BRUCE NAUMAN PINCH NECK, 1968

AGATHE SNOW AT NEW MUSEUM

Banner image: Agathe Snow, Master Bait Me, 2008
Magnets, handballs, hardware, and paper
Courtesy the artist and James Fuentes LLC, New York

Agathe Snow, Master Bait Me
New Museum
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
1/28/09 - 3/8/09

Commissioned expressly for the New Museum, Agathe Snow’s installation of magnetized rubber handballs rises in a single floating column, held together by magnetic force, jail-like bars, and a little magic. Surrounded by images the artist has obsessively collected from newspapers, magazines, and advertisements, the column teeters between classical solidity and contemporary chaos. The handballs, transformed with glue and paint, conjure the artist’s teenage years spent on the streets and playgrounds of the Lower East Side, or disassembled molecular structures attempting to reincarnate themselves as some as-of-yet-unknown strand of DNA. The caged column of balls is encircled by a warren of debased popular images: celebutantes and otherwise infamous tabloid denizens gallivant about the base of this peculiar pillar, their placement nodding towards the culture from which this relic hails, a culture that is both past and present.

Snow has a background engaging in large-scale, ad-hoc communal public performances ranging from twenty-four-hour dance marathons to guerilla dinner parties. In these works as well as in her sculpture, Snow engages in building communities by creating spaces in which people may eat and dance, or play and look. For Snow it is in the broken shadow of her column, in its cracks and fissures that a new Renaissance—spiritual, political, and artistic—might sprout forth. Snow asserts that the love powering this contemporary rebirth will not be one of total knowledge advocated during the historical Renaissance, but instead a love that acknowledges our inability to know completely. In Snow’s vision, this new communal awakening will be one that willfully contradicts the tenets of empirical rationalism and instead be based in a reverence for those things outside the possibilities of human understanding: of myths, fables, clairvoyance, and the supernatural. It is these ambiguous and amorphous ideals and notions to which Snow has built her neoclassical pillar of the twenty-first century.

JAN KAPLICKY (1937-2009)

The architect outside his Future Systems studio. Photograph: Getty Images

Jan Kaplický's death leaves the world of architecture a far duller place. Kaplický's commitment to radical futuristic design meant that his buildings were too ahead of their time for all but the most far-sighted clients.
How tragic that architect Jan Kaplický should die on the streets of Prague within hours of the birth of his daughter. And within a few years of what would have been, and hopefully still will be, his greatest architectural achievement, the new national library in Prague. The project, which has yet to begin construction, is typical of the architect – radical, exciting and far enough ahead of its time to provoke a fair degree of controversy. It represents a triumphant return to his homeland for the Czech-born émigré, a vindication of his uncompromisingly forward-looking philosophy and a tragically poetic ending to his remarkable career.
Not for nothing was Kaplický's practice called Future Systems. He was as much a trailblazer of the high-tech movement as his better-known contemporaries, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, and the most futuristic of the bunch. Kaplický worked alongside all of them at one time or another, having fled to Britain in the wake of the Prague Spring of 1968. He was instrumental in the design development of the Pompidou Centre, for example. But when he set up on his own, in 1979, his highly individual style became apparent.
Where Rogers, Foster and Piano tempered high-tech to the demands of the commercial market, Kaplický arguably remained "out there", dreaming up wonderfully fanciful projects that were closer to science fiction than dreary 1970s Britain: movable houses that perched on slender steel legs like insects, or rose out of the ground like giant sandworms, not to mention concept cars and homeware that wouldn't have looked out of place on the set of Kubrick's 2001. Where Rogers and Foster were hard-edged and pragmatic, Kaplický was fluid and organic, curvaceous and sensual. His designs might have been more wildly unfeasible than the others, but they were equally influential, and usually more interesting.
It was only in recent decades that big clients began to actually trust him, even if he was still slightly too far ahead of reality. His Lord's media centre in 1994 was a typical breath of fresh air: a smooth white aluminium alien peering over the cricket ground. Inside, it was less successful – the building was plagued by overheating problems – but it still won him the Stirling prize in 1999. Better known and loved is his Selfridges store in Birmingham, a studded space-age blob that has gone beyond simply enlivening its surroundings to represent the regeneration of an entire city.
He might yet do the same for Prague. Winning the prestigious competition for the national library was the most important project of his career, he said. He called his design "a celebration of democracy" for his homeland, and a personal "closing of the circle". Whether the design will survive without him in the face of local opposition remains to be seen, but let's hope he gets away with it one last time. Even if he doesn't, he has at least left his mark here and elsewhere. Britain would be - and architecture as a whole will be - a more boring place without him.

