Reporter Carol Vogel wrote last week in the New York Times about an upcoming Antony Gormley public art residency with the Madison Square Park Conservancy. All well and good: Gormley is bringing his nude sculptures in multiples to the environs of the park on 23rd Street. He’s a Turner Prize winner. He’s fresh off a living art project in London’s Trafalgar Square. He’s a finalist in some big secret project for the 2012 Olympic Games. But why, according to Vogel, is his commission any less “improbable” than other recent New York showings from the likes of Roxy Paine, Olafur Eliasson, or Christo and Jeanne-Claude? And what, really, should we expect or demand from the realm of public art?
Anish Kapoor‘s bigtime solo exhibition at the Royal Academy ends next Friday, and with its deadline looming The Guardianwonders: how in the h-e-double-hockeysticks are they going to clean up that mess? You may recall that one of the main attractions in Kapoor’s eponymous show involves a cannon firing globs of red wax into a wall. Another work in the classical galleries is a length of oily red paint with a hulking door-shaped wax monolith at one end. The Royal Academy curators aren’t giving up their Fairy Godmother sanitizing secrets, but we know they must have a few tricks up their collective sleeve. Which left us pondering which other art exhibition remnants should be left to the pros of Sunshine Cleaning...
So, this is really cool. The BBC reports that “an international team of architects, artists and engineers” has dreamed up a centerpiece for London’s Olympic village called The Cloud. The observation deck/park consists of 400-foot tall mesh towers and a series of interconnected plastic bubbles that can be used to display images and data — like weather information, spectator numbers, race results. The inflatable elements would rest on top of the towers, stabilized by metal cables. Technology, similar to what’s used to earthquake-proof Japanese skyscrapers, would minimize the effects of the wind.
Celebrated for his gigantic, stainless steel Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago’s Millennium Park, Anish Kapoor is changing the cultural environment with his public works.
The Indian-born, London-based artist represented Britain at the 1990 Venice Biennale and took home the 1991 Turner Prize with his monochromatic, pigment-covered, abstract forms. Since then, he’s carved mysterious cavities in stone, made massive wax installations, and fabricated shiny concave disks — like the enormous Sky Mirror in New York’s Rockefeller Center — that dynamically reflect their surroundings.
Anish Kapoor, he of The Bean in Chicago and the sky mirror at Rockefeller Center, has an eponymous show opening at the Royal Academy of Arts in London on September 26, and he’s launching it with a literal bang. His piece “Shooting Into the Corner,” featured in the exhibition, is a cannon shooting red wax projectiles at regular intervals into, yes, a corner of the gallery space. The wax will build up over the course of the exhibition — on display until December 11 — creating a one-off sculpture. A Turner Prize winner in 1991, Kapoor’s large-scale public installations have garnered the most attention in his decades-long career, though we’d hazard to guess that firing pigments from a cannon into a gallery will come in close second.
VIEW THE SLIDESHOW HERE>> TEFAF Maastricht 2009 — which took place in Maastricht, the Netherlands from March 13 to 22 — was billed as “the world’s most influential art and antiques fair” and it certainly lives up to its boast. We arrived from Amsterdam on the final day of the fair to experience it for the first time. Read More »
