SPREAD | ArtCulture » Architecture

Sheffield Gets a Facelift with Street Artist Phlegm

KisaLala — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:35:52 +0000

Phlegm painting at an old abandoned school in Sheffield, UK © Phlegm

UK street artist Phlegm has been changing the face of Sheffield’s abandoned lots, transforming them into galleries of black and white murals.

Phlegm has a unique talent for adapting to the surfaces of his dilapidated surroundings, allowing his characters to evolve in situ; the walls appear to have been constructed just to inhabit his creatures.

Phlegm painting at an old abandoned school in Sheffield, UK © Phlegm

In the above images Phlegm painted the walls at an abandoned school in Sheffield. “Spend a week on your own in there and you can literally watch nature eating it’s way through it, claiming it back,” says the artist of his experience of working at the school

Phlegm at Work © Romany WG

Phelgm in Sheffield, UK photo: © Romany WG

“This big robot is painted on the back of some abandoned substation just outside Sheffield,” says Phlegm

Falling - Phlegm, Sheffield, UK, February 2012

This above mural is part of a brilliant series of falling men in which Phlegm’s enigmatic creatures are suspended mid-motion in the act of falling. It recalls Georg Baselitz’s inverted paintings in which the world seems temporarily disrupted and turned upside down.

Phlegm, Outside Sheffield, UK. 2011 - from unurth.com

Phelgm Zombies, Sheffield, UK 2011

Phlegm painted this wall while they were filming a zombie movie at the location.

Phlegm paints a Telescope or Eyeglass at an abandoned site in Sheffield, UK

Phlegm paints a warehouse in Sheffield, UK December 2011

Harnessing of the Giant Squids Sheffield, UK

Read more:
Phlegm Website
Photographer Romany WG

A Temple to Godlessness

KisaLala — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:31:50 +0000

Alain de Botton – A Temple for Atheists Image: Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgson

The writer, Alain De Botton, famous for his musings on Proust and the nature of happiness, has always had an interest in the way humans are impacted by architectural spaces. De Botton has explored transitional places and the way they affect human emotions – and he has lived in an airport continuously for a week for research on his book A Week At the Airport. But, for his latest project, De Botton has been inspired to create an edifice for atheists to counter the millions of monuments that exist for gods.

For the scores of glorious cathedrals and mosques built by architects there appears to be none that had been built for atheists. Places of worship have been built for Jesus, Mary and for the Buddha, but temples can also be built for love, friendship and calmness…

Alain de Botton – A Temple for Atheists Image: Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgson

De Botton intends to build his tower in London at a symbolic height that reflects a scale of 300 million years of life on earth. He explained in the Guardian, “Each centimeter of the tapering tower’s interior has been designed to represent a million years and a narrow band of gold will illustrate the relatively tiny amount of time humans have walked the planet.” De Botton’s idea is to encourage contemplation. He also added, “the exterior would be inscribed with a binary code denoting the human genome sequence.”

Alain de Botton – A Temple for Atheists - Image courtesy of Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgson

The Secular Retreat designed by Peter Zumthor, in South Devon for Living Architecture concept for 2012

De Botton has said that he finds Richard Dawkins‘ and Christopher Hitchens’ approach to atheism too aggressive and destructive, and not positively persuasive to people who are just not that interested in religion but not aggressively opposed to it.

He believes that a temple for atheists fits into a tradition of secular places such as Rothko’s chapel. De Botton also manages Living Architecture, which is an organization that invites people to rent and holiday at some of the most innovative spaces designed by contemporary architects, and recently Peter Zumthor has designed a new building for Living Architecture, “Secular Retreat” which will be available to renters later in 2012

Alain de Botton - researching airports

The Balancing Barn, Alain De Botton, Living Architecture

Alain De Botton has a new book out, Religion for Atheists, which poses the idea of whether religions are neither all true or all nonsense – http://www.alaindebotton.com/religion.asp

Clouds and Cobwebs

KisaLala — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 22:23:48 +0000

Tomás Saraceno Observatory/Air-Port-City Hayward Gallery,London, 2008. Gesamthöhe: 9,6 m Courtesy: The artist and Andersen's Contemporary,Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, pinksummer contemporary art. Foto: Courtesy Tomás Saraceno

Photo: Courtesy Tomás Saraceno

Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno’s visionary exhibition Cloud Cities at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin is a hall of floating spheres and webs inspired by utopic visions of hanging settlements or cloud cities that can migrate across the globe.

