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 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

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

Photo: Courtesy Tomás Saraceno

Cloud Cities runs until February 9 2012.

EVOL 2011 © All rights reserved by evoldaily

EVOL 2011, Hamburg, Germany © All rights reserved by evoldaily

Usually the artist creates urban stenciled work on city walls – of prison-like, pre-fab buildings and drab housing projects, but when asked to create an installation for the music festival, he was confronted with a natural landscape with grassy fields. Describing the space Evol says, “Usually I prefer to work on site by interfering with already existing structures,” but instead he found, “endless meadows, trees and blue sky.”

VOL 2011, Hamburg, Germany © All rights reserved by evoldaily

EVOL 2011 © All rights reserved by evoldaily

Evol excavated narrow trenches into the meadow to house his cityscape art, creating an even darker claustrophobic feel through this transformation. The installation also creates a metaphor for the paving over and destruction of the natural environment with concrete urban architecture.

These images below are from EVOL’s ‘Buildings’ series for Dresden Germany, in which he creates illusions of miniature buildings using stencils.

© EVOL Dresden, Buildings

© EVOL Dresden, Buildings

See more images of EVOL’s work here Evoldaily and on his website http://www.evoltaste.com/

Lovebird, 2005, Taxidermy lovebird, Taxidermy mouse skin, Brass, Metal, Glass, Wood, 30 x 20 cm @ Polly Morgan

Interview continued with Polly Morgan Part 2 (Read Part 1)
Morgan grew up in the country, “It wasn’t a farm. [My dad] was an eccentric character. He used to start businesses up, generally importing and exporting of animals, but then he would get sentimentally attached to them, and never let them go. They were never killed. We had Angora goats, llamas, ostriches, chickens for a while.”

Still, Morgan prefers small creatures than large mammals for her art. The largest has been the white-back vultures, which took a good year from concept to finish. She works with a 3D computer modeler to visualize relative sizes. “I try not to be set on the birds…because I could go for years without finding enough…so the flying machine was a variety of birds… I made a smaller one with bright orange finches and canaries to look like flames but it’s impossible to find enough, so I had to experiment in dying feathers with hair dye.”

When she finally visited Deyrolle in Paris, she was, “Underwhelmed really – so many people mentioned it, I had built it up to be an incredible mecca I had to go to. I spent hours looking for it, so I was knackered when I got there, and half their stock was gone – since the fire. The taxidermy was very badly done – and I’m not just being a taxidermy snob!” she laughs.

In Polly Morgan's fridge: Fox and Magpie. Photo: Kisa Lala

Polly Morgan's Blackboard photo:Kisa Lala

Still Birth - Purple 2010 - Taxidermy Pheasant chick, resin balloon - © Polly Morgan

“Systemic Inflammation” references concepts for imaginary flying machines. Morgan was interested in the way animals had been historically harnessed: Carrier-pigeons, monkeys in space. Air balloons. In Still Birth, a chick is tethered as though through an umbilical cord to a balloon cast in resin that won’t deflate. She’s fascinated with birds and flying and used Muybridge as a reference in Black Fever. In fact, Morgan says it ruined her holiday in Jamaica when she forgot her bird book.

Systemic Inflammation, 2010, Taxidermy Finches © Polly Morgan

Departures, 2009 © Polly Morgan - Installation View at Thomas Olbricht's Me Collectors Room on Augustrasse in Berlin

No, because in mummification you’re preserving what’s already there, whereas in taxidermy you are taking out a vast majority of the animal. It’s like peeling a latex suit off a human. You are keeping the skin, feathers or fur, and a few bones. Bones don’t decay. With birds, I keep the skull and strip them off flesh. When you’re bending the wires in place it helps as guide. I use woodwool, used to pack crockery, bind it with string and penetrate it with wires then stick it into the body’s central core. That anchors them there. Then you stitch up the skin in the front. You fill up all the cavities and skull with clay. You take out the brain and eyeballs. Often you remove the skull in mammals because after you take off the gristle and flesh around the skull – it will disconnect off the jaw and the padding is gone, so it’s best to sculpt the shape.”

The skin is still organic – can it decay?

