The word “expo” conjures big visions: grand pavilions, ferris wheels, exotic exhibitions, a world’s fair. But last Sunday, a different kind of expo opened at MoMA PS1, in Long Island City, Queens — Expo 1: New York, the latest curatorial effort of the institution’s director, Klaus Biesenbach. It’s not quite a world’s fair, but Expo 1, which is the result of a ongoing partnership between MoMA and Volkswagen, riffs on the idea by comprising many pieces that fit loosely together as a whole. It might best be described as an exhibition of exhibitions, or an extremely multifaceted exhibition, or an exhibition that’s “not only an exhibition,” as Biesenbach said at a press preview last week. He also talked about it in terms of wrapping “an envelope around the building [MoMA PS1],” while curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, a co-organizer of the show, called it “almost like a Russian babushka.” This was shortly after Obrist posed the essential question from which Expo 1 sprang: “What is a large-scale exhibition for the 21st century?”
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One of the advantages of living in a city is that the urban environment is in many ways more sustainable than suburbia — mass transit provides easy access to different areas without cars or highways, and dense planning efficiently fits more people into less space. But the quintessential architectural unit of the city, the skyscraper, isn’t always the greenest method of building. Enter “farmscrapers,” a new creation by the France and Belgium-based firm Vincent Callebaut Architects.
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Matt Hope, a Beijing-based artist, is taking his adopted city’s problems head on. Instead of hiding in his apartment and dealing with Beijing’s extreme pollution crisis with the help of air filters and masks, Hope is hitting the streets with a bicycle-cum-sculpture that actively filters the air around it.
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The artist Christo appeared in Cañon City, Colorado, yesterday to announce the postponement of his controversial “Over the River” project. The 77-year-old artist did not give a new date for the project, saying only that the current legal issues need to be resolved before the work can go forward.
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Almost five years ago, Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab released the first iteration of the Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT), a mobile-phone technology that provides poetry to immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border while leading them to water caches in the Southern California desert. In 2010, the project caused a firestorm of controversy on the American political scene, and the artists of EDT/b.a.n.g. lab were investigated by three Republican Congressmen, the FBI Office of Cybercrimes and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where Ricardo Dominguez, co-founder of EDT (with Brett Stalbaum) and principal investigator of b.a.n.g. lab, is an associate professor in the visual arts department.
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While in Santa Fe for the Currents New Media Festival, artist Jason Varone found an early James Turrell skyspace on the grounds of the Center for Contemporary Arts.
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A judge has halted ROAR’s lawsuit against Christo’s “Over the River,” but only so that a previous appeal of the project can be reviewed.
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Just a few months after the exhibition date of Christo’s “Over the River” project was pushed back by a year, Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) officials have announced that the work will be extensively examined for its potential impact on traffic on Highway 50, the central road that runs through Bighorn Sheep Canyon, the site of the installation.
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When BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in April 2010, an estimated 172 million gallons of oil poured into the Gulf of Mexico, creating the worst petroleum-industry spill in U.S. history. The stories and images of crude oil reaching the coastlines of the Gulf States were appalling — pelicans mired in grease, local fishermen devastated, ocean water slick with oil, ecological systems threatened. But that mess is fixed now, all cleaned up by BP. The oceans are clear. Swimming is safe. And we can all happily gobble down as much Louisiana gumbo as we desire. This is what BP would have you believe.
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This week, students at Denver University’s Environmental Law Clinic have taken action to block artist Christo’s massive “Over the River” project to be built almost entirely within the federally-protected Arkansas Canyonlands Area of Colorado.
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