STEVEN HOLL: QUEENS WEST LIBRARY

Steven Holl, at 63, is widely considered one of the most original talents of his era. His work has influenced a generation of architects and students. And over the last decade or so he has become a star in faraway places like Scandinavia and China, where he is celebrated as someone able to imbue even the most colossal urban projects with lyricism. Yet his career at home has been negligible. He has had only a handful of notable commissions in the United States, and his output in New York is embarrassingly modest. So when the Queens Library Board of Trustees approved the design of the new Hunters Point community library this month, it was a well-deserved and long overdue breakthrough. The project will stand on a prominent waterfront site just across the East River from the United Nations. The building’s beguiling appearance — with giant free-form windows carved out of an 80-foot-tall rectangular facade of rough aluminum — should make it an instantly recognizable landmark. Seen from Manhattan, it will have a haunting presence on the waterfront and at dusk the library’s odd-shaped windows will emit an eerie glow. Only at the site itself, however, will the optimism driving Mr. Holl’s design come into focus. The library will stand at the western edge of Queens West and Mr. Holl’s design is not about escaping this world but transforming it into something more poetic. Approaching from the towers across the street, visitors will enter a tranquil reading garden. As visitors move closer to the library, they will be able to see through the lobby windows and out over a reflecting pool and the riverfront park. Other odd-shaped windows will allow diagonal glimpses up through the building and out to the sky. This facade brings to mind Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1975 “Day’s End,” in which Matta-Clark used a power saw to carve big circular openings into the exterior of an abandoned industrial building on the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan. In both works the over scaled cut-out openings are powerfully metaphorical. They suggest the desire to expose private, interior worlds to public scrutiny, and — by seeming to undermine the buildings’ structural stability — they evoke an unstable, ever-changing world. But Mr. Holl’s design is also a statement about the individual’s place in a larger communal framework. The lobby is a towering space framed on both sides by several big, balcony like reading rooms. To get to them visitors climb a staircase that runs up the lobby’s back wall and past one of the huge free-form windows that afford views of the East River and Manhattan. But it is the constant reminders of the larger world provided by the giant cuts through the building’s surface that give the design so much resonance. Mr. Holl is not interested in creating a monastic sanctuary; he wants to build a monument to civic engagement. The views aren’t just pretty; they remind us that the intellectual exchange of a library is part of a bigger collective enterprise. It’s a lovely idea, and touching in its old-fashioned optimism.
Excerpted from:
NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
New York Times

HAMMER MUSEUM: All of This And Nothing

January 30 - April 24, 2011



All of this and nothing is the sixth in the Hammer Museum’s biennial invitational exhibition series, which highlights work of Los Angeles-based artists, both established and emerging, alongside a number of international artists. All of this and nothing features more than 60 works, much of it created for the exhibition, by fourteen artists: Karla Black, Charles Gaines, Evan Holloway, Sergej Jensen, Ian Kiaer, Jorge Macchi, Dianna Molzan, Fernando Ortega, Eileen Quinlan, Gedi Sibony, Paul Sietsema, Frances Stark, Mateo Tannatt and Kerry Tribe. The first major exhibition at the Hammer to be curated jointly by the museum’s chief curator, Douglas Fogle and senior curator Anne Ellegood, this exhibition presents a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, sound, performance, and the moving image. The artists explore fundamental questions about our experiences of existing in the world and in the potential for art to reveal the mysterious and the magical. Reaching beyond exclusively visual references, many works incorporate aspects of music, literature, science, mathematics, sound, or time into their subject matter or structure. This group of intergenerational artists closely considers the process of art-making in their work by playing with scale, the ephemeral quality of their materials, the nature of time and language, and the relationships between the objects that they create. Their work explores ideas of disappearance and reemergence, of shifting visibilities, as well as the beauty found in the everyday. These artists resist notions of autonomy and completeness in favor of openness to multiple interpretations over time. For them the value of the work resides more in the process of its making than in the resulting objects.

MACRO MUSEUM IN ROME

Plus Ultra
Works from The Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection
Until 20 March 2011

Piotr UKLANSKI, "Untitled (Monster)," 2009.
Juta, linen, plant fiber, aluminium.

MACRO and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo are proud to present PLUS ULTRA, a selection of major works from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection, curated by Francesco Bonami, at MACRO Testaccio, Rome until 20 March 2011. This is the first time a group exhibition featuring works from Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo's contemporary art collection, first started in the early nineties, has been shown in Rome, presenting an important selection of highly acclaimed Italian and International contemporary artists. PLUS ULTRA, which takes its name from a work featured in the exhibition by Polish artist Goshka Macuka (previewed at the 2009 edition of the Venice Biennale) presents the work of thirty-eight artists utilizing painting, sculpture, video, photography and installation, offering an in depth insight into today's art. Among the artists featured in the show are: John Bock, Damien Hirst, Pawel Althamer, Carsten Höller, Sarah Lucas, Tobias Rehberger, Piotr Uklanski, Cerith Wyn Evans, Maurizio Cattelan, Giuseppe Gabellone, Diego Perrone, Paola Pivi and Patrick Tuttofuoco.

