Just before the weekend, the MAC Cosmetics brand has announced that it will be collaborating with artist and photographer Cindy Sherman on a limited-edition collection of what looks like borderline theatrical makeup. It makes sense, of course, given that Sherman is the undisputed queen of artistically rearranging her own face to look like different people, but the three images that will serve as the campaign for the new line are a touch off-putting. Though we suppose that’s what makes the whole thing edgy and artistic, like this chunk of the press release about the collection which, in the second paragraph, features words but doesn’t really say anything:
With the help of props, makeup, prosthetics, wigs and sets, artist Cindy Sherman embodies this Power of Transformation — from off-kilter Hitchcock heroine to fresh corpse, Caravaggio Portrait to Park Avenue Plastic Surgery Maven — all elaborate exercises in trying on different personas.
In the campaign we’ve longed forever to conceive, Cindy Sherman for MAC created three characters using three different colour stories. We’re living in a time when people of all persuasions have become bolder than ever about the ways they choose to express themselves: with a colourful palette of possibilities, You are the Artist, You are your own Subject, and no matter how fearfully you begin, you become fearless in the process.
If you’re eager to suffer through all that fear to become fearless, the Cindy Sherman for Mac collection launches at the end of September.
Speaking of MoMA, as we were in that earlier post, this weekend the museum’s PS1 branch kicked off two celebrity-heavy programs by the same two celebrities. The first is a collaboration between film director Gus Van Sant and actor-turned-everything-else called My Own Private River, which ” is comprised of unused footage and dailies from Van Sant’s 1991 film My Own Private Idaho.” The film reportedly focuses on River Phoenix‘s character and “is more observational and less linear than its original iteration.” The second project is the launch of the month-long Summer School series of master classes, taught by Van Sant, Franco, and media theorist and RISD professor, Francisco J. Ricardo. The classes will run, presumably at least once per week, for the whole of August, and of course its limited slots filled up in mere seconds, so don’t start planning your summer around getting schooled by Franco. Here’s a bit about how the program will function:
Modeled after European summer academies and especially relevant considering that MoMA PS1 is housed in a former school, Summer School makes the museum grounds a campus again with Master Classes taught by contemporary practitioners. The intimate space of the museum provides a setting for candid conversation, experimentation and practice. As a part of the program, students attending the first Master Class will be assigned “homework” for the subsequent sessions, establishing an ongoing, sustained dialogue between teachers and students, institution and visitor.
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art really, really, really wants you to come see their popular “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” exhibition before it closes next weekend. Accounting for a large chunk of the museum’s record-setting attendance levels, when we wrote a couple of weeks back that, for the third time since the exhibition opened in May, it was extending its hours, we warned you that this would be the last chance you’d get to see it. However, we were smart to add a little extra at the end: “Or until they extend it again.” And, of course, that they have. For the first time in the Met’s history, they plan to leave an exhibition open until midnight. You’ll have only those last two days, August 6th and 7th, to attend the show that late, as they haven’t yet decided to go all “Body Worlds 2 is closing, so we’re leaving the museum open for 24 hours” yet, but given the recent past, anything is possible. Here’s a bit from Met director Thomas Campbell:
“We have created these late hours to satisfy the unprecedented interest in this landmark retrospective. Visitors from across the globe have come to see this remarkable exhibition, and we want to keep it open for as many people as possible. Indeed, these midnight hours will mark a fitting conclusion to this powerful exploration of McQueen’s work.”
Shepard Fairey, whose street art work seems so identifiable that developers won’t need to build for him a tracking app, has just recently finished up a mural project for a not-yet-open public library branch in West Hollywood. According to the LA Times, Fairey was commissioned, along with fellow artists Retna and Kenny Scharf, after Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art director Jeffrey Deitch took a tour of the under-construction library and thought murals might look nice on the sides of the building’s large parking structure, no doubt with the intent of also boosting interest in the MoCA’s popular but sometimes controversial “Art in the Streets” exhibition. You might recall that this is the second time in recent days that Deitch has brought in Fairey, as he had him paint a mural just before leaving New York. A few eyebrows are sure to be raised at Deitch suggesting big murals on public walls, given that just a few months ago, the newly-West Coast-transplanted museum director was catching a generous amount of flak for painting over a mural he had commissioned from French street artist Blu, fearing that it would generate hostilities among the locals. However, while he might not be able to dodge that coming-criticism, the whole mural-painting crew seems to have thought a bit ahead when it came to another important question, particularly in a financially-starved state, as Fairey writes on his blog, “Calm down taxpayers…I was not paid to do the mural and paid for my own supplies and labor.”
