As soon as Frame Publishers' Frameweb newsletter pops up in my inbox I minimize any paid-work windows and take an invigorating break to check out their new art/architecture/design beauties. Today's brought wind of Jonathan Harris's Balloons of Buthan, in which the artist seeks to measure happiness using balloons as a quantitative measure, on a scale from one to ten. Immediately above, "Restaurant owner Khandu shows his level of happiness." The photographs are captivating, and at the Balloons of Bhutan Web site Harris has created a deeper interactive multimedia exploration, including interviews, audio, and statistics. Each of the 117 participants also wrote a wish on one balloon, and the balloons were strung along prayer flags at the conclusion of the project. While the colorful balloons make for whimsy and cheer, the material does not avoid the more bittersweet stream that courses through the study. One man's balloon wish reads, "I want to go with you so I have a place to live." And when we see participants holding fewer than five balloons, we are able to presume (with an admixture of relief) that Harris hasn't fluffed up the happiness level of the Himalayan characters who are his subject (along with happiness and other more general and elusive states and measures).
Check out Harris's website (linked above) to see his webby/tech-related art/thought and photo projects, and to peek into his handwritten, handdrawn sketchbooks.
I meet people. One at a time they step inside me and live inside me. Some of them only for a moment, some stay. They set up wherever they want to and take my facial expressions or my leg's resting position and put their own in their place. They lie on my back and press their toes into my Achilles tendons. They appear in every pause and come out when I am in doubt and fill all the empty space. I shake and say to myself for a long time: good, really good. —Talo/The House
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| (Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris. © Crystal Eye Ltd, Helsinki.) |
A month back I saw "Talo/The House" (2002), a three-channel video installation by Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila, at the Art Institute. Ahtila drew on research and interviews with individuals suffering psychotic disorders for her work, which is rendered with high production values, pretty sets and mise-en-scène, to make a dreamlike experience for a viewer, one part Anthropologie, two parts Roman Polanski. The dream bridges the divide between those Ahtila interviewed and the viewer on the bench in a darkened room in the corner of an art museum. I looked Ahtila up and read a NYT piece on an exhibition that came down Dec. 3.
Marian Goodman Gallery was showing two projections: "The Annunciation," enacted by non-actors (all women, excepting one, who had experienced addictions); and "Horizontal," which NYT writer Ken Johnson described as "representing a tall spruce tree rotated 90 degrees . . . six vertical projections, each showing a section of the tree, it spreads more than 35 feet across one wall. With its wind-blown branches heaving and swaying and its trunk whipping up and down, it looks more animal than plant, as if it were a great, arboreal whale." Sounds great. There's never enough (really top) video art around.
So, when that week's Frameweb email came through featuring Pipilotti Rist, my longtime (once?) favorite video artist, I went from, "Oh, I guess I won't unsubscribe," to "Now I definitely won't unsubscribe." The newsletter and website feature an agenda section that trots out mentions of a fine stable of very contemporary artists. I was lucky to catch a Rist installation in Chicago soon after moving to the city (maybe "Sip My Ocean"?), and then saw and loved "Ever Is Over All," a giant-flower-smashing-car-windows number at MOMA a few years later—uncannily, giddily uplifting (a bit of a reenactment below). The "Agenda" covered her first solo show in Italy, ending this weekend.
The divergence . . . I am actually touting a magazine here, versus a book; a magazine available in a digital format no less (in addition to print, but given the cost of international subscriptions a digital option is a coup). Definitely peruse Frame's books offerings; if you have a serious interior designer on your gift list you can pull out the stops and make his or her season. But for uber-contemporary art lovers who blur the "line" between fine art and applied arts and design, a subscription to ELEPHANT is in order.
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| "A view of MoMA’s second-floor atrium with Pipilotti Rist’s “Pour Your Body Out” installation." Thanks, NYT. |
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