THE WOODSMANS: Provocative Portrait of Photographer Francesca Woodman and Her Artist Family

Documentary Had U.S. Theatrical Premiere Wednesday, January 19 at Film Forum

Francesca Woodman's haunting B&W images, many of them nude self-portraits, now reside in the pantheon of great photography from the late 20th century. The daughter of artists Betty and Charles Woodman (she a ceramicist and he a painter/ photographer), Francesca was a precocious RISD graduate, who came to New York with the intention of setting the art world on fire. But in 1981, as a despondent 22-year-old, she committed suicide.

THE WOODMANS beautifully interweaves the young artist's work (including experimental videos and diary passages) with interviews with the parents who have nurtured her professional reputation these past 30 years, while continuing to make art of their own in the face of tragedy. The film grapples with such issues as parent-child competition and the toxic level of ambition that fuels the New York art scene. It also has much to say about the healing powers of creativity. Winner of the Best New York Documentary award at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival. —Karen Cooper, Film Forum

It's one of the fundamental questions of art. Who is a work of art ultimately about, the artist or the audience? In film we have the auteur theory, which argues that a movie is the creation of a single author, and that to understand that author is to better understand that movie. Our interpretation of Alfred Hitchcock's filmography and its recurring theme of wrongful imprisonment is enhanced by our knowledge of a story from Hitchcock's childhood; his father had him locked up in a local jail for a couple hours to teach him a lesson. Hitchcock was scarred for life, but that scar produced some wonderful movies. So that brings in a second fundamental question: are the best artists the ones who are the most emotionally damaged? Both of these questions are at the core the new documentary "The Woodmans," a thought-provoking look at one troubled family of artists and their need to express themselves. Francesca Woodman committed suicide at the age of 22 after producing some of the most fascinating photographs of the 20th century. Was her work a cry for help or simply a darkly beautiful point of view of the world? Did her need to compete with her parents, both artists themselves, compel her need to create? "The Woodmans" by director C. Scott Willis offers no simple answers to these questions. It isn't interested in absolving or indicting this family, but rather uses them as a case study to try to understand what makes an artist an artist. Husband and wife George and Betty Woodman have been married for 54 years. George is an abstract painter, Betty a potter. They had two children: Charles, who grew up to become an experimental electronic artist, and Francesca, a photographer. Francesca, arguably the most talented member of the family and inarguably the most emotionally troubled, killed herself in 1981. "The Woodmans" is filled with Francesca's photographs, which are moody and surreal images of nude women, many of whom were portrayed by Francesca herself. Betty believes her daughter's work was not autobiographical, but "The Woodmans" uses Francesca's photographs as the visual accompaniment to the story of her life up to and including George's recounting of his daughter final, tortured months, and they do not seem out of place in that context. But perhaps that's my interpretation, and not Francesca's intent. When Charles and Francesca were young, the Woodmans consumed art the way most families consume food: creating and studying it was absolutely essential to their existence. We imagine children's lives enriched by early exposure to culture. But maybe this particular family's zeal for art pushed past love into something closer to obsession. When the Woodmans would go to a museum, George says, Charles and Francesca would be given a notebook and a time and place to meet so he and Betty could enjoy the art "without the children around our necks." Director C. Scott Willis cuts between George and Betty's interviews and footage of the pair working on their art, juxtaposing their babies with their "babies." We see how incompatible an artist's life can be with a parent's life: the artist must be devoted entirely to one's self and one's impulses, which can leave little time or room for loved ones. Am I suggesting George and Betty neglected their daughter and are therefore responsible for her death? Absolutely not. But George and Betty have clearly wrestled with guilt over Francesca's suicide; in their darker hours, they may still wrestle with it ("Maybe I've been an absolutely horrible mother. I can't go back and rewrite it," Betty says at one point). Throughout the process Francesca herself remains something of a mystery, but that's appropriate given the fact that "The Woodmans" is about her family and friends reflecting back on her life and her work and trying to make sense of her decisions. Francesca's words, taken from her journals, leave nearly as large -- and nearly as ambiguous -- an impression as her photographs ("I am so vain and I am so masochistic. How can they coexist?"). Perhaps the most moving part of "The Woodmans" is George and Betty's creative reaction to Francesca's death. Both changed dramatically as artists -- maybe even improved as artists -- in the wake of the tragedy: George took up photography after years of abstract paintwork while Betty abandoned functional pottery for more whimsical creations. Now she has an enormous mixed media piece hanging in the new American embassy in China. Betty says the most common reaction she gets to her work these days is joy; when people talk about her art with her they say it makes them feel "better." The Woodmans may not believe in autobiographical impulses in artists' work. But that doesn't mean I can't see them in theirs.
Matt Singer IFC

