed. In each of these instances, her work traffics in the third dimension of space as well as the fourth—of time. It is meant, in her words, "to be experienced."

The Museum of Modern Art, New York - March 15–September 2, 2013
Abstraction emerged in Western art a century ago, and it was the defining mode of expression for key modern movements throughout the twentieth century—from the utopian geometries of Suprematism and Constructivism to the heroic gestures of Abstract Expressionism and the perceptual phenomena of Op art. Today abstraction continues to play a vital role in art practice, not as a singular style or approach but as a rich and varied trove of formal languages and ideas upon which artists can draw, deliberately or indiscriminately. This exhibition focuses on the print medium, highlighting ways in which printmaking's inherent processes, such as layering, transfer, and reproducibility, have been particularly fertile terrain for experimentation with abstraction.

Unveiling of Jessica Stockholder's Los pès del parpalhòl (Butterfly Legs) at Les Abattoirs in Toulouse, 13 April, 2013.

An Evening with Kerry Tribe
Monday, May 13, 2013, 7:00 p.m.
MoMA, Theater 2 (The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2), T2

Kerry Tribe (American, b. 1973) uses the formal mechanics of the moving image to explore the instability of recall and the subjective nature of perception. The evening will feature Tribe's live performance Critical Mass, based on the 1971 Hollis Frampton film of the same name. Tribe's ambitious project re-enacts Frampton's film cut by cut with two live actors, Emelie O'Hara and Nick Huff, inverting the role of film as performance document while examining the historical specificity of language and gender. The artist will also speak about her practice. Organized by Erica Papernik, Assistant Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art.

A CONTEMPORARY ART AUCTION BENEFITTING PROJECT ANGEL FOOD

TUESDAY, APRIL 23, 2013
7:00PM Cocktails & Viewing
8:00PM Live Auction

ON VIEW APRIL 15 to APRIL 23 at CAA
weekends by appointment

CREATIVE ARTISTS AGENCY
2000 Avenue of the Stars, Los Angeles

Tickets:
$150 per person
$250 per couple

Project Angel Food's mission is to nourish the body and spirit of men, women and children affected by HIV/AIDS, Cancer and other life-threatening illnesses.

Project Angel Food cooks and delivers meals designed by registered dieticians and cooked by devoted volunteers and professional chefs with quality ingredients. Our meals are delivered to clients' homes, free-of-charge, our drivers are often the only human contact a client will have in a day.

In 1989, Project Angel Food was conceived by a group of caring friends driven to action after witnessing their loved ones' health deteriorate as a result of disease and the malnutrition that accompanies it. Twenty-four years later, Project Angel Food is a nationally-respected organization with an involved Board of Directors, a professional staff and more than 3,500 active volunteers. Today, Project Angel Food cooks and delivers more than 12,000 meals a week to people for whom a healthy meal, delivered with a warm smile, is truly life-saving.

When Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) composed "Oktophonie," the father of electronic music was unable to perform it before his death due to the spacial limitations of a traditional hall — the piece requires a flexible space where eight speakers can be arrayed in a cube around the audience. Twelve years later, the performance is realized under the sound projection of his original collaborator, Kathinka Pasveer. Together with visual artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, the Park Avenue Armory's drill hall was transformed into a ritualized event to kick off the 2013 Arts at the Armory Season.

Pae White's most recent work, Too much night again, which she describes as "a self-portrait of sorts", has overtaken the main gallery space at the South London Gallery on Peckham Road. Using 48 kilometres of yarn she has created an immersive environment that captures her experiences with anxiety, insomnia and Black Sabbath.

The most recent project by the central artist of the so-called "relational aesthetics" movement, Rirkrit Tiravanija, is a staging at New York's Park Avenue Armory of "Oktophonie," a performance of electronic music by the singular, often controversial German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (through Mar. 27). The music, a 70-minute excerpt of the late composer's 29-hour opera "Licht," was intended to be performed in a specially designed chamber with octophonic (8-channel) sound. Tiravanija conceived of a circular stage with a lunar surface to include both the audience and the performers, all-white smocks to be worn by all attendees, and a light show that approximates an eclipse.

Parreno discusses his latest film Marilyn, which conjures up Marilyn Monroe through a phantasmagoric séance in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, where she lived in the 1950s. Phantasmagoria was an early form of cinema, a kind of circus act where conjurers would use lighting and artificial smoke to summon an ethereal apparition in an attempt to bring back the dead. Here, the image is taken from the point of view of the deceased Marilyn. The film reproduces Marilyn Monroe's presence by means of three algorithms: the camera becomes her eyes, a computer reconstructs the prosody of her voice and a robot recreates her handwriting.

Three Star Books (Paris) and Westreich/Wagner Publications (New York) have just produced a new work from Blake Rayne's 'a' line, an ongoing investigation by the artist. As with all the 'a' works, this new project can be seen as a distillation of ideas, processes and techniques inherent within different formats of cultural production.

  
The varied 'weather' of White's work, like the actual weather, can be, for example, pleasantly sunny or too 'bright' to tolerate; forlornly or invitingly cloudy; and on some occasions turbulent. All of these events take place in her different works without any permanent displacement of the steadfast climate of her overall enterprise and its atmosphere of simultaneous abundance and scrutiny.

This spring the Langen Foundation is presenting the most extensive exhibition by Pae White (b. 1963, lives in Los Angeles) to ever be shown in Europe. The exhibition focus lies on the artist's large-format tapestries and mobiles – including a new "mirror mobile" specially made for this show – as well as on couch sculptures. Also included are the exhibition poster and advertisements, which Pae White designed herself.

When you encounter a work by Pae White, the best thing is to give in to its magic — because it's sure to give right back.

