viz.

Image Credit: Experiments in Architecture and Research

A few days ago, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) unveiled its newest exhibition, Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream. A collection of five architectural plans that reimagine how five different suburbs in America could have benefitted significantly from Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds, Foreclosed is an amazing exhibition that melds art and architecture, politics and place. Today, I’m going to discuss the impetus of this exhibition—The Buell Hypothesis. The Hypothesis is an amazing hybrid publication created by Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. According to the publication’s graphic designers, The Buell Hypothesis is “part socratic dialogue, part contemporary screenplay, part media scape and part power point slide presentation.” This hybrid production, with its emphasis on collaboration and reinterpretation, is an appropriate point of genesis for Foreclosed. 

Lucas Cranach's Melancholia Image Credit: Art Tattler

Last week, I examined how painters of the nineteenth century revised the image of Phillipe Pinel, the famous mental health physician, to contribute to an evolving national mythology and edify the physician's archetypal (as well as vocational) role in fostering mental health. While the representation (as well as the specific job description) of the mental health practitioner has changed drastically over the past five centuries, one cannot help but notice that there are striking continuities to be found in representations of people said to be afflicted with maladies of the mind. Today, we will take a look at some remarkable consistencies to be found linking 16th and 21st century visual representations of one of Western society's most frequently visualized maladies: melancholia.  

Image Credit: Sandy Carson, taken from CultureMap Austin

For those of us interested in architectural sculpture, the last few months in Austin (especially on the UT campus) have felt like gifts from the art gods. I’ve already written about one exhibition (the recently-closed El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa show at the Blanton Museum of Art). This month ushered in a second sculptural exhibition. New York sculptor Diana Al-Hadid’s Suspended After Image, a site-specific installation at UT’s Visual Arts Center’s Vaulted Gallery, is a feat of texture and height. As a fantastic example of architectural art, Al-Hadid’s most recent work for the VAC asks viewers to circumambulate the sculpture and ponder the relationship between memory, built objects, and humanity.

(Image Credit: Wim Delvoye)

It's pretty easy to understand (and probably join in) the outrage surrounding Wim Delvoye's work with pigs. Tattoos aren't exactly taboo in any real fashion anymore, but even as commonplace as they've become they still seem to provoke discussions about the use of bodies as writing platforms. In casual conversation clothes don't have nearly the same effect; though, it could be argued that they write on the body just as much as any tattoo. Clothes, though, seem to be commonly taken up as transient while tattoos are (mostly) permanent. I doubt there would be nearly as strong a reaction to these pigs if they were just dressed up on a daily basis.

Image credit: The Blanton Musuem of Art

El Anatsui’s art is haunting. The shimmering bottle tops of his most recent pieces, meticulously netted and woven with the help of his young crew, speak of previous uses, prior intents, and pasts that pummel and prod. A retrospective exhibition of the Ghanaian artist’s 30-year career is currently on view at UT’s own Blanton Museum of Art. The exhibition, “El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa,” is a wonderful investigation of the tangible ways that the past weaves itself into our present.

Image credit: Aram Bartholl's "Map"

Google Maps is a godsend—in our daily lives, we use the site to find a new place to live, track the settings of a public controversy, catch lawbreakers in the act, and claim land that’s been long-contested. Border scuffles and all, Google Maps is helping us reimagine the terrains, cities, and spaces of the real world. It was only a matter of time before we witnessed the melding of Google Maps virtual and Real World spatial. That time is now: Berlin-based artist Aram Bartholl has spent the last five years working on a project that brings Google Maps’ digital location markers into real city spaces. His installations in different cities in Europe and Asia—all entitled “Map”—ask us to question the lines between real and virtual, center and periphery.

Image credit: Screenshot, "Metropolis II" on YouTube

Los Angeles, the city we all (excluding Randy Newman) love to hate, is the inspiration for Chris Burden’s new kinetic sculpture, "Metropolis II," using 1,080 toy cars, many steep ramps, and a few powerful motors. The sculpture is expected to debut at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) this fall. Despite the sculpture’s not-yet-finished state, it’s already causing quite a buzz in the blogosphere, with coverage in the New York Times’ Wheels blog, LACMA’s Unframed blog, and GOOD Magazine’s Culture blog.

“Do not cede your desire" – Jacques Lacan

"Desire is a gift in life” – Chris Corner (IAMX)

The World Erotic Art Museum in Miami Beach, Florida, is a brilliant study in desire as well as an implicit deconstruction of the opposition between pornography and art. My recent visit there thus not only provided me with much food for thought and aesethetic enjoyment, but certainly tickled my loins. The WEAM (yes, even the acronym for the joint sounds suspiciously erotic) has captured the hearts not only of Floridians, but art-lovers from all around the world as well, so I'd love to have the pleasure of sharing my experience of the museum with you.

Image Credit: World Erotic Art Museum

I never imagined my childhood play would be a harbinger of real-life disaster. Before I discovered Nintendo, I amused myself with various toys, and countless hours were devoted to “playing war” with what I referred to as my “army guys”those small, forest green, plastic soldiers forever frozen in distinct battle poses.  Others may have had more elaborate sets, but my collection of army men (there were no female plastic soldiers), consisted of only a handful of poses.  As I remember I had: radioman, grenadier, crawler, crouching machine gunner, standing shooter, and lookout, similar to the first  group pictured below:

Image by I remember JFK

 I would intricately arrange opposing armies on battlefield carefully peering at my men, delicately positioning each figure, pointing weapons, and constructing groupings, before finally opening fire.  Perhaps because each army guy had dozens and dozens of identical types, I never thought of my casualties as individuals.  This held true both in my monologues in the heat of the battle, “that grenade-thrower just took out my last machine gunner” and after all the soldiers had fallen.

After happening upon images of a new series of army men, my eyes have been opened to a dark side of this game and my position as indifferent war master, casually killing of and tossing about my soldiers, typecasts, not individual warriors (unlike my GI Joe collection).  I can’t help but find myself haunted by Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” with its biting accusations

You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

After destroying my opposing armies, post-war I’d briefly examine the aftermath of the battle, a disarray of fallen soldiers that I’d quickly pile together, throw in my toy bucket, and forget about until some future battle.  A creative reworking of these familiar army men by UK-based Dorothy collective prohibits any such forgetting, and it forces us to linger post-battle—what happens to our veterans after “the fast bullets fly.”  This collection was inspired a report published in July of 2009 in the Colorado Springs Gazette, a two-part exposé  “Casualties of War” (part1, part 2), that details soldiers from single battalion based at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs who, after returning from Iraq, spin out of control, engaging in rampant domestic abuse, rape, suicide, shootings, drug abuse, drunk driving, and assault at alarming rates.

Dorothy repositions the tiny army men in new poses, in so doing, repositions the “toys” as, arguably, masterworks of visual art, and certainly as poignant and massively effective productions of social commentary.

Perhaps the most striking new figure is of a veteran amputee:

Evans Dances Baldessari Sings Lewitt Via UIC

Can the Stanky Legg bring new publics to conceptual art? Perhaps this is arguable.  But why don't you make up your own mind about it while Chaz Evans shakes a leg in his Vimeo video.  Shots of Evans dancing the Dougie, the Robot, and the Hustle after the break.