Elmgreen & Dragset Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square, London 2012

Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset are the winners of the Fourth Plinth, one of the most significant public art commission in Britain. Their work Powerless Structure, Fig. 101 will be exhibited in Trafalgar Square in London in 2012.

RICHARD HAWKINS "THIRD MIND" OPENS AT HAMMER FEBRUARY 12, 2011

Richard Hawkins
Untitled (Slash/Twombly)
1992

Altered book; twofold leaves of plates. 12 x 8 1/2 in. (30.5 x 21.6 cm). Collection of Joel Wachs.

Martin Creed Ballet Work 1020.wmv

AI WEIWEI:NEVER SORRY TEASER

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry TEASER from Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry on Vimeo.

The first feature length doc on the iconic Chinese contemporary artist, Ai Weiwei. Coming 2011.

Producer/Director:
Alison Klayman

MASS MOCA: AN EXCHANGE WITH SOL LEWITT

Daniel Joglar
Instruction, 2010
documented action

OPENS JANUARY 23-MARCH 31, 2011

The story of Sol LeWitt's exchanges with other artists is widely known. Though most artists engage in this process at one point or another, LeWitt seemed fully committed to it as an artistic code of conduct, a way of life. Eva Hesse, Robert Mangold, Hanna Darboven, and Robert Ryman are just a few of LeWitt's celebrated contemporaries with whom the artist exchanged works. Such exchanges were not limited to well-known artists -- LeWitt consistently traded works with admirers whom he did not know but who had nevertheless sent their work to him, as well as amateur artists with whom he interacted in his daily life. LeWitt's exchanges —- he responded to every work he received by sending back one of his own -— fostered an ongoing form of artistic communion and, in some cases, a source of support and patronage. The Sol LeWitt Private Collection retains all of the works he received, as well as a record of what he offered in return. For LeWitt, the act of exchange seemed to be not only a personal gesture, but also an integral part of his conceptual practice. In addition to encouraging the circulation of artworks through a gift economy that challenged the art world's dominant economic model, LeWitt's exchanges with strangers have the same qualities of generosity, and risk, that characterized his work in general. This kind of exchange was designed to stage an encounter between two minds, outside the familiar confines of friendship. If we consider the process of exchange as another of Sol LeWitt's instructional pieces, then the rational (or irrational) thing to do is to continue to exchange work and ideas, if only symbolically, with him. This exhibition, curated by Cabinet's Regine Basha, springs from a call to those who share an affinity with Sol LeWitt's legacy as a conceptual artist, to those who knew him and those who did not—to anyone who has ever wondered, "What would Sol LeWitt like?" Cabinet and MASS MoCA issued an open call for gifts to Sol LeWitt in any form of an image, an object, a piece of music, or a film, books, ephemera, and other non-perishable items (e.g. wine) for a two-part exhibition taking place at MASS MoCA and at the offices of Cabinet (300 Nevins Street in Brooklyn) from January 20- February 19, 2011. A publication documenting the contributions will accompany the shows and will be presented at the conclusion of the project to all participants.

"THE BROAD"

Billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad and his wife on Thursday unveiled long-awaited plans for a new museum in downtown Los Angeles that will house their collection of contemporary art. The museum, called "The Broad," features a honeycombed shaped facade, glass-enclosed lobby and three floors to display various works in their 2,000-piece collection. "The Broad" was designed by New York-based architects Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, and will be situated near the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall. The cost is estimated at around $130 million, and it is planned to open in 2013 with works by luminaries of contemporary and modern art including Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Calling the concept the "veil and the vault," DS+R's design consists of a cast-concrete "veil" that wraps the building with a distinctive pattern and floods the interiors with that must-have for any museum: natural light. The second-story core of the building is the "vault" for the Broad Art Foundation, including Broad's massive collection -- over 2,000 works by 200 artists -- with windows that allow visitors to peek at the holdings as well as at the day-to-day operations of the foundation itself. The top floor features a completely sky-lit gallery that offers 24-foot ceilings and almost an acre of unobstructed gallery space.

Steven Holl: First Annual Raimund Abraham Memorial Lecture

First Annual Raimund Abraham Memorial Lecture - Lecture