Thursday, June 28, 2007

Heat Stroke

Here's some funky japanese houses that apparently went nuts from the heat

Sunday, June 24, 2007

The Anger and the Bunker

So I was a bit pissed off that the lovely landscape of Merope turned ugly suburbia so fast, and I just wanted to block off everything.
Literally I turned the small plot of land into a big bad bunker, and it looked something like this.

But then I thought, that living secluded in a concrete box might be a second life,
but it is not a happy life.

Friday, June 22, 2007

New Visitors Forever

Scene for a New Heritage is a film trilogy by David Maljkovich. I know I saw parts of the film somewhere, in some exhibition, but I have no idea where.
"The film presents a futuristic world set in the year 2045. Shot over three years spanning 2004 – 2006, the first film focuses on a group of travellers visiting a memorial park, erected in Petrova Gora, Croatia, for victims of the Second World War under the Communist government of Yugoslavia. As they visit the monument, debate is sparked as to its long-forgotten meaning – it means nothing to them, just as their strange dialect is alien to us. "
I'm slightly obsessed with the aluminum foil collages and the retro looking maquettes and film stills.
Have a look:
Most of the film revolves around this monument. Parked next to it is a futuristically aluminim-foil wrapped car. Is it a Trabant?
In the show of course.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Bubble me crazy

This is what Centre Pompidou could have looked like if Chaneac and Pascal + Claude Hausermann had won the competition instead of Piano+ Rogers. Chaneac's surrealist pumkin-like agglomeration has spooky notes of Guggenheim on the interior courtyard. Unfortunately the future was not so wacky, though the Pompidou that was actually built was plenty crazy in it's time, and forever defined the industrial space-art center relationship, which by the way is so boring and expired. Why do Art centers have to always be in converted industrial spaces? Why couldnt they be in converted hair salons?and here's some further Chaneac, otherwise know as Jean-Louis Rey. For further reading check out Jean-Louis Chaneac: Architecture Interdite, and also, of course, Future City, Experiment and Utopia in Architecture by by Marie-Ange Brayer, Jane Alison, Frederic Migayrou, and Neil Spiller

Monday, June 11, 2007

Venice Works

Just back from the Venice biennale, which was nothing new but lots of nice and some excellent. Here's a mix of faces and places and things that grabbed my very short attention:
The impossible to photograph but utterly fantabulous Canadian pavilion by David Altmejd, full of business men corpses with owl heads out of whose wounds fly smaller birds and golden chains and moss grows on their knees while other body parts turn into mirror crystals,and the men turn into werewolves and the installation seems to engulf the pavilion itself, turning everything into a magically gay forest nightmare disco funeral.

Also fabulous and out of control was the German pavilion by Iza Genzken, full of venetian samsonite cat poster dead ninja turtle silver spray paint and mirrors too.yes
couldnt resist a self portrait, because I waited 45 minutes to get in, so I really had to take a picture of everything
and Genzken
and Genzken too all the while Angelo was sleeping with the winged lion of Venice that fell off it's pedestal, Sylvia danced around and Christodoulos studied carefully
comparing foldable wayfarers with Marina FokidisR.I.P. Jason Rhoadesboxes that fell on boxes in the curiously interesting Australian pavilion by Daniel von Sturmer, and a great great title: The Object of ThingsI cant remember the name of this artist at Arsenale, but he was born in 1920
and makes these apocalyptic invisible cities hanging rocks

walking around exhausted we passed by the best fence in Venice

the great "Hamster Wheel" where Gelitin caused havoc and terrified the police with their nakedness, and their "back in 5 minutes" video
and a rabbit with a flower on it's head checking out the chaosumm this
and Paola Pivi's lovely yellow feather polar bear
and Kostis Velonis going up some amazing stairs

the typical chandelier in our room in Dorsodurothe fantastic animation in the Russian pavilion

the fabulous Grotto on Garibaldi street
anarchy and ivy
sometimes hardware looks like art too

typical venetian skyline of tourists and boats and pink street lamps and antennae and palazzos and clouds
and of course the completely amazing Greek pavilion by Nikos Alexiou, a monastic hallucination on the floor of Iviron Monastery, overlaying paper cuts with projections with hanging plastic strings and models of tables on piles of papers and triangles and patterns
and amazing artists' studio installation where the table becomes the world
fragile paper labyrinths become the byzantine sky of complexity
that magically reappears in a hole on a building on the beach in Lido