July 16, 2008 12:46

Prefab Five

Prefab is an idea that seems to be in the air in New York this summer. As part of its ongoing Buckminster Fuller show the Whitney Museum has a big model of one of Bucky's Dymaxion Houses, his proposal for a prefab. And last night I made it over to the preview of "Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling", a new show at the Museum of Modern Art that opens July 20. As part of the show, MOMA invited five architects or firms to build full scale prefab houses in an empty lot on the western end of the museum. In a way this revives what was once MOMA's occasional practice of having architects build model homes in the museum's sculpture garden. As it happens, in 1941 Bucky himself entered the garden with two interconnected "Dymaxion Deployment Units" — basically a Dymaxion House adapted by the military to house radar equipment and troops.

I've always found prefab an interesting idea that never quite gets off the ground, like the videophone. I'll have more to say about the MoMA show later. For now here are some pics from last night of three of the houses.

First up is Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier's Burst*008. It's built from plywood pieces that are custom cut by a computer controlled saw to allow the house to be fashioned in different ways for different clients

Burst*008, Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier/All Photos: LACAYO

Burst*008 Interior, Edmiston and Gauthier

Next is this prototype of housing for New Orleans, modeled after the city's characteristic shotgun houses — many of which fell victim to the lethal combination of Hurricane Katrina and government incompetence — was designed by Lawrence Sass, a professor at MIT, and his students. Through a system of precut wooden joints and notches, the plywood panels can be fit together without nails or hinges.

Digitally Fabricated Housing for New Orleans, Lawrence Sass

Finally, the Cellophane House by Stephan Kieran and James Timberlake. It has photovoltaic cells embedded within the plastic membrane walls that gather solar energy and conduct it to batteries within the house.

Cellophane House, KieranTimberlake Associates

Apologies to the designers of the other two — the "micro compact home" by Horden Cherry Lee Architects/Haack+ Hopfner Architects and "System3" by Oskar Leo Kaufmann and Albert Ruf — but they might be pleased to know that I couldn't get close enough to get good pictures of their projects because of the crowds around them.

July 15, 2008 8:23

Streetsy

A London newspaper reported over the weekend that it may have uncovered the real identity of Banksy, the Robin Hood of British street art. I'll believe it when I see their guy do something like this....

One Nation Under CCTV, Banksy, 2008/All Photos: LACAYO

What you see up there is a massive Banksy that he whipped off last April just around the corner from my hotel, a protest against the CCTV street surveillance video cameras that are everywhere in the U.K.

Not a Banksy, 2008

Though you can't see it in the picture, one of those cameras is located just to the right of the wall space where Banksy went to work. The image is so tall that British newspapers assume it required him to build a scaffold — directly under the nose, or at least to one side, of the CCTV lens.

London is having a sort of street art apotheosis-moment this summer. In May Tate Modern temporarily gave over its long Thames-side wall to six big images by street artists or collectives from outside the UK, including Faile from New York.

Another is by Blu, the Bologna-based artist whose incredible wall drawing animation I linked to last month.

The Brazilian artist Nunca satirized the whole project of bringing street art into a British museum with the figure of a giant sipping a cup of tea while stepping on a severed hand — the artist's?

The Sao Paolo-based twin brothers Os Gemeos also took a swipe at CCTV with a giant yellow nude holding a bunch of captured surveillance cameras.

The feet were the best part. They reminded me of those clunky flat feet you see at the bottom of early Renaissance paintings, the kind that Picasso borrowed in his neo-classical phase.

These however won't last five hundred years. They all come down on August 25.

July 13, 2008 11:45

Things from England

I'm back in New York after a week of checking up on London. From time to time over the next few weeks I'll be emptying my notebooks into the magazine and also here on line.

For starters, it's no secret that Tate Modern can't mount a complete narrative of modern art in its galleries. It has too many gaps in its permanent collection. But it makes a virtue of necessity with changing temporary galleries, some that juxtapose work from different periods in a way that ordinary chronological display doesn't permit. Right now there's one spectacular example of that kind of hanging at the Tate, a room that brings together one of Monet's Water Lilies, a version on long term loan from the National Gallery....

