G.E.M.

Museum of the Hellenic World (2009-2011)

The design proposal focuses on the concept of a museum of history - not original historical exhibits. The design principle is based on the spatio-psychoanalytic concept of lack (deeply routed in Greek culture) as a critique against the notions of 'collection'/ 'acquisition'. Both as sense of loss of original pieces as well as creative spatial process, lack, led to the formulation of a new museological approach integrating exhibition and builiding into one. Spatiality is conceived, psychoanalytically, as the mode of history, and highlighted both as the major diachronic documentation of Greek civilisation (recurring, homeomorphing, collocating) and the main concept of the building: a spatial monument as opposed to a symbolic memorial.
The proposed continuous strip, self-evolving across the building, produces homeomorphic curved schemes in three distinct, spatial gestures/installations: a) the amphitheatre introducing Classical Antiquity, b) the dome introducing Byzantium, c) the sheltering cell introducing Modern times (17th - early 20th century), covering the overall museum space. Accordingly, three distinct lighting treatments are proposed: a) bright daylight, small sharp shadows, b) indirect, ambient, no shadows, c) cinematic side-lighting, long shadows. Yet, the strip surface employs a gradient synthesis of materials and construction techniques - varying from: a) tectonic, marble, stone, b) cast material, c) timber, glass and metal structures. Client: Foundation of Hellenic World, Athens. Total exhibition space: 6000 sq.m
http://www.anamorphosis-architects.com/index.html 

Olafur Eliasson

Stand Still; A Spectacle Will Happen

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: April 18, 2008

What a relief. Near the end of a decade crammed with junk-art collectibles geared to junk-bond budgets, and a museum season of ragbag sculptures and wallpapered words, we get bare walls and open space in the Olafur Eliasson survey at the Museum of Modern Art and P.S. 1. Light and color, with a few odd-duck objects of a kind you might wrap up and take home.

Mr. Eliasson, who was born in Denmark in 1967, spent part of his life in Iceland and now lives in Berlin, is well known for creating immaterialist magic through bare-bones means: literally, in some cases, mist and mirrors. In style his work is un-Murakami; not tightly packaged, not cash-and-carry.

He makes murals — there’s one at MoMA — from fragrant clods of Iceland moss; they look like a cross between an aerial landscape — of Venus maybe — and deep-pile Aubussons. For his New York debut at Tanya Bonakdar in 1996 he ran a perforated hose along a gallery ceiling, then turned on a flickering strobe to transform a sheet of falling droplets into a field of stop-action stars.

Four years later he removed the gallery’s skylight and added a frieze of mirrors to bring the sights, sounds and frosty air of the outdoors inside. And this tour-de-force fusion of nature and culture was nothing compared to the grand setting sun he created from lights and haze at the Tate Modern in 2003. It was a one-piece blockbuster. Tens of thousands of people came to soak in its glow, as if they were at the beach. Or Woodstock. Or Lourdes.

Like abstract painting, Mr. Eliasson’s art can be slow to reveal itself. In an installation called “Beauty” a rainbow emerges from a curtain of mist and vanishes. Maybe you see it; maybe you don’t. The illumination in an empty “white” room at P.S. 1 changes color all but imperceptibly as you watch: from white, to faint gray, to pale pollen beige, to lavender, one dissolving into the next like shifts in weather or the readings of a mood ring.

And like certain kinds of jazz, or ragas, or New Age ambient sound, this is an art of variation rather than destination. It lays out a visual theme, then asks you to wait, watch, wait some more and discover things happening. A stationary object turns out to be moving; a window view of the street through a prismatic sculpture turns reality upside down, but not entirely.

A new piece at P.S. 1, made for the show, consists of a huge, slanting, disc-shaped mirror suspended horizontally from a gallery ceiling. What strikes you at first is the omniscient, bird’s-eye reflection of the room below, with you standing in the middle of it. Then you notice that the mirror is rotating very slowly, and with a subtly undulating motion that causes the room itself to feel warped and unstable. You experience this as much with your sense of balance as with your eyes.

The piece is called “Take Your Time,” which is also the name of the exhibition, originally organized in a smaller form by Madeleine Grynsztejn for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It is an aptly utopian title. “Take” implies an invitation, a sharing. “Your” suggests inclusion, community. “ Time”— we all know about that. Everyone has some of it; nobody has much, or enough. Museums are built to freeze time but end up freezing other things too, like ethics and history, which are, or should be, fluid. Art, by contrast, can expand or dissolve time, which is something Mr. Eliasson seems to want to do.