As part of its continuing interest in creating convergence between the visual arts and live events, the Centre Pompidou invited artist Angela Bulloch and musician David Grubbs to mount an original production. Both chose to instigate the process by which images and ideas break down, deteriorate and simplify. This loosening and slackening occurs visually through performance, video and theatrical light and takes the audience on a voyage to the interior of the image. Simultaneously, the live musical composition creation by David Grubbs (guitar and voice), Andrea Belfi (drums, electronic) and Stefano Pilia (guitar) work and compress the sound material by separating out its constituent parts, one by one, thus separating from the work's initial coherence. Angela Bulloch's conceptual works combine a practice inherited from minimalist art and references to daily life. They subvert existing systems, rules and structures and, thus, the public's expectations. She often uses light, sound and text to create her sculptures, questioning the notion of "artist" and the perception of time.

Innovators, Part 4: 5 Figures Who Are Redesigning the Way We Raise Our Children
Superkilen is a prime example of the notion that the design of our environment can have a dramatic impact on our daily lives, particularly in the way our children socialize and learn. The collaborative creation of architect it-boy Bjarke Ingels, urban landscape architects Topotek 1, and artist collective Superflex features more than 100 pieces of "urban furniture" — neon signage from Russia, manhole covers from Israel, trashcans from around the world — to represent the 60-or-so nationalities of the neighborhood's residents, as well as myriad examples of urban modernity: bicycle paths, pedestrian trails, and the most avant-garde of playground equipment. It opened last fall to showers of praise for its lofty goals of bringing together one of Denmark's most diverse neighborhoods, starting with its children.

The exhibition "Do You Know What Time Is?" by U.S. American artist Kerry Tribe will open at the same time in the Studio as part of the exhibition series "Im Gespräch – Acht Untersuchungen zum subjektiven Wissen".

The 2002 two-channel video installation Here & Elsewhere (presented for the first time in an institutional solo exhibition in Germany) shows a dialogue between a father and his captivating and precocious ten-year-old daughter. The father (British film critic and theoretician Peter Wollen) remains off-screen as he asks his daughter a series of questions that touch on various philosophical themes. To each question–about time, memory, body and being–the daughter pauses before responding with careful, honest answers. Her directness at once makes the topics accessible, while also revealing how difficult it is to understand and articulate questions of our own existence.

Karlheinz Stockhausen is one of the most significant composers of modern and electronic music, influencing artists from The Beatles to Bjork, Miles Davis to Animal Collective, Frank Zappa, and more. Performed by one of his original collaborators Kathinka Pasveer, the maverick composer's OKTOPHONIE from his opus Licht gets an exciting new life in an epic production of this monumental composition.

Acclaimed contemporary visual artist Rirkrit Tiravanija stages the work as the composer originally intended—in outer space—creating a lunar floating seating unit to fully envelop the listener in octophonic sound. Adorned in white, the audience takes a ritualistic musical journey from plunging darkness into blinding light to fully immerse themselves in the all-encompassing score and surroundings. The vastness of the Wade Thompson Drill Hall is the perfect setting to fully realize this rarely performed work that Stockhausen so boldly envisioned in its highly-anticipated New York premiere.

For "Bare Use," Fiona Connor has fabricated objects that replicate spa fixtures and furnishings. A small square table is piled high with perfectly folded white towels while nearby, a guidepost with hand-lettered arrows points the viewer toward destinations such as THE REFLOXOLOGY PATH and THE OLMECA AND TOLTECA GYM. A lamppost leans diagonally against the wall, and a cushioned pool chair is positioned in the center of the gallery, looking quite plush.

Deprived of context and function, these objects take on the aura of sculpture. From the tastefully unbleached cotton of the sun umbrella to the rustic stone pedestal of the water fountain, the details of each piece are so concrete and specific that they easily conjure the social and physical space of the spa and resort. This act of narrative, more than any object, is the show's most engaging piece of illusionism, largely because there is something subtly coercive about the entire setting. The show is full of instructions: There's an abundance of signage telling us where to go, how to use the Jacuzzi, what to do in an emergency, and so on. In this company, even text-free pieces like the towels or the lounge chair seem like directives—they create a space in which only certain predetermined types of experiences are to be had. Many of the replicas are fixtures that are generally installed along a pathway, which speaks to the possibility of the journey, yet one where the outcome seems fixed. The exhibition could be read as a critique of the commodified, quasi-spiritual trips proffered by sites such as the wellness retreat, or for that matter, the art gallery. By putting one space inside the other, Connor sheds a little light on both.

The Bride and the Bachelors: delighting in Duchamp
French artist Philippe Parreno speaks to Adrian Searle about his mise en scène for The Bride and the Bachelors exhibition at London's Barbican. Summoning the ghosts of Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns and Merce Cunningham among others, Parreno creates new ways to experience the great masters, whether it's in the walls, playing pianos – or even under the floorboards.

Interview
Article

A Matter of Synchronization: 
Philippe Parreno & Anri Sala
For Philippe Parreno and Anri Sala the object is always a thing in transit: one phase of a detailed itinerary taken by an idea amidst multiple forms, and in parallel one phase of the itinerary the visitor takes in the context of exhibitions conceived as choreographed routes.

"To re-present or re-do the same thing is not very interesting. We are not craftsmen, we don't reproduce forms: we re-create them." - Philippe Parreno

1301PE is pleased to announce the release of Jorge Pardo: Tecoh. This lavishly illustrated monograph chronicles the design and construction of a series of buildings deep in the Yucatán jungle. Taking over six years to fabricate, and engaging existing ruins of a nineteenth-century hacienda, the project is by far Pardo's most ambitious work to date.

1301PE is pleased to announce the release of Kirsten Everberg: In Grove, the catalogue to her current exhibition at the Pomona College Museum of Art.