Water Lilies, Claude Monet, after 1916/NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON

.....with three Abstract Expressionist canvases that owed a debt to the Water Lilies series. One of those is a Rothko from 1952 that not only harks back to the earlier painting's shimmering "all over" fogs of color but does it in a palette of pale green, yellow, lavender and violet that's a near match with Monet's.

Untitled, Mark Rothko, 1952 /TATE MODERN

Going back and forth between the two canvases, you could understand in an almost physical way how Rothko's picture operates, how its vertical orientation and near human-scale dimensions, its direct address to your eye, brain and body, condenses the visual field of Monet's horizontal image and untethers it from its last connections to the visible world. It's been a commonplace of art history for more than half a century that Monet's numerous Water Lilies were a precursor of AbEx. But how often do you get to see any of them juxtaposed with the pictures — the other two in this gallery are Jackson Pollock's Summertime: Number 9A and Joan Mitchell's Number 12 — they gave rise to?

July 9, 2008 5:05

London Calling

It's been a non-stop rainy week in London, the kind where you might as well run for cover into the galleries and museums. So for the last four days that's what I've been doing. I got to spend a solid hour again with the Elgin Marbles, deciphering that bumper-to-bumper Panathenaic procession, the world's longest traffic jam until that one in Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend. And I did a long morning at the National Gallery, making an inventory of the different kinds of wood the Italian Renassance collection was painted on. Fewer than I thought. Mostly poplar, with some oak and limewood.

And yesterday, dodging puddles all the while, I made it over to the Royal Academy of the Arts on Picadilly and their always daft looking annual Summer Exhibition, the 240th. (You do the math.) It's a kind of Picadilly circus where art by old and new and honorary and not actually quite in the door yet Academy members is displayed cheek by jowl and all over the walls and floors. (There are roughly 1200 works, but who's counting?) The galleries are organized, if that’s the word for it, by Academicians including well known British artists like the sculptor Tony Cragg. Let the record show that the one Cragg supervised was a relatively clear and lucid space, with a good, almost sacramental Gavin Turk bronze, Ash, that replicates a conical pile of just that, and a wonderful trompe l'oeil by Kim Meredew, Yellow Folding Table, in granite, composite sandstone and limestone, complete with trompe l'oeil coffee cup stain.

As an introduction to the Summer Exhibition there was also a small memorial show for R.B. Kitaj, who died last year, including his canvas The Jewish Rider, a mordant post-Holocaust take-off on Rembrandt's Polish Rider. (Since demoted to "School of Rembrandt".) Those tribute galleries were cluttered with lesser stuff but still a reminder of the power of Kitaj's sustained revitalization of history painting.

The Jewish Rider, Kitaj, 1985

And there was a gallery curated by the open wound (and recently elected Academician) Tracy Emin. Her's, naturally, is the one with the sign that warns: “There are works in this gallery that are shocking. Over 18s only”. And if you’re shocked by videos of nude women spinning in hula hoops, by all means run away. I was almost shocked by Emin’s admission on a wall card that Julian Schnabel “does my favorite paintings in the whole world” — what, not the whole wide world? — until I remembered her lame offerings at the British pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale.

The Schnabel aside, her gallery offers a good untitled Louise Bourgeois, one of Bourgeois's creepy, biomorphic hanging sculptures in bronze, this one painted to resemble biomorphic blobs of a pale waxy substance. And then there’s the Tim Noble and Sue Webster sculpture of an orgiastic mingling of hands and penises in pink silicone rubber, Pink Narcissus (Version 1). They all combine into a writhing globe mounted just above floor level. But the piece is only “completed” by a spotlight that casts its shadow on a nearby wall, where the whole wild ball somehow assumes the perfectly composed silhouette of two faces in profile looking in opposite directions. As a commentary on the seething realities behind placid human surfaces, it’s very funny. It’s also beyond doubt the last word in shadow puppets.

July 7, 2008 11:18

On the Road Again, Again

In London this week to look in on a few things happening here. I'll be reporting back throughout the week.