Toward the intersections of art, space and structure, and new media:

1) “Beyond the obsolete models of artist or author as genius and their fetish objects, what collective and collaborative practices are inventing new terrains and flows?”

In Autonomedia’s new book Critical Strategies in Art and Media: Perspectives in New Cultural Practices Ted Byfield, Steve Kurtz, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Claire Pentecost, and Peter Lamborn Wilson with the likes of Franco (Bifo) Berardi, Marco Deseriis, Rene Gabri, Brian Holmes, McKenzie Wark, Felix Stalder, and others gather to explore such questions.

2) “It was John Ruskin who claimed that the ‘measure of a city’s greatness is to be found in the quality of its public spaces.’ Looking around the London landscape – the 200-strong herd of fibreglass elephants currently roaming the streets, Banksy’s signature graffiti, the production line of fourth plinth sculptures – it’s hard to imagine the city even registering on Ruskin’s fastidious scale of “greatness’.”

In, State of the Art/Art of the State: Public Art in the UK Alexandra Coghlan explores the role of public art in a cities image and reputation.

3) “Two recently published books – Louis Moreno and John Alderson’s The Architecture and Urban Culture of Financial Crisis and Sarah Glynn’s Where the Other Half Lives – assess the damaging impact of financialisation on built environments and urban housing. In his double review, Owen Hatherley identifies architecture as a prime casualty of neoliberalism’s de facto Non-Plan.”

*Above Image: photo by Albert Renger Patzsch

apexart
291 Church Street
New York, New York

June 10 – July 11
Men With Balls: The Art of the 2010 World Cup
Curated by Simon Critchley

Including work by artists Miguel Calderon • Mark Leckey • Hellmuth Costard Maria Marshall • Liam Gillick • Santo Tolone • Douglas Gordon and Uri Tzaig • Philippe Parreno
memorabilia from Roger Bennett • Bill Shankly
match results read by Mark E. Smith

“The FIFA World Cup is the most important and widely watched sporting event in the world. The germinal idea for this exhibition is very simple: to create the perfect football environment, a sort of mini-soccer paradise at apexart for watching games. Around the games themselves, there will be talks, events, and a series of works, objects, and activities that will expand the spectacle into a more conceptual and sensual rumination on the meaning and significance of football/soccer.

The World Cup is a spectacle in the strictly Situationist sense. It is a shiny display of nations in symbolic, atavistic national combat adorned with multiple layers of commodification, sponsorship and the seemingly infinite commercialization. It is an image of our age at its worst and most gaudy. But it is also something more, something bound up with difficult and recalcitrant questions of conflict, memory, history, place, social class, masculinity, violence, national identity, tribe, and group. The hope of the exhibition Men With Balls is to construct a unique situation where these questions can be ruminated on collectively.

Football is working-class ballet. It’s an experience of enchantment. For an hour and a half, a different order of time unfolds and one submits oneself to it. A football game is a temporal rupture with the routine of the everyday: ecstatic, evanescent, and, most importantly, shared. At its best, football is about shifts in the intensity of experience. And stories will multiply from that experience, stories of heroes and villains, of triumph, and a gnawing sense of the injustice of defeat. The aim of the exhibition is to produce with this show some experience of being together with others in a group, watching a game, waiting for something marvelous, unexpected, and possibly magical to happen. And it will happen.”

MORE [schedule of screenings of matches and curator's statement.]

[Cross-posted to the blog of Goal 2010!, a soccer and social media project. Text and graphic from apex press release.]

Artist David Belt is at it again: making recycling fun and, well, cleansing – in more ways than one. Glassphemy is a project/structure designed to allow individuals to pelt glass bottles towards their friends and family; of course, the bottles smash against a bullet proof glass wall instead. The glass is recycled. Everyone laughs. Glassphemy is an act of both environmentalism and therapy – a way to exorcise some of your pent up frustration while helping the planet just a little.

Read what the New York Times and Good have to say about it.

While you are at check out Macro Sea – Belt’s organization of like-minded eco-artist types.

Artist and activist Ellen O’Grady documents personal and political circumstances facing Palestinians as Israeli continues to expand settlements.  Her new book, Outside the Ark: An Artist’s Journey in Occupied Palestine, is based on seven years’ experience working in Palestine and Israel.

Join Ellen in Washington for an event co-sponsored by U.S. Campaign to End Israeli Occupation and Foreign Policy In Focus, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies. Please RSVP to netfa@ips-dc.org or by calling 202-787-5229.

Order the book here.

Mostar has been a divided city for over fifteen years now, and there are no indications that this fact will change soon enough. It has been divided since the 90’s war in Yugoslavia, and the borderline since then has been a street in the center of the city called the “Boulevard.” This street, although in a state of reconstruction and revival, still functions as a phantom limb – a mental borderline in the consciousness of people. Today, this division is supported by parallel educational and cultural institutions which glorify the separate nationalist attitudes and their programs; ideologies reflected through architecture; divided water supply/waste systems; and urban construction works that keep the city being divided.

