Scaffolding, Scribbles, Poemfields, Garden Sculptures Ontologies: More Art

Yes, more art. In late May I saw David Byington’s The New City @ Leslie Tonkonow: etching-esque oil paintings depicting scaffolded cities of extraction and naked infrastructure.

Then Christopher Wool paintings and sculptures @ Luhring Augustine:

Cildo Meireles @ Galerie Lelong

Ceilo Meireles — Cildo Meireles (via Lelong; my own images were terrible)

Pam Lins’s “model model model” @ Rachel Uffner

In the 1920s, the golden age of rationalized labor and assembly lines, abstract models of all types suffused artistic and architectural culture. Soviet artists especially embraced model making, and nowhere more zealously than at VKhUTEMAS (The Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops), the school of art, architecture, and design founded in Moscow in 1920, renamed VKhUTEIN (The Higher Artistic and Technical Institute) in 1927, and dissolved in 1930. Opening three years after the October Revolution, the school was known for its radical pedagogical approach and Constructivist connections. Student models from the “Space” course, taught by the architect Nikolai Ladovskii, investigated formal and spatial relationships, but far from being useful designs to be built later, elsewhere, at a larger scale, they invoked works by Kasimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, and Vladimir Tatlin—all of whom taught at VKhUTEMAS. Aiming to replace outmoded bourgeois art forms, avant-garde Soviets turned to models: objects defying classification that promised a utopian dissolution of the categories of artistic production.

Stan VanDerBeek‘s Poemfield series + prints @ Andrea Rosen

VanDerBeek first worked on Poemfield at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey and then as an artist-in-residence at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Originally conceived as a multi-screen installation,Poemfield was eventually included in VanDerBeek’s ambitious, moving image and sound environments such as Movie-Dromeand Cine Dreams. In each individual film, powerful sequences of words gradually emerge from, and back into, kinetic mosaics of glittering geometric graphics. The images seen within each projection are the visual manifestations of unique poems written in a specific computer language, then processed by an IBM 7094, and ultimately output onto the surface of a cathode ray tube and filmed.

As a pioneer collaboration between artists and scientists, Poemfield was realized by VanDerBeek with the Bell Labs computer programmer and physicist Ken Knowlton. One of several programs developed by Knowlton, BEFLIX (short for Bell Labs Flicks), was used to make Poemfield and is considered by AT&T as one of the first computer animation languages.

“Black Mountain. An Interdisciplinary Experiment 1933 – 1957″ @ Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

Black Mountain College @ Hamburger Bahnhof

“And away with the minutes. Dieter Roth and Music” @ Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

Museum der Dinge: Werkbundarchiv, Berlin, with its gleefully mixed-up ontologies of classification: plastics, measuring tools, imitations, Turkish everyday things…

Superkilen Park, Copenhagen, by BIG Architects, Topotek 1, + Superflex

Iwan Baan's much better image #1 — Iwan Baan’s much better image #1

Iwan Baan's much better image #2 — Iwan Baan’s much better image #2

Terry Winters @ Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen

Winters, "Influencing Machine" — Winters, “Influencing Machine”

“Africa: Architecture, Culture, Identity” @ Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen

In May/June I also saw “Everything Is Design: The Work of Paul Rand” @ the Museum of the City of New York; Nina Beier @ Metro Pictures; Candida Höfer @ Sean Kelly; and Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian @ Callicoon Fine Arts (ugh). I regret missing William Larson’s “Fireflies” at Gitterman Gallery.

Upon my return from European adventure, in July, I saw Wolfgang Tillmans’s “Book for Architects” at the Metropolitan Museum. Then I visited “All Watched Over” [by machines of loving grace], featuring arts of information processing, @ James Cohan.

“Hello Walls,” a group exhibition of wall painting, with fantastic juxtapositions, @ Gladstone

Angela Bulloch’s “Topology: No Holes, Four Tails” @ Mary Boone

I'd like to think that these electrical cords are the "tails" they're referring to. — I’d like to think that these electrical cords are the “tails” they’re referring to.

“Objects Food Rooms” @ Tanya Bonakdar, an homage to Stein’s Tender Buttons: “All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. / The difference is spreading.”