Another week and another chance to say “You’re welcome, universe, for giving you such wonderful ideas.” Of course we’re talking about the credit we should be duly given, first for the city of Bristol deciding that it might need a registry of pieces of Banksy‘s street art, something we’d suggested might be a good idea so their residents don’t accidentally keep painting over them after one of its residents accidentally painted over one. Now that same sort of idea has come out on a larger scale with a whole iPhone app. Called Banksy Locations, the app not only offers galleries and videos of pieces by the mysterious artist, but will also “show you locations of Banksy’s famous street art and then give you directions so you can experience them for your self!” Granted, the app was announced back in early July and we didn’t write our post recommending a registry until the 15th, but we’re still just going to keep claiming everything Banksy-related as stemming from our borderline-divine, shared inspiration. Seems easier that way. Anyway, here’s the app’s promo video:
Talk To Me is new exhibition at MoMA in New York that explores how objects communicate with us, and in turn can help us communicate with others. The show features nearly 200 projects, all centred on interaction, and emphasises how the need to share information and have a dialogue with audiences is overtaking form and function in contemporary design…
Unusually for a museum show, the curators of Talk To Me were entirely open about their process in the run up to the show, placing all the projects that were being considered for entry on a website, moma.org/talktome. The site has now been turned into a hub for the finished exhibition, featuring details of the 194 projects that made the final cut. As with any show about the ‘now’, Talk To Me is an eclectic mix. There are works centred on utility and information sharing rubbing against pieces that would probably be more commonly described as fine art. But there are undoubtedly some brilliant ideas in the show. A number of projects, such as Chris Milk’s Wilderness Downtown and Chris O’Shea’s Hand From Above have already been covered in depth on the CR blog, but here’s a selection of the other projects on the site that stood out for us.
First up is Konstantin Datz’s Rubik’s Cube for the Blind, shown above, designed in 2010. Datz has replaced the cube’s usual coloured stickers with white panels embossed with the Braille words for each colour, transforming the game from a visual puzzle into a tactile one.
Chris Woebken created the Bat Billboard as urban housing for bats, who despite being seen as a pest by many, play a key role in our ecosystems, pollinating plants and providing insect control. The housing is set inside a standard billboard structure, as the film above shows. Woebken has also placed monitoring equipment inside the billboard that uses voice recognition software to map and translate the calls of the resident bats. These are then matched to archives of various call patterns and meanings, currently being compiled by biologists, and the translated bat messages are displayed on a screen, allowing humans to understand bats better. More on the project is here.
A group of designers at Mobile Art Lab (a research centre looking at mobile phone content, part of Dentsu ad agency in Japan) created the PhoneBook in 2009, which brings modern phone technology together with a physical book for children. The film above shows how the PhoneBook works.
While they are a pleasure to have around the home, plants can also be a worry, especially for those of us with a tendency to forget about watering. To help with this, a group of US designers created Botanicalls, a device that uses moisture sensors in a plant’s soil to trigger messages to its human caretaker over a wireless network. The messages are either tweeted or read out by a recorded human voice via telephone and allow the plants to send out distress calls, and even notes of thanks. More on the project is here.
Maarten Baas’s Analogue Digital Clock is available as an iPhone or iPad app and appears, initially at least, as a classic digital clock. In fact, as the film above demonstrates, it is a videotaped performance of an actor painting or erasing sections of the digital display numbers by hand, minute by minute. A nice mix of analogue and digital worlds.
Designed by Stewart Smith in 2007, the Windmaker applies current wind conditions to any website. As the film above shows, this means if it’s blowing a gale outside your window, Windmaker will also cause chaos on your internet browser. Visit the Windmaker site here to play.
The SMSlingshot was created by a group of German designers in 2009, and mixes a traditional weapon with digital technology. The wooden device looks like a large catapult but contains a display screen and keypad where users can write messages. These can then be flung at large public screens where they will appear as if splattered. The film above shows the SMSlingshot in action.
