Hasta La Ideas

(Photos: Benoit Pailley)

For his first New York survey exhibition, German artist Carsten Höller has transformed the New Museum into a fun house-cum-laboratory that invites visitors to take a ride on the mirrored carousel, commune with nature (giant mushroom sculptures in the lobby, canary mobiles, a zoo’s worth of napping polyurethane mammals), assault their visual cortices with a wall of flashing lights, and take a disorienting dip in the “Psycho Tank,” a sensory deprivation pool. Getting to all of these attractions—uh, works—is half the fun, thanks to the 102-foot-long stainless steel slide that now perforates the ceilings and floors of the SANAA-designed building. The pneumatic mailing system for humans runs from the fourth floor to the second floor, but those that prefer to take the elevator will find Höller’s videos—of elevators and twins—playing, appropriately, on a loop.

On view through January 15, the exhibition features work from the past two decades, but don’t expect clear chronology at this carnival. “The show is conceived as an immersive environment,” writes curator Massimiliano Gioni in the exhibition catalogue, which borrows its mini-encyclopedia format from a publication for Marcel Duchamp’s 1977 retrospective at the Centre Pompidou. “Nearly all of the works in the show are meant to be used and tested. And viewers themselves will also be tested and tried by an exhibition that alternates between excitement and boredom, overstimulation and radical dullness.” That’s also an apt description of the labor-intensive process of installing Höller’s slide, and the New Museum has created the below series of three videos to answer the inevitable question: How’d they do that?

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

You say “Gwathmey”! We say “Siegel”! Gwathmey! Siegel! The storied architectural firm, which was acquired by architect Gene Kaufman back in June, is the subject of an exhibition opening on Monday, November 14, at the Yale School of Architecture. Organized by the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, North Carolina, and retooled for New Haven by Yale’s Brian Butterfield, “Gwathmey Siegel: Inspiration and Transformation” examines the close relationship between art and architecture in eight of the firm’s residential and institutional projects, ranging from the iconic house and studio that Gwathmey designed for his parents in the mid 1960s and the Bechtler residence in Zumikon, Switzerland to the renovation of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the makeover of Yale’s own Paul Rudolph Hall (née the Art + Architecture Building). You may recall that last year, Gwathmey’s widow, Bette-Ann Gwathmey, agreed to donate the Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects archives to the Yale University Library, and the exhibition will also showcase some more personal artifacts, including Gwathmey’s scrapbook from a family tour of Europe in 1949-50 and a selection of his student work at Yale, where he studied under Rudolph.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Coffin shaped skateboards from an artist-run company living to skate and die

Inspired by the gritty streets of NYC and the raw style borne from them, Corpse Corps Boards makes coffin-shaped skateboards fit for the cutthroat mentality of East Coast skating. Founders and lifelong skateboarders Drew McKenzie and Jordan Walczak understand the need to make a product strong enough to hold up to the daily abuse of skateboarding. From its humble beginnings as a DIY art project in McKenzie’s Manhattan apartment, Corpse Corps Boards has evolved into a full-fledged skateboard company now making two sizes of decks and a small run of high-quality softgoods.

Not just another cruiser board, these shred-sleds are meant to be skated—case in point, the images of McKenzie killing it. Available in two sizes—9″ and 10″—with the perfect amount of concave, each deck is made with pure hard rock American maple. The standard 9″ deck is produced on the East Coast with wood sourced from the same legendary distributor that supplied Blockhead Skateboards and JFA in the mid-’80s and early ’90s. These 7-ply hand-screen-printed decks retain the general dimensions of a standard skateboard—31.5″ from nose to tail for plenty of pop.

In an effort to establish an artists’ network of sorts, Corpse Corps Boards’ 10″ decks are created in collaboration with local artists, graffiti writers, punk band members and all-around creative types who run the same seedy streets. Each board is cut, shaped and painted by hand in Brooklyn. Like all Corpse Corps Boards these individually-crafted decks are meant to be shredded, designed to the same length and concave as the 9″ board. In order to preserve the one-of-a-kind artwork, even after a good thrashing, each deck is coated in polyurethane.

To celebrate the official launch of Corpse Corps Boards the minds behind the company are curating a group exhibition featuring hand-painted decks by some of NYC’s most influential artists. “Open Casket” opens Friday 28 October with a party at Lower East Side’s Coat of Arms, showcasing original works from the likes of Nicholas Gazin, Greg Mishka, Bill Connors (top left) and many more.

“Open Casket” runs through 7 November 2011 and all custom-painted decks will be auctioned off after the opening party tomorrow night. Standard 9″ decks sell for $55 while the hand-painted 10″ decks go for $88—not bad for an original work of art. To purchase head to Corpse Corps Boards’ online store.

This past weekend saw the opening of the Graphic Design: Now in Production—an extensive new exhibition that examines the remarkable growth of the field over the past decade—at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN. “This major international exhibition explores how graphic design has broadened its reach dramatically over the past decade, expanding from a specialized profession to a widely deployed tool.”

Peter Buchanan-Smith – Best Made American Felling Axes (2009)

This phenomenon is attributable to several factors, from the advent of Web 2.0 to the accessibility of software tools to “innovations in publishing and distribution systems,” which has enabled “people outside the field… to create and publish visual media.” Conversely, “designers are becoming producers: authors, publishers, instigators, and entrepreneurs employing their creative skills as makers of content and shapers of experiences.”

Graphic Design: Now in Production explores design-driven magazines, newspapers, books, and posters as well as branding programs for corporations, subcultures, and nations. It also showcases a series of developments over the past decade, such as the entrepreneurial nature of designer-produced goods; the renaissance in digital typeface design; the storytelling potential of titling sequences for film and television; and the transformation of raw data into compelling information narratives.

Daniel Eatock – Felt-Tip Print (2006) & Pantone Pen Print (2006)

The curatorial team consists of Ian Albinson (artofthetitle.com), Andrew Blauvelt (Walker Art Center, Jeremy Leslie (9magCulture.com), Ellen Lupton (Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum) and Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio of Brand New. Together, they’ve selected works from over 200 designers, dating to no earlier than 2000, for the massive exhibition, which runs until January 22, 2012.

Graphic Design: Now in Production is the largest museum exhibition on the subject since the Walker’s seminal 1989 exhibition Graphic Design in America: A Visual Language History, and the Cooper-Hewitt’s 1996 comprehensive survey, Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture. Appropriately, this exhibition is being developed jointly with the Cooper-Hewitt.

Sarah Illenberger – Infographic for “The Truth about Sex” for Neon Magazine (2008)

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Artist and communication designer Nils Völker‘s latest site-specific installation “Thirty Six” isn’t a huge departure from his previous work, but it definitely has enough charm to warrant at least a minute or three of online video distraction. As with “CAPTURED: An Homage to Light and Air,” a collaboration between the self-proclaimed “machine artist” and his brother, a graphic designer, Nils’ recent solo piece consists mostly of large, inflatable bags that are “choreographed,” so to speak, to evoke respiration.

This time around, the translucent plastic is suspended from the ceiling like a living, breathing chandelier, such that the cells’ organization around a central axis, their gauzy constitution and the yellow light itself make for a stark contrast to the shimmering, alien balloon-field of “CAPTURED.” Where the previous work took on a distinctly space-age—even Olafur Eliasson-esque—look and feel, “Thirty Six” feels far more organic, short of biomimicry; it’s something like an uncanny, larger-than-life alveoli.

The installation is made of “plastic bags, fans, aluminum, halogen light, steel,” brought to life by “custom electronics and programming.”

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