Image of the Day

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Ai Weiwei, Map of China, 2004.
Fabricated of wood from dismantled Qing Dynasty temples.
On Wednesday, the Chinese government, following through
on an order issued last summer, razed the artist's studio
on the outskirts of Shanghai.

Mütter Mart

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I'm kind of intrigued by this Discovery Channel show "Oddities," about the various goings-on, inventory, and clients of Obscura Antiques & Oddities, a shop in the East Village. In this clip, former mortician turned fashion designer Laura Flook (pictured below on an embalming table she also found at Obscura) shops for vintage corsets.


More on "Oddities" here.

[via Refinery 29]

That New Phoebe Philo

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Apparently it's Céline week on Pacific Standard again. Tough to choose but here are some of my favorites from the pre-fall collection.




See the whole collection and many others at style.com.

Now We are Delivered fromthe Imbecile Tyranny of Genres

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Pablo Picasso, Guitar and Bottle of Bass, 1913

This is the last weekend to see the Seattle Art Museum's massive Picasso show, and the museum is staying open till midnight every day through Monday. If you haven't gone and have a chance, I'd recommend checking it out. With so many lesser-known works on display, the exhibition offered perspectives on Picasso I hadn't seen or thought about. I loved the etchings and other black and white works, and many of the paintings. The videos were really cool. I especially enjoyed the sculpture, and there's a lot of it. I was probably most excited by this quote, a reaction to his groundbreaking 1913 still-life Guitar and Bottle of Bass:

"Now we are delivered from the imbecile tyranny of genres." –Art critic André Salmon

I still have to say that I like Picasso more in theory than in practice – I like the ideas but I don't really connect with the work much of the time – but I'm glad I got to see the show and I think it's possible I will have a Picasso revelation at some point. Sometimes it's like that, it takes going back to something many times before you really figure it out.

If you haven't seen the show, or want to see it again, you can get info and tickets at seattleartmuseum.org. [And if you want my recommendation – really, why wouldn't you – I'd suggest going on the later side and getting venison at Lecōsho afterward.]

Mad Dash

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A poster by Dash Snow from The Hole NYC's Postermat show, which features artwork by Wes Lang, Andrew Kuo, Aurel Schmidt, Kembra Pfahler, Dorothy Iannone, Futura, Cass Bird, Hanna Liden, Jack Pierson, Jesse Edwards.... the list goes on seemingly forever.

Click here to see more and to order prints (while they last) for only $75 each.

Best Foot Forward

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Isabel Marant Spring 2011.
From the looks of it, soon to be available at net-a-porter
(possibly with the option of a higher heel?
which would be wonderful).

Image of the Day

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Patrick Tuttofuoco: Ice Mask, 2009 (Inkjet print, 42 x 29.7 cm), from Those Ghosts, a two-person exhibition featuring work by John Kleckner and Tuttofuoco at Peres Projects, Hamburg. More info here.

The 41st Chamber

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Happy birthday Raekwon the Chef


Raekwon "Knowledge God"
from Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... (Loud, 1995)

Skate On

An image from the Spring/Summer 2011 Céline campaign – Daria Werbowy photographed by Juergen Teller. Kind of reminds me of an old Stussy campaign. Unexpected but I like it a lot, it's good to mix things up.

Sculpting Text

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Gilbert & George, Any Port in a Storm, 1973 (Mailed exhibition announcement card)

This morning I got an announcement from ZieherSmith Gallery in New York about their great-looking new show. Sculpture in So Many Words: Text Pieces 1960–75 "examines a body of work in which the most material of the visual arts was reduced to the least substantial of materials: ideas." It features work by Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Joseph Beuys, Mel Bochner, George Brecht, Dan Flavin, Dan Graham, Jasper Johns, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Fred Sandback, Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, and many others, including those shown here.