Pae White: Too Much Night, Again
13 Mar-12 May 2013, Main Gallery, Admission Free
Los Angeles-based artist Pae White merges art, design, craft and architecture through site specific installations and individual works which defy our expectations of a variety of techniques and media. For her South London Gallery exhibition she creates a mesmerising installation in which vast quantities of coloured yarn span and criss-cross the room to create supergraphics spelling out words that can only be deciphered by navigating the space. Inspired by a period of insomnia and consequent reflection on the transience of our existence, the letters and words emerge and dissolve depending on both our physical relationship to them and the relative weight of the overall aesthetic experience.

Sunday, March 3, 2013 | 4 pm
Artist Jorge Pardo and Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director, discuss the Tecoh project, a private residence in the Yucatan designed by Pardo that comprises a sprawling series of buildings that incorporate nineteenth-century ruins. Having taken more than six years to realize, Tecoh is Pardo's most ambitious work to date. A book documenting the project was recently published and contains more than one hundred color images and an introduction by Michael Govan, who provides a context for Tecoh within the deeper history of his dialogue with Pardo, which began in 2000 with the artist's installation at Dia:Chelsea.

Studio #6: Kerry Tribe "Do You Know What Time Is?"

The exhibition "Do You Know What Time Is?" by U.S. American artist Kerry Tribe will open at the same time in the Studio as part of the exhibition series "Im Gespräch – Acht Untersuchungen zum subjektiven Wissen".
The 2002 two-channel video installation Here & Elsewhere (presented for the first time in an institutional solo exhibition in Germany) shows a dialogue between a father and his captivating and precocious ten-year-old daughter. The father (British film critic and theoretician Peter Wollen) remains off-screen as he asks his daughter a series of questions that touch on various philosophical themes. To each question–about time, memory, body and being–the daughter pauses before responding with careful, honest answers. Her directness at once makes the topics accessible, while also revealing how difficult it is to understand and articulate questions of our own existence.
Tribe often cuts away from the interview to interior shots of the house or to outdoor views of Los Angeles. In some scenes, the conversation is shown alongside a shot of the girl engaged in a banal activity: napping on her couch or brushing her teeth. The philosophical conversation about time and being is at once given a recognizable location and temporality.
Tribe's piece is loosely adapted from a 1978 made-for-television documentary by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville titled FRANCE/TOUR/DETOUR/DEUX/ ENFANTS, in which Godard interviewed schoolchildren on a range of political and philosophical topics.

An Exhibition features works by Stefan Brüggemann, Lawrence Weiner, Carey Young and Itinerant Texts a collection of original slide works by twelve international artists including Angela Bulloch, Tacita Dean, Tracey Emin, Douglas Gordon , Joseph Kosuth, and Simon Patterson. These artists have created works that comment on travel, transience and the nature of site-specificity.

The Bride and the Bachelors: Duchamp with Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns
Mise en scène by Philippe Parreno
14 February 2013 - 9 June 2013

Exploring one of the most important chapters in the history of contemporary art, The Bride and the Bachelors: Duchamp with Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns focuses on Marcel Duchamp 's American legacy, tracing his relationship to four great modern masters – composer, John Cage, choreographer, Merce Cunningham, and visual artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

Leading contemporary artist Philippe Parreno has devised a dynamic experiential staging of the exhibition inspired by the choreography of Cunningham and music of Cage, featuring two Yamaha Disklavier pianos playing live Cage scores, while the 'ghost' of the dancers can be heard pounding the floor. The soundscape is also punctuated by Parreno's own interpretation of Cage's famous 4' 33".

“NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” looks at art made and exhibited in New York over the course of one year, providing a synchronic panorama in which established artists and emerging figures of the time are presented alongside the work of authors whose influence has since faded from the discussion. Centering on the year 1993, the exhibition is conceived as a time capsule, an experiment in collective memory that attempts to capture a specific moment at the intersection of art, pop culture, and politics.

Light Show explores the experiential and phenomenal aspects of light by bringing together sculptures and installations that use light to sculpt and shape space in different ways. The exhibition showcases artworks created from the 1960s to the present day, including immersive environments, free-standing light sculptures and projections.

From atmospheric installations to intangible sculptures that you can move around and even through, visitors can experience light in all of its spatial and sensory forms. Individual artworks explore different aspects of light such as colour, duration, intensity and projection, as well as perceptual phenomena. They also use light to address architecture, science and film, and do so using a variety of lighting technologies.

Light Show features works by 22 artists including David Batchelor, Jim Campbell, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Bill Culbert, Olafur Eliasson, Fischli and Weiss, Dan Flavin, Ceal Floyer, Nancy Holt, Jenny Holzer, Ann Veronica Janssens, Brigitte Kowanz, Anthony McCall, François Morellet, Iván Navarro, Philippe Parreno, Katie Paterson, Conrad Shawcross, James Turrell, Leo Villareal, Doug Wheeler and Cerith Wyn Evans. The exhibition is curated by Dr Cliff Lauson, Hayward Gallery Curator.

Jessica Stockholder: Conversations with Artists
March 21, 2013, 6 pm / Center Studio - The Phillips Collection

Stockholder creates site-specific "paintings in space" using everyday objects and materials—curtains, bowling balls, yarn, plywood—painted in vibrant colors. She talks with Phillips Curator at Large Klaus Ottmann. In collaboration with the George Washington University, Washington, D.C. $10; $5 members; free for students. Registration required.

Superkilen / Topotek 1 + BIG + Superflex

Superkilen is a half a mile long urban space wedging through one of the most ethnically diverse and socially challenged neighborhoods in Denmark. It has one overarching idea that it is conceived as a giant exhibition of urban best practice – a sort of collection of global found objects that come from 60 different nationalities of the people inhabiting the area surrounding it. Ranging from exercise gear from muscle beach LA to sewage drains from Israel, palm trees from China and neon signs from Qatar and Russia.

Superkilen is the result of the creative collaboration between BIG, Topotek1 and SUPERFLEX, which constitutes a rare fusion of architecture, landscape architecture and art – from early concept to construction stage.

