New York artists Barbara Lubliner, Bernard Klavickas, Shari Mendelson, Janet Nolan, Olivia Kaufman-Rovira, Ilene Sunshine and Tyrome Tripoli are upcyclers. They turn garbage into art. Upcycling, according to Wikipedia, is “the process of converting waste materials…into new materials or products of better quality or a higher environmental value.” The term is on everyone’s lips these days—and why not? With increasing numbers of shopping bags flapping in trees and plastic six-pack yokes skittering down streets, it shouldn’t surprise us that environmental detritus would get funneled through the creative process as often as the recycling plant. (more…)
Archive for the ‘Installation’ Category
The Transformers
Posted in Check out..., Design, Exhibition, garbage, Installation, Old Media, Popular Culture, Recycling on January 2, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Cupcake Cutie.
Posted in A Picture is Worth..., Art or Commerce?, Exhibition, Installation, Popular Culture on February 6, 2009| Leave a Comment »
A commercial display of baked goods is an art form built on the strategic use of separation.
Example: We step from the mean streets of our little town or big city into a store scented with vanilla, cinnamon and coffee, pull a tiny paper ticket from a stingy red dispenser and read the number that tells us… nothing, really, except that we must be patient. We are. We take our place among the many suitors craning to see the confectionery vision laid before us. Glittering gustatorial gems are staged in Busby Berkeley arrangements on gold foil laminated cardboard platters and white paper doilies.
When we finally reach the front of the line we bend down to peer through the glass encasement—the border fence, the high wall between us and our object of desire. Trays and rows of frosted, sprinkled, drizzled, confettied, and powdered morsels tease our eye and our pallet. (more…)
Diner Semiotics.
Posted in A Picture is Worth..., Design, Exhibition, Installation, Photography, Popular Culture, Theater on February 4, 2009| Leave a Comment »
I took this photograph with my cell phone a couple of months ago, at a local Staten Island diner. It is not an unusual scene in a diner. The monster cookies. I was enamored of their inflated forms piled high on a metal pedestal. Who eats these cookies? Does anyone? Does anyone eat the lemon meringue pies with the fake egg white swirl that’s higher than Elvis’ hair? I’ve never seen a person eat a slice from one of those pies. Do the same cookies and pies stay in their respective spots, uneaten, forever? Are they immortal props that complete the “authentic” diner experience? Maybe they were bought 25 years ago when the diner first opened and have stuck around ever since — dusted occasionally — along with the framed first fiver over the cashier’s counter. (more…)
American Flag, Redux.
Posted in Beyond Borders, Check out..., Design, Exhibition, Installation on February 1, 2009| Leave a Comment »
I’m planning my first visit to the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, so I checked out their web site. Happily, the museum is featuring one of Dave Cole’s American flags. Cole is a conceptual artist whose work is as strong on social and political commentary as it is on celebrating the physical side of art making. He is best known for his startling reinventions of the American flag. For instance, “Memorial Flag (Toy Soldiers)” is made entirely from red, white and blue “troops”; a bristling thicket of tiny soldiers that turn the American flag’s design into manufactured postures of war.
The Aldrich will be displaying Cole’s “Flags of the World.” “Flags of the World” is zigzag stitched from the red, white and blue scraps cut from 192 flags that represent the countries who are United Nations members. (more…)
An Obama Presidency: Sweet, Sweet, Sweet!
Posted in A Picture is Worth..., Design, Installation, New Media, Old Media, Photography, Popular Culture, tagged cupcakes, Obama, Obama Volunteers, pixelated art, politics, Polling Places, Upstate New York on November 11, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Not since Marie Antoinette uttered, “Let them eat cake!” (not!) have cake and politics been so closely related. Zilly Rosen, a cake maker and artist living in Buffalo, New York created a 1,240-pixel, er, cupcake portrait of Barack Obama to express her excitement and gratitude for the presidential election process. Interviewed by Cupcakes Take the Cake bloggers, Zilly explained the source of her genius idea:
“I knew I wanted to do something to be part of this moment in history. I wanted to send up my creative energy to the “ether” in the days preceding the election. I’m a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo, and they always have a bake sale on Election Day for the people voting at their polls. I first thought about making this installation for their bake sale, but then realized I couldn’t have an image of Barack within 100 feet of the polling place!” (more…)
Notorious Design
Posted in Border Violations, Conflicts of Interest, Design, Exhibition, Installation, Multimedia, Popular Culture, surveillance, Theater, tagged Darfur, Design, Hugh Grant, interior design, Janjaweed, Roland Emmerich, Starck on August 14, 2008| 1 Comment »
Roland Emmerich. He’s the big-budget director of “Independence Day,” “Universal Soldier” and “Eight-Legged Freaks.” I came across an article on Emmerich and his design aesthetic in the New York Times’ August 7, 2008 Home section.
