Monthly Archive for October, 2011

From Adam Nagourney at The New York Times…

It is just under 60 miles from the Stone Valley Quarry here — an expanse of dust, boulders, roaring bulldozers and cut granite hillsides — to the lush campus of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Museum Mile. Behind a pile of rocks the other afternoon, out of sight from the road, workers scurried around a 340-ton, 21-foot-high solid granite boulder, trussed with red steel girders, gleaming under the desert sun. If all goes well, this boulder will be hovering over a cut in the earth on the grounds of the museum, and be open for viewing, by the end of November.

The piece, known as “Levitated Mass,” by Michael Heizer, a California-born sculptor known for huge outdoor installations that make extensive use of earth and rock, is by any measure an ambitious and brash use of outdoor space. But more ambitious might be the logistics of moving Mr. Heizer’s rock, which was dynamited out of a hillside, from here to there. It is a trip that will take the boulder through the heart of one of the most congested urban centers in the country: nine nights at six miles an hour, through 120 miles of roads, highways, bridges, overpasses, overhead wires, alarmingly low-hanging traffic lights and sharp turns. More…

From dezeen magazine

London Design Festival 2011: divisive designs from the 1970s and 1980s are brought together in a retrospective exhibition entitled Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990, which opened at the Victoria & Albert museum at the weekend.

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From John Adams at The New York Times Sunday Book Review…

Idealistic, fantastic, grotesque, violent, tender, sarcastic, confrontational, confessional, the symphonies of Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) are among the most profoundly autobiographical of all composed music. “I have written into them, in my own blood, everything that I have experienced and endured,” he confided to a friend after finishing the Second Symphony. For all its professional, emotional and physical crises, Mahler’s life was exemplary for an artist who, no matter how loud the outside world might pound on the walls of his concentration, vigilantly maintained an unobstructed direct line to his creative self, keeping it uncorrupted and unblocked to the end.

He was the living embodiment of “the world as will and idea.” The composer Hans Pfitzner said Mahler was “one of the most strong-willed men I have known.” Romain Rolland, novelist and creator of the fictional genius composer Jean-­Christophe, saw in the “extraordinarily high-strung” Mahler “something of the schoolmaster and something of the clergyman,” with a “long, clean-shaven face, hair tousled over a pointed skull and receding from a high forehead, eyes constantly blinking behind his glasses, a strong nose, a large mouth with narrow lips, sunken cheeks, and an ascetic, ironic and desolate air.” More…

From Nicolas Rothwell at The Australian…

Since the first triumphs of the Western Desert art movement, which had its origins in remote Papunya 40 years ago this month, a shining dream has haunted the Australian indigenous art market: the dream of international acceptance and global cultural prestige.

Those first, mysterious boards with their elusive symbols painted by the desert men; the grand topographic panels of the mid-1980s; the wild, jagged colour fields poured out in the far western sand-dune communities in recent years: how is it they charm Australian audiences so easily and dominate private collections and state galleries in this country, yet fail to win such concerted admiration in the wider world?

Aboriginal art promoters and enthusiasts, Australian and foreign, have tried repeatedly in the past two decades to overcome the indifference of the fickle, shifting contemporary culture establishment and stage breakthrough shows that would put the indigenous tradition on the map: regularly, a landmark exhibition is held, word spreads, then ebbs away, and all the optimism dies. More…

Ned Kahn. Parking Structure 9. Santa Rosa, Ca. 2007.

From 3 Quarks Daily

“A series of stainless steel cables stretched across the space between two circular access ramps of a parking structure. Hanging from the cables are approximately 20,000 small mirrors that move in the wind and bounce beams of sunlight onto the architecture and pavement below. Resembling a series of parallel spider webs, the artwork is visible from many vantage points inside the parking structure and the courtyard below. Intricate patterns of light and shadow, much like the pattern of sunlight filtering through a canopy of trees in a forest, sweep across the ground throughout the day and change with the wind.”

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