Day After Day: The Diaristic Impulse
February 5 through April 6, 2013

Artists whose obsessive desire to record day-to-day activities, document private worlds, or chart the passage of time is reflected in work that serves as either a staging ground for more ambitious projects, or as an end in itself. At times confessional in tone, and presented in a range of media from journals and sketchbooks to video and sound recordings, these artists draw upon self-imposed rituals, secret narratives, and personal longings to give tangible form to fleeting ideas, experiences, and emotions. Some artists present themselves as subject through self-portraiture, personal effects, or actual diaristic texts with visual and aural components, while other artists look outward for inspiration, using history and current events to create personal chronicles of the larger world.

Artists include: Guy Ben-Ner, Simon Evans, Ray Hamilton, Byron Kim, Meridith McNeal, Laurel Nakadate, David Shapiro, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Harvey Tulcensky, and Martin Wilner.

Printed Matter's LA ART BOOK FAIR
February 1-3, 2013
Opening: Thursday, January 31, 2013, 6–9 pm
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA

London's Design Museum has announced the contenders for the sixth annual Designs of the Year Awards. They include the best designs from around the world in the last 12 months across seven categories: Architecture, Digital, Fashion, Furniture, Graphics, Product and Transport. Selected by a panel of distinguished nominators, the awards compile the most original and exciting designs, prototypes and designers in the world today – brought together in a Design Museum exhibition from 20 March – 7 July 2013. A Room for London designed by David Kohn Architects in collaboration with artist Fiona Banner was nominated in the Architecture category. Perched above Queen Elizabeth Hall at London's Southbank Centre, the boat-shaped one bedroom installation offers guests a place of refuge and reflection amidst the flow of traffic surrounding its iconic location.

Garage Center for Contemporary Culture Presents
Philippe Parreno
3/2/13-4/4/13

Garage Center for Contemporary Culture presents the first solo exhibition in Russia by Philippe Parreno, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist. The artist will show two works – Marilyn (2012) and C.H.Z. (2011) – guiding the visitor through the exhibition space using an orchestration of sounds and images.
For more than twenty years, Parreno has radically redefined the exhibition experience by conceiving his shows as a scripted space where a series of events unfold. He creates as much space and time as possible in a given volume, by folding and unfolding the space onto itself. At Garage, the exhibition space is a non-stop movie theater, continuously screening films without a beginning or an end. Upon entering the room, visitors see rotating bleachers and are invited to take a seat and watch a film, Marilyn, play.
Parreno's most recent work, Marilyn, conjures up Marilyn Monroe through a phantasmagoric séance in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, where she lived in the 1950s. Here, the image is taken from the point of view of the deceased Marilyn. The film reproduces Marilyn Monroe's presence by means of three algorithms: the camera becomes her eyes, a computer reconstructs the prosody of her voice and a robot recreates her handwriting.
The film ends and the bleachers rotate 180 degrees, coming to a standstill, as the next film, C.H.Z, begins. In C.H.Z., Parreno unites science and fiction to create an eerie, futuristic landscape. C.H.Z. stands for 'Continuously Habitable Zones,' an astro-biological term used to describe planets offering viable conditions for life to grow. The film consists of continuous, uninterrupted views of a black garden - created in collaboration with landscape architect Bas Smets - and is accompanied by a soundtrack of underground recordings obtained from microphones embedded onsite. There are no cuts in the film, merely the stretching and folding of space.
The exhibition emphasizes Parreno's continued research into the mechanisms of time and space and the manner in which this structures the public's experience. No longer master of his own time, the visitor is subject to the temporal layout of the exhibition, which unfolds like theater.

Project Series 45: Kirsten Everberg: In a Grove
January 22 - April 14, 2013
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 26, 5-7 PM
"Project Series 45: Kirsten Everberg: In a Grove" will consist of a suite of four new paintings based on Everberg's exploration of the 1950 Japanese crime drama Rashomon by filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. For "In a Grove," Everberg is creating an almost hallucinatory environment as the four new large paintings wrap the viewer in an immersive atmosphere that alludes to the slippery nature of truth. For over ten years, Everberg has explored issues of meaning, memory, and history through fluid abstractions that have multiple narrative and painterly layers.  In strikingly beautiful paintings, she explores how images work and how images mark the elusive passage of time. Everberg has developed an innovative technique of pouring glossy enamel paint onto horizontal canvases creating lush surfaces that blur representation and abstraction. With vibrant color and shimmering light, the images shift and change as the viewer moves around the work.

[Un]Natural Limits at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York
Wednesday Jan. 23 - Tuesday April 01

This exhibition at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York gathers together different artistic reactions to the alienating effects of the unfettered global exploitation of resources, and offers insight into the denial and myopia of current political responses to what increasingly appears to be a perpetual crisis. [UN]NATURAL LIMITS focuses on the environmental relays sent back in response to our human activities (or failures to act), while giving voice to various groups, thinkers, and artists who seek to interrupt narcissistic and destructive self-involvements in society.

The exhibition, which was curated by the Viennese-New York team of Dieter Buchhart and Arnaud Gerspacher, maintains a deep ambiguity towards the modernist legacies of endless expansion and selective prosperity as our social and political systems slowly begin to confront the limits of growth and sustainability. Each artist or collective poses a challenge to the perceived limits that condition our understanding of the world: on the one hand, the limited prospect for action, compassion, and change, while on the other, the limitless drive for resources and capital in all its forms.  A reversal is necessary: it is compassion that should be limitless.