Steve Rose
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 15 January 2009

COOSJE VAN BRUGGEN (1942–2009)

Photo: Bob Carey/Los Angeles Times

Coosje van Bruggen, an art historian, writer, and curator whose professional partnership with her husband, artist Claes Oldenburg, turned ordinary objects into startling monuments around the world, died of breast cancer Saturday January 10 at her Los Angeles residence, the Los Angeles Times’s Suzanne Muchnic reports. She was sixty-six.
Van Bruggen was the author of scholarly books and essays on the work of major contemporary artists including John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, and Gerhard Richter. She also wrote a monograph on Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. But she is perhaps best known for collaborations with Oldenburg. Cologne has its upside-down ice-cream cone; San Francisco, its bow and arrow; Denver, its dustpan and broom.
Born in Groningen, the Netherlands, on June 6, 1942, and educated there, van Bruggen got her professional start as a curator at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Enschede. Her first work with Oldenburg came in 1976, when she helped him install his forty-one-foot Trowel I on the grounds of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo. Van Bruggen, who became a US citizen in 1993, continued to work independently throughout her career. She helped select artists for Documenta 7, the 1982 edition of the prestigious international contemporary art exhibition; contributed articles to Artforum from 1983 to 1988; and served as senior critic in the sculpture department at Yale University School of Art in 1996–97.
Artforum

MADOFF, MERKIN AND ROTHKO

ART + MONEY
Nothing like bankruptcy to make for a "motivated seller." Financier J. Ezra Merkin, whose Ascot Partners reportedly lost $1.8 billion in the Bernard Madoff scam, is also one of the world’s largest collectors of paintings by Mark Rothko. According to a report by Lindsay Pollock in Bloomberg News, the art world is keeping a close eye on Merkin’s trove in case he is forced to sell his art holdings to raise cash. Merkin reportedly bought many of the paintings directly from Kate Rothko and the Rothko estate, which is handled by PaceWildenstein Gallery. The total value of the collection, which includes Rothko’s studies for his famous Rothko Chapel murals as well as the paintings originally made for the Seagram Building, is estimated at $150 million-$200 million. Though the paintings aren’t for sale now, “everything has a price,” said Ben Heller, 83, who helped Merkin buy the abstract expressionist paintings during the past five years. The Merkin’s collection was assembled between 2003 and 2008. Seven came directly from the artist’s estate and heirs, according to Heller. New York’s PaceWildenstein gallery represents the Rothko estate. Arne Glimcher, the gallery’s founder and director, declined to comment. “I am flooded with phone calls,” said Heller, the stepfather of actress Kyra Sedgwick who was himself a Madoff victim. Sedgwick also reportedly lost investments with Madoff along with her husband, actor Kevin Bacon, according to media reports.
The Rothkos, housed in Merkin’s Park Avenue duplex, include two 9-by-15-foot studies for murals that Rothko executed for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building and Houston’s Rothko Chapel, and a third, smaller study for a Harvard University mural. The Four Seasons mural paintings are in the National Gallery in Washington.
Merkin’s Ascot Partners LP lost $1.8 billion from investments with Madoff, according to lawsuits. A second fund, the $1.5 billion Gabriel Capital LP, which also invested with Madoff, was closed last month. Also, GMAC Financial Services, the financial services arm of General Motors (GM: News ), Friday announced that its chairman, Ezra Merkin, resigned from the board, effective Jan. 9. Recently, Ezra Merkin was blamed by the investors for the investments made through Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, whose founder has been charged in a massive Ponzi scheme fraud. Madoff's funds depended in part on so-called "feeder funds" that funneled investor deposits directly to Madoff. Merkin's Ascot Partners was one such feeder fund, directing "substantially all" of its assets to Madoff.

THE REVOLUTION CONTINUES AT SAATCHI GALLERY IN LONDON

Untitled 2005 by Yue Minjun, at The Revolution Continues: New Art From China exhibition at the new Saatchi gallery. Photograph: David Levene

The record for the number of visitors to a contemporary art exhibition, set in 1997 by the groundbreaking Sensation BritArt show at the Royal Academy, has been broken by the inaugural show at Charles Saatchi's new London gallery in Chelsea. The Revolution Continues, which showcased new art from China, was visited by an average of 5,200 people a day and, it has been announced this weekend, will now be followed by Unveiled, another free show, this time featuring new work from the Middle East. By the time the exhibition of Chinese work closes, it will have attracted around 525,000 people, soundly beating Sensation which was seen by 300,000 and duly anointed the most popular contemporary art show in the world at the time. Curiosity about Chinese contemporary work reached fever pitch this year. Many of the most financially successful artists in the world are working in or come from China, including Zhang Xiaogang, Yue Minjun and Zeng Fanzhi. Of the 20 top-selling 20 international artists, 11 are Chinese. Building on the impact of the Chinese show, Saatchi, who was born in Iraq, now hopes to surprise his audience with unexpected work from an artistic community that the British public rarely has the chance to see. The former advertising guru, who is now one of the world's richest art collectors, concedes that the unknown work of Middle Eastern artists may not compete as a popular attraction with pieces from the booming Chinese art scene, but he argues that it is an increasingly important region.
Saatchi initially set a target of attracting a million visitors a year, compared with the total of 600,000 who came during the three years that his gallery was in London's County Hall building, opposite the Houses of Parliament. Tate Modern, Saatchi's main rival in scale and content, attracts around four million a year.