October 12, observed yesterday as a holiday, is most commonly known as Columbus Day in the United States, but is also recognized as Dia de la Raza throughout Latin America, as well as Indigenous People’s Day. Fraught with controversy, the various iterations of this holiday reflect the range of perspectives on Christopher Columbus and his legacies. The Columbus Day of my youth celebrates the heroic “discoverer” of the Americas, playing up mythical stories of his genius on insisting the world was round, and often neglecting the icky bits about the ensuing genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
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In order to properly follow up on my experience with Creative Time’s social practice summit, and given my heretofore lack of involvement with #OccupyWallStreet protests, I was pretty much obligated to visit Creative Time’s Living As Form exhibition at the historic Essex Street Market. I mean, the art included, for the most part, is all about progressivism and alternative modes of operating within our faulty society. And community! I love that word, community! As a dutiful citizen of the world, surely taking in an exhibition dedicated to valuing people doing stuff together over commercially-based, materialized practice would amount to me contributing something, somehow. Right?
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Last Friday, I attended Creative Time’s third annual progressive social practice-centered summit, this year held in conjunction with their Living As Form exhibition. The summit was a day-long affair, stuffed to the gills with presentations about current examples of the intersections of art and politics. Over thirty artists, groups and thinkers presented in quick-fire, 8-minute succession, tackling a wide range of concerns, from the recent protests in Madison against the union-busting legislature to squatting to abortion, among other, less specific but otherwise community-oriented projects.
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LONDON — I thought I was going to see Jonathan Safran Foer live and in person Monday night. Sure, it seemed odd that he would randomly be in London with no very recently published book to tour, but who am I to know the details of an acclaimed author’s personal schedule? Literary fun plus art means I’m in.
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LONDON — We are now six days into the unrest that started in the Greater London neighborhood of Tottenham, spread throughout London and then erupted across England. London has been relatively — but tenuously — calmer than it was on Monday night, when looting, arson and violence escalated and reached new and disparate parts of the city … What’s been more interesting to me, however, has been the ways in which many denizens of England have established identities as non-rioters or anti-rioters and expressed criticism through social media and images circulated through it.
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A Hedonist’s Guide to Art may as well be called A Hedonist’s Guide to the Art World. Released last winter, the book is a collaboration between Artica, an eGallery for contemporary art, and Hg2, a series of luxury travel guides. It’s comprised of short essays from about 60 people from various reaches of the upper echelons of the London art world. The essays are divided between five chapter headings — ideas, lifestyle, the market, the art itself and “inner workings.” The content is most often in the form of a personal anecdote. That said, these tidbits are best nibbled on in small doses — it’s slow-going to read very many of these essays all at once.
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Editor’s note: Vermin.me is a worldwide sculptural installation initiated by Jamie Burmeister. The Nebraska-bsed artist mailed us a box of three clay figures and we asked Janelle Grace, the London-based managing editor of Hyperallergic LABS, to take one of the figures on a trip.
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Hey readers, I’m Janelle, the managing editor of the Hyperallergic LABS tumblelog. For the un-initiated, “tumblelog” is the name for a blog hosted on the free platform Tumblr, which utilizes a fairly simple interface for short-form posts. Images are often the most popular posts on Tumblr, but text audio, and video formats are also very easily posted. On Hyperallergic LABS, our posts usually follow a weekly theme, mixed in with blog posts from Hyperallergic. Here’s a quick introduction to what LABS is all about and how Tumblr works.
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The 2010 Turner Prize was announced last night, and Susan Philipsz was named the winner (against betting company William Hill’s unlikely odds of 16/5). Her piece, “Lowlands Away” (2010), has been much ballyhooed as the first sound installation to win the award for UK artists under the age of 50. The piece, a critic favorite before the announcement, is an easily digestible recording of the artist singing a traditional Scottish folk song. It was originally installed along various river-adjacent alleyways in Glasgow, re-contextualizing the spaces with the lament of a man whose lover had drowned.
Philipsz’s work is considerably less politicized than that of her fellow nominees …
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This past weekend was the annual Frieze Art Fair, held in London. Featuring over 150 galleries from all the best Western nations (and maybe a few others), the Frieze Art Fair is one of the largest and most notable in the world. This was my first outing to Frieze, and people keep asking me “How was it?” I think “how it was” can best be summed up as the top 5 parts of Frieze I actually remember (presented here in no particular order).
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