Artists: Desire Machine Collective, Thomas Hirschhorn, Mathias Kessler, SUPERFLEX, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Lois Weinberger

Made to Last: Fiona Connor finds personal meaning in reconstruction
Fiona Connor's latest show, "Bare Use,' on view at L.A.'s 1301PE from Jan. 19 to Feb. 23, is based on research she conducted during a self-initiated "residency" slot at a spa in Tecate, Mexico. In this solo exhibition, her work explores the uncanny feeling of that first encounter with a space for healing.
Although her work is playful, there's more to it than art-world jokes. At its heart are personal connections. "I may not know anything about you," she says. "But what we have in common is this room. And what everyone in this room has in common is this room."

Acknowledging the breadth of mediums engaged by contemporary artists, the Hammer's growing collection comprises works in drawing, film, painting, photography, sculpture, and video made by artists from Southern California and around the world. The collection of the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, established in 1955, has grown to more than 45,000 prints, drawings, photographs, and artists' books, dating from the Renaissance to the present. This exhibition acknowledges the donors and friends whose generosity has helped to form these exceptional collections and highlights recent purchases, including works by Carlos Amorales, Jimmie Durham, Omer Fast, Thomas Kovachevich, Charles Long, Lee Mullican, Kori Newkirk, Mary Weatherford, Pae White, and David Wojnarowicz. This exhibition is organized by Cynthia Burlingham, deputy director, curatorial affairs and director, Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, and Anne Ellegood, senior curator.
 

John Baldessari spreads a message on L.A. city buses
Twelve metro buses that go into service this week have been redesigned to look like traditional yellow school buses, with one side bearing Baldessari's saying "Learn to dream" while the other says the phrase in Spanish, "Aprende a soñar."

10 Must-See L.A. Gallery Exhibitions Opening in January
Fiona Connor, "Bare Use" at 1301PE
January 19 — February 23, 2013
L.A.-based artist Fiona Connor will present her first solo show at 1301PE. Connor's practice exists at the intersection of architecture, sculpture and installation. She seeks to encourage viewers to reflect on their physical surrounding by re-contextualizing objects through the painstakingly crafted replicas of everyday objects. Her work was featured in "Made in L.A. 2012" at the Hammer Museum, the first Los Angeles biennial.

The Jerwood Gallery is delighted to announce its forthcoming show Knock Knock: Seven Artists in Hastings, which will open on 2 February 2013 and run until 17 April 2013.
Knock Knock is an exhibition of work by contemporary and internationally recognised artists with a close association to Hastings. The exhibition will showcase seven artists: Fiona Banner, Becky Beasley, Professor Stephen Buckley, Jane Hilton, Martin Maloney, Alessandro Raho and Mario Rossi. All of the artists operate internationally and have strong affiliations to Hastings, either living, working or playing in the vicinity.

On location at Fort Point, artist Pae White talks about her project for "International Orange": a monumental tapestry of fog.

Kerry Tribe
1301 PE
In Tribe's meta-narrative "There Will Be ______" she both critiques and embraces the myths of Hollywood and the ability of a dynamic medium like film to be a purveyor of truth.

Superkilen in Copenhagen, designed by Danish architecture firm BIG and SUPERFLEX, received a citation in the national AIA awards as one the best 21 projects built last year. More here. It was also placed on the cover of Architect magazine.
360 degree image of what it's like to be in the middle of SUPERKILEN made by John Krøll of Virtual Works. To experience it click here.
Download the Superkilen App and start experiencing the park by learning what is around you - start here.
Finally a book on the Superkilen project will be published in Summer of 2013 edited by Barbara Steiner, designed by Rasmus Koch and with images by Iwan Baan. To see the upcoming book click here.

By projecting moving images in every direction - images we interrupt whenever we walk in front of a projector - Diana Thater totally immerses her audience in the world she has captured.

Gap, Mark, Sever, and Return: Series
Curated by artist and Human Resources collective member Chiara Giovando, the premise of the thematic exhibition, "Gap, Mark, Sever, and Return", is that of the "series", the way interconnected works can mark time, to organize, to build. In the vein of documentation, or the archive, artist Fiona Connor hired four professional photographers to document the exhibition in ways to gap and open the discourse of representation; a misrepresentation that does not only exist with the viewer, but with institutions and more concrete entities. Connor is known to comment on the tangible sensibilities of architecture or design as sculpture to permeate our experiences of space. For the show, she has placed a replica of an almost archetypal drinking water fountain that occupy several public parks through Los Angeles. She coined this mundane bureaucratic aesthetic: Found Minimalism. The acid blue, ninety-degree angle water fountain serves its purpose, but even its anonymous mechanic reproducibility is undermined by the way these structures quietly age, rusting, crumbling.

Single-channel 3 / Part 3: Time and Circumstance
Superflex, Flooded McDonald's, 2009
February 1 - April 28, 2013
Single-channel 3: Time and Circumstance, features videos in which the artist undertakes some sort of task or challenge, often in a restricted time format. The third work in this series, created by Danish artist's collective Superflex, is Flooded McDonald's, 2009. The video presents a provocative, tense vision of destruction. Over 21 minutes, the interior of a McDonald's fills slowly with water, destroying the space, products, and iconography familiar to consumers around the world. Evocative of both big-budget disaster movies and the recent tragedy of Hurricane Sandy, Flooded McDonald's invites critical questions about global consumerism, the fragility of contemporary structures, and the voyeuristic pleasure viewers often take in watching disaster unfold.

Continuing and Recommended, January 2013
Diana Thater's "Oo Fifi, Five Days in Claude Monet's  Garden, Part I and Part II" is a reprised video installation first seen here in 1992 at owner Brian Butler's original apartment gallery (Part I) and Shoshana Wayne Gallery (Part II), so it is very much of the pre-digital era. There's a heavy emphasis on the RGB foundations of analog video that Thater pushes as hard as can be pushed. One of the two wall projections has each of the three projectors dedicated to either red, green, or blue. The imagery of Monet's iconic garden at Giverny that she chose as the catalyst isn't always game - there's an aimless, meandering element to some of the footage that provokes some head scratching. Separating the red, green, and blue channels of the images offsets them so as to display a distorted image that appears to be three versions of the same thing overlapped but not quite in register. The effect is dizzying and surreal. But patience, and/or good timing, is rewarded, with a more satisfying experience, when the flowers bloom along with the RGB's. For Part II of the work, she uses three projectors, each showing the same footage: one as red, one as blue and one as green so that together they reconstruct the image as a whole. That Thater's environments are more installations than videos per sé, you benefit most from opening up to the experience of being fully in each space, as opposed to viewing video, as we now so often do, that is decidedly apart from us.

