Hasta La Ideas

(Photos: Raul J. Garcia)

For the past few years, we’ve been telling anyone who would listen about Denver’s imminent Clyfford Still Museum, designed by Brad Cloepfil and Allied Works Architecture. The frequent response: “Who’s Clyfford Still?” Exactly! On Friday, the museum opened its doors and commenced reacquainting the public with the life and work of the late artist (meanwhile, earlier this month at Sotheby’s, one of his canvases fetched $61.7 million, a record for the persnickety Abstract Expressionist). The majority of the museum’s approximately 2,400 paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures—a mind-boggling 94% of Still’s total creative output—has never been on display, and the inaugural exhibition fills the nine second-floor galleries with 110 works (including the only three Still sculptures in existence). The show “aims to redefine our grasp of Still’s vision in both its scope and sustained intensity—highlighting his extraordinary use of color, draftsmanship, gesture, figuration, serial, procedures, and scale,” said adjunct curator David Anfam in a statement issued by the museum. Stay tuned for further reports on the cantilevered concrete marvel after we visit next month, and get a feel for the 28,500-square-foot museum in this virtual tour:

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Usually more heavily weighted toward the east, we have the good fortune today of having Philip Johnson news from both coasts. First, in Los Angeles, the legendary architect’s Crystal Cathedral, which he co-designed with John Burgee, has been sold to the Catholic Church. The LA Times reports that the televangelist-heavy ministries who had originally commissioned the building and had used it for the past 30 years (for things like the “Hour of Power” program) have gone bankrupt and were forced to give it up. On the other side of the country, if you’d like to see Johnson as an apparition, on Friday, December 2nd, starting at 7pm, the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects will be hosting a reading of a new architecture-and-Johnson-related play by Bob Morris (though not the same one who has sculptures at Johnson’s New Canaan masterpiece), entitled “Glass House.” Here’s a description:

Anthony is an architect who idolizes mid-century modern design. When he and his wife, Abby, move into a glass house in the suburbs, Anthony’s obsession with order surfaces as his persona begins to shatter. The play features giants of design who comment on how style, substance and organization affect our daily lives. The great architect (and Nazi sympathizer) Philip Johnson makes a special ghostly appearance.

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Art and design collide in a thought-provoking show that encapsulates the beauty of brotherly collaboration

A project four years in the making, Kin Coda comprises a range of 25 uniquely crafted keepsake boxes, each an assemblage of art by the diverse design collective We-Are-Familia. Since graphic designer Jennifer Garcia began the project in 2007, several of the first 11 boxes have been featured in galleries or snapped up by discerning collectors, debuting at Colette and then coming stateside to Open Space in Beacon, NY and Fountain Art Fair.

For boxes 12-25, We-Are-Familia used damaged furniture from the sustainably-minded Danish brand Fritz Hansen. In order to protect the integrity of their classic designs, Fritz Hansen is forced to destroy a small amount of unusable furniture each season, and when sales director for North America David Obel Rosenkvist heard about the collective’s forward-thinking project, he and his team decided to donate the damaged chairs and tables to Garcia and her team.

Garcia originally started the project to exemplify the synonymous nature of art and design, and has brought her point to life with this second wave of furniture-based conceptual boxes, currently on view at NYC’s Fritz Hansen store. Several notable designers, including David Weeks, Iacoli & McAllister, Kiel Mead, Joe Doucet, UM Project and more, have put their own distinctive twist on the Fritz Hansen furniture, which rounds out the project. Serving as a stimulating foundation for the ingenious designers, the Fritz Hansen furniture takes new shape in works like Chen Chen and Kai Williams’ deconstructed Star Base Swivel Chair in fire engine red, or Nightwood’s rustic Swan chair-turned-“Hunter-Gatherer Chair,” and UM Project’s modern armoire made from Arne Jacobsen Series 7 chairs.

Living up to the We are Familia name, Garcia tells us that when one of the pieces sells—prices top off at $10,000—they all split the profit. It’s with this communal enthusiasm that the designers created the singular keepsakes, each brimming with the works of 40 different artists. The full collection of collaborative creations, combined with the support of Fritz Hansen, perfectly illustrates the familial spirit of the artists’ collective.

Kin Coda will be on display for just a short time at Fritz Hansen, from 17-23 November 2011. To see more of the series, including the original 11 keepsakes, check out the gallery below.

Just at the start of this month, and heading internationally between now and March of next year, Starbucks has rolled out single-cup Keurig packs, licensed with the company’s brand to help tap itself into that market worth billions. But have they also just walked into a big design lawsuit along the way? Hyperallergic reports that Los Angeles-based artist Ophelia Chong discovered that the packaging on the coffee giant’s french roast version of its new self-brew packs looks too close for comfort to her own work, which has been viewed thousands of times on Flick and variations of which have been seen in galleries and advertisements. While it’s feasible to believe it’s mere coincidence, given that the image on the Starbucks box is in a form of what we’d describe as a familiar “burning flame”, the coloring and curved shape of the individual fire bits, do make it clearly convincing enough that perhaps Chong has a case here. According to the site, a case is what she seems to want, as they report that she “isn’t going to take this lying down” and that “she’s retained a lawyer.” Here’s a bit about why the artist believes it’s outright theft:

The artist says her book, containing her images and style, have been show to all the ad agencies by her reps, so she doesn’t understand why they simply didn’t hire her rather than rip her off. ”It looks exactly like what I create,” she says.

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Just before the weekend, Los Angeles’ MOCA found itself embroiled in something of a battle between it and famous choreographer, Yvonne Rainer. The latter had come out publicly against the museum’s plans for this past Saturday’s annual fundraising gala, which was to be created by Marina Abramovic and would involve hired performers sitting on lazy susans under each table, with just their heads poking out, serving as an ever-rotating human centerpiece (here’s a photo from the LA Times). Hearing from an auditioning performer about what Abramovic had planned (and by extension, what controversy-courting museum director Jeffrey Deitch had give the okay to), and learning that the artist had demanded the the performers remain in “character” no matter if party attendees tried to feed them, get them to drink, “fondle us under the table,” etc., that was enough for Rainer, who fired off a letter to Deitch, labeling the event as “public humiliation at the hands of a bunch of frolicking donors” and “yet another example of the Museum’s callousness and greed and Ms Abramovic’s obliviousness to differences in context and some of the implications of transposing her own powerful performances to the bodies of others.” In response, the museum offered to have Rainer come to the rehearsals, which she did. While the choreographer found the scene, with hundreds of rotating live heads sitting atop tables both “touching and somewhat comic” and admitted that she herself has “never been averse to occasional epatering of the bourgeoisie,” it didn’t seem to change her opinion at all. Rainer updated her letter to Deitch, adding 50 fellow supporters names to it, and called the event a “grotesque spectacle” that “promises to be truly embarrassing.”

So that was all leading up to Saturday’s event. How did it all go over? The Daily Beast‘s Isabel Wilkinson has the first on-site report we’ve seen published, wherein the rotating heads are but just a slight bit of the weirdness Abramovic had ready for the evening. It’s worth reading Wilkinson’s report in full, so we won’t spoil it here, but we will say it involves famous women being hacked up with machetes, members of the crowd chanting “violence against women!” and a woman being quoted as saying, “This is misogyny at its finest.” All in all, at least for publicity’s sake, it sounds like yet another triumphant success for both Abramovic and Deitch.

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