Edward Burtynsky, Nickel Tailings No. 36, Sudbury, Ontario 1996
Things fall apart: mnartists.org has a great new feature called 10 Questions in which critics, this time including Patricia Briggs, Alex Starace, and Tyler Green, answer questions generated by forum visitors. Green, of Modern Art Notes, on the biggest non-art-world factor influencing artists: “Degeneration, particularly of societies, cultures, and political systems…We see it in the work of Jason Middlebrook’s works-on-paper of societies ‘advancing’ to a point of environmental collapse, or in Ed Burtynsky’s photos [above] of what we are doing to the planet. Hans Haacke and Raymond Pettibon looked at the American political system in their recent solo shows at Paula Cooper and Regen Projects respectively. Artists such as Enrique Metinides go back into their old work to present violent images, installing them recently to remind us how fascinated Americans are with destruction.”
TEDtalks: Kind of a big brother to Minneapolis’ PUSH conference, TED features big-name thinkers, including Al Gore, New York Times writer David Pogue, MacArthur fellow and Sustainable South Bronx founder Majora Carter, and others. Now their talks at TED 2006 are being made available as free podcasts. (Burtynsky, by the way, was the winner of the 2005 TEDPrize; click on his Worldchanging link to see what he did with the $100k award.)
Artist/Curators: Brian Sholis traces a recent trend: artist-curated summer group exhibitions–A four-dimensional being writes poetry on a field with sculptures, curated by Charles Ray, at Matthew Marks; Justine Kurland and Dan Torop’s A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts at Mitchell-Innes & Nash; Arturo Herrera’s I’m Yours Now at Sikkema Jenkins; Banks Violette‘s War on .45 / My Mirrors Are Painted Black (For You) at Bortolami Dayan; and others.
Free Adam Curtis! Stay Free! tips us off that Adam Curtis’ BBC documentaries The Power of Nightmares (mentioned here) and The Century of the Self are available for free download at the Internet Archive. Because of the archival and found footage of his work, Curtis says getting rights to produce a DVD would be “prohibitively costly and a nightmare – no pun intended.”
Canine choreography: New Art finds some early films of William Wegman, from synchronized Weimaraners to comedic gags about crooked fingers and a dog spelling bee.