Hasta La Ideas

Herd your own laser-cut cardboard mechanical menagerie

Using the same tab-and-slot construction technique as classic balsa wood airplanes, Kinetic Creatures start as flat-packed, laser-cut cardboard and transform into the impressive mechanical Rory the Rhino, Geno the Giraffe or Elly the Elephant. The DIY animals were conceived by Portland, Oregon-based visual arts teacher Alyssa Hamel and industrial designer Lucas Ainsworth, who were interested in encouraging youth to “be builders, thinkers and inventors”. After four years of research and design, the duo are launching a Kickstarter campaign today with the goal of raising enough funds to make the project possible while keeping the production local and sustainable.

As a project with educational roots, Kinetic Creatures require hand assembly and move by either a hand-cranked wire handle or an optional electric gear kit. The intuitively-assembled kit consists of little more than laser-cut wooden gears and a battery-operated on/off switch that fits in the open back of each animal, showing off all the moving parts for a basic lesson in mechanics.

To learn more about the project or to support this clever blend of art and science head to the Kinetic Creatures’ Kickstarter. At this point donations are the only route to getting your own animal, so for $30 you can score your own Elly the Elephant or Rory the Rhino, while $40 buys Geno the Giraffe and $90 or more gets you all three critters for your own moving menagerie.

Inspired by the ever-popular Magic 8 Ball, the Magic Tate Ball app presents users with a different artwork from the Tate Collection each time their phone is shaken. Using GPS and weather data, ambient noise levels and time of day, the app will, in theory, chose the best match to your circumstances

The Magic Tate Ball was devised by digital agency Thought Den in collaboration with Tate Media and is sponsored by Bloomberg as part of its ongoing support of things digital at the galleries. It was built by Thought Den and Mobile Pie.

The app gathers data on your whereabouts, the time and date, the local weather and even ambient noise levels to make its predictions.

When I downloaded it on a rainy Tuesday morning at CR’s offices, its first response was to suggest Edward Burra’s 1930 painting The Snack Bar as an appropriate artwork for me – well, it was nearly time for elevenses.

Touch the ‘Find out why” button and you are presented with an explanation for the Magic Tate Ball’s choice, in this case, it chose the painting because “This looks like a typical Soho café [CR’s offices are nearby] – maybe you should drop in?”

My second go threw up William Blake’s Newton, because Blake was born on Broadwick Street, just down the road from CR – evidently the GPS function was working well.

One more try and I was given Tuesday Weld by Peter Blake. Because, er, it was a Tuesday?

The Magic Tate Ball’s suggestions were getting less apt but it works well and is fun to use. There is also an educational element – each picture comes with a short description. The app also encourages visits to Tate Modern, promising to unlock a hidden bonus feature if the user goes there.

This is the third in a series of Tate mobile apps aimed at introducing new audiences to art, previous releases being Race Against Time, in which users travel through the history of modern art in order to defeat the evil Dr Greyscale’s plans to remove all the colour from the world, and Tate Trumps, a kind of Top Trumps game for art.

The Magic Tate Ball is also available for the Nokia OVI platform, here.

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The May issue of Creative Review is the biggest in our 32-year history, with over 200 pages of great content. This speial double issue contains all the selected work for this year’s Annual, our juried showcase of the finest work of the past 12 months. In addition, the May issue contains features on the enduring appeal of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, a fantastic interview with the irrepressible George Lois, Rick Poynor on the V&A’s British Design show, a preview of the controversial new Stedelijk Museum identity and a report from Flatstock, the US gig poster festival. Plus, in Monograph this month, TwoPoints.net show our subcribers around the pick of Barcelona’s creative scene.

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A mad tea party of paintings

Initially catching our eye at the recent NADA NYC fair, Michael Bauer has made an impression in the European art market for years with his energetically moody compositions. The German artist recently set up shop in New York, and in celebration of his move from Berlin to NYC he is holding his first solo show at Lisa Cooley Gallery, dubbed “H.S.O.P. – 1973“.

Bauer spent much of 2012 experimenting with collage and drawing, a practice that has invigorated his new paintings with what the gallery calls an “openness, dynamism, lightness and mischievous humor” not seen in his previous work. Still, certain elements from his early career remain, most notably his small, meticulous markings and his predilection for highlighting and obscuring physical deformity. According to the Saatchi Gallery, “Bauer uses the qualities of abstract painting as a deviation of representational portraiture, allowing the media to replicate the characteristics of physical matter.”

Even as his compositions become tighter and more centralized, Bauer seems consumed with making figurative elements from the marking of his medium. He describes the work in “H.S.O.P – 1973” as “portraits of gangs, families, music bands, collectives, or mobs—a grouping of characters revealed through the occasional eye or profile emerging from shadowy abstraction. Flat, crisp, bright, patterns usually provide the structure from which these organic nebulas originate.”

The title for the exhibition is a little obscure, and Bauer calls “H.S.O.P.” an “arbitrary reference” to the Hudson River School of painting, and because there’s a foot or foot-like shape in each painting, the accompanying numbers indicate European shoe sizes. The other elements aren’t quite so random. Bauer adds circular shapes to the corners to make them more like playing cards, with each painting like a “character in an unfolding cast, a mad tea party of sorts.”

”H.S.O.P. – 1973” is on view at Lisa Cooley Gallery through 17 June 2012.