Saraceno builds on his knowledge of architecture and astronomy to create artwork inspired by soap bubbles and the tensile configurations of spider webs. Viewers at the museum can interact and enter the bubbles to experience their translucent, trans-dimensional qualities. The Mother Bubble, features an undulating plastic base for visitors to lounge on.

Photo: Courtesy Tomás Saraceno

Tomás Saraceno Biosphere, Installationsansicht Statens Museum for Kunst, Kopenhagen, Dänemark, 2009 Foto: Courtesy Tomás Saraceno, Produced by National Gallery of Denmark 2009

In an interview, Saraceno explained his project of creating cities like mobile platforms or habitable cels that float in the air. “These change form and join together like clouds.” His ideas of nomadic architecture are inspired in part by Buckminster Fuller. The artist explained his vision, “Up in the sky there will be this cloud, a habitable platform that floats in the air, changing form and merging with other platforms just as clouds do. It will fly through the atmosphere pushed by the winds, both local and global, in an attempt to equalise the (social) temperature and differences in pressure. It will be a sustainable and mobile migration. These aerial cities will be in a permanent state of transformation, similar to nomadic cities. After all, gypsies never go back to the same place simply because the place is constantly changing.”

Photo: Courtesy Tomás Saraceno

Cloud Cities runs until February 9 2012.

Stand in Line: Out of the Ordinary

KisaLala — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 23:18:59 +0000

By Kiša Lala

Nineteen year old street photographer Shane Vincent has an eye for capturing those ephemeral moments when the changing light transforms the mundane into the sublime.

The project, Stand in Line, came about when Vincent began photographing utility poles in the streets of North London where he lives: “The series started at a time where the sky looked pretty cool,” he says. “It was autumn so it would change constantly. It caused me to look up a lot.” The outcome of his first photograph, Stay connected of a utility pole “with wires coming out at all directions,” was captivating enough, recollects the young photographer, that it caused him to pay more regard to the perpendicular poles and lampposts which most take for granted and which habitually punctuate the urban horizon. By isolating them against the vivid autumnal sky, and shooting them from an anamorphic perspective, Vincent enhanced their geometric abstractions.

Never having been formally trained in the field, Vincent fell into photography as a hobby. Soon, his spontaneous street images brought him enough attention as a photographer to develop his dabbling to a more serious professional level. Initially, he says, he began by experimenting with 35mm because he liked the grain and quality of the images, but because of the expenses of printing, he later gave way to digital, whose more crisp, modern feel led him towards a contemporary vision.

“Visually, film has had the greatest influence,” the photographer tells me, remarking on his inspirations, “mainly those that show futuristic visions.”

“The interest in the future, dystopian and utopian sides is shown in the series, in the colours and moods particularly,” Vincent elaborates. “I decided to shoot them from a similar angle, straight up through the centre, fading and distorting towards the peak. It struck me as a most intimidating perspective.”

For more information on Shane Vincent’s photography: www.shaneellisvincent.com

Keeping Time with Tom Sachs

KisaLala — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:38:26 +0000

By Kiša Lala

Tom Sachs, Photograph by The Selby

After a few years of tinkering in his studio, Tom Sachs has resurfaced with a new show entitled Work at New York’s Sperone Westwater gallery filling three floors with art exploring as many creative tangents: a series of pyrographic works, using a wood burning-etching technique; a foamcore crafted collection based on Sevres porcelain; and a series that pays homage to James Brown, with a JB listening station, his Last Supper packed in a microwave, and a framed array of JB’s hair products.