A sidebar show at MoMA, “Geometry of Motion 1920s/1970s,” organized by Klaus Biesenbach and Roxana Marcoci, the curators who reshaped the Eliasson survey for New York, puts his art within a modern idealist tradition. The work, all from the museum’s holdings, ranges from László Moholy-Nagy’s early, light-based, socially salutary abstractions, to Robert Irwin’s floating white light-backed painting and a film of Gordon Matta-Clark creating “Day’s End” in 1975, for which he cut a hole in a wall to let the sunshine in.

Matta-Clark’s sliced architecture clearly had a big influence on Mr. Eliasson’s Tate sun. Both were spectacular, monumental. Both invited people to gather and linger, pull up a floor, tune in or zone out. Both were ephemeral. When the light was shut off, or night had come, they were gone.

The other important reference in “Geometry of Motion,” though, is to Duchamp. And it’s useful to view Mr. Eliasson through Duchamp’s antic, absurdist, illusion-piercing sensibility, and we are encouraged to. Mr. Eliasson’s “Concentric Mirror” (2004) plays off Duchamp’s “Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics).” But where Duchamp assaulted the optic nerve, Mr. Eliasson’s assaults the body, breaking the viewer’s reflection into fragments.

A fair amount of his work, in a witty way, is about disruption and disorientation. Rooms tilt; doors are not doors. At P.S. 1 a waterfall flows upward; a rotating metal fan, propelled by its own wind power, swings from a cable, just above head height, in MoMA’s atrium. This is art that teases and even, a little, humiliates, as we hesitate before the false doors, or are blinded by flashing lights, or duck the buzzing fan.

That hint of not-niceness is a crucial ingredient in Mr. Eliasson’s audience-pleasing art. It keeps it from being too sappy or flashy, all disco balls and special effects. And he obviously wants the work to feel tough, which is why he leaves the mechanics transparent. You can see everything: the mundane materials, the seams and edges, the motors that make things turn. There’s no mystification in his fogs and mists, just water and air.

This directness is a reminder that Mr. Eliasson, like his Chinese contemporary Cai Guo-Qiang, is at his best as a producer of public gestures; impermanent, immersive theatrical situations. When he is in this mode, he starts to move beyond being an institutional entertainer, or he becomes at least a resistant one.

And how radical is Mr. Eliasson’s art? How market-challenging or expectation-shifting? In the end — so far — not terribly. “Take Your Time” looks anomalous enough in an object-fetish moment, and in MoMA’s galleries, where you don’t find moss murals, or dripping water everyday. At the same time the work is too intent on appealing to our appetite for passive sensation and too readily adapted to corporate design. (Mr. Eliasson’s architectural and commercial projects include proposals for BMW.)

It so happened that my trip to see the show at P.S. 1 coincided with a panel discussion there related to “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution.” The five artists speaking and showing their work had all come of age well after the beginnings of the feminist movement, but consider themselves to be engaged in its complex continuance.

One of the panelists, the performance artist Sharon Hayes, projected a photograph of herself on a sunny city street carrying a placard reading, “I Am A Man,” a sign that originated in the civil rights protests in the 1960s but to which she gave multifold new meanings. And I understood afresh how resonant, engaging and convention-skewering art as a public gesture can be. Ms. Hayes really, truly went back to basics. Using only herself, a sign, and deep history, she made the world, for a little while, her theater. The sky was its roof. Admission was free.

Mr. Eliasson’s art is, of course, of a different kind and deals, some would say, in a different kind of activism, a politics of enchantment. Enchanting the work certainly is, and spacious, evanescent and intellectually stimulating. In these ways it offers a model for a future art beyond the present rummage-sale glut. In others ways, though, it reminds us how far in the current decade art has not come.

http://www.olafureliasson.net/

http://media.moma.org/subsites/2008/olafureliasson/#/intro/

twenty-eight artists and two saints

Starred Review.  Acocella is the New Yorker's dance critic, but dancers and choreographers comprise a minority of the artists featured in this elegant collection of writings mostly from the New Yorker. The dance pieces are literally the center of the book, sandwiched between Acocella's lucid assessments of writers (and one sculptor, Louise Bourgeois). She has a taste for early 20th-century European, often Jewish novelists who, she says, helped create the modern consciousness in literature: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Italo Svevo, among others. In featuring these long-forgotten writers, she fulfills what, in a fascinating profile of Susan Sontag, she calls "an essential function of criticism: that of introducing readers to... strange work, things they wouldn't ordinarily encounter." A particularly affecting look at Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1998 portrays a man long in search of an artistic home who had to find that home, finally, within himself. The essays that follow the dance pieces focus largely on American and British writers (Bellow, Philip Roth, Sybille Bedford). Acocella can flatten a book she dislikes with cool derision ("The less she knows, the more she tells us," Acocella says of Carol Shloss's biography of Lucia Joyce), but her passionate and penetrating endorsements of other works make you want to discover their pleasures firsthand—the best service a critic can render. (Feb. 6)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.    

