Today, we received a message in a plastic bottle from Pennsylvania-based artist Deidra Krieger. Labeled with a neon-colored sticker with the word “PLAY”, the bottle was covered with handwritten messages on the surface, including “EMPTY POSTconsumer FANTASTIC PLASTIC” near the mouth of the bottle and “MAIL ART” all around. Inside, were 10 “play” stickers and a “Certificate of Authenticity.” Ours was numbered 004.
Art
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Mail Art Bulletin: An Enveloped-sized Pittsburgh House
Tim McCool let us know that when he saw this building in his hometown of Pittsburgh he thought it would be a perfect fit for a standard envelope … and mail art.
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Australian Millionaire’s Museum Tries Something New (And Old)
In 1999, the National Gallery of Australia cancelled a planned exhibition of Sir Charles Saatchi’s Sensation, a collection of art focused on the work of the Young British Artists of the 1990s, on the grounds of the possible offensiveness of many of the works included in the show. Several of those works and artists are now on display in the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) recently opened in Hobart, a small city on the island of Tasmania in the south of Australia. Where the National Gallery quailed at the idea of exhibiting work by Damien Hirst, Chris Ofili and the Chapman brothers, MONA has no such qualms today. Works by these artists feature alongside 400 other pieces from the private collection of David Walsh, a Tasmanian millionaire gambler, art collector and founder of MONA.
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Peruvian Adventures in Brooklyn, a Graphic Review
Many of you will know that I’ve been critical of the conventional art review and how it doesn’t appear well suited to a lot of art that is produced today. So, in the interest of trying new art review forms, I’ve given a shot at using the graphic novel format for my review of Celso’s ¡No Habla Español! at Pandemic Gallery in Williamsburg.
His graphic sensibility seemed a perfect fit for this style. I couldn’t resist producing a short review of the show in this pop culture-friendly form.
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Mail Art Bulletin: Sex & Skulls from Iowa
Mary Rork-Watson is the creator of the newest work to be featured on the Mail Art Bulletin. The Iowa-based artist explains on her website that her work is about: “Revisioning the lost, discarded and ordinary into original works of art.”
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Tonight, Party for Bushwick’s First Ballet
We don’t have definitive proof that Norte Maar’s In the Use of Others for the Change will be the first-ever modern ballet in Bushwick, Brooklyn but we think it just might be.
As an added bonus … tonight (Friday, April 1, 9pm – closing), Bushwick watering hole, Bodega Wine Bar, welcomes fans of Norte Maar for a night of celebration. Eat, drink and be merry and the establishment will donate 10% of all of tonight’s proceeds to the ballet production!
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Rob Pruitt Admits Union Sq Warhol Monument Actually Robert Storr
In a shocking revelation, appropriation artist Rob Pruitt admitted at a cocktail party last night that his “The Andy Monument” (2011), which was unveiled this week in New York’s Union Square, is actually a statue of Robert Storr, Dean of the Yale University School of Art. This news bomb has spectators around the world scratching their heads, wondering both who the hell Robert Storr is, and why Pruitt would prank the good people of New York in such an elaborate — and shiny — way.
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5 Awesome Modernist US Homes Turned Museums
Next month, the very first sunken conversation pit will open to the public as a museum. The Indianapolis Museum of Art plans to open a private residence designed by Eero Saarinen for industrialist J. Irwin Miller as a design and architecture showcase, featuring interiors (and the conversation pit) by Alexander Girard. To celebrate, we’ve collected the best of American’s modernist houses turned museums, magnificent private residences now made public. There’s Philip Johnson’s Glass House, of course, but also Richard Neutra’s Neutra VDL, Louis Sullivan’s early Charnley-Persky House and Richard Meier’s epic bachelor pad, the Rachofsky House. Get ready for real estate envy — but take heart, you can go visit any of these homes.
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Mail Art Bulletin: Wreck & Salvage from Vermont
As promised, today we inaugurate the first edition of our newly minted Mail Art Bulletin, catchy, ain’t it? And we start with this work from a rather hunky talented Vermont-based trio, Wreck & Salvage.
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Math and Art Together at Last
I never would have imagined stuffy mathematics and playful chance could blend in peaceful harmony, let alone lead to the series of subdued yet provocative drawings on display in James Bills’ current exhibition Golden Parachutes and Tin Handcuffs at Yes Gallery in Greenpoint. Only an artist adept in the language of architectural drafting could manage to successfully transform boring data charts into appealing visualizations of randomly generated numbers produced by the throw of a pair of polyhedral dice.
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Interview with Tipi Artist Bently Spang
The following is an interview with artist Bently Spang, whose work appears in the Brooklyn Museum’s current Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains exhibit. Through the interview, Spang explores ideas of Native American identity, cultural stereotypes and the difficulty of showing Native American spiritual objects in museum spaces. The Brooklyn Museum show makes progress, Spang says, but there remain problems to be solved.
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An Attempt to Shatter Native American Stereotypes in Brooklyn
A traditional 19th-century Sioux warrior shirt in the Brooklyn Museum’s current Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains exhibit is made from buckskin, decorated with green and red pigment, hair, feather, fiber and a white and red beaded bear claw motif. Like all Plains war shirts, it could only be worn by males after acts of bravery in battle.
Exhibited just a few feet away, Northern Cheyenne contemporary artist Bently Spang’s “War Shirt #3, The Great Divide” (2006) is made out of photographs, photographic film, sinew, velvet and found objects such as the compact disc pinned on the shirt’s center like a decorative medallion or amulet. Its arms are outstretched through a white plastic stand in the form of a “t” and two tiny white plastic toy horses flank either side of its base. Like the traditional Sioux shirt, Spang’s is now ensconced in a glass case but it has never been — nor will it ever be — worn.