Sachs had cited James Brown’s work ethic as an inspiration for the show, so I took him to task for being late for our meeting and disappointing Brown’s high standards for punctuality.

“When Brown fined his workers for being late it was contributing to a culture of punctuality,” explained Sachs in defense of the Hardest Working Man in Show Business. “He fined them for missing a beat, he used punctuality as a percussive element: to be on time, to keep time; not miss a beat.”

Sachs runs his Vulcan smithy of tinkerers like a boot camp, with red beans and rice every Monday. “Rather than a prison fantasy it’s more a utopian fantasy. More Amish. You can leave,” he forewarns me, “but you might find that the outside world may not be as inviting.”

Tom Sachs' tribute to James Brown: © Tom Sachs 'Please, Please, Please', 2011 mixed media 64 x 22 x 14 inches 162,6 x 55,9 x 35,6 cm overall Courtesy Sperone Westwater Gallery

Tom Sachs James Brown's Last Supper, 2009 mixed media 68 x 42 x 22 1/2 inches 172,7 x 106,7 x 57,2 cm Courtesy of Sperone Westwater Gallery

Tom Sachs, Photograph by The Selby

Many of Sachs’ artworks retain a quasi-functional element, and he often appropriates objects to demonstrate rituals in people’s lives. I ventured that his use of diagrams, maps, floor plans and lists might hark back to his childhood, playing with models perhaps?

“I want to use this opportunity to debunk the myth immediately that I’m as organized as I might look,” he tells me, further shattering any suspicions I might have had of his discipline. “It’s my way of battling entropy. I live an incredibly chaotic life. In recent years, I’ve made an incredible effort to eliminate chaos from my life. But it’s also where I find inspiration, so it’s a question of finding balance. I don’t know what Donald Judd’s life was really like because I never met him – but I imagine someone with furniture like that would have a very ascetic existence.”

“I grew up very unhappy and learning disabled, a terrible athlete, failing classes constantly, always having to go to summer schools, profoundly unsuccessful,” Sachs summed up his childhood, “It might have been diagnosed as dyslexia or ADD – but when I think back, it’s really that I hadn’t found my calling yet.”

Might he have found his calling in architecture school to channel his wavering interests? Sachs scoffed at this, “No, architecture training was completely worthless. Sculptural building is where I learned all that…and I spent some time as a construction worker.”

Sachs can afford to thumb his nose now at architects too lofty to get their hands dirty with any kind of actual building. At the Architectural Association in London, where he studied, Sachs remembers how his classmates tried bribing him to finish their technical studies project for them. “I told them to fuckoff, so they probably hired someone else to do it. But I bet those are the bitches out their making terrible buildings.”

Tom Sachs Spade, 2010 - 2011 camouflage cloth 78 3/4 x 4 x 3/4 inches 200 x 10 x 1,9 cm Courtesy of Sperone Westwater Gallery

Our conversation meandered into Ant Farm, the Design Build movement and the corrosive action of urine on corner walls of fancy architecture, but I thought James Brown might have disapproved of our attention dissipating, parenthetical digressions so I returned our swerving line of query back to the ubiquity of branding, and its impact on our cultural consciousness: Sachs, has a scaled-up version of a Macdonald’s coffee stirrer in the show – it’s like a paddle with a weaponized spade-tip that could be used in agriculture or war… but Sachs is likely taking a dig at its proletarian usage, “for cocaine.”

“I’ve been repulsed by the promises and the perceived obsolescence that advertising creates in our lives, the insecurities of not having something – and that buying the product might make our lives better – but simultaneously, I’m attracted by the glamor, beauty and power of brands. I’m not exclusively critical of them – I’m a complicit critic. A participant in the cycle.”

