Category: Shows that are on!

Artist Measures Visitor Attention Span With Kinect-Powered Tape Measurers

"Tape Recorders" (2011) by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer from bitforms gallery on Vimeo.

How much time do we spend looking at a work of art when we’re in a museum or gallery? Do we really take the time to reflect and let the work sink in? Or do we simply breeze by in an effort to see as much as possible? Some studies suggest that the average visitor only spends about 5 seconds looking at each work, but Mexican media artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has found a different way of measuring this interaction.

Lozano-Hemmer’s new installation Tape Recorders takes a more physical approach to calculating the answer to this question. Composed of a series of automated measuring tapes fixed to a wall, the tape ascends to the ceiling when visitors are present, tipped-off by a Kinect sensor. Once it reaches its peak, the tape crashes down, unable to hold itself up any longer, and is then reeled back in. Visitors can walk past the full spectrum of tape measurers, making them grow in succession as if performing the “wave,” or stand in front of one to force it to its crashing point. It also tabulates the collective time spent in front of the installation and prints out the summation every hour.

The installation’s awareness of its visitors seemingly has the effect of making them stay longer, incentivizing their attention with the tapes’ impending crash and recoil. Since the presence of people is required for the installation to activate, audience participation and appreciation is crucial to the piece—it would’t work otherwise. The longer visitors interact with the work, the more interesting it becomes.

Tape Recorders, along with several other works by Lozano-Hemmer, will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney through February 12th, 2012.

Artist Measures Visitor Attention Span With Kinect-Powered Tape Measurers
Dylan Schenker

Anonymous Paper Sculptures

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In March 2011, an anonymous artist left the first of ten intricate paper sculptures at various arts based locations around Edinburgh, Scotland. The Scottish Poetry Library found a paper sculpted tree mounted on a book with a tag addressed to the library’s Twitter name. The tag read: “It started with your name @byleaveswelive and became a tree.… … We know that a library is so much more than a building full of books… a book is so much more than pages full of words.… This is for you in support of libraries, books, words, ideas….. a gesture (poetic maybe?)”
Other sculpture gifts and notes followed. In June 2011, the National Library of Scotland received a sculpture of a gramophone and then Edinburgh’s Filmhouse found a tiny cinema made of books. In July, the Scottish Storytelling found a paper dragon sitting on a window sill. In August, two more sculptures appeared at the Edinburgh Book Festival, and another at the Central lending library. In September, more sculptures were found and a final one with a note indicating the completion of the artists journey:
“It’s important that a story is not too long ……does not become tedious …….You need to know when to end a story,’ she thought. Often a good story ends where it begins. This would mean a return to the Poetry Library. The very place where she had left the first of the ten. Back to those who had loved that little tree, and so encouraged her to try again …….and again. Some had wondered who it was, leaving these small strange objects. Some even thought it was a ‘he’! ……. As if! Others looked among Book Artists, rather good ones actually…….But they would never find her there. For though she does make things, this was the first time she had dissected books and had used them simply be- cause they seemed fitting….Most however chose not to know….. which was the point really. The gift, the place to sit, to look, to wonder, to dream….. of the impossible maybe…….A tiny gesture in support of the special places…..So, here, she will end this story, in a special place … A Poetry Library ….. where they are well used to ‘anon.’”

http://www.dailyartfixx.com/2011/12/07/anonymous-paper-sculptures-edinburgh-scotland/

For the love of Damien Hirst: Tate Modern hosts first UK retrospective

Diamond-studded skull to take Turbine Hall pride of place as economic crisis puts Hirst’s career in new light

Damien Hirst with For the Love of God, 1/7/07

Damien Hirst with For the Love of God, his cast of a human skull made of platinum and diamonds. Photograph: Reuters

Damien Hirst‘s famous – indeed notorious – platinum and diamond skull will go on show in Tate Modern‘s Turbine Hall next year, in the first survey show devoted to the artist in the UK.

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David Shrigley given first major UK retrospective

Hayward gallery’s Shrigley exhibition next year will have one foot in the art world and the other in popular culture

Pumpkin by David Shrigley

David Shrigley’s Pumpkin will be one of the works on display for his retrospective at the Hayward gallery next year.

Watch out for carpet burns… the ‘tiger-skin’ rug that’s made out of 500,000 cigarettes

Made from 500,000 individual cigarettes and weighing an incredible 440lb, this mock tiger skin rug is the creation of master artist Xu Bing.

Currently on exhibit at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the painstakingly put-together tobacco artwork is meant to highlight global trade, packaging and how people are seduced into deadly smoking habits.