The Ink Calendar, by Oscar Diaz, is a ‘self-updating’ calendar, where the ink is gradually absorbed through the paper over the course of the month, revealing each date as it goes. More on the project is here.
The BBC Dimensions website (found at howbigreally.com) gives a sense of the literal enormity of important events by overlaying them on a map of where you are. For example, as the above image shows, it turns out the Apollo 11 moonwalkers only actually walked the equivalent of a couple of blocks. Lazy gits. The site was created by a group of designers at Berg in collaboration with the BBC.
The Talk To Me show also includes some less expected pieces of interaction design, such as Call Me, Choke Me, designed by Gunnar Green, a product that ties mobile phone activity to the practice of erotic asphyxiation. With each phone call or text message, whether or not it is picked up or responded to, the collar tightens. Fun for all the family.
Talk To Me is at MoMA until November 7. For more info on the products shown here, and all the others featured in the show, visit moma.org/talktome. A full review of the exhibition will appear in the September issue of Creative Review.
What’s the best way to pump a whole ton of money into a small town? Simple: pump a whole ton of money into building a gigantic museum with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of art that people will flock to see. Such is apparently happening in Bentonville, Arkansas on the eve of the opening of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. The massive Moshe Safdie-designed complex, set to open in November and founded by Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, is pushing the town into high gear, as the APreports that construction will begin in September on “a luxury hotel that will be designed to host travelers” and that the city is already “upgrading water and sewer lines for the hotel.” There are already more than a dozen places to hang your hat in and around Bentonville, but the city is likely (and perhaps rightly) expecting a big uptick in visitors this winter and wanted to have something a bit nicer than the Hilton on Walton Blvd. Though given that the Wal-Mart headquarters has long called the town home, we’re sure that that Hilton was already pretty nice. We just think it would be fun to see a Four Seasons or a Ritz in a town of less than 40,000 people. Yep, that’s the sort of thing that we find fun.
We’ve already covered LCC’s degree show on the CR blog, but a recent exhibition, The Space Between, showing as part of this year’s Create festival, saw a group of graduates from the Interaction and Moving Image course take up another opportunity to exhibit their work in London.
Organised in collaboration with Nexus Productions, who also showed video works in the exhibition and held a series of talks by their directors/artists on the opening night, The Space Between was staged in a disused office space in Canary Wharf. The setting gave the LCC graduates room to show their final year projects, as well as a number of other installations created for the space.
These included the work shown above and top, titled Mausaleum, which was a collaborative piece by Jimmy Irwin, Kirsty Tizzard, Hannah Blackmore, Jake Dowling and James Morrison. Channelling the artist Rachel Whiteread, the piece was created by casting details of the existing building in latex.
Another piece seemingly inspired by the contemporary art world, this time by the work of Anya Gallaccio, was Unwanted Change by Fiona Choi, who hung a group of strawberries in the space and recorded them slowly rotting. According to the exhibition notes, Choi aims to look “at the changes which people normally neglect or abominate” with the piece. As I visited right at the end of the exhibition’s run, the strawberries were in a pretty precarious state.
Yong Ding exhibited a series of films he has made about homelessness in London in the exhibition, alongside an installation on the subject, shown above.
Christophe Amaning’s installation What Used To Be played on the disrepair of the Canary Wharf space. It featured a series of empty desks with bingo paraphernalia left scattered across them, and had a ghostly soundscape of a bingo game in session. According to Amaning, it aimed to encapsulate “the essence of an abandoned community room in its prime, fading to the echoes of what it once was”.
Jake Dowling had a number of works in The Space Between. These included Know The Difference Between Your and You’re, shown above, which is a 3D visualisation of an online argument (this was also shown in the LCC degree show).
Dowling also created the sculpture above, titled Desk, for the show, which “focuses on the potential tension of a once busy office space”.
Jenny Keuter used the empty office space “like drawing paper” to create a work made of string, which is part of a series of drawings, prints and installations by Keuter that explore and reflect the notion of space.
The show also included a number of interactive works by Tomomi Sayuda, who graduated from LCC in 2009, and was featured in Creative Review’s special graduate issue (see article here) in the same year. One of these was Oshibe, shown above, which plays sounds and lights up as users interact with its eggs.
