Hasta La Ideas

One of Theo Jansen’s self-propelling Strandbeests (beach animals) beside a drawing by the artist depicting the creature’s “stomach” of recycled plastic bottles containing air that can be pumped up to a high pressure by the wind and “muscles” of plastic tubing.

“Theo showed me around his small on-site workshop [near Delft, The Netherlands]. It was filled with tools like vises, saws, clamps, and heat guns for softening the plastic tubes. On perforated wallboards, tools hung neatly inside their black magic-marker outlines. From a workbench Theo picked up a piece of three-quarter-inch PVC tube about two feet long. He said this was the basic element in the Strandbeests’ construction, like protein in living things. ‘I have known about these tubes all my life,’ he told me. (He speaks good English.) ‘Building codes in Holland require that electrical wiring in buildings go through conduit tubes like these. There are millions of miles of these tubes in Holland. You see they are a cheese yellow when they are new—a good color for Holland. The tubes’ brand name used to be Polyvolt, now it is Pipelife. When we were little, we used to do this with them.’

He took a student notebook, tore out a sheet of graph paper, rolled it into a tight cone, wet the point of the cone with his tongue, tore off the base of the cone so it fit snugly into the tube, raised the tube to his lips, blew, and sent the paper dart smack into the wall, fifteen feet away. He is the unusual kind of adult who can do something he used to do when he was nine and not have it seem at all out of place. ‘I believe it is now illegal for children in Dutch schools to have these tubes,’ he said.”

–Ian Frazier in his article on Dutch artist and kinetic sculptor Theo Jansen that appears in the September 5 issue of The New Yorker
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Lui è Korehiko Hino.
{Via}

The work of Anish Kapoor is a delight to experience but awfully tricky to translate into words or pictures. The Bombay-born, London-based artist’s monumental sculptures send photographers scurrying to dodge distorting reflections and leave critics to expound upon “mirrored convexities” and “funneled, shallow volumes.” This has kept Kapoor rather removed from the featured collaborator circuit, in which companies tap top artists and designers to put their aesthetic signature on everything from t-shirts and jeans to mascara tubes and wine labels. He’s finally found a good match in illy, the global espresso purveyor that has invited artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, and Marina Abramovic to reimagine its trademark white porcelain cup, originally designed by Matteo Thun. For the latest in illy’s series of artist-designed cup collections, Kapoor came up with a cup and saucer that could double as a dollhouse-sized version of some his best known works. The inside of the cup and centerless saucer are coated in a shiny platinum finish, and the distinctive silvery life preserver quality of the latter is sure to spark deep conversations—and possibly a craving for glazed donuts. The Kapoor cups go on sale in September in beautifully packaged sets of two ($90 at illy’s online shop).

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Show RCA 2011: Royal College of Art graduate Malene Hartmann Rasmussen created this ceramic installation evoking a surreal forest hut from a Brothers Grimm fairytale for her graduation show earlier this summer.

Entitled If I Had A Heart I Could Love You, the installation features a stove at its centre that’s filled with burning logs, which on closer inspection are shaped like human hearts.

The wooden boards of the hut are nailed down but continue to grow, and a spiky kettle overflows with smoke on top of the stove.

See all our stories about this year’s Royal College of Art graduate show here and all our stories about ceramics here.

The information below is from Malene Hartmann Rasmussen:

In this project I work with how we perceive the world, twisting and changing the perception of the space to create an eerie surreal and otherworldly feeling. The setting is a wooden hut as we know it from the folk tales of Brothers Grimm. The viewer is intruding this reality-shifting dark place. It is a fake wooden hut, a piece of theater-like scenery made from drawn wood planks, the “Flintstones” aesthetic and Technicolor quality of the ceramics underlines the hyper real dreamlike feeling.

In the hut there is a fireplace, the burning logs look like hearts, but the hearts look like real hearts and the branches sticking out of them resembles blood filled arteries and veins. The hut is in a forest or maybe the hut is the forest; the wooden planks are sprouting and coming to life, or maybe they were alive and someone is cutting them down? This uncanny and dark fairytale is fragmented, like in a crime story the clues are scattered around, the viewer is the detective trying to make sense of it all.

I am working with mixed media sculpture, making and arranging multiple components into complex narrative sceneries, the dialogue between components and the way one’s unconscious can direct the composition interests me. The intention is to impose personal feelings and stories onto container objects that traditionally have no feelings. Initially the viewer may, mistakenly, be drawn to my figures thinking them to be toys; however closer examination reveals their rather darker narrative. They invite you into an absurd and surreal world where things are not what they seem…

I want my work to look like a very skilled child could have made it, clumsy and elaborate at the same time. My intention is to create compositions that have an underlying story and mood. I hope the interpretation of my work isn’t too fixed; my intent is to make it open for the viewer to filter their own references through, to make sense and contribute to the story themselves. My aim is to create a visual poetry based on my own personal story.

Size: height: 200 cm. width: 200 cm. depth: 130 cm.
Materials: ceramics, MDF, polyester fiber, pins, print, found object

See also:

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The Skullmate by Luke Twigger	After the Party by Makiko Nakamura	Chicle objects by Hella Jongerius

Over the past couple of weeks with artist Ai Weiwei suddenly starting to reemerge online and in the media, despite a gag order placed on him by the Chinese government upon his release from a three-month detainment, we’ve spent time speculating every time he quickly pops his head out in public to test the waters if the ban has been lessened or if Weiwei just can’t be kept away. Breaking the gag order once more by recently talking to the LA Times, it appears to be much more of the latter. In between talking about an installation of his work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which opened this past Saturday, writer David Ng managed to get the artist to reveal a bit about his recent forays back into the limelight (like right at that moment, talking to the LA Times). Though very brief and, as Ng puts it, “the artist hesitated when asked,” Weiwei offered up the following: “Twitter is not allowed, of course,” he said. “I can’t talk about my case. I have broken some rules, but I have to take the consequences. I have been warned again.” So, as we’d said back when Weiwei joined Google+, once a rule breaker, always a rule breaker. How much trouble he’ll get in for saying he’ll get in trouble for saying that is anyone’s guess. We’ll wait to hear all about it on Twitter or maybe a profile/interview in the New Yorker.

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