Diana Thater: Oo Fifi, Five Days in Claude Monet's Garden, Part I and Part II, 1992
by Shana Nys Dambrot
One main quality of Impressionist painting is how pure color and speedy brushstrokes work to re-create the experience of looking, more than reasoned depiction. Shapes and spaces are ripped apart, broken down into luminal and chromatic elements, and reassembled in a volatile fashion which more closely resembles the real-world tumult of visual perception than pictorial illusions. All of this was clearly on video artist Diana Thater's mind when, in 1992, she was artist-in-residence at the historic Giverny home of Claude Monet. The pair of video-based works she produced there, "Oo Fifi, Five Days in Claude Monet's Garden, Part I and Part II, 1992," were as revolutionary in the video-art canon as Monet's paintings had been to the Paris Salon, and for similar reasons. Both halves of the piece consisted of installations of projected footage she'd shot in Monet's famous gardens. In Part I, she generated in-camera color separations that broke the images apart and projected them around the gallery; for Part II, she switched that up by separating color streams and combining several projections into a single, multilayered image. Both digital and analog, intellectually rigorous and physically funhouse, 1301PE's 20th anniversary installation sees Thater expanding the work with elaborated architectural interactions that more fully immerse viewers in this kaleidoscopic garden of art-history.

From December 1, 2012 – March 31, 2013, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden will be illuminated with hundreds lamps by Havana-born artist Jorge Pardo. Garden Lights will be on view along Fairchild's glorious tree-lined path overlooking the Garden.

Renowned for his meticulous attention to craft and his eye for vibrant color combinations, Pardo's lamp works are delightful permutations of red, orange, and white and made of powder-coated steel. Reminiscent of blooming flowers romantically dangling from a tree, Pardo's installation will transform the Garden's tree canopy into a visual utopia.

"The design of the Allee (by William Lyman Phillips) is dependent on light," says Nannette Zapapta, Fairchild's Chief Operating Officer and Art Curator. "The tree canopy overhead creates a gentle dappled light while the end of the Allee is open to the bright sun; the purpose being that visitors are drawn through the shaded path and into the sunlight leading out to the Garden's majestic vista. Jorge's lamps create a beautiful, interesting and respectful juxtaposition in the Allee especially at night."

Michael J. Fox and Tracy Pollan's Manhattan Home

Why Artists Are Blurring the Line Between Real History and Pretend
The L.A. art being made right now that explores the border between facts and fantasies — and there is a lot of it these days, some of it exceptionally smart — does not first and foremost feel "so L.A." It feels like it's speaking to a bigger trend in arts and letters.
There's Kerry Tribe's film There Will Be ____, a period drama, the script for which consisted entirely of dialogue from the many Hollywood movies shot in the Greystone Mansion. Tribe's drama chronicles a murder that really did occur in the mansion in 1929, and implies that maybe the wrong man took the fall back then. So in the film, all the fictions that have played out in an actual historical site work to reveal a potentially hidden truth.
So even if L.A. is a place where you have a Greystone Mansion murder to suss out or a Ten Commandments film set burial site to excavate, the thing that has seemed "so L.A." for so long — meshing reality with fantasy — actually seems, suddenly, just "so right now."

Block, Pillar, Slab, Beam, Art
The Aspen Art Museum is hosting four Latin American artists who turn their talents toward the act of building and construction as well, as the gallery hosts "BLOCK, PILLAR, SLAB, BEAM." It's on display through Jan. 20.
The centerpieces of the room are two large pieces by Jorge Méndez Blake, which blend culture and construction with a few books and many, many bricks. "The Castle," is a wall of red bricks, stacked uniformly but interrupted by a single paperback copy of Franz Kafka's "The Castle" inserted at floor level at the wall's center-point. It gives the wall a curious wave-like bump, hinting at the book's subversive message on the horrors of bureaucracy.
His "Bartelby" does the same with copies of Herman Melville's classic of civil disobedience, "Bartelby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street," wedged between cube cinderblocks stacked on the far end of the room. The 1853 novella, you may recall, was a centerpiece of 2011's Occupy Wall Street protests, where demonstrators read it allowed in Zuccotti Park.
The cultural baggage of such books, Blake says, is very much a part of his artistic vision. Because people know these books and their impact on society, how they've shaken things up and challenged conventional wisdom, the presence of these paperbacks among the bricks and blocks is made meaningful.
"You will never see me working with some strange text that nobody knows," he says. "It's always Shakespeare, Kafka, very well known writers."

Installation Magazine - The First All-Digital Contemporary Art Magazine
20 + 20: The Photography Issue
featuring Uta Barth
Download this issue for iPad or iPhone here.

Let there be Light
Light Show is spread over the gallery's two floors and features work from a handful of international art collectives, including Minimalism, Kinetic Art and the California-based Light and Space movement in the 1960s-70s. From being immersed in illuminated environments to moving through spaces that have been sculpted by light, spectators will be able to experience light in a vast array of spatial and sensory forms.

Jessica Stockholder, Professor and Chair of the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago, shares images of her work and discusses its relationship to context. Her presentation focuses particularly on the "Color Jam" installation that was on view on the corner of State and Adams this past summer, describing the process of its construction and how its meaning is in part derived from its location. She shares images of other works that relate to this one and gives an overview on how she arrived at this way of working.