Tom Sachs, Photograph by The Selby

If not entirely immune to the latest Prada handbag then, Sachs is far more consumed by his next project of a make-belief odyssey, ‘Space Program 2.0: Mars,‘ about to transform the cavernous interior of the Park Avenue Armory in New York next year. Sachs also makes seductive cabinetries for his NASA projects, with knobs and dials exquisitely detailed from an era of machine hardware, rendering them as fetishized historical artifacts. He speaks wistfully about the golden age of machine design, which he considers to have been dead by 1974. “So discouraging for me to see how amazing the software has become and how degraded the hardware has become, and how we’ve kind of given up.”

“When I was in architecture school – I thought I could contribute to the world by making beautiful buildings. I got discouraged and dropped out and said fuck it – I was going to enjoy my life and make what I really love to do…make the best sculptures I can – and communicate the way I do things as ethically as possible – building things to last,” said Sachs earnestly. “I make things out of paper, foam-core and non-durable materials but I do everything in my power to imbue them with value and meaning so that they can live on beyond me.”

Tom Sachs Swans, 2011 epoxy resin on mixed media 14 x 16 x 16 inches 35,6 x 40,6 x 40,6 cm Courtesy of Sperone Westwater Gallery

Coming full-circle, back to Sachs’ original cobbled-together hot-wired artifacts he’s best known for, is his new series of beautiful foam-core bricolage that imitates the highly coveted 18^th c. porcelain collections produced by a factory in Sevres, founded by Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV (c. 1745). Known for her fashionable tastes, she set the Jones’ ablaze with envy, starting a mad collecting rush that inflated prices and resulted in buyers paying more for a tea set than an entire farm. The huge inequity eventually led to the Goldman Sachs 1% of the 18^th c. losing their heads in the revolution. But later, even Napoleon, not without vanity, ordered his customized set in Empire style for his empress Josephine.

The value of cultural artifacts will rise and fall with the times, and Sachs is particularly interested in why. At the Met, the value of objects, ornamental and functional, many thousand years old, seem to converge. “So many hierarchies shift,” says Sachs, “History paintings were the most valuable, like Oath of the Horatii, a work by French artist Jacques-Louis David (1784), then below that were landscape paintings and portraits, and below that, the genre paintings of poor people. It wasn’t until Manet did a portrait of a prostitute, elevating her, that it threw that hierarchy on its head…today, anything functional is super downgraded.”

“If I use something that can be used as a chair, it’s worth a lot less than a painting I would make.” A chair is more accessible to the public, lacking the mystique associated with art.

Tom Sachs, Photograph by The Selby

How did you manage to get James Brown’s hairbrushes? I asked, referring to another set of functional objects, their value skewed by another form of mystical reverence.

“That’s something that happened accidentally because when the vampiric auction house took the worldly possessions of a historic figure to capitalize on his infamy – letters from prison, shameful objects that should have been thrown away, I tried to rescue some of the things that capture his greatness. It was a garbage bag full of crappy hair products.”

“The entire piece is a frame for that photograph of the top of JB’s head. And you can imagine him taking it to his hairdresser, telling him to make it look like this…”

I blasphemously questioned whether it was all his real hair. Not a wig, then? Though Brown hadn’t been feeling well he was a man that visited his dentist the day he died; it was real hair.

“He said all man needs is good hair and good teeth,” said Sachs approvingly. “They are like reliquaries – it’s not about the artist recontextualizing it – it’s all about him and his greatness,” said Sachs, reflecting on the divinity of the Grandfather of Soul. “It’s no difference than going to Turin and seeing the shroud – putting a euro in the box at church so it lights up…” JB would no doubt have found Sachs’ tribute a perfect stage for a second coming.

James Brown memorabilia - Tom Sachs, Photograph by The Selby

At Tom Sachs' studio, Photograph by The Selby

Art Fairs from the Last Century: Grand Palais

KisaLala — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 21:33:13 +0000

The first air show at the Grand Palais in Paris, France. September 30th, 1909. Photographed in Autochrome Lumière by Léon Gimpel

While art fairs have become common, attracting patrons the world over – they are still a long way off from the extravagant theatricality of events from the past century.