Not once you’ve tanned it. It’s preserved like leather. With birds, sometimes you put chemicals on the skin but often when you take the flesh off, it’s just brittle, like parchment and dries. Then you position it and don’t touch it for a few weeks until it dries out. If you try to move the head after it dries it will just tear like paper.

Could you do that to a human being? Has it ever been done?

It has – not sure what methods were used. The former incarnation of Haunch of Venison (at Burlington Gardens, London), used to be the Museum of Mankind. They had a taxidermied black woman that an explorer had brought back. They used to do that – preserve people and bring them back; they couldn’t take photos, but they could go, ‘look what I found back there.’ I would have liked to have had seen it because I could have worked out how they’d done it. Must be pretty ghastly…

Mummification preserves the facial expressions – it’s much more real in that sense, right?

Exactly, if you’d taxidermied a human being – all you’d have was skin and it would be up to you to model, the face. You could end up with anything! Taxidermists are reluctant to do people’s pets because they’ll make it look like a dog, but the person will come back and go, ‘that’s not my dog’ – something different about the expression. They have a rule: put the animal in the freezer for 3 months, and if you still want to have it done after that, then they’ll do it…it’s because owners often don’t come and collect once it’s done because they can’t bare seeing it again…

© Polly Morgan, Dead Ringer

Polly Morgan’s work can be seen at following shows in London and Venice:

‘Women make Sculpture’, at Pangolin London from 19th May – 18th June.

Polly Morgan, Burials, Venice, June 3rd through July 22nd, 2011

Carsten Höller's Soma exhibit in Berlin

By Kiša Lala

Carsten Höller’s new exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin, ‘Soma’ examines the mythic traditions of this Vedic elixir. Though the recipe and ingredients for it have been lost, ethnomycologists and artists alike have been interpreting its origin through ancient manuscripts – from such sources as the verses of the Rigveda, an ancient North Indian text from the 2nd millennium BCE: ‘We have drunk of the soma; we have become immortal, we have seen the light; we have found the Gods.’

Carsten Höller’s exhibit on Soma 2010

The libation that promised enlightenment and divine knowledge, some believe, may have come from the fly Amanita mushroom (Amanita muscaria), which also happens to be the natural diet of reindeers (and consequently can be derived from reindeer urine), is herded by ancient nomadic tribes of central Asia, and also the source of myths and indirect allusions in tales like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Hamburger Bahnhof, one of my favourite museums (which also has excellent exhibits of Joseph Beuys’ works), is dividing the space along its main axis into two halves to display Höller’s work – each enclosure populated by living creatures such as reindeers, canaries, eight mice and two flies – with one half hypothetically under the influence of soma, and the other unaffected, so as ‘to enact a comparative study between the normal world and the realm of soma.’ We are left to contemplate which of the animals betray the influence of soma in their behaviour.

In the middle of Höller’s extraordinary exhibit is a ‘floating hotel room’ on a mushroom-like platform, giving more adventurous visitors a chance to fully immerse themselves in the experience of soma by spending the night in the museum. There is also a publication from Hatje Cantz accompanying the exhibition of Höller’s works, which explores the written research on soma.

Installationsansicht Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, 2010 © VG Bild-Kunst 2010 / Carsten Höller, Foto: Attilio Maranzano

Book cover of catalogue for Carsten Höller show: SOMA Documents

Mushrooms pop up quite bit in Höller’s past work. His art typically confronts our sense of the ordinary with whimsy, interrupting habitual pathways with the unexpected. He created Test Site (2006) for the Tate Modern’s Unilever Series, with sculptural slides that explored various aspects of the act of sliding. And in 2008 in London he opened The Double Club, a pop-up night club sponsored by the Prada Foundation, which had a dance floor and restaurant that melded Congolese culture with the western experience of nightlife.

