“Killer Ring” By Tobias Wong, Photo Courtesy the New York Times
I was saddened to hear of the passing of Tobias Wong. Tobias was a young artist / designer living in New York City. Tobias blurred the lines between Art and Design and made us more aware of the american consumer culture.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/06/27/style/20100627WONG.html
I have started a group on LinkedIn called “Artists, Science and Museums”.
LinkedIn Link:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2869188
A networking group for artists, designers and museum professionals working in the field of Science Centers and Children’s Museums to share ideas about incorporating sculpture into science exhibitions.
Antoine Predock skiing on the roof of one of his buildings.
I am sitting on the deck in Ubud, Bali, thinking “who are my heroes?”. Below is a short list. They all are:
-Mark
Antoine Predock – He has combined Architecture, Art, Motorcycles, Scuba, Skiing and Dance, and his buildings are damn sexy!
Ingo Maurer – Has combined sculpture with lighting using a atelier structure for his business
Gaetano Pesce – An artist /designer, who creates “one off” functional Art.
Vito Acconci – Started as a Poet, then Sculptor, crossed over into architecture, industrial design and landscape architecture. Link to MIT Show Recent article about studio
James Ossi – I met James in 1990 and it changed my life. An artist who makes machines that create square bubbles?!! He was living in a farmhouse with a studio in the back and teaching.
Ron Arad – Industrial Designer, started by making Hi fidelity stereo equipment out of concrete, went on to have a furniture studio and now an architecture firm.
The Eames “Do-Nothing Machine” is one of my favorite sculptures.
Ray and Charles Eames on Wikapedia
Exhibition design of Ray and Charles Eames
Art, Kinetic Sculpture, Science Center
Reuben Margolin, a Bay Area visionary and longtime maker, creates totally singular techno-kinetic wave sculptures. Using everything from wood to cardboard to found and salvaged objects, Reubens artwork is diverse, with sculptures ranging from tiny to looming, motorized to hand-cranked. Focusing on natural elements like a discrete water droplet or a powerful ocean eddy, his work is elegant and hypnotic.
Art, Exhibition Costs, Interactive Exhibit Philosophy, Kinetic Sculpture, Museum Planning, Project Management, Types of Museums
Natural History Museum London, Photo by DAVID ILIFF
“A museum is a “permanent institution in the service of society and of its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment, for the purposes of education, study, and enjoyment”, as defined by the International Council of Museums.[1] The UK Museums Association definition (adopted 1998)[2] is:
“Museums enable people to explore collections for inspiration, learning and enjoyment. They are institutions that collect, safeguard and make accessible artifacts and specimens, which they hold in trust for society.”
Etymology
The English “museum” comes from the Latin word, and is pluralized as “museums” (or, rarely, “musea”). It is originally from the Greek (Mouseion)[3], which denotes a place or temple dedicated to the Muses (the patron divinities in Greek mythology of the arts), and hence a building set apart for study and the arts,[4] especially the institute for philosophy and research at the Library established at Alexandria by Ptolemy I Soter c280 BCE.[5] The first museum/library considered to be the one of Plato in Athens[6]. However, Pausanias gives another place called “Museum”, namely a small hill in Classical Athens opposite the Akropolis. The hill was called Mouseion after Mousaious, a man who used to sing on the hill and died there of old age and was subsequently buried there as well.[7]
Overview
Museums collect and care for objects of scientific, artistic, or historical importance and make them available for public viewing through exhibits that may be permanent or temporary. Most large museums are located in major cities throughout the world and more local ones exist in smaller cities, towns and even the countryside. Many museums offer programs and activities for a range of audiences, including adults, children, and families, as well as those for more specific professions. Programs for the public may consist of lectures or tutorials by the museum faculty or field experts, films, musical or dance performances, and technology demonstrations. Many times, museums concentrate on the host region’s culture. Although most museums do not allow physical contact with the associated artifacts, there are some that are interactive and encourage a more hands-on approach. Modern trends in museology have broadened the range of subject matter and introduced many interactive exhibits, which give the public the opportunity to make choices and engage in activities that may vary the experience from person to person. With the advent of the internet, there are growing numbers of virtual exhibits, i.e. web versions of exhibits showing images and playing recorded sound.
Museums are usually open to the general public, sometimes charging an admission fee. Some museums are publicly funded and have free entrance, either permanently or on special days, e.g. once per week or year.
Museums are usually not run for the purpose of making a profit, unlike private galleries which more often engage in the sale of objects. There are governmental museums, non-governmental or non-profit museums, and privately owned or family museums. Museums can be a reputable and generally trusted source of information about cultures and history.
An installation by the Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto comes to life in the vast drill hall of the Park Avenue Armory. It opens on Thursday and runs through June 14. More Photos >
Article by: Randy Kennedy
New York Times, May 13, 2009
The Park Avenue Armory was built as the epitome of Manhattan masculinity, a Gilded Age boys’ club for its wealthy regiment, an imposing palace of oak paneling, ironwork and ornamental armor under the majestic gaze of many a stuffed moose head.
