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I spoke with Memphis native and long time New York resident Allison Smith about her work at Gagosian Gallery, the shifting New York gallery scene, and the possibilities that evolve from creative happenstance.
Top 10 – Sunday 11 October 09
1. Endangered World Cultural Monuments:
Since 1966 the World Monuments Fund has published a Watch List that includes cultural sites in danger of being demolished or permanently damaged due to encroaching development or environmental disasters. A total of 93 sites have now been denoted "at risk," but here's the good news: The attention brought to them through these efforts often helps to rally preservation and stewardship groups around the monuments.
2. Brad Pitt not just another pretty face: movie star’s Make It Right Foundation unveils floating house for New Orleans
It's inevitable that a Katrina-style hurricane will strike again. But maybe this time we should be prepared to go with the flow--literally. Brad Pitt's Make it Right Foundation unveiled today the Float House, a home that can break away from its moorings in the event of a flood and rise up to 12 feet on guideposts.
The house, designed by Morphosis Architects, is covered with concrete and built with a polystyrene foam base. Float House does break away from electrical lines in a flood, but a battery backup can provide enough power to juice up appliances for three days.
So far, Morphosis hasn't had the chance to test the home in real flood conditions--just computer simulations. The company hasn't revealed how much the Float House will cost, but a home that can save itself during a flood is like homeowner's insurance for its inhabitants. And today, one family displaced by Katrina will have the chance to move into a model Float House, effectively giving them a second chance in the event of a second major hurricane.
3. Fight graffiti with art
THE BEST way to combat vandalism is on vivid display on walls in several Boston neighborhoods. From paintings of colorful cultural scenes in Jamaica Plain to a mural of open books along the Neponset River Greenway, public art in Greater Boston has transformed walls that were once targets for taggers and graffiti artists.
Taggers generally steer clear of walls with murals, says Julie Burns, the city’s arts and tourism director, who also oversees its two mural crews. “Most graffiti artists consider themselves just that - artists,’’ she said. “Out of respect for other artists, they won’t do it.’’
Boston’s crackdown on graffiti artists has been bolstered by neighborhood associations bent on putting vandals behind bars. In February, Boston police arrested celebrity artist Shepard Fairey just as his exhibition opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art. On Thursday, a judge sentenced Danielle Bremner, who spray-painted her moniker “Utah’’ in Back Bay alleyways and on trains in an East Boston railyard, to six months in jail. In both cases, neighborhood groups expressed the hope that punishment would discourage other would-be taggers.
Those groups should also rally behind the proven deterrent of public art. If public art is championed by neighborhoods and supported by the city and private donors, it can change places that attract vandals into places that inspire respect.
4. ArtPrize, Grand Rapids, Michigan
Ran Ortner of Brooklyn, N.Y., has won the $250,000 first prize in the inaugural edition of ArtPrize, the contemporary art competition in Grand Rapids that dispensed with a traditional jury of experts in favor of choosing the winner by public vote. Ortner, 50, won for his monumental three-panel oil-on-canvas painting “Open Water No. 24,” a 6-foot by 19-foot realist picture of the churning spray of ocean waves.
The $100,000 second prize was awarded to Tracy Van Duinen from Chicago for Imagine That!,a colorful mixed-media tile mural on the façade of the Grand Rapids Children’s Museum. The $50,000 third prize went to Eric Daigh of Traverse City for “Portraits,” three large photograph-like images made color pushpins.
The competition’s creator, Rick Devos, a 27-year-old Web entrepreneur and a member of one of the city’s most prominent families, said he had shied away from judging the merits of the entries.
The rules of the ArtPrize, which he announced in April, were relaxed enough to allow 1,262 artists to participate in the first part of the competition, which concluded last week.
Voters could cast “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” ballots at artprize.org for as many works as they liked, though they could cast only one vote per work. More than 32,000 people registered, casting an average of about 10 votes each. In the final round of competition, each voter could cast only one ballot.
5. The Building Framed as Beast: Jean Nouvel’s MoMA Monster
Have you seen the “Say No to the MoMA” ad? It makes Jean Nouvel’s proposed MoMA Tower look like a rabid King Kong, casting ominous shadows across midtown Manhattan. It also suggests that this building — unlike the scores of skyscrapers that have gone up over the past century — will block the entire skyline. It would be rather funny if the alarmist attitude wasn’t holding up progress on what is such a bold, exciting design.
Back in September, City Planning Commission chairwoman Amanda Burden chopped 200 feet off the 85-story tower, assuring it would not rival the Empire State Building in height, although not doing much to placate area residents. Earlier this week, Nouvel and developer Hines Interests went before City Council with a new design, hoping to overturn the decision, keep the project financially viable, and maintain the building’s architectural integrity. This version had fins.
The museum, which does not receive direct support from the city or the state, has a vested interest in this seeing this building go up so that they can get money from the air rights. If the new design is approved, it will take four years to complete the tower, although as Hines’ David Penick told Lee Rosenbaum that even if it got government approval, building would not start any time soon because of the economy.
Nouvel has said he is uncertain if he will stay on the project if the building is shortened to 1,050 feet.
