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

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/

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, Virginia

Top tips: Xu Bing’s rug is currently on display at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond for an exhibition on how people are seduced into smoking

Designed through initial sketches laid out onto the floor of the Virginia museum, the tiger rug piece is the culmination of a decade long exploration of the tobacco trade for 56-year old Xu.

Known as one of China’s most prominent and influential artists, the Beijing resident began his cigarette artwork at Duke University in the U.S. at the turn of the century and has delved into the relationship between smoking and packaging.

‘Xu Bing: Tobacco Project explores the production and culture of tobacco as seen through the eyes of one of China’s most ground-breaking contemporary artists,’ said a spokesperson for Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

‘The artist visited tobacco farms, warehouses and cigarette factories in Virginia to create the work for this exhibition, which also includes pieces from the artist’s previous projects on this topic.

‘Altogether, this exhibition spans 12 years and surveys one of his most ambitious undertakings.’

The artist chose Virginia to exhibit his work as the eastern American state is traditionally known as the home of mass produced tobacco products.

‘Virginia’s long history with tobacco makes Tobacco Project a particularly relevant exhibition,’ said Alex Nyerges, director of Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

‘Xu Bing is one of China’s most recognised and celebrated contemporary artists, and we are pleased to feature this noted artist’s work at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.’

Using tobacco as both a material and a subject in which to explore a wide range of issues, Xu Bing’s work relates to topics from the global trade to the exploitation of tobacco.

Xu Bing’s interest in ‘tobacco culture’ extends to the historical impact of China’s large-scale exportation of tobacco products from the United States that began in the late 19th century.

‘Xu Bing brings his usual wit and insight to his work with tobacco, as well as his sense of craft and showmanship,’ said John Ravenal Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the museum.

‘Viewers will see exquisite books of poetry printed on cigarette paper and matchbooks, and a forty-foot tiger-skin rug made of half a million cigarettes.

‘The exhibition will be a stunning and thought-provoking display of Xu Bing’s innovative art.’

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.”

That insight came from “Cheap Lecture” (2009), a whimsical and smart duet by the British choreographer Jonathan Burrows and the Italian composer Matteo Fargion that was performed over the weekend at Danspace Project as part of a larger examination of this team’s ’s work of the last decade.

In many ways, these five related works, which are deeply and sometimes overtly indebted to John Cage, are about the tension between structure and choice, as well as how these tensions play out within an artist and between artists and audiences. These tensions and negotiations are always shifting when we view art — never more so than in the realm of performance.

Mr. Burrows and Mr. Fargion are fine company. The front they present — straightforward, sometimes deceptively so — allows for ease of access on multiple levels. Here are two regular-looking middle-aged men singing, talking, moving in pedestrian ways and playing with props that include musical instruments and, utterly winningly in “The Cow Piece” (2009), toy cows.

You can let all of this roll over you. You can geek out on the counts and phrasing and rhythms of their structures (and enjoy, as the artists seem to, their small missteps within these). You can do both, while sometimes stumbling, as if by chance, onto larger questions about the nature of creation and collaboration among those who make art and those who take it in.

Would Cage have approved? Let’s say yes — at least on some level. He approved of chance, after all, and of choice.

I spent Saturday afternoon at the Performa Hub in NoLIta walking through “Musée de la Danse: Expo Zéro,” a project created by the French choreographer Boris Charmatz. The beloved New York dancer and actress Valda Setterfield approached me in one of the hallways, its bright blue paint adorned with squares of sunlight coming through the windows — and said she was available to talk about Merce Cunningham, her former boss and Cage’s life and artistic partner. She was not making idle chitchat, or rather, she was doing so purposefully: she was among the 10 people from the worlds of art, architecture and philosophy who had been installed by Mr. Charmatz in this colorful old schoolhouse on Mott Street much as sculptures and paintings fill a traditional museum.

I asked if Cunningham would have liked “Musée.” “I don’t know if he would like this piece,” she answered, “but he would like the fact that somebody was doing something.”