So there is a whole category of adjectives not often seen in the vicinity of its name, words like curvaceous, diaphanous, voluptuous, lissome. Or, of course, fleshy, glandular, uvular, uterine.
But over the past several days inside the armory’s vast drill hall, one of the largest unobstructed spaces in the city, the Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto has been hard at work with a small crew of riggers and needle-and-thread-wielding helpers building a sprawling version of one of his signature biomorphic sculptures that requires all of those words and a few more to describe adequately.
Made of hundreds of yards of stretched Lycra tulle, it looks something like a superfine spider web, laden with egg sacks, that has drifted down onto the skeleton of a forgotten species of dinosaur shaped like a cephalopod.
On Thursday it will open to visitors, who are invited for the next month to look at it, walk through it, touch it, lie down in it, even smell it. And to size it up as the first work of art to be commissioned solely by the conservancy that took over the long-neglected armory in 2006 and is seeking to remake it into the kind of raw, urban, big-art destination that is represented in London by the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern or in Paris by the Palais de Tokyo.
Rebecca Robertson, the armory’s president and chief executive, said that the selection of Mr. Neto, whose work is crowd-pleasing but also uncanny and almost unknown to American public-art audiences, was intended to begin defining the institution’s identity, after earlier collaborations with art organizations like Creative Time and the Art Production Fund.
“The guiding thought is that this shouldn’t be a mausoleum,” Ms. Robertson said last Wednesday. “It should be a really dynamic space where you never know what to expect.”
As if by way of illustration, at that moment carpenters were swarming around the drill hall, racing to dismantle the booths of the annual International Fine Art Fair, while in a room off to the side Mr. Neto and his workers were carefully rolling up the long Lycra socks that would soon hang down from the hall’s barrel-vaulted ceiling like stalactites.
Two days earlier bags and boxes of ground spices — cumin, black pepper, ginger, cloves and turmeric, 1,650 pounds’ worth — had arrived, to be sifted into the bottoms of these socks so that when they were suspended, the weight would stretch them, and the spices would stain the tulle, giving it a kind of corporeal mottle. Within a few hours after the spice operation got under way, the entire drill hall began to smell like a hot curry.
Ms. Robertson said that when Mr. Neto, 44, came to New York from his home in Rio de Janeiro last year to get a sense of the drill hall’s 55,000 square feet, he first saw it at night after a boozy dinner and he walked to the middle of its old pine floor — once used for tennis, with green paint and baselines still visible — and lay down, spread-eagle.
Over the course of several long days last week as the sculpture began to take form, he could often be seen pirouetting and striking gymnastic poses as he explained how it should look. While its design relies heavily on computers and engineering calculations, sewing machines and long, blunt needles were the most frequently employed tools in the drill hall.
“You really have to use your whole body to make this work,” said Mr. Neto, who has titled the installation “anthropodino,” perhaps to suggest a sort of late-surrealist rejoinder to the American Museum of Natural History on the other side of Central Park. “It is a sculpture that begins in one form and takes another and another and then a last form, and in between is a kind of dance.”
Tom Eccles, the executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, who serves as an art adviser to the armory and is the installation’s curator, said that the challenge of making art there, in addition to competing with the history of the place, is the sheer size.
“The drill hall is kind of awe-inspiring and terrifying at the same time for an artist,” he said. “In a way, you have to be spectacular but without making it seem like just a spectacle.”
There were a few nail-biting moments during the construction. A rip appeared in part of the Lycra canopy stretched tightly from the hall’s trusses. A few of the precision-cut plywood “bones” that make up the archaeological-looking ground structure didn’t fit together. Mr. Neto, who said he had recently re-watched Fellini’s “8 ½,” at times resembled the besieged director played by Marcello Mastroianni, moving from one swirl of concern to the next.
But more often, he seemed to revel in the chaos and relax in direction proportion to its intensity. On Thursday as a young clothing designer, Hannah Fallon, hunched beneath an expanse of filament-like fabric with a sewing machine to fix a flaw — “I felt like a silkworm,” she said — Mr. Neto stretched himself out in front of her to watch, lying on his side like a wild-haired Brazilian odalisque.
Around him nearly everyone, including the riggers, walked around in stocking feet to keep from damaging the tulle. And despite the presence of hydraulic lifts and trucks, the whole thing began to take on the feel of a pajama party. (It is no coincidence that a Google image search for “Lycra tulle” turns up mostly pictures of nighties or of Mr. Neto’s work.)
By Monday afternoon, energy was flagging, and Mr. Neto himself was getting a bit slap-happy, approaching a group of dozing workers and trying to rally them by doing a little samba: “So this thing goes here.” (Hip shake.) “And then this other thing goes there.” (Hip shake.)
Behind him the sculpture was nearly finished, rendering the drill hall almost unrecognizable. As painstakingly as he had planned it, Mr. Neto said, it still seemed like something that had generated itself.
“In the end,” he said, “there’s a way these pieces express themselves that is beyond the rationality of the design I make. You know, man? I just sit back and watch it come to life.”
Mark is available for consultations. Feel free to contact him by email at mark@walhimer.com.
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