Artist Daniel Buren plants a forest of candy-colored sunshades for “Exentrique(s), travail in situ” at the Grand Palais

Following the installation by Anish Kapoor in 2011, Monumenta 2012 invited famed French artist Daniel Buren for the fifth edition of the annual challenge to create an installation that will fill the soaring nave of Paris’ Grand Palais. Buren’s take on the site-specific concept is “Excentrique(s), travail in situ”.

True to its name, what Buren has created can best be described as eccentric—a rainbow forest of hundreds of transparent, sunshade-like plastic saucers planted on flagstaffs spreads over the entire area of the 13,500-square-meter space, playing with the light pouring into the huge, glassy cupola to cover the ground with colorful reflected spots.

For this color-dominated installation, even the central cap of the dome itself has been saturated with a blue checkerboard to resemble the stained-glass windows of a church. Working as a huge illuminated forum, the whole display is conceived to attract, reflect, expend and multiply the light into fragments of joyful colors. At night the figure reverses and the glass roof is lit by the reflected colors of the saucers, due to a sweeping electrical device. The forest also features a relatively low ceiling that counterbalances the 35 meter height of the building.

At the center of the work is an interruption in the cover of the sunshades, with disk-shaped mirrors on the floor that make the area seem like a glade among the forest of umbrellas. Their pools reflect the steel structure of the roof above, and from there, the exhibition spreads out on all sides in a dotted landscape of colorful saucers.

In keeping with the idea of the eccentric—meaning away from the middle, existing on the fringe of the mainstream—the experience was designed to keep the center from swallowing up the rest of the space. Visitors enter on the north side of the nave and exit through the south wing, an intentional course that forces the visitor to cross the length of the expanse while avoiding the center. As Buren explains, the center tends to draw all the attention and leave the rest of the space empty.

Buren touches on the idea of the eccentric by diverging quite far from his typically austere and minimalist black and white vertical stripes which established his name. Though still highly recognizable, Buren’s new work hasn’t been seen before from him, all circles, transparencies, light and color.

Having now established himself as a master of color, Buren uses his basic figures—black and white vertical flagstaffs—along with the new round shapes of the saucers and mirrors. The circle is the key figure of the installation—the high, round saucers as sunshades, the round mirrors on the floor in the center. Buren started considering the circle after he realized that the whole architecture of the Grand Palais building was based on the pattern of this figure.

Continuing the 40-year pursuit of his work, Buren plays on forms with a mathematical approach. The game here consists in assembling tangent discs, all in contact with one another, filling the empty space as much as possible. Employing only four basic colors (blue, yellow, red and green) Buren displayed them after an alphabetical order, with blue appearing 95 times and the others, 94 times each. The installation is completed by a soundtrack comprising the repetition of the names of the colors in 40 different languages.

“Excentrique(s), travail in situ” is on display at Grand Palais through 21 June 2012.

Ari Marcopoulos presents richly degraded photography, photocopies and film in a new solo show

Dark, densely textured images seem to float on the stark white walls of the Marlborough Chelsea, the mostly massive black and white photographs fill the space with an almost unrecognizable, vaguely ominous mood. “Wherever You Go” is a considered collection of new photographs, photocopies and film by renowned photographer, filmmaker and artist Ari Marcopoulos.

“It’s as much about photography as it is about printmaking,” says Marcopoulos about the selection of high-contrast images. Shot predominantly with a 35mm point-and-shoot, the large-scale pigment prints and smaller photographs on rice paper are often printed multiple times and blown up to expose a gritty quality. Similarly Marcopoulos experiments with additional, non-photographic printed matter by layering photocopied imagery that evokes a visceral experience enhanced by the ability to walk up close and really see each minute detail of the bigger picture—a signature characteristic of Marcopoulos’ shows. But while each image finds identity in its distinct textures, the subjects themselves strike a cord with the viewer as well. “I think there is certain power in the images, a certain strength when you look at them. They’re kind of heavy images,” admits Marcopoulos.

Best known for his portraiture, Marcopoulos starts to stray from the expected with the inclusion of some more abstract images that remove all apparent context. “I like the idea of looking at something where you dont have an exact idea of what it is. It’s nice to make something where your first reaction is not words but just a feeling.”

Feeling this way upon seeing the unnamed image dated 5.8.08, we asked Marcopoulos to elaborate on the compelling photograph of stained skin. “It’s very close up,” he says. “It’s hard to tell what it is. It kind of has to do with the idea that as a photographer or in photography so often the images are about what it is you’re looking at. So this is kind of more about just creating a rectangle, that doesn’t really inform you as to what it is. It’s open you know. It’s more of a mood or a feeling.”

While some artists may shoot specifically for a show, Marcopoulos prefers to focus on a vague idea, letting the body of work develop organically. “A lot of thought goes into it, but in the end it’s very intuitive, it’s like improvisation,” says Marcopoulos. “You have an idea in your head and you do what you feel is needed to get it done. That idea is often not a wordy idea because you work in images, so the ideas are images in your head. The only way to get it done is actually select images—it can be one image, but it’s often two or three—and then put it together. Sounds very abstract but that’s kind of how it is. There is not ever one theme.”

While the large-scale prints and enlarged photocopies dominate the show, Marcopoulos chose to include a projected film with a colorful splash of life that contrasts nicely with the still black and white environment. Entitled “City Riders”, the voyeuristic piece was shot in a few short months with Marcopoulos’ BlackBerry, capturing about an hour’s worth of unsuspecting NYC subway commuters.

“Wherever You Go” opens tonight at NYC’s Marlborough Chelsea with a reception from 6-8pm. The show will then run through 16 June 2012.

Installation image by Ari Marcopoulos