Yes indeed. Come August and September, Tóxico will take over this lil’ beauty here called Casa del Lago, by the Chapultepec lake, right smack in the middle of Mexico City.
Plans for the space started to unfurl Friday night over wine, and I am every time more enchanted with the idea of working from here for two months, and filling it up with things and ideas.
(For starters, daily breakfasts on the terrace, no?)
(Gracias a Willy K. por la invitación.)
(Y a Andrés por los vinos.)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJD2xlVcgRI&feature=share[/youtube]
This video might be from way back in 2007, but Hussain Chalayan ‘Transformer Dresses’ are quite amazing even as we step into 2012.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxW18RDJk6A&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
Happy 91st birthday Ray Bradbury!
(Travel back to the 70s and listen to him talk of literature and art as the safety valve of humanity.)
(v Open Culture)
Good to see Candy Chang–fellow TED Fellow–and catch up over wine yesterday night.
Candy is cofounder of Civic Center: an art/design studio based in New Orleans that works to make cities more comfortable for people. “Civic Center blends art, design, education, research, and urban planning to create spaces and tools that help people navigate their cities and improve their neighborhoods. We believe that public spaces should inspire conversation, make the machinery of the city more accessible, and restore a sense of dignity to the public realm.” And many of their projects offer simple, low tech solutions with exponential community-building results. Because, with a background in architecture, graphic design and urban planning, Candy combines these disciplines to make urban information and communication tools more accessible and engaging through field research, design and the creative use of public space. Her recent work includes a guide to street vending in New York City, air quality mapping on mobile devices, participatory post-it note installations on local rents, a little book about skyscrapers, and flash cards on tenants’ rights.
Take a look at Civic Center’s website right here.
In today’s newspaper i read about six Italian ex Costra Nostra mafia members who are now guarding the painting of a virgin in a museum in Sicilia. “Yesterday they killed people, today they guard museums” reads the headline.
And so I remembered these images from Andy Freeberg’s project on Russian art museum guards.
More here.
“Oliver Sacks, the famous neuroscientist and author, can’t recognize faces. Neither can Chuck Close, the great artist known for his enormous paintings of … that’s right, faces.
Oliver and Chuck–both born with the condition known as Face Blindness–have spent their lives decoding who is saying hello to them. You can sit down with either man, talk to him for an hour, and if he sees you again just fifteen minutes later, he will have no idea who you are.”
Listen to a fascinating WNYC Podcast where both Close and Sacks talk about their Face Blindness, and speak about how their work has been determined by their dissabilities; Close for example was driven to paint portraits to commit them to memory–since he has photographic remembrance for flat unmovable pictures.
Well worth the listen, so click click click.
(Gracias Maria Popova)
*
“What is this fear of seduction? A fear that art may have power over us rather than we over it? A desire to reside in the rational space of the head, rather than to be drawn into the body by beauty, which speaks to the senses?”
-Rebecca Solnit-
*
“The case of a growing scene at the intersection of education, pedagogy and art in Mexico”.
You can read the essay–and also see my video interview with SofÃa Olascoaga–right here.
THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
October 18, 1956
Dear Mr. Warhol:
Last week our Committee on the Museum Collections held its first meeting of the fall season and had a chance to study your drawing entitled Shoe which you so generously offered as a gift to the Museum.
I regret that I must report to you that the Committee decided, after careful consideration, that they ought not to accept it for our Collection.
Let me explain that because of our severely limited gallery and storage space we must turn down many gifts offered, since we feel it is not fair to accept as a gift a work which may be shown only infrequently.
Nevertheless, the Committee has asked me to pass on to you their thanks for your generous expression of interest in our Collection.
Sincerely,
Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
Director of Museum Collections
P.S. The drawing may be picked up from the museum at your convenience.
—
(Transcript of letter that was sent a few years before Warhol became famous)
(Via Letters of Note)
Our dear dear Quay Brothers–whose Tóxico workshop and lecture was a mind banquet for us all–have an exhibition up in NYC.
Read a post on it right here, from BLDG BLOG.
***
(“What happens in the shadow, in the grey regions, also interests us – all that is elusive and fugitive, all that can be said in those beautiful half tones, or in whispers, in deep shade.”
Animal Wall, a site-specific Ecological Artwork by artist Gitta Gschwendtner.