This “something” was a reimagining of the museum: what the space might allow for and what it might hold if populated not by objects but by people. This idea has been in vogue again in recent years, and this thought-provoking “Musée” was one of the more enchanting iterations I’ve seen.

Mr. Charmatz was there, too, leading people through various choreographic exercises, including one that emphasized how the transmission of movement is like a game of telephone. “You could say the dance gets lost,” Mr. Charmatz explained. “But it goes somewhere else.”

“Musée” thrummed with the pleasures and perils of exchange. Everything was destabilized, however gently; it took awhile, as you walked through the idiosyncratic spaces, to figure out who was an onlooker and who was a performer. By the time you did, you had also likely realized that the distinction had been rendered moot; everyone inside was an autonomous moving part.

I spent much of my visit with just a few of these parts. These included an invitation from the artist Heman Chong to share whatever I might like about myself, an exchange that resulted in the suggestion of a book I might enjoy, “Roadside Picnic.”

I also spent time with the actor Jim Fletcher, who was ensconced in the corner of a classroom, where he offered enigmatic non sequiturs. Was this a script? Was it whatever entered his mind? An example: “Almost anything can be used as a weapon if you are keen enough to do damage to your opponent.”

Yes, sir. Just as almost anything can be used to make art. Mr. Burrows and Mr. Fargion had demonstrated this. In “Musée,” so did the young choreographer Eleanor Bauer, an American living Brussels, as she asked passers-by for personal items with which to create brief but full-bodied dances on the spot.

Then, on Saturday evening at New York Live Arts she performed “(Big Girls Do Big Things),” her ambitious and generous questioning of what it is that drives us to make things and present them to others.

Ms. Bauer channels everything from Karen Finley to “Swan Lake,” morphing with live-wire intensity from giant teddy bear to rebellious little girl to chameleon chanteuse. Ada Rajszys’ terrific costumes were a help, but Ms. Bauer is a shape-shifter in any case, lunging for her desperate pleasures as if her life depended on securing them, and earning our hearts in the process.

And what about that drive, to see and be seen? Her oblique answers are complicated. They are also simple. As the poet Frank O’Hara said so perfectly: “I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.”

By CLAUDIA LA ROCCO , New York Times, Published: November 8, 2011

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.

I love his interpretations of Christo, Hockney, Koons, Kruger, Kusama, Nara, Twombly and Walker especially, but it’s the creepiness of Claes Oldenburg that really sticks with me. Leavitt really does an amazing job at capturing the essence of each artist. The likeness is on point and yet stylized without being a caricature. Each action figure is a hand-made one-off and will be offered for sale through the gallery. If you can’t afford an original, word on the street is that a production version of one member of Leavitt’s Art Army may be coming soon…

Mike Leavitt and Jeff Koons’ body

Written on September 9, 2011 by jeremy

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.”

After a reading from a text, which called museums a “pyramid scheme” in which “the wealthiest one hundredth of one percent claim ownership of culture,” the Occupy Museums group opened the floor to supporters to speak. One woman noted that the New Museum had recently collaborated with a group called WAGE – Working Artists and the Greater Economy – to take on the issue of artist compensation in an exhibit called “Free.” She wanted to acknowledge the museum for paying artists fairly for their work in it. But she added, “This should not be an exception, but rather a rule.” She called upon artists to be brave and stand up to gatekeeper cultural institutions. Together, she said, “we are stronger than the threat of obscurity.”

At MoMA, the protesters had been cordoned off by the police, but at the New Museum they were unencumbered. Three police officers casually watched the proceedings, leaning on their squad car. Museumgoers, too, seemed to take the spectacle in stride (though a protester in a gorilla mask, a woman who said she worked at an art museum, drew a few double takes). Some passersby stopped to listen. “It makes sense,” one 60-ish man, a neighborhood resident, said of the group’s comments, before heading on his way.