Carsten Höller: soma Hamburger Bahnhof image©designboom

Carsten Höller, Soma at the Nationalgalerie, Hamburger Bahnhof from 5 November 2010 – 6 February 2011
Video: Click here

Production Still, Rape of the Sabine Women, Marilisa on the Floor Photo by Eve Sussman & Ricoh Gerbl, Courtesy of Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation

Eve Sussman’s film Rape of the Sabine Women is an operatic vehicle set in five locations – the first two segments shot at Pergamon Museum and Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, with its stylized treatment of austerely dressed men parading within the high-design decor, has the appearance of a Gucci commercial; these are followed by scenes shot in the Athens meat market, then, a modernist summer house, and finally the Herodion Theatre in Athens, where all the sophistication of the former scenes collapse, and the denouement, driven by the film’s title, takes place.

The theme is taken from the story of the founding of ancient Rome, where the men of Rome steal the women from the neighbouring Sabine tribe – here rape has the connotation of a kidnapping or an abduction, as represented in many of the renaissance paintings, originating from the Latin word rapere from which rapt or rapture is derived.

Film Still, 89 Seconds at Alcázar, Courtesy of Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation

Her earlier film 89 Seconds at Alcázar, was an enactment of Velasquez’ Las Meninas, in which she synthesizes a past and future from the moment depicted in the painting. Just as in that work the artist paints himself into the picture looking directly at us, Sussman offers us a surveillance gaze that implicates the viewer. In Rape of the Sabine Women, often the camera seems to capture the actors in unguarded moments and frequently the crew intrudes upon the film-set, crashing through the fantasy world Ms. Sussman so painstakingly creates.

I asked Eve Sussman about her cinematic interest in breaking down the fourth wall.

“I was interested in the play between what was filmic fiction and what was the reality was, with the makers of the film being in the film. And yes every now again the fourth wall breaks down and you see the crew, you hear the camera go by the frame.  You are reflected.”

In the scene set in Nikos Valsamakis’ 1961 iconic modernist summerhouse, we see stylish men and women who allegorically represent civilization at the height of Rome, flirting and conversing in front of the camera, but there is a tension in the dynamic between the sexes, which ostensibly leads to a fight scene in the last act.

“It was as if we were surveilling an extended family or a group dynamic in this affluent summer house. It was all about letting the actors improvise for 2 or 3 hours and watching them. We never really called action, or said cut, and they never really knew when the camera was rolling or not.”

She explains the film’s plot, “these women are stolen and the men who steal them, turn on each other. Love triangles develop…And everything falls apart, the architecture, the fashion, the hairdos, all the accoutrement of 20th century better living through design, dissolves into nothing. It was all about letting the actors improvise and create those relationships; and it was between real life and fiction – watching them unfold in front of you and filming it”

Wives of the Patricians, Rape of the Sabine Women, Eve Sussman, Photo by Bobby Neel Adams

Jonathan Bepler, who also worked on Matthew Barney’s Cremaster films, collaborated on the music.  Bepler creates a wonderful accompaniment with the sound of knives and a coughing choir that builds threateningly to sync with the tension of the film and the final fight scene, in which all sound is turned abruptly, violently off.

Having come in at the end of the film, which was on rotation at the gallery, just as the fight or “rape” scene was unfolding, I found the action evolving in slow motion instead to be eroticized and sensual, where men grab and tussle and the women’s clothes get ripped in an orgiastic mélange of bodies down the steps of the Greek amphitheater, and which as voyeurs we witness, becoming invited participants to the theatrical staging before us.

Sussman says, “the fact that you could have that reading is also really interesting – I never spoon-feed the audience everything – its not TV, people can develop their own readings of it, even if you have watched it out of order, it still works. That confusion is very interesting. You would think of it as a contradiction.”

The scene, she explains is “a decrescendo, the denouement of everything that has happened before it; the build up and heyday of Rome; these women becoming trophy brides, the beautiful houses, clothes and hairdos – and it all falls apart. To me it is more about the allegory of ‘be careful of what you wish for’, dust-to-dust idea. And if you watch it from the beginning it is clear. But if you come in towards the end you may get the reading that you had but both those readings are interesting.”

Annette with Rabbits, from Rape of the Sabine Women by Eve Sussman, Photo by Benedikt Partenheimer

There is a more reality-based rape scene that takes place in a butcher shop with painterly carcasses of hares hanging on the walls. Sussman decided to include this in keeping with the modern more violent meaning of the word. “Because the modern meaning is violent and sexual we felt that we had to address that, and that’s why that scene is in there,” she states.