Next week, with the city of Mostar as a backdrop, The Festival of Divided Cites will showcase the research of a group of citizen-activists living and working in the divided cities of Mostar, Kosovska Mitrovica, Beirut and Berlin. The Festival treats the city as a starting point for a multidisciplinary approach to the issue of public space divisions. Research participants will present, analyze and discuss various material, including artwork and concepts as well as theoretical works on the subject with the aim of deconstructing myths of stereotypical divisions.

Ice House Detroit is a project bringing awareness to a variety of housing issues in Detroit.

Follow their blog or join their Facebook group.

dala
Durban, South Africa
ongoing project: spaza-de-move-on

In the early 60s ‘café-de-move-ons’ could be seen wherever there were substantial numbers of African workers or passers by in need of refreshment. Vendors were frequently arrested in police raids and fined or imprisoned.

Since apartheid, South Africa witnessed the phenomenon of urbanization. Thousands of workers move daily from the township’s into the cities for their livelihood. This has given rise to the re-birth of the trade in refreshments, loose cigarettes, sweets and chips along pedestrian routes. Similarly these vendors too face victimisation by the powers that be.

The spaza-de-move-on is a design response to the need for an efficient, easily transportable solution for these vendors. Its evolution, involved bottom-up collaboration with Moses Gwiba – a street vendor – who Doung has formed a relationship over a number of years of walking in the city of Durban. His hail “when you make something for me?” sparked the inspiration for this South African solution.

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dala is an interdisciplinary creative collective that believes in the transformative role of creativity in building safer and more liveable cities. dala emerged as a response to the growing need for a sustainable space for creative practitioners actively engaging in the production of art / architecture for social change in eThekwini. dala believes that sustainable change can only happen through democratic participation and collaboration. dala therefore facilitates creative initiatives between creative practitioners from a variety of backgrounds (artists, architects, researchers, performers, urban planners, designers), the municipality and most importantly the people and organisations that live and work within and around the city. dala’s initiatives all revolve around re-imagining the use and expression in and of public space.

Founders, Doung Jahangeer, Rike Sitas and Nontobeko Ntombela have been working on similar initiatives individually and collectively for close to ten years. The strength of dala lies in the interdisciplinary skills the founders bring to the organisation – Doung (architect), Rike (social scientist), Nonto (curator). All three are practicing artists and educators who have been involved in a number of local and international projects and exhibitions.

[Text and graphic from dala website. Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]

Here’s the view across the famously restored bridge in Mostar, with two religious pinnacles in competition beyond.  The identity politics of religion are acute in Bosnia, where the carrot of European Union membership hinges on the seemingly impossible formation a “functional state” where power is shared between Bosnians, Serbs and Croats.

A little farther north, near Donji Vakuf, we came across this Tatlin-esque Christian shrine under construction across the valley from a newly erected mosque.

More on recent mosque architecture here.

More on Provisions’ Balkans Project here.

Wunderbar Festival
“Housewarming”
138 St. Lawrence Square
Newcastle England NE6 1SU

“Jorn Ebner and Monica Ross cordially invite you to a housewarming in reverse.

On this site a row of council flats was demolished in 2008 to make way for the Byker South Redevelopment plan. The scheme has recently been shelved due to the current economic crisis – a situation that reflects the fragility of the social housing sector within society.

Housewarming will take place in open space, unsheltered and probably cold. No house stands here and another may or may not again: the artists imply the history of their private occupation of a flat on this site as the basis to host the sharing of social space. Tea, coffee, drinks and snacks will be provided by the artists, but guests are also welcome to contribute refreshments to be shared by all.

Housewarming is produced by Michelle Hirschhorn and supported by Wunderbar Festival, Newcastle City Council, ISIS Arts and the Friends of St. Lawrence Park.”

more on Byker and The Byker Wall:

• BBC on the original Byker Development
• City of Newcastle > Environment and Planning > Regeneration > Ouseburn Byker Sites >St. Lawrence Square

Wunderbar Festival Schedule

[text and graphic from Housewarming Facebook Event page. Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]

apexart
291 Church Street
New York, New York

Wednesday, October 28, 6:30 pm
Public Talk:
To New Horizons

Emre Huner, current apexart resident, and Lauren Cornell, Executive Director Rhizome, will discuss utopian constructs, speculative fiction, and the juggernaut of modernism. In their conversation they will touch upon the inspirations for Huner’s latest work from the New York World’s Fair, to the NASA Space Program, and Walt Disney.

Born in Istanbul in 1977, Emre Huner is an artist producing drawing, video and spatial works following different techniques. He now lives and works in Istanbul after being in Milan for eight years. Central to his oeuvre are over technological, industrial progressions and the concept of society of risk in this respect and the themes such as the affinities of the modern man with architecture and nature. Huner creates a common language in his works through using an archive he formed out of various sources such as internet, found out pictures and books.

Lauren Cornell, Executive Director, Rhizome, oversees and develops Rhizome’s programs, all of which serve to promote and contextualize art engaged with technology. Previously, Cornell worked as a curator and writer in London and New York.

Part of apexart’s international resident lecture series.

[text and graphic from apex art website. Caption: "Trylon, Perisphere and Helicline. Photo by Sam Gottscho." Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]