Mr. Fischer, 34, a Brooklyn sculptor, performance artist and Fulbright scholar, has been a supporter of Occupy Wall Street since it started five weeks ago, though he has spent only one night at Zuccotti Park, the movement’s epicenter. “My girlfriend, she would not appreciate me sleeping there every night,” he said, as his girlfriend looked on, nodding. He has, though, committed himself as an artist to protesting. “Right now, this is my practice,” he said. (He teaches at the Pratt Institute and rents out artist studios to make ends meet.)

Even in its first day, Occupy Museums, which is meant to be a weekly event, had drawn some criticism online, but Mr. Fischer said dissent was welcome. “This is our moment to expand people’s thinking about what part of our culture is controlled by the one percent,” he said, “and people who think about it will figure out pretty quickly that MoMA is.”

Over the summer Mr. Fischer and several others were involved in a performance of their own on Wall Street, “Summer of Change.” Wearing an oversized mask that resembled the head side of a coin (a penny or a quarter), Mr. Fischer and his compatriots gave out vast amounts of change – 400 quarters, 1,000 dimes – in an attempt at redistribution of wealth. (The project was funded by a Kickstarter.) “It’s time now, in the movement, to look beyond Wall Street and notice that a culture of economic inequality flows to all parts of our city, and all parts of our culture,” Mr. Fischer said.

At the New Museum, a protester mentioned White Box, a small gallery off the Bowery that was having an opening that night. After a consensus vote, the group marched their protest over to its doors. But the exhibit there, “WALLmART,” turned out to be in solidarity with the 99 percent movement. So after a few minutes, the Occupy Museums group abandoned their sidewalk chants and went in.

“We occupied, and now we’re going to schmooze,” Mr. Fischer said.

October 21, 2011By MELENA RYZIK

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.

John Kaldor knocked on a door at 8 a.m. when I was destroying everything on Oxford Street back in 2001. The security guard didn’t want to let John in but I was intrigued so I said “let him in.” John introduced himself but we weren’t open until 10 so I said “please come back.” That afternoon, he brought some catalogues and told me about his previous projects. Because I was destroying everything in my possession, I had to destroy the catalogues.

I’ve been coming back and forth to Sydney since. This is my fifth time being here. The first time I came out was in 2002 for a week. Then I came back again a few years later for a month and came up with some ideas and maybe even spoke to John about Acts of Kindness then as an idea. One of the early ideas I came up with was making the Sydney Opera House disappear. I sent him on a mission to try. Instead of adding something, I was quite interested in taking something away. Another idea was to do a high rise of bungalows. I had another idea, which I still might do one day, of finding a square with houses surrounding it, and for people to just throw all the rubbish into the square. I’m slightly intrigued by rubbish, about our own feelings about rubbish and the amount of rubbish we produce. So I had various ideas that didn’t happen because they were either not feasible, too expensive or too smelly.

Kaldor Public Art ProA puzzle piece displayed at Martin Place.

I first started thinking about Acts of Kindness after Break Down. Partly what intrigued me about that project was how much members of the public wanted to talk about it. People were very generous. Most people spend their lives working hard to accrue all these things and they put them on their shelves and they look after them, and I was doing quite the reverse of that. I could have been vilified but I wasn’t. I came away thinking the general public are OK. Then, since I didn’t have many things at that time, I started to think about what else makes us human apart from being consumers. What I started to ponder was compassion and kindness.

In the U.K., I’ve done a project called Art and the Underground. They commission art works on the London underground and this year they are concentrating on the Central Line, which runs from East to West. About three months ago, we made call-for-action posters asking members of the traveling public to send in stories of everyday acts of kindness they’ve either taken part in or witnessed, and we displayed them along the Central Line.

The underground can be an alienating place. Most people are in their bubbles. They are trying to get to work. They are listening to their music, reading the paper, but sometimes you’ll look up and someone has offered their seat to somebody or is helping someone up some steps with some heavy bags. I started to think about what that was about and why would somebody go out of their way to do something like that. It was me thinking about what kindness means to me, and our own slightly uneasy feelings about whether to get involved or not. You can pull your newspaper up just a bit higher to ignore it. It might go away.