The Times devoted two whole pages and thirteen photos to the redesign of Emmerich’s townhouse in the “buttoned-up” Knightsbridge section of London. Apparently he redesigned the place primarily to shock his neighbors. It’s not a townhouse anymore; it’s a fun house of cultural and pop-cultural references: Mao Tse-Tung, Pope John Paul II, pseudo Renaissance paintings, Barbie dolls and Philippe Starck chairs… If it shocks the neighbors, he’s happy. Whatever…
But what about the miniaturized diorama tables in the living room? The ones that Emmerich commissioned from his movie prop department. The ones that depict, in the Times’ words, “notorious events”? (more…)
Four ways to avoid incontinence…
Posted in A Picture is Worth..., Border Violations, Comedy, Exhibition, Installation, Performance, Popular Culture, Television, Theater, tagged Bad Art, Barak Obama, Chris Matthews, Hillary Clinton on May 20, 2008| 1 Comment »
A. Culture-Jamming:
Stop watching the SNL Obama / Clinton split “campaign ad.” (Then you won’t laugh so hard you pee yourself.)
B. Performance Art:
Stop watching the Chris Matthews grilling of right-winger Kevin James, who hasn’t got a clue who Neville Chamberlain is. (Then you won’t laugh so hard you wet your pants.)
C. Theater of the Absurd:
Stop thinking about Hillary Clinton’s continuing “campaign” for the presidency. After all, she deserves the nomination, right? Besides, she’s the only one who’s reaching white people. (Really. Stop thinking about it. It’ll just piss you off.)
D. Art Exhibition:
Forget about politics and check out some really good bad art. It ain’t bad when it’s this good. (Besides, it’s hung near the bathroom.)
Above: Running Mates by Anonymous, acrylic on canvas. (I made that up.)
It’s a jungle out there…
Posted in Architecture, Beyond Borders, border conflicts, Border Violations, Design, Installation, tagged barriers, Carolina Cisneros, construction, deconstruction, GRO Architects, public art, Tattfoo Tan, walls on May 1, 2008| 3 Comments »
I live on Staten Island in NYC. Although the borough is loaded with artists, galleries have a hard time surviving here. The ones that do generally fall into two categories: the typical frame-shop / retail gallery and the funky done-on-a-dime kind of place. Naturally I love the latter, though I’m content to have the former for the occasional frame job.
One of the best galleries ever to “have a go” here on Staten Island was Tattfoo Temple of Art and Design, established by artist and graphic designer Tattfoo Tan and his wife, Ensze Tan, in 2003, just three years after their arrival from Malaysia. The Temple was established in an old factory loft that they cleaned up and painted white. (more…)
Feeling small? There’s “The Man” with the movie camera.
Posted in Architecture, Exhibition, Installation, tagged creativity, Jeremy Mora, Joe Fig, Michael Peter Smith, miniatures, Ryan Boyle, scale models, shrinking dollar, small, tableaux on April 28, 2008| 2 Comments »
It’s little wonder we Americans are feeling small, despite our nation’s massive carbon footprint, enormous economy ($13.8 trillion GNP) and gargantuan military-industrial complex. There are still forces greater than we are. Consider the weather. Over the past five years California wild fires, severe droughts, Hurricane Katrina and regional floods have overpowered the government’s resources, decimated states and reduced vibrant neighborhoods to unlivable ruins.
That’s not all. Economic forces have sent us tumbling into a recession. Our homes are worth less than the mortgages we pay, our personal debt is rising, the price of oil has blown past $100 a barrel, job opportunities have diminished and the dollar has shrunk to half the size of the Euro. (more…)
Competing Relationships: Art, Money and the Power of Time and Space
Posted in Art or Commerce?, Exhibition, Installation, Multimedia, tagged 2008, art, artists, audience, biennial, money, museum on April 23, 2008| 2 Comments »
Earlier this spring, as we stepped off the elevator on the top floor of the Whitney Biennial, my company at the museum made the rather amusing but to my mind also very accurate observation that it all looked like “an open studio at an MFA program”. My friend was reacting against the lack of space to move around any one piece, to truly see it and attempt to take it in, without bumping into either people or other works of art. In all, visiting this biennial (as well as the 5 or 6 I’ve seen before this, I should add) is a rather stressful and uncomfortable experience; perhaps especially so for those of us who have the luxury to visit Chelsea weekly and often find ourselves to be the only visitor in a gallery at a time. What’s most annoying to me is that with all the clutter, movement and distracting chatter, it is impossible to establish a new relationship to an artist’s work that I have never seen before. That, it seems, should be one of the biennial’s most important purposes. As it is, it resembles a big, well-attended art fair, both in aesthetics and function, with the exception that sales staff is really hard to come by.
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