The Space Between finished on Saturday but more details of it can be found here. The exhibition demonstrated not only the talent of the students coming out of the LCC’s Interaction and Design course, but also the benefits of getting out there and organising additional exhibitions on top of degree shows, which is certainly a great way of standing out among the crowds. More info on the graduates featured here can be found online at lccgmd2011.com; my original post on the LCC degree show (which features pieces by a number of other interaction and design graduates, I’ve tried to avoid any overlaps here) is online here.
Speaking of the ends of legal issues, as we were in that last post, the case against former Lawrence Salander henchman, Leigh Morse, finally wrapped up last week with her sentencing. You might recall that, back in April, the former director of Salander’s gallery, was found guilty of selling millions of dollars of art from the estates of artists without letting the owners know. Salander had been convicted and sentenced back in the summer of 2010 and is expected to spend the next 6 to 18 years in prison for his roles in defrauding investors, becoming known as “the art world’s Bernie Madoff.” Morse was facing up to four years in prison herself, but wound up getting off a bit more easy. Instead, Reutersreports that she’ll be required to pay back $1.85 million in restitution, “will spend weekends in confinement for four months,” and is set to “serve probation for five years.”
Last night around 150 @CreativeReview Twitter followers descended on Tate Britain to join us in a bit of creative merriment. There was a fine mix of agency types, image-makers and art lovers, and all in all things seemed to go rather well.
Tate Britain provided a fantastically cultured environment for our guests, and, as well as plying everyone with drinks and nibbles, granted a private view of their new Vorticists exhibition to everyone who attended (Highly recommended. We have a review of the show in this month’s issue).
Upon exiting the exhibition attendees were greeted by a twitterstream and feed from the Blast/Bless tumblr we have been running in partnership with the Tate, before being met by the team from interactive production company Specialmoves, who pulled out all the stops with an HTML5 version of parlour game Consequences (aka Exquisite Corpse), topped off with a Vorticists-inspired twist. The app proved hugely popular with our guests and we reckon Specialmoves should release a multiplayer-friendly version for the masses. For a glimpse of how the app works, take a look at the following video:
A couple of crops of some of the efforts that were produced are shown below.
But it wasn’t all hi-tech action. Back in the reception area, Emma Taylor and some of the staff from photographers’ agents Vue Represents set our guests to work on a more traditional version of Consequences, with crayons, colouring pens and A1 sheets of paper. (Vue also threw in a free ticket for everyone to this weekend’s National Lottery draw. So fingers crossed all round.) The results were documented by photographer Jonathan Minster and in the picture below you can see a combined effort by @stuartwitts, @GrossmaryK and @jiteshpatel.
Photograph of Stuart Witts, Rosemary Kirton and Jitesh Patel at Tate Britain by Jonathan Minster
Tomek Zarebski bring a touch of Surrealism to a night that otherwise belonged to the Vorticists (Photo by Lubna Keawpanna)
After all the fun and frolics, all that remained was for our guests to grab their swag and head en masse to the local pub to inspect it. And what a haul it was..
Photo by Chloe Kirton
Rampant Sporting provided both the bags to carry everything in, plus stylish sports socks we’re asking our guests to deface by transforming into puppets, for them to upload pictures of to a dedicated Flickr group.
Also included in the bags was a poster of the winning entries from the Blast/Bless tumblr. The Blast contribution is by illustrator Abigail Daker and the Bless is by designer and writer Daniel Gray.
Blast/Bless by Abigail Daker and Daniel Gray
A tidy haul
In addition to the socks (and Rampant pin badges), posters and lottery tickets, everyone went away with a copy of the latest Creative Review, the novel Tarr by Wyndham Lewis courtesy of Oxford University Press, Selected Poems by Ezra Pound provided by Faber & Faber, and an artists’ pencil set supplied by Derwent Pencils.
A great big thanks to all those mentioned above for helping make the evening such a memorable one, and of course thank you to our guests. We hope you all had as much fun as we did. See you at the next one!
CR in Print
Thanks for reading the CR Blog but, if you’re not also getting the printed magazine, we think you are missing out. This month’s bumper July issue contains 60 pages of great images in our Illustration Annual plus features on Chris Milk, Friends With You and the Coca-Cola archive.
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