‘Animal Wall’ is part of a 50 metre long wall, running along the south-western edge of ‘Strata’, a new residential development in Century Wharf, Cardiff Bay. The environmental impact of Cardiff Bay’s extensive development is an ongoing concern and various measures have been put in place to mitigate this. The approach taken for this artwork is to assist wildlife in the area and encourage further habitation. The new housing development of Century Wharf which provides approximately 1,000 new apartments and houses; Gschwendtner’s design for the ’Animal Wall’ will match this with about 1,000 nest boxes for different bird and bat species, integrated into the fabric of the wall that separates the development from the adjacent public riverside walk.
Through consultation with an ecologist, four different sized animal homes have been developed, which have been integrated into a custom-made woodcrete cladding to provide an architecturally stunning and environmentally sensitive wall for Century Wharf. The animal wall also transcends the barrier between the private and the public, with the wildlife roaming freely between the two areas.
Via Denzeen. More here
Says The Telegraph:
Since he was a child, Simon Faithfull has suffered from “a melancholy awareness that I was tethered to this mundane realm. Like many young boys I was annoyed to find out that other things could fly and I couldn’t. Flies could even walk on ceilings. That didn’t seem fair.â€
And for more than a decade now, the 42-year-old artist has been expressing his beef with the forces that keep him earthbound through a series of quixotic films and sculptures to be exhibited as “Gravity Sucks” at the BFI gallery in London as part of the “One Giant Leap†summer season celebrating the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.
Via the great C-Monster blog
See full article here
The Stranger has an amazing collection of photographs from the Michael Jackson auction that was supposed to take place in Beverly Hills. It was all stuff Jackson was forced to auction due to some severe financial problems. Watch the whole gallery here.
Imágenes de Kasper Eistrup, artista danés
(Gracias Pachequeiras por el dato. Y por el bombardeo constante)
Imágenes de Guillermo Tragant, quien ahorita tiene una expo en el Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires.
The photographic dictionary is dedicated to defining words through the literal, figurative, and personal meanings found in each photograph.
Went to retrospective of Bayrle´s work at the MACBA (Museo de arte contemporáneo de Barcelona); the exhibition is called I´ve a feeling we are not in Kansas.
Bayrle is a German artist, not very well known, since most of his work was in the hands of a few private collectors while the rest was boxed and stored by him decades ago, and rescued only for this show (his first retrospective ever). He has meticulous and interesting work in sculpture, film, collage and illustration that dates from the 60s and onward. Alas, what I considered to be the best of it was nowhere to be found on the web, nor can the detail of some of it be properly appreciated. I´ve a feeling we are not in Kansas. I like that.
Sachiko Kodama is a Japanese Artist. She builds kinetic sculptures with Ferofluid, a liquid material developed by NASA in the 70s that can morph in and out of solid states and take on different forms when exposed to magnetic fields.
See videos of the crazy changing sculptures here.
Well known for these types of things:
Banksy is now also doing these types of things:
As part of his project “The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill”.
And more here, on his official website
(PS:  If you arrived here by chance, and if you love Banksy (we do) then do do do take a look at the rest of the Toxico blog, ajá. Direct from Mexico City with love and abandon, all sorts of intoxicating things from the world over, across various creative disciplines. Mmm.)
(And you can also follow us on Twitter: @toxicocultura)
El proyecto de Benjami Aranda y Chris Lasch plantea el desarrollo de un sistema que permite registrar la ciudad tal y como la percibe una bandada de pájaros, en contraste con la representación convencional de la misma -basada en un sistema de mallas uniformes-  que nos ofrecen las tecnologÃas de información geográfica.
La bandada se mueve de forma compleja pero organizada, en base a múltiples decisiones locales de interacción entre sus componentes. El conjunto se convierte en un sistema fluido, de lÃmites variables, pero que obedece a un claro sistema de organización interna.
AsÃ, un vuelo corto ofrece una representación no cartesiana del entorno, afectada por aspectos ambientales (temperatura, dirección del viento, frecuencias ambientales, etc…) antes que puramente geométricos.
(Via Inútil e Inestable blog.)
(Y un video sobre el Pigeon Project aquÃ.)
—
(Y otra paloma, de otros tiempos.)