So what happens now to the building that Nicolai Ouroussoff once said “promises to be the most exhilarating addition to the skyline in a generation,” and would give the MoMA an estimated 40,000 square feet of additional gallery space? It looks like we’ll just have to wait and see.
6. Serpentine Pavilion: annual act of awesome
In most years you can spot the Serpentine Gallery’s Pavilion a mile off. Every summer its director, Julia Peyton-Jones, and the curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist, invite a contemporary architect untested in Britain to create a “temporary wing” to the gallery, open to all for outdoor events and impromptu picnics. And each year architects from Daniel Libeskind to Oscar Niemeyer respond by sparing not a rivet to plonk a monumental opus in Kensington Gardens. This year’s pavilion (the ninth), by the Japanese architect SANAA, does the opposite. Approaching the gallery, you can hardly make out the thing.
Made from a single, slim, horizontal plane of aluminium perched on skinny columns, and polished to a mirror, it so reflects its surroundings, the park’s trees and lawns, as to be almost absorbed by them. It disappears. The camouflaged pavilion is a stealth bomber. Is it there? Is it not?
This, say SANAA’s Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, is not an icon. This is no monument. Instead, they call it a “collection of atmospheres” or moods, like a 3-D Mark Rothko. Last year’s, by Frank Gehry, took architecture’s iconic bent of recent years perhaps as far as it can go, creating a massive monument of hulking great timber almost as large as the neighbouring permanent gallery itself. SANAA’s, though, they say, is a delicate “pool of water”. Under the roof your eye is forever distracted by reflections caught on the ceiling. A tree. A person. A bus on the road next door. A blond comet streaks across it — a labrador chasing a ball in the park outside.
When it rains, Obrist says, “beads of drops cascade from the roof”, which, from inside, reflect on the ceiling as if falling upside down, turning a summer downpour into installation art.
The pavilion may be ethereal, but it’s not unreal like a computer graphic. It’s chunkily riveted together like an aircraft or a 1950s Airstream caravan, so the mirrored “pool of water” shimmers with dimples as if someone has thrown in a stone. It’s mesmerising, and fun. Undulating from waist to tree height, it might tempt the naughty to transform it into London’s biggest slide. The building is only really finished when the public take it over, popping in for a cuppa or a lecture, jogging through on the morning run. The intent always is to make contemporary architecture unintimidating, but not dumbed down. You can touch it. It won’t bite.
And in this, once again, the Serpentine succeeds, big time. The pavilion series has had its ups and downs. This is one of the ups. Architects just never get the chance to create projects of such conceptual richness in Britain. Most of the spaces we are surrounded by are like watery slop. This, though, is a shot of the hard stuff.
7. Hutong Bubble 32 by MAD
Beijing architects MAD have completed the first of a series of proposed bubble-shaped additions to traditional hutongs in the city.
The first bubble, called Hutong Bubble 32, provides a toilet and staircase in a hutong – a traditional but basic housing typology based around a courtyard that is under threat from rapid development in Beijing.
MAD’s Beijing Hutong Bubble project proposes adding similar bubbles to many of the city’s hutongs to improve living conditions while preserving the vernacular urban fabric.
MAD’s proposal for the future Beijing 2050 was first revealed at its exhibition MAD IN CHINA in Venice during the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale.
8. Creative Conversation at MCA 29 October 2009
On October 29, Memphis College of Art will host its 2nd Annual Creative Conversations event in partnership with Americans for the Arts* and MPACT Memphis.
Instead of a panel, this year, we will have Helen Johnson, co-founder of Create Here, and Chris Reyes with Live From Memphis give an inspirational intro before breaking out into groups to discuss how to integrate creativity more into the life of Memphis, etc.
Breakout sessions led by:
Chris Reyes (LFM), Tom Jones (Smart City), Eric Mathews (LaunchPad), Shalishah Franklin (Sneak Peek), Gwyn Fisher (MPACT), Gary Backaus (ArcherMalmo), John Kirkscey (ArtPark), Marvin Stockwell (Church Health Center and Pezz) and yours truly.
What are Creative Conversations?
Creative Conversations are local gatherings of emerging leaders in communities across the country and are part of a grassroots movement to elevate the profile of arts in America during National Arts & Humanities Month every October. Started in 2004, some of these local convenings have grown into cohesive, organized emerging leader networks. This local tool empowers emerging leaders to take a leadership role in their own community by both designing programming and galvanizing their peers to connect professionally. Model for the CODA Symposium I hosted at Rhodes College in 2006 and 2007.
9. Commune Design
Ace Hotel, Juicy Couture, Oliver Peoples, Hush Puppies.
10. Jarvis Cocker in Wes Anderson’s film version of Roald Dahl’s ‘The Fantastic Mr. Fox
Cocker voices 'Petey,' one of the few human characters, his role the result of meeting director Anderson when DJing with Pulp bassist Steve Mackey in Paris at the wrap party for Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. "When he'd written the script, he'd also written the words for this song and he asked if I'd do the music for it. Which was quite nice for me 'cause usually when I get asked to do things it's the other way round - they want me to do the words." Cocker discounts his previous film appearance, as part of band the Wyrd Sisters in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, as "more like prancing around on stage".