Museums in the 21st Century: Concepts Projects Buildings

The projects represented highlights the diverse personalities and handwritings of the architects.

Competition winner
Diller + Scofidio
Eyebeam
Museum of Art and Technology
New York, NY

"We are thrilled to have been selected. The Eyebeam project is at the intersection of our passions, architecture and new media art. The great challenge ahead is to reconcile their discrepancy in speed: architecture is permanent by nature and new media is transient by definition. We will have to invent the map as we navigate it."
Elizabeth Diller

http://www.dillerscofidio.com/eyebeam.html

Jean Nouvel of France 2008
Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate

The 2008 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the most prestigious award given in architecture, goes to Jean Nouvel of France. This is only the second time an architect from France (Christian de Portzamparc in 1994 was the first) has received the honor in the prize's 30-year history.

      

Mr. Nouvel is saluted for a lifetime of achievement. In a phone interview, he says, "I have designed everything except an          airport and a cathedral. I challenge myself to give each project a distinctive look."       

                    

His delight at receiving the high honor is palpable: "I am not noted for pursuing a particular style of architecture," he says. He likes to use innovative materials and approaches. "My work deals with what is happening now. I like to use the techniques and materials we are capable of today." He has designed museums, office buildings, cultural centers, housing – and more – in Italy, Japan, Spain, England, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, South Korea, Mexico, Brazil, Iceland, Russia, Taiwan, Morocco, the United States, and elsewhere.

      

His pursuit of new ideas has led to creative experimentation; his buildings defy "modernist" or even "postmodernist" labels. Each project, to him, is a problem to be solved in a unique way: "I have always developed a different procedure for each commission," he says. "Much research is required." One critic observes that Nouvel's buildings are characterized by "their shimmering transparency, their enigmatic use of light and color, and their poetic use of modern technology."

      

Nouvel is particularly well known for his design of the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA) in Paris, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the 75-story tower alongside the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and a forthcoming condominium complex in Century City, Los Angeles.

      

At the IMA, the southern facade is composed entirely of panels fitted with a pattern of mechanical oculi operated by photoelectric cells. They respond to changing light levels automatically, opening and closing the oculi. The intent is to give the building similar lighting to what it would have if located in the Middle East.

      

"Some describe me as a conceptual architect," Nouvel says, "one who deals more with words than with drawings. I believe that drawings often establish things too early, while words liberate, give you a chance to say something, to do something more profound."

      

Jean Nouvel was born in Fumel, southwestern France, in 1945.

      

"I must admit to sneaking out to the cinema," he says, and chuckles. "I wasn't officially introduced to the arts until I was 16." His father was a county school superintendent, and his mother taught high school English. "I wanted to be an artist," he says, "but they objected. We settled on architecture, for they thought being an artist was just too risky."

      

At 20, he went to Paris and won first prize in a competition to attend the Beaux Arts School. To earn money, he took a job working for architects Claude Parent and Paul Virilio. He'd been at the firm less than a year when they made him project manager for an 80-unit apartment complex. When he finished school, he opened his own office. It was a huge step for a man not yet 25. Many of his early commissions were steered to him by his former employers.

      

Jean Nouvel was on his way. In the 1980s, President François Mitterand chose Nouvel to build the IMA, composed of a museum, a library, temporary exhibit spaces, children's workshops, a documentation center, an auditorium, and a rooftop restaurant. In 1994, he created his current firm, Ateliers Jean Nouvel, with Michel Pelissie.

      

No article about Nouvel would be complete without discussing his "Tower Without Ends" ("Tour Sans Fins"), a quarter-mile-tall project intended to be built in Paris and be the tallest building in the world. It has yet to be realized. Granite was to be used in the lower floors, transitioning to aluminum, then to stainless steel and to glass, the tower becoming more ethereal as it soared upward. It was to rise from an excavation and disappear into the sky, hence a tower with no ends.

      

Nouvel says he likes to be continually challenged. "That is when the excitement comes, to constantly be searching for new ways to accomplish things, unusual colors, high-tech ideas, and a variety of shapes," he says. "That's why I found the narrow lot next door to the Museum of Modern Art in New York so challenging. It would be part of the museum with its galleries, yet it was shaped so its silhouette was like a needle."

      

The award will be presented June 2 by Thomas Pritzker, president of the Hyatt Foundation, at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Nouvel will receive a bronze medallion and a grant of $100,000, followed by a formal banquet in his honor.