The Genius Series: MacArthur Winner Uta Barth
Conceptual photographer Uta Barth, who was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in October, says in her artist statement, "We all expect photographs to be pictures of something. We assume that the photographer observed a place, a person, an event in the world and wanted to record it... The problem with my work is that these images are really not of anything in that sense, they register only that which is incidental."

Daniel Lamelas' "Best of 2012," Artforum, December 2012, pp. 111.
"Jack Goldstein x 10,000" (Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA)
 I first met Jack Goldstein in London back in 1971, at his first show with Nigel Greenwood Gallery. We used to talk about ideas, whenever he would visit Los Angeles during the '70s. He'd work two or three shifts a day as a short-order cook, flipping burgers to pay for his glamorous films about Hollywood mythology. His fascination with glam and the spectacle of the media were the inspiration for his beautiful paintings, of which he was the producer, rather than the "painter." Goldstein was a poet/thinker and a great manipulator of visual concepts. At his retrospective, which Philipp Kaiser organized for the Orange County Museum this year, moving from painting to painting was like going through an MGM motion picture directed by Jack Goldstein.

Rirkrit Tiravanija's "Best of 2012," Artforum, December 2012, pp. 108.
"To the Moon via the Beach" (LUMA Foundation, Arles Amphitheater, France)
For for days in early July, while the international photography festival of Arles was going full blast, the quiet refuge of the city's ancient Roman amphitheater was a relief. The salty air of the Camargue, mixed with the scent of lavender in the fields, gave me a sense of ease, and time slowed down. Away from the urgency of Documenta 13, Philippe Parreno and Liam Gillick's "To the Moon via the Beach" felt transcendent. Seven hundred tons of sand had been brought into the center of the arena and slowly transformed (by a team of sand sculptors from Holland, directed by Wilfred Stijger) from seascape into lunar terrain–scenes that provided settings for parallel activities and interventions (full disclosure: including a project of my own). It was like watching a long take from a naturalist film; not all was discernable to the human eye, but a lot was going on.

Willem de Rooj's "Best of 2012," Artforum, December 2012, pp. 244.
#2 - Angela Bulloch (Witte de WIth Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam)
For "Short Big Drama," Nicolaus Schafhausen's last exhibition as director of Witte de With (curated in collaboration with Amira Gad), Angela Bulloch presented older and newer works in an installation divided across two floors: a dimly lit parcours featuring her trademark "Pixel Boxes" on one, and striking, brightly lit large-scale text compositions (called "Rules-Series") printed directly onto the walls on the other. The exhibition epitomized Bulloch's impressive and multi-faceted oeuvre, as well as Schafhausen's inimitable directorship: intelligence, humor, and sharp political awareness paired with an emotional, sensuous, and sensitive intuition.

Eungie Joo's "Best of 2012," Artforum, December 2012, pp. 2220-221.
#4 - Rirkrit Tiravanija, Lung Neaw Visits his Neighbors
In his first feature (though by no means longest) film, Tiravanija crafts a staged portrait of Chiang Mai, Thailand, through the figure of Lung Neaw, a retired rice farmer. Whether foraging for edible plants, shopping in the market, fishing, bathing in the river, or listening to the radio, Uncle Neaw exists in a world of direct exchange and self-reliance that is clearly unconcerned with the late-capitalist desire and corruption fueling contemporary Thailand's political turmoil.

Passion #2
Kunstmuseum aan zee
08/12/2012 - 03/03/2013

Passion #2 is the second and final episode in the series in which the museum collection and Collection Belfius meet.
Central within Passion #2 is the work Riffs by Ann Veronica Janssens: this installation, purchased by Mu.ZEE in 2009, consists of thirteen videos. The display resembles a light laboratory. 'Riffs' is a concept from the field of music world and refers to a rhythmic base pattern. The videos were all created between 2006 and 2008 and the recordings, which each have a different sound rhythm, were made in various locations and in different countries. This installation will be seen for the first time in Mu.ZEE.
Light and rhythm are two of the elements that modern and contemporary artists often unite: Walter Leblanc, Jef Verheyen, Emile Claus, Marcel-Louis Baugniet, Léon de Smet, René Guiette and Luc Tuymans... all create the story of Passion #2. James Ensor literally radiates with the etching Les étoiles en fusion (The Stars in the Cemetery) from 1888. A second cahier will be published on the occasion of the exhibition.

Art (& Science) Talk with Kerry Tribe

The Language of Forgetting investigates the neurological condition of aphasia through the language of moving image, sound, and installation. A few years ago, I made a film installation called H.M. that explored the true story of Patient H.M., a man with no long-term episodic memory; he would forget everything that happened to him within about 20 seconds. H.M. describes the condition of amnesia in a (relatively) traditional documentary style while simultaneously producing the experience of short-term memory loss for the viewer by looping the 16mm film through two projectors with a 20 second delay between the images. I see The Language of Forgetting as a continuation of the work I did for H.M., as a project that will both describe the condition of aphasia for the viewer and also "produce" some aspect of the aphasiac experience by playing with the dissociation of images and words. - Kerry Tribe

Lost Line: Contemporary Art from the Collection
LACMA, BCAM, Level 2
November 25, 2012–February 24, 2013

Culling from LACMA's permanent collection, the exhibition takes as its starting point Gabriel Orozco's sculpture Lost Line (1993-1996). Orozco describes the piece as "the opposite of a static monument," in effect a "sculpture as a body in motion." Lost Line uses Orozco's fragile and mutable form as premise to bring together works from the collection, including large-scale sculpture and painting installations, film, photography, and works on paper. The works gathered in the exhibition reflect a shared desire to complicate typical representations of landscape, the built environment, and the monumental.
Artists include Uta Barth, Ingrid Calame, Lecia Dole-Recio, Shannon Ebner, Harold Edgerton, Llyn Foulkes, Mark Flores, Buckminster Fuller, Mark Hagen, Alfred Jensen, Barbara Kasten, Jim Lambie, David Lamelas, Steve McQueen, Yunhee Min, Ruben Ochoa, Claes Oldenburg, Dennis Oppenheim, Gabriel Orozco, Sheila Pinkel, Ed Ruscha, Analia Saban, Erin Shirreff, Robert Smithson, Frances Stark, Koen van den Broek, and James Welling.