Sussman’s cinematography, with its often formalized compositions brings to mind the rigid framing techniques of Peter Greenaway’s films, another director who has worked with light and the filmic adaptations of painting, and indeed, Sussman’s own background in photography inclines her towards composing her shots with beautiful precision; sometimes all the action is set in the lower third of the frame, pushing elements to the edges of the film.

Production Still, Women in the S-Bahn Photo by Benedikt Partenheimer

Ms. Sussman said that though she had taken Renaissance and Dutch still-life paintings for inspirations, she had also researched media and films from the 60s, “Gimme Shelter, the Rolling Stones at Altamont and old LIFE magazines. “It wasn’t only about trying to replicate paintings,” she clarifies, “it was about trying to look at that idea of the iconic period in western history where gender roles were very clear, where there was this great shift in architecture and fashion, and it was also the first time where we started to be sold a lifestyle. In 50s and 60s in Europe and America, where there were these lifestyle magazines, there was the beginning of the idea that you could be sold the concept of better living through design – that you can design the perfect future.”

Deducing this theme of unfulfillment, I ask the film-maker if her work was about unconsummated desire. “Yes it’s part of human nature – you can look at any point of history but certainly in modern times it is something we grapple with: How do we make the next best thing happen? Who is going to be controlling, what the latest technology is. The power wars in the world are about who controls the oil and water. It’s all about desire for that power. You’ve nailed it when you say its about unconsummated desire, a lot of my projects address that, but through very different ideas, a very different look and a very different way of film-making.”

Video Still from Rape of the Sabine Women by Eve Sussman

Her next film, White on White, with footage of Yuri Gagarin, the Russian cosmonaut’s office and referencing another painter, Kasimir Malevich, is based on a futuristic film noir set, and I ask Sussman if would carry a similar trajectory.

“In certain aspects it is a very different project and has a different look, primarily shot in grainy b&w – film as well as video, in central Asia, and post Soviet architecture. But it does again address the idea for the quest for the perfect future. Idea of transcendence through trying to control the future.” She sums it up: “Again,” she says, “be careful what you wish for.”

Eve Sussman’s film Rape of the Sabine Women (2007) can be viewed at Haunch of Venison, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, 20th Floor, from 16 September – 30 October

All photographs courtesy of Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation

Every time the DREAMERS heard someone talking about Berlin in the last few years, it has been energizing. It seems like every young artist in Europe has Berlin on their radar, if they haven’t already visited or moved there.  The city is young (it has been only twenty years old since the fall of the Wall) and maybe because ot the complexity of its past life, the love of Freedom is fundamental in Berlin.  An on-going city-wide affirmation. For us here in New York, Berlin seems like the bright-burning torch of Europe.

Researching places in Berlin to stage the portrait, the DREAMERS came across images of the Berlin Wall. To their great amazement, they realized that Berlin is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall this November, the same time they will be there to stage the portrait.

The photo above is by marc hoffmanfrom at so-called “East Side Gallery,” one of the few remaining sections of the Berlin Wall, reborn when artists from all over the wolrd came to celebrate freedom in Berlin days after the Wall fell in 1989.

Trust Art – The DREAMERS Project Picturebook – The Next Chapter: Berlin (November 14)

Rob Pruitt and the Delusional Downtown Divas

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum recently announced with event partner Calvin Klein Collection a new art event premiering in 2009: Rob Pruitt’s The First Annual Art Awards at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Association with White Columns, to be held on Thursday, October 29, 2009.

Artist Rob Pruitt, whose conceptual practice is rooted in a pop sensibility and a playful critique of art world structures, has conceived the event as a performance-based artwork which follows the format of a Hollywood awards ceremony. The Art Awards will be an annual celebration of select individuals, exhibitions, and projects that have made a significant impact on the field of contemporary art during the previous year, specifically, for this year’s ceremony, from January 2008 to June 2009.