Stephen Kaltenbach, Build a Reputation, 1969 (Magazine ad)


Richard Serra, Lead Shot, 1970-71 (Magazine insert)

Curator Dakin Hart:

Why call these text pieces sculptures? Many of the artists defined their text work as sculpture and referred to it, both explicitly or implicitly, in their titles. Moreover, typical of art of this era, all of these works are concerned with the physical and conceptual place of the art object and the object of art in the real world. By the early 1960s music, film, dance and other forms of performance were infiltrating the visual arts, even as the rigid distinctions between painting and sculpture were crumbling in works such as Robert Rauschenberg’s combines and Jasper Johns’ object paintings. Sculpture, however, was still the de facto mental model for artworks designed to occupy, and exist in, real space—as opposed to hanging on walls as representational windows onto something else. What the artists making text sculpture realized was that working with ideas in the form of language allowed them the conceptual freedom required for rapid, inexpensive, logistics-free prototyping. There is no space in which an idea cannot be installed, no material of which it cannot be made, no shape it cannot assume, no conceptual feat it cannot attempt.

N. E. Thing & Company Ltd., IT, 1966 (Mailed exhibition poster)

Get more info and see more images from the show, which runs this Thursday through February 12, at ZieherSmith.

Image of the Day

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Ezra Stoller (American, 1915–2004): Chamberlain Cottage – Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Wayland, MA 1942 (Gelatin Silver Print) on view through February 12 at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York as part of a retrospective of Stoller's photographs of iconic modern architecture. From the release:

A pioneer in the field of architectural photography, Ezra Stoller was commissioned by architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Paul Rudolph, Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Marcel Breuer and Richard Meier [and Northwest modernist Arthur Erickson -ed.], because of his unique ability to capture the building according to the architect’s vision and to lock it into the architectural canon. His photographs convey a three-dimensional experience of architectural space through a two-dimensional medium, with careful attention to vantage point and lighting conditions, as well as to line, color, form and texture.

Visit Yossi Milo Gallery in person or online for more images and info.

Image of the Day

.The Barneys windows downtown are really cool right now, they all have fluorescent lightbulbs wrapped in colored cellophane. This photo doesn't really do it justice and I actually think the Lanvin window is my favorite, I just snapped this quickly yesterday on the way to a meeting. Anyway they're worth a look if you're downtown – I might take some more pics if I get the chance. (See some process shots at our friend Ashley's blog – she works on the Barneys windows.)

Lost and Found

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Vivian Maier, a heretofore unknown street photographer who died two years ago at the age of 83, is the subject of a new solo show that started this past Friday at the Chicago Cultural Center.

The story of Maier's discovery is a romantic one for all the thrifters and flea-marketers among us. In 2007, John Maloof, then a 26-year old real estate agent who was working on a book about his Chicago neighborhood, stumbled upon a trove of over 100,000 of Maier's negatives at an auction, and set about scanning, preserving, and introducing the images to the world, while slowly piecing together the photographer's biography.

Maier was born in New York and worked as a nanny in Chicago for 40 years, beginning in about 1956. In her spare time she traveled the streets, mostly in Chicago and New York, with her camera. It's too early to say what position she'll ultimately occupy in the canon of modern photography, but either way that doesn't really affect the power of her photographs. They capture the people and scenes of an era with a clear eye for the humor and pathos of a moment, and a tangible sense of the weight, and fragility, of the human condition.

It was hard to choose just a few to include here. See more images at Maloof's blog, and watch a piece about Maier's work below.

[hat tip to friend, and friend of the blog, Kristina]

Watch
the full
episode. See more Chicago Tonight.

A Visual Life

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The Sartorialist: A Visual Life is a short documentary on Scott Schuman, aka street fashion photographer The Sartorialist, by Acne Production for Intel.


Also recently brought to my attention:
"The Sartorialist is Dirty & Depraved"
by (ahem) Karl Lagerfeld.

At the Intersection

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A few spreads from issues 4 and 5 of Club Donny, a "Strictly Unedited Journal on the Personal Experience of Nature in the Urban Environment." The magazine solicits photographs through its web site, and prints and binds them as a stack of double-sided posters, allowing readers to flip through the publication or remove individual posters to view them in full.

Club Donny is assembled by graphic designer Samira Ben Laloua, artist Frank Bruggeman, and landscape architect/art historian Ernst van der Hoeven, and is published biannually in the Netherlands by Post Editions. See more, subscribe, and purchase back issues here.

[hat tip to Brian Kennon of 2nd Cannons Publications, via Art Forum]