An example is Paris’ Grand Palais, a building that was designed as the venue for singular happenings in the 19th c. and became a host for world fairs for over a hundred years.

Salon de locomotion aerienne 1909 - Grand Palais, Paris

Anish Kapoor Leviathan at Grand Palais, 2011

Universal Exhibitions were held regularly in European capitals throughout the second half of the 19th century. It was an opportunity for architects to showcase bold new buildings that would exhibit the latest innovations in industry and in fine arts, allowing people to compete with designs from around the globe. The Crystal Palace was built for the first Universal Exhibition in 1851 in London, a monument of glass and steel that stunned visitors with its transparency, sheer size and original construction techniques. Later, not to be outdone, the French followed up with more extravagant buildings. From 1867 Paris organized Universal Exhibitions at eleven-year intervals – but many of these were ephemeral constructions that were later dismantled – an exception was the Eiffel Tower (1889), which was so popular it never got demolished. Another was the Grand Palais (1900) which was designed to last, and together they forever changed Paris’ skyline.

The pictures here show some of the exhibitions at Grand Palais over the last century, from the very first industrial air shows of the early 20th century to recent sculptural installations by Anish Kapoor and Bulgari’s Black Diamond.

The Air Show in the Grand Palais. Paris, October 1910. © Jacques Boyer / Roger-Viollet

Salon de l'Aviation au Grand Palais. Paris, octobre 1910.

The first Motor Show in the Grand Palais, 1901. © Mondial de l’automobile

Art Paris 2009. Art Paris viewed from the Great Staircase. Events © Collection Grand Palais, François Tomasi

Bulgari, 125 years of Italian magnificence (December 2010 10 - January 12 2011) a huge 30-foot black diamond… © Collection Grand Palais, François Tomasi

Jours de fêtes 2009. The 2nd edition was ablaze with colour © Collection Grand Palais, Cosimo Mirco Magliocca

More information: http://www.grandpalais.fr/en/

Earthscrapers and Vertical Forests

KisaLala — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 23:06:03 +0000

Earthscraper, Mexico City. Designed by BNKR Arquitectura BNKR Arquitectura www.bunkerarquitectura.com © Copyright BNKR

“The Earthscraper is the Skyscraper’s antagonist,” said a spokesman from BNKR Arquitectura describing their latest venture in densely packed Mexico City. Their proposal is to drill downwards, inverting a skyscraper that would extend 65 stories under ground, circumventing restrictive local laws that prevent building skywards higher than 8 stories.

Bosco Verticale - Architectural Design: BOERISTUDIO (Stefano Boeri, Gianandrea Barreca, Giovanni La Varra)

Earthscraper, Mexico City. Designed by BNKR Arquitectura BNKR Arquitectura www.bunkerarquitectura.com © Copyright BNKR

The structure will not be without natural light as the inverted pyramid will be hollow allowing air to ventilate and sunlight to reach all 65 stories below underground. The tiered walls will also anchor plants and trees to create added green space while preserving the historic Mexico city landmarks above ground.

The high density of cities, with little room for expansion, has been an incentive for creative architecture and many London homeowners have drilled through their basements to fit swimming pools several stories below ground, and during Frieze, Lazarides Gallery opened a pop up art event, the Minotaur in London’s Old Vic Tunnels, a ‘labyrinth’ of passages underground at London’s Waterloo railway station.

Bosco Verticale - Architectural Design: BOERISTUDIO (Stefano Boeri, Gianandrea Barreca, Giovanni La Varra)

In Milan, a vertical forest is planned due to the city’s lack of space for parks and carbon congestion. The tower will host 900 trees apart from a wide range of shrubs and floral plants, equivalent to 10.000 sqm of forest. The Bosco Verticale will be a system recycling energy and implementing a micro-climate that will help filter dusty Milanese air. The plan is also to irrigate the vertical forest by reusing the grey waters produced by the building.

