Art

Pablo Valbuena, The Hague City Hall, Today art, 2008
voir le video ici / see video here

Pablo Valbuena, Entramado, Madrid, 2007/2008
Voir le video ici / see video here

Pablo Valbuena, The Hague City Hall, Today art, 2008

Augmenter l'espace.
Augmented space.

Older post on Pablo Valbuena
 

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Then 19th edition of Art Futura, the Barcelona-based festival of Digital Culture and Creativity, closed on Sunday with the Prize Giving Ceremony. Awards were handed to the creators of best pieces in 3D and digital animation and of the best Spanish videogames. Not one single girl climbed on the podium to receive a prize (that's ok, ladies, i'm not into 3D either) but most of the awardees thanked either their girlfriend or their mum for their support. There was even one 'gracias a mi abuela/thanks to my granny'. How sweet!

I'm back in my kitchen, so time has come to write a couple of posts and share with you what were for me the most interesting moments of the festival.

First one is the presentation of a sculpture called Splash.

Image by Núria Jordán & Salvador Barceló

Mona Kim, Todd Palmer, Olga Subirós and Simon Taylor from Program Collective took the stage to share with us the whole process that lead to the spectacular sculpture they created for the Water for Life exhibition at the Expo Zaragoza 2008, a fair that focused on water and sustainable development.

The challenge was to fill in two entire floors of the Water Tower, the Expo's signature edifice. Two floors might not seem much until you add to that a huge empty space of 40 m high that the designers had to occupy with a work which could somehow balance the architecture and get people to walk up the ramps that wrap around the tower's interior.

Photo: Matias Costa for The New York Times

The result of that brief was a series of installations and a very photogenic hanging sculpture called Splash which freezes in solid form the kinetic properties of water hitting a surface, like the arrival of life on our planet. Video:

As visitors climb to the top of the tower, they can enjoy a panoramic view of the city but also discover all the layers and facets of the sculpture. Besides, Splash's shiny surface reflects the environment around it, becoming a distorted mirror of the video images playing below, and of the people watching it from the ramps that circle around it. The designers had to break down the sculpture into its most basic elements, ending up with 84 giant pieces that had to be suspended from the tower's ceiling by a total of 140 cables, some of them as thin as 3 mm.

Image by plus arquitectura

The forms of this 22.5 meters (74 ft) high installation were generated through digital animation technologies that modeled the deformation and energetic scattering of a drop of water being acted upon by various extreme planetary forces - including gravity, wind and heat. The dynamic simulation systems were carried out by Pere Gifre from IKONIC ARTS.

Image on the homepage by Gallo Quirico.

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Personal comment:

Un peu "facile" comme projet, mais toujours aussi fascinant de voir une forme figée dans son mouvement. Ici une sculpture monumentale et un processus de "digitale" production complexe (design & fabrication).

In the context of the exhibition theanyspacewhatever at the Guggenheim Museum NY, Douglas Gordon will "deploy time as medium" and Hans-Ulrich Obrist will discuss 24h on time. Shall we speak about dimensional interferences? P_

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theanyspacewhatever
Oct 24, 2008 - Jan 7, 2009

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 5th Ave (at 89th St)
New York, NY

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 Originating with a desire to present a contemporary group exhibition that would capture the spirit of the art that emerged during the early 1990s, this presentation has evolved into a collaborative venture among ten artists who share certain strategies and sensibilities: Angela Bulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Though each artist is recognized for his or her own practice, they are linked by a mutual rethinking of the early modernist impulse to conflate art and life. Rather than deploying representational strategies, they privilege experiential, situation-based work over discrete aesthetic objects. The exhibition model—in essence, a spatial and durational event—has become, for these artists, a creative medium in and of itself.

The following programs accompany the exhibition.

Catalysts and Critics: The Art of the 1990s
Fri Oct 24, 9:30-5:30 pm
Columbia University, School of the Arts
Join critics, curators, gallerists, and collectors for this day-long session dedicated to the critical debate surrounding "relational aesthetics" as well as to the shared history of the artists featured in the exhibition. Participants include: Alex Alberro, Claire Bishop, Ina Blom, Massimo de Carlo, Jose Falconi, Nancy Spector, and Andy Stillpass.