When I was planning the London project, I mentioned Acts of Kindness to John again and he seemed to like the idea. I came over to Sydney three months ago for a week and we basically had to work out how we were going to do it here. So it has been quite a fast turnover. I’m not used to working this fast.

We’ve hung up 200 jigsaw pieces with stories on them around the CBD. Then in Martin Place I have all the pieces put together. It’s like 13 meters by seven by the cenotaph and you can walk on it if you want. It’s a bitmap I’ve drawn. They sent me a map of central Sydney and then they made an inventory of all the streets within that. They sent me all the pictures, and I’ve drawn all the pictures of all of that into the map, you know streets, shops, I’ve got people wandering around.

Some of the stories are about very generic things, people dropping things, people picking things up. There was one story of a man driving along and he saw a handbag in the middle of the road and he drove past it but he came back around and collected it. He looked through this bag and found a mobile phone and looked up M because he thought M for Mum. He found this woman’s mother and she said, “Oh yeah, my daughter is having a nervous breakdown and she has gone to hospital today.” She told him where she was situated and he got there and this woman was pulling her car apart trying to find her handbag. That’s what I’m trying to celebrate, those kind of everyday acts of kindness that have always happened in Sydney and always will.

It’s all been made here. I’ve never worked like this before where I’m many thousands of miles away. I did the drawing at home and they cut it into little sections and scanned it and sent it over here. That’s how they’ve made this huge jigsaw puzzle piece. Kaldor Projects made little brochures and they used the Internet to ask people to send in their stories, and they’ve collected all their stories. It’s a team of people who work on it. I’m normally very hands-on so I find it quite odd.

When I was on the plane coming over, it was like “Oh my God what have I done?” You are always a bit nervous until you go to the workshop and see what they’ve been doing. Touching the physical thing is completely different to people sending you pictures. I could see the individual pieces stacked up and drying. I helped to put up some of the signs and I felt more involved.

I think I might be doing it in Greece as well. I’m going to go there in November. So I could literally spread kindness all over the world.

By Rebecca Thurlow,The Wall Street Journal, October 17 2011

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.

The 20 artists or collectives chosen for “The Matter Within” cover a wide spectrum, thematically, stylistically and geographically. Home addresses include New York and London as well as various Indian cities.

By mixing the three media together in the galleries, Hertz hopes to set off fruitful conversations among the works. Dhruv Malhotra’s photographs of people sleeping on the streets, for example, are meant to examine the mingling of public and private spaces. Several of the video artists use appropriated cinematic and home-movie imagery to play with different sorts of boundaries, between past and present, the imaginary and the real.

One guiding idea emerged as Hertz assembled the show. “For a concept to take hold and be meaningful,” she said, “it has to go through the body.” That’s an idea with deep roots, evident in the “Maharaja” show, about the centrality of the human figure through the history of Indian art. For Hertz that physicality is encoded in everything from the sensual candle wax of Dube’s “Love” to the “ghostly bodies” of the videos.

Another recurring theme was something Hertz did not foresee. “I was surprised how often the topic of the Partition came up,” she said. While none of the artists, who range in age from late 20s to late 50s, were alive when Pakistan came into being at the time of India’s independence in 1947, that historic event’s hold on the subcontinent’s collective imagination endures.

As Hertz sees it, “The trade-off for independence was this division between Hindu and Muslim. It’s not always apparent on the surface or necessarily addressed in the art, but it weighs heavily. It’s like a fault line that runs through everything. A lot of it is about the way the artists’ parents were affected.” Multimedia artist Nikhil Chopra looked even further back into his country’s colonial and post-colonial life with the creation of a character based on his grandfather.

Strolling past a collection of hefty crates that have started to arrive from halfway around the world, Hertz looked a little dazed that “The Matter Within” was finally coming together. The logistics of locating and shipping the works, several of them very large, were complicated to say the least. The last time Hertz worked on a show with an Indian theme, she recalled with a rueful smile, was when she worked at the San Diego Museum of Art.

“It was a painting show,” she said. “They were all miniatures.” {sbox}

Steven Winn, The Chronicle Sunday, October 16, 2011