Bosco Verticale: http://www.stefanoboeriarchitetti.net
Underground Art: http://theminotaur.co.uk/
Earthscraper: www.bunkerarquitectura.com

Architect of Illusions

KisaLala — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 03:18:02 +0000

By Kiša Lala

A retrospective of handmade miniature interiors by Charles Matton is on exhibit in London’s All Visual Arts gallery. Matton, who died in 2008 of lung cancer, built ‘Boxes,’ that recreated artist studios and mise-en-scènes, emotive still-frames of inhabited interiors, empty hotel hallways, lonesome ateliers and imaginary boîtes. Poking one’s head inside one of Matton’s enclosures is being Gulliver trespassing into another reality and expecting the room’s lilliputian occupants to return any moment.

The fascination with doll’s houses is that we glorify our need for tidying and collecting objects with imperial strokes and a make-belief sense of omniscience. Replicating the world exactly had been Matton’s passions, and his artistic journey began with painting hyperreal interiors that he eventually extrapolated into three-dimensions, creating rooms with walls exactly as he would have painted them on canvas, drawing cracks on the patina, filtering sun and shade on the furniture, miniaturizing the effects of light itself.

Reduced to a scale of 1:7 the boxes use mirrors and light to project an anamorphic, miniature wonderland, in which our sense of perception is enhanced rather than being diminished by the scale: The wires and outlets, chipped wood, dust and stains, the slant of a picture, a crooked frame, a curtain’s crease and mirrored reflections astonish us with details that would likely be overlooked if the same room were at eye-level. Seeing is amplified. Our eyes sweep entire vistas instead of vision being patched together by our consciousness.

It is not easy to suspend disbelief. At times we may be fooled by Photoshopped images of trashcan lids masquerading as spaceships, but skilled craftsmen building make-belief film sets to imitate large landscapes understand that the way light falls, or how a fabric folds, and the manner of gravity on a mote of dust can give the game away.

Matton’s boîtes are not just an arrangement of artefacts but encapsulate the memory of a fleeting moment. His series of ateliers, Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti’s studios and Sigmund Freud’s study, were meticulous reconstructions created through exhaustive research of the originals. He painstakingly crafted miniature newspapers and book covers, wall hangings and scaled down sculptures to give the studios the authenticity of a lived-in space, pushing the spectator to the position of voyeur.

Jean Baudrillard, who was a close friend of the artist for twenty-five years, described Matton’s worlds, “when they are condensed in a marvelously small space, one rediscovers their quintessence. Recreating a space and a scene on a smaller scale convinces us to enter it more intimately.” Delighting in his obsessiveness, Baurdrillard concluded that Matton, was “quite certainly a fetishist.”

See more of Charles Matton’s works at All Visual Arts Gallery, 2 Omega Place, London N1
Charles Matton: Enclosures: 9th September – 7th October

Don’t Look Now

KisaLala — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 22:18:22 +0000

Ten years ago, on just another week like this, with New Yorkers speeding to their next meetings, racing for subways with coffee in hand, and models primping for Fall Fashion week – a morning like any other suddenly unraveled. The following moments would gnaw at collective memories, punctuate lives, and instigate a series of devastating world events. It was a tragic start to the new century and an ominous beginning for the new millennium. It was America’s passage from puberty. Some still recollect their movements in dreamlike sequence, whether it was the moment of becoming first aware, escaping the avalanche of dust, peering from rooftops at the collapsing towers, or just smelling the acrid vapours alone in one’s room…

©Alex Webb/Magnum Photos USA. New York City. September 11, 2001. Terrorist attack on World Trade Center. View of Lower Manhattan from Brooklyn Heights rooftop. ©Alex Webb- here is new york - exhibition at School of Visual Arts

Some exhibits in the city are commemorating the tenth anniversary of those events that deflected the course of many lives. The New Museum is presenting New York-based artist Elena del Rivero’s [Swi:t] Home: A CHANT (2001-2006) in the lobby gallery to remember the World Trade Center tragedy.