Tiger feat: Chinese artist Xu Bing's art work made of more than 500,000 individual cigarettes designed to look like a tiger skin rug pictured in Richmond, VirginiaTiger feat: Chinese artist Xu Bing’s art work made of more than 500,000 individual cigarettes designed to look like a tiger skin rug pictured in Richmond, Virginia

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People Who Mistook Life for a Museum, and Vice Versa


Eleanor Bauer in her performance piece “(Big Girls Do Big Things)” at New York Live Arts, part of Performa 11 biennial. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

The Performa biennial, now in full outrageously outsize swing across the city, is known for its big events: parties and premieres that, as is usually the case in the arts, have far more flash than substance.

Real magic is often more easily conjured in smaller offerings, and this year’s version, Performa 11, is no exception. Some of these events, whether presented by the biennial or its myriad partner organizations, have only a tangential connection to Performa’s central focus, which is new visual-art performance, or to the specific biennial’s themes. (This year’s include Russian constructivism and Fluxus.)

It’s curatorial sprawl, for good and for ill. Sometimes you wish more choices had been made; sometimes the grab-bag mayhem works out swimmingly, as it did for me last weekend at a cluster of events (all of which the smart young Performa curator Lana Wilson had a hand in). Composition is, after all, in the words of one of the pieces I saw, “about making a choice, including the choice to make no choice.”

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Art Stars as Action Figures

Julian Schnabel © Mike LeavittJulian Schnabel © Mike Leavitt

You’ve seen his sketches, now marvel at the masterwork of Mike Leavitt, the artist’s artist.  Saturday, September 10th, his Art Amy Royalty will be on view at Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York. The show includes never-before-seen action figure versions of art stars Matthew Barney, Christo, Chuck Close, Lucian Freud, Gilbert & George, Damien Hirst, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, Claes Oldenburg, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Tom Sachs, Julian Schnabel, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, Frank Stella, James Turrell, Cy Twombly, Kara Walker and Ai Weiwei.

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Taking the Protests to the Art World

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The Occupy Wall Street movement took on the art world, sort of, this week, with a splinter group, Occupy Museums. Convened on Thursday evening through a Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr posts, about 20 people made their way from the Museum of Modern Art to the New Museum to a downtown gallery, protesting what they say is the conflation of art and commerce, the snobbery of the art market and high ticket prices at museums, which they called the “temples of the cultural elite.”

Outside the New Museum they chanted: “Museums, open your minds and your hearts, and listen. Art is for everyone! The people are at your door.” Standing in a circle on the sidewalk, they used the call-and-repeat system known as the people’s mic, which has become a hallmark of the movement. The people’s mic is an “art form,” Noah Fischer, an artist and organizer of Occupy Museums, said later, promising that it was only the first new artistic tool to emerge from the protests. “I thing art is going a change from this movement,” he said, “because it’s going to unstick the current paradigm, which is based on money.”

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Artist Known for Destroying Finds Kindness

[MOMENT] Kaldor Public Art Project

On show until Oct. 23, Acts of Kindness is the 24th public art work facilitated by the Kaldor Public Art Project, a charitable organization established by Australian art collector John Kaldor that’s best known for bringing out Christo and Jeane-Claude to wrap Sydney’s Little Bay for the Wrapped Coast project in 1969.

The works of U.K. artist Michael Landy have often focused on destruction. He became famous in 2001 for systematically obliterating all of his personal belongings in a former department store in London’s Oxford Street for a performance installation called Break Down. For Art Bin last year, he invited artists and members of the public to dispose of works of art.

By contrast, his latest work explores the constructive nature of everyday gestures of kindness and compassion. Landy, 48, has collected stories of kindness from people across Sydney to form the basis for an installation in the central business district that’s part of the city’s annual Art & About festival. Michael Landy’s Acts of Kindness was a team effort. Workers prepare the puzzle pieces to be displayed.

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‘The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India’

Rina Banerjee’s “Tender was her wound, pink and playful was her mood.” (Edward Nahem)

The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India: Through Jan. 29. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St., San Francisco. $7, free for members. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org.

One sculptor, New Delhi’s Anita Dube, fashioned the word “Love” out of candles. Another, New York’s Rina Banerjee, works in tortoise shells, beads and parasols. Bangalore-born photographer Pushpamala N. borrows a page from Cindy Sherman by posing in native garb and guises to cast fresh light on the so-called “native types” of India.

All are part of an ambitiously disparate show, “The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India,” that opened this weekend at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. It was timed to coordinate with and complement the Asian Art Museum’s “Maharaja: The Splendor of India’s Royal Courts,” which premieres Friday.

YBCA’s director of visual arts, Betti-Sue Hertz, spent 2 1/2 weeks in India last fall, visiting artists, gallerists, art historians and curators in New Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai. Dazzled by the contemporary art scene there and in the Indian diaspora, Hertz decided to restrict her focus to photography, sculpture and single-channel video. Contemporary Indian painting, she said, has been well represented in other exhibitions.

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