Pierre Huyghe: OPENING
Fri Oct 24, 6:30 pm; Mons, Nov 17, Dec 8, 4:30 pm
Museum visitors are invited to a participatory event in which Huyghe transforms the Guggenheim's rotunda to disrupt and disorient the exhibition experience.

Works & Process–World Premiere - NY.2022
Fri Oct 24, Sat Oct 25, 8 pm
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Ari Benjamin Meyers create an original work "about endings and last things" for the Peter B. Lewis Theater. Inspired by the iconic science-fiction movie Soylent Green (1973) depicting a disturbing vision of New York City in 2022, this performance will be accompanied by Staten Island's Richmond County Orchestra (music director Alan Aurelia). Photography by Alex S. MacLean and costumes by Balenciaga complete the work.

Douglas Gordon: 24 hour psycho back and forth and to and fro
Oct 31, Nov 14, Jan 6, 10am – 10am
Deploying time as a medium, Gordon's new iteration of the work 24 Hour Psycho (1993) slows down the 1960 Hitchcock thriller to a full-day cycle on a split screen installation, running the film both forward and in reverse. The museum will remain open through the night each time this work is shown.

24-hours on the Concept of Time
Tue Jan 6 – Wed Jan 7, 6 pm – 6pm
Continuing non-stop for 24 hours this rich and polyvalent event organized by Nancy Spector and Hans Ulrich Obrist expands upon the theme of time—an interest central to the artists represented in the exhibition. Guests from a wide spectrum of fields and disciplines share their philosophical, sociological, economic, theological and aesthetic perspectives on time.

FILM SCREENINGS
Rirkrit Tiravanija: CHEW THE FAT
In conjunction with the exhibition, Tiravanija's documentary film provides a perspective on the art of the 1990s through interviews with artists, including those participating in the exhibition.

Suns 1 pm and 3 pm
Mons 2 pm and 3:30 pm
Fri Nov 14, Tue Dec 2, 8 pm

Anna Sanders Films
Founded in 1997 by Pierre Huyghe, Charles de Meaux, Philippe Parreno and the association of contemporary art distribution (Xavier Douroux, Franck Gautherot) in collaboration with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Anna Sanders Films brings a new language of imagery to cinema, creating a hybrid form between film and the visual arts.

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Fabricateurs d'espaces
17 October 2008 - 4 January 2009
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Björn Dahlem, Jeppe Hein, Vincent Lamouroux, Guillaume Leblon, Rita McBride, Evariste Richer, Michael Sailstorfer, Hans Schabus
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Curator: Nathalie Ergino ; assistant curator: Aude Merquiol


Institut d'art contemporain
Villeurbanne – Lyon
11, rue Docteur Dolard
69100 Villeurbanne
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http://www.i-art-c.org

 The Institut d'art contemporain presents a new generation of artists on the European scene who are concerned by questions of sculpture in the broad sense.

Differing from the sculpture of the past decade with its mainly post-ready-made techniques or assemblies of recovered materials, this new 'extended sculpture' simultaneously forms set-up, installation and architecture and uses space as the actual material for sculpture.

Fabricateurs d'espaces groups eight internationally reputed artists. The works shown are recent or made for the occasion. Sculptors of space or 'spacers', these artists use a vocabulary of forms derived from minimal art or land art.

The many meanings of space are explored - space generated by the body of the spectator, architectural space, mental and imaginary space, cosmic space, etc. Space is probed, constrained, gone beyond and reinvented.

These artists use the actual gestures of sculpture to make space interact with the material nature of their works, works that paradoxically generate the immaterial.

Here, the quest for 'elsewhere' is not necessarily on a cosmic scale but accompanies a wish to be free of gravity. The philosphical and perceptual approach that runs through the artistic approaches and works in this exhibition addresses the notion of Utopia and the quest for a future in the process of reinventing itself.

This exhibition is the fruit of a partnership with the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Siegen, within the framework of the series of exhibitions entitled European Partners initiated by the Goethe-Institut and Kunststiftung NRW (North Rhine-Westphalia Art Foundation).
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Institut d'art contemporain
11, rue Docteur Dolard
69100 Villeurbanne
T + 33 (0)4 78 03 47 00
F + 33 (0)4 78 03 47 09
iac@i-art-c.org
http://www.i-art-c.org

Image:  Michael Sailstorfer
Unendliche Säule, 2006
Copyright: DR

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