Elena del Rivero exhibit at the New Musuem in New York City 2011

Del Rivero lived and worked on Cedar Street directly across the street from the World Trade Center. Though she was in Spain on the day of the attacks, she returned to find her apartment filled with debris from the collapse, and began salvaging the office memos, personal notes, and other scraps that had blown through the collapsed windows of her loft. After five years of cleaning and chronicling her finds, she hand-sewed them onto rolls of fabric which will hang from the lobby of the New Museum – a 500 feet long stream that evokes the details of personal lives of what would have been an otherwise ordinary day for many workers in the building.

The School of Visual Arts is exhibiting a show of photographs that began originally as an impromptu collection by contributors in a vacant storefront in SoHo, a few days after the event. “here is new york: Revisited,” records the collective eye of New Yorkers – the office workers, spectators and emergency crew that recorded the events as they unfolded, creating through a thousand viewpoints, a patchwork of memories.

The show at SVA features 300 of the images submitted by the 3000 photographers at the time, and the project’s website, www.hereisnewyork.org is an archive of the 5000 images submitted to the original exhibition. The New York Historical Society is the principal repository for the “here is new york” archive of prints and ephemera. Two complete sets of prints, are held by the School of Visual Arts Archives.

A third exhibit, PIIOTOS_WTC at 1500 gallery is a group show comprising of photographs of the Twin Towers by 22 of Brazil’s most recognized photographers who lived, worked or were passing through NYC over the past three decades.

Collective Memory, organized by Sheryl Oring is a public arts project in which ten typists with manual typewriters at Bryant Park 12:30-2:30 p.m. Sept. 9, 10 and 11, will type the answers to the question. “What would you like the world to remember about 9/11?” The sheets of paper will then go on a traveling exhibition to college campuses.

The New Museum – Visitors receive free admission to the Museum on Sunday September 11, 2011.
New Museum 235 Bowery New York, NY 10002 212.219.1222
PIIOTOS_WTC will be on view at 1500 Gallery from September 7-17, 2011 – 1500 Gallery
511 West 25th Street #607, New York, NY 1000 +1.212.255.2010
School of Visual Arts (SVA) “here is new york: Revisited”—
A Tribute to the Landmark Photography Exhibition Following 9/11 September 6 – 17, 2011
Reception: Friday, September 9, 6 – 8pm Westside Gallery, 133/141 West 21 Street, New York City

Watercraft

KisaLala — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 23:47:43 +0000

Batman inspired Thierry Mugler boat - The Thierry Mugler Spire Speedboat

Speed-freaks and fashionistas will dig the Batman boat by runway designer Thierry Mugler modeled by Spire Boat Builder, set to debut in September this year in the 2011 Monaco Yacht show. The boat is a blend of nostalgic 50s era chrome and tailfin-inspired car aesthetic with the comic book style of Bat mobiles. But designing for a floating lifestyle maybe a new trend.

Aquariva by Marc Newson

Batman inspired Thierry Mugler boat - The Thierry Mugler Spire Speedboat

Speedboats and yachts have become the new luxury art objects after Gagosian Gallery launched Aquariva by Marc Newson which combined Italian riviera chic from the 60’s with the best of aerodynamic design by Riva

Batman inspired Thierry Mugler boat - The Thierry Mugler Spire Speedboat

Other nautical inspirations include the Greek billionaire art-collector Dakis Joannou’s Jeff Koons-commissioned work for his yacht Guilty. Koons’ idea came from WWI boat-camouflaging techniques called razzle dazzle, or razzle camouflaging, but his angular abstract shapes also recall pop-art by Roy Lichtenstein.

The Jeff Koons' designed boat for Dakis Joannou

Yet the most green concept yacht was proposed by artist Dennis Ingemansson which is fueled by one of the cleanest fuels, liquefied natural gas and boasts a most inter-planetary spaceship-look designed for traveling warp speed on water. Check out his solar powered ’sea-limousine’ and other marvelous wonders such as ‘flying apartments’ on his website.

Dennis Ingemansson designed green concept boat

Dennis Ingemansson designed concept boat