According to Mr. Pruitt, “This annual gesture will function as a community-building and philanthropic event for the Guggenheim Museum, White Columns and, in 2009, Studio in a School, while simultaneously mobilizing the wide ranging talents and energies of the international arts community, focusing on our mutual admiration and support for one another’s unique endeavors.” Mr. Pruitt continued, “With one eye on supporting our great institutions, and the other on injecting our community with a renewed sense of energy, spirit, and a dash of showbiz glamour, we are pleased to announce this very unique event.”

Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum, stated, “As the impresario behind the First Annual Art Awards, Rob Pruitt presents a daring new event model injected with the humor that underscores his work. Pruitt’s orchestration of this performative piece—with the rotunda as center stage—is aligned with the Guggenheim’s mission to continue to engage and present contemporary artists.”

“The First Annual Art Awards, held at the Guggenheim Museum, will celebrate today’s most interesting and respected artists, in an entirely innovative way,” said Malcolm Carfrae, EVP Global Communications, Calvin Klein, Inc. “Calvin Klein, Inc. has always been a huge supporter of the arts and we are thrilled to be a part of such a groundbreaking event that celebrates the arts community and gives it the recognition it deserves.”

Pruitt has invited the Delusional Downtown Divas to preside over the event as Masters of Ceremonies, and Glenn O’Brien will step in as the Announcer, or, as Pruitt describes his role, as “the Voice of God.” An additional distinguished list of presenters will participate in distributing the awards, created by Pruitt to resemble a celebratory bucket of champagne that also serves as a fully functional lamp. The presenters will include Cecily Brown, Sofia Coppola, James Franco, Knight Landesman, Nate Lowman, and Mary-Kate Olsen, among others. Original music has been composed by Matthew Friedberger of the Fiery Furnaces, who will perform at the event. Christine Muhlke, food editor of the New York Times Magazine, is curating the cuisine for the seated dinner.

Lifetime Achievement Awards, determined by Rob Pruitt along with organizing partners the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and White Columns, will be awarded to Joan Jonas and Kasper König. In addition, a group of more than four hundred art world professionals has been invited to form a Nominating Council that will select four nominees in nine categories that focus primarily on exhibitions and projects that took place over the preceding eighteen months (January 2008 to June 2009), in the United States, as well as one category recognizing an international exhibition. The Rob Pruitt Award is being decided solely by the artist. Of the following list of nominees, a larger group (including the Nominating Council) will establish the eventual winners, who will be announced at the live awards ceremony on October 29. The ten categories—in addition to the Lifetime Achievement Award—and the nominees for each category are:

Artist of the Year
• Louise Bourgeois
• Urs Fischer
• Dan Graham
• Mary Heilmann

Curator of the Year
• Klaus Biesenbach
• Daniel Birnbaum
• Connie Butler
• Massimiliano Gioni

Exhibitions Outside the United States
• Francis Bacon, Tate Britain, London
• Jeff Koons, Versailles, Château de Versailles, France
• Mike Kelley: Educational Complex Onwards: 1995–2008, Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels
• Wolfgang Tillmans: Lighter, Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin

Group Show of the Year, Gallery
• A Twilight Art, Harris Lieberman, New York
• Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns? Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York
• Your Gold Teeth II, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
• ZERO in New York, Sperone Westwater, New York

Group Show of the Year, Museum
• After Nature, New Museum, New York
• The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
• The Quick and the Dead, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
• WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York

New Artist of the Year
• Elad Lassry
• Daniel McDonald
• Marlo Pascual
• Ryan Trecartin

The Rob Pruitt Award
• To be announced the evening of October 29, 2009

Solo Show of the Year, Gallery
• Cindy Sherman, Metro Pictures, New York
• Manzoni: A Retrospective, Gagosian Gallery, New York
• Paul Sharits, Greene Naftali Gallery, New York
• Picasso: Mosqueteros, Gagosian Gallery, New York

Solo Show of the Year, Museum
• Dan Graham: Beyond, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
• Lawrence Weiner: As Far as the Eye Can See, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
• Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton, New Museum, New York
• Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Museum of Modern Art, New York

Writer of the Year
• Tim Griffin
• John Kelsey
• Walter Robinson
• Jerry Saltz