Russel Ferguson's "Best of 2012," Artforum, December 2012, pp. 218-219.
#8 - Jorge Méndez Blake (1301PE, Los Angeles)
This two-part exhibition consisted of a virtuoso series of works that brought together poetry, sculpture, and architecture under the rubric of the monument. Apparently simple drawings of poems by Yeats, Poe, and others played off models for elaborate memorials to writers, and the space was unified by wall paintings that derived their form from poems, even as they obliterated the texts. Méndez Blake achieved the rare feat of convincingly integrating poetry with a visual content.

Three artists from Southern California — Alison Saar, Kerry Tribe and William Leavitt — have been named USA fellows for 2012, receiving grants of $50,000 with no strings attached. United States Artists made the announcement of all 50 new fellows Sunday at a ceremony led by Tim Robbins and hosted by the Getty Museum.
Tribe, 39, is a video artist who recently made a short film about the noir history of Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, where oil heir Ned Doheny Jr. and his secretary were found dead in 1929 in what was classified (some say dubiously) as a murder-suicide. Her script was a collage drawn from the dialogue of other movies filmed at the mansion.

Diana Thater at David Zwirner
November 9–December 22

Diana Thater's intricate video installation Chernobyl, 2010, opens, on its backmost screen, with sunrise over the titular sarcophagus: a concrete tomb, ceaselessly shored, that contains the infamous reactor's noxious remains. The image is cast from one of six projectors, each centered before a floor-to-ceiling wall. Joined in an open hexagon, this makeshift structure mirrors that of a movie theater in Prypiat, a Soviet city built to house workers from the nearby reactor, now left to the slow decay of nuclear sludge. The theater's collapsed walls and debris-strewn floor furnish the ground for footage from the "Zone of Alienation," a nearly eighteen-and-a-half-mile radius of land surrounding Chernobyl that remains uninhabitable. Look closely, and Thater's tripod appears on each wall amid sedimented rubble, while the artist and her crew periodically perambulate the space. Their presence, along with the theater's now-conspicuous, now-faded interior, anchors each image of ruin in its status as spectacle.

All the Calvino Books (and Other Stories)
Special project by Jorge Méndez Blake, Curated by Anna Lovecchio
30 November 2012 – 20 January 2013
Museum of Contemporary Art of Villa Croce, Italy

The Mexican artist Jorge Méndez Blake investigates the invisible relations between literature and architecture, knowledge and memory, culture and democracy, and traces the frontiers of contemporary knowledge through a poetic mapping of 20th century literature. Shortly after its presentation at the Cantoni Staircase in the Palazzo Ducale of Genova, the artist revisits the installation Tutti i libri di Calvino for the Museum of Contemporary Art of Villa Croce. An instance of "literary activism", this work questions public libraries as institutions of knowledge. Given its structural and functional mission, the library collects, systematizes, and catalogues a number of resources relevant to both the history and interests of its own community, therefore through the simultaneous removal of all Italo Calvino's books from the city's libraries, Méndez Blake causes the order of knowledge to crumble and collapse from the inside. By "kidnapping" Calvino from the city's library network, the artist diffuses a state of "temporary blindness", opens up a void that calls for more reflections, recollections, and, perhaps, indifference.

"Mankind Will Destroy Civilization": Diana Thater on Her David Zwirner Show
As a waterlogged West Chelsea counts its losses and begins to pick up pieces of New York's art infrastructure, Diana Thater's video installation Chernobyl is a sobering reminder of the price of man-made environmental disasters. In 2010, Thater spent six days in and around the ghost city of Pripyat, a purpose-built Soviet city in northeastern Ukraine. Founded in 1970 to house workers for the nearby Chernobyl Power Plant, Pripyat was deserted after the now-infamous nuclear facility broke down with disastrous consequences in 1986. More than 25 years later, it is an epitome of eerie, post-apocalyptic beauty.

New York galleries after Sandy
Uncanny parallels: Diana Thater's video installation
For her intimate explorations of endangered creatures and environments, the Californian artist Diana Thater often puts herself at risk: she has filmed gorillas in the trees of Central Africa and has stroked the face of a blind tiger. But she respects the otherness of wild animals just as much as she recognizes homo sapiens as the most fearsome predator of all. Mankind's destructive force is the subject of her video installation "Chernobyl," a 360-degree projection onto six walls−modeled on the ruins of the city's movie theater−shows the devastation left by the nuclear meltdown on April 26, 1986.  Yet, while time stopped for the untold victims among the 50,000 inhabitants and for the city itself, Thater shows nature continuing, however compromised.

15 November 2012
Fiona Banner's 1066

1066 builds upon Banner's previous work Top Gun (1993) and The Nam (London: Frith Street Books, 1997), pieces she considers "still-films." With 1066 Banner shifts her gaze from Hollywood depictions of the Vietnam War to the 11th-century Bayeux Tapestry. The Bayeux Tapestry is a 230-ft long embroidered depiction of the Battle of Hastings and thus fits well within Banner's ongoing engagement with the weapons and depictions of war. 1066, much like Banner's work Top Gun and The Nam, consists entirely of a textual relating of the action. Much as Cage wrote through other authors' texts creating new compositions, Banner's writing though of the Bayeux Tapestry—a veritable "still film" in and of itself—creates a new text by pointing and selecting.