(incli)NATION

Frank Stella discusses his 'Failed Architecture' on the Roof of the Met

Frank Stella's architectural projects have never been built. Not a single one. ArchRecord does a fine job of covering the obvious issues in the trajectory of Stella's career, but sheds no light on the details of his failure to realize these fantastic designs. I've always assumed his work is not taken seriously by architects who may be more than a little envious of his vision and independence.

Regardless, the interview is fantastic, and the supporting media is a treat!

BR: What if I just say the word “curves”? How do you respond? 

FS: One way or the other, the issue of compound-curved surfaces somehow just dug in, and then that’s probably where the computer came in—when everyone decided that they can do curves and they can do blobs and anybody can do it. But not just anybody has been able to actually build them because they still are a problem.

But you know with Nervi and Le Corbusier, the curved forms, they’re there. It’s not that they haven’t been around. But the more complex versions of the curved forms have been sloughed off. You can see it even in Frank. Yes, he has the curved surfaces, but, by and large, they’re dealt with in quite a traditional way. It’s not that easy to make the surfaces run. But Nervi certainly and Corbusier did do it.

read the rest HERE

Technorati Profile

Sympathy for the Devil @ MCA Chicago, 9.29.07

As far as I'm concerned, this is THE show to see this fall; a perfect storm of music, art, and politics with the likes of Tony Oursler, Richard Prince and Jack PIerson, together with (incli)NATION favorites like Marnie Weber, Dave Muller and Jason Rhoades, not to mention references to Warhol, Lou Reed, Destroy all Monsters, Red Crayola, and Kraftwerk among many others.

So now all we need to get are tickets and a schedule and see you there!

CHICAGO.-The explosive social and political climate of the late-1960s produced a revolutionary spirit that led to the fusion of avant-garde art and rock music. Artists as diverse as Andy Warhol, The Velvet Underground, Captain Beefheart, and Richard Hamilton burst forth with new creative endeavors. The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, presents Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967, the first major exhibition devoted to the convergence of contemporary art and rock music over the past forty years. Sympathy for the Devil opens on September 29, 2007, the MCA’s official 40th Anniversary and the kick-off of “40 Free Days,” and closes on January 6, 2008

more at the MCA

via Artdaily

"Moses Lake" by Anne Mathern @ Lawrimore Project, Seattle. Through Sept. 29/2007

We just updated our link to DAILYSERVING and while I was cruising their terrific site today, I ran across this post on one of our favorites; Anne Mathern. Looks like we missed the performance, but I will be sure to check out the show tomorrow.

Opening just yesterday at Lawrimore Project in Seattle is "Anne Mathern -- Moses Lake," new photographs, film and a live installation. Along with the opening, Mathern presented a live installation and performance, featuring fantasy metal band DOOMHAWK. "Moses Lake" is the first solo exhibition at Lawrimore Project for the Seattle-based artist, and the show is centered on a cluster of small farm towns in Eastern Washington that have Greek and Hebrew-derived names but were originally inhabited and eventually stolen from Native Americans. The exhibition investigates the imposition of the cultural values embodied by one set of people upon another. Mathern received her BFA in photography from the University of Washington in 2004 and received several awards during her study, including the Marsh Scholarship and the UW Undergraduate Research Award for special projects. The artist also co-founded and currently acts as the managing director of Crawl Space, an artist-run gallery in Seattle. The artist has also exhibited with the King County Gallery 4 Culture in Seattle.

via DailyServing

X-Seed 4000; Architectural Self-Abuse

Now this is fabulous, in every sense. The X-Seed 4000, a 13,000 ft. building which would house up to a million residents! What do you think? Not currently feasible, but a nice exercise in green-thinking. Not that I'm normally given to fits of claustrophobia, but the thing kind-of freaks me out. Maybe I'm spending too much time fishing...

There’s a lot of debate about what the tallest tower in the world currently is. Some say the Taipei 101, at 1671 ft to the tip of it’s spire, is the world’s tallest tower, whereas we might argue that the Sears Tower, at a whopping 1731 ft (and 110 stories), still takes the prize. However, if the enormous, 13,000 ft X-Seed 4000 structure ever gets built in Tokyo - it will win the worlds-tallest-building competition hands down and leave its puny competitors in the dirt.

Looking eerily like Mt. Doom in the above rendering, the mountain-like X-Seed 4000 represents a utopian eco-vision for a self-contained high-rise city in the Tokyo harbor - powered mainly by solar energy. Aesthetically inspired by nearby Mt. Fuji, the behemoth building would measure 13,123 feet tall with a 6 square-kilometer footprint, and could accommodate five hundred thousand to one million inhabitants.

via the always fabulous Inhabitat

"I Write for Myself in Multiplicate..." Vladimir Nabokov

". . . as I have said often enough, I write for myself in multiplicate, a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizon of shimmering deserts." -- Vladimir Nabokov

"Even though you think you know exactly who you are, it is very difficult to have real understanding of oneself. Your self-conception continually changes as you discover more and more about yourself. If you have complete understanding then even ideas of the wisdom of enlightenment or the status of detachment will be seen for what they are - tentative and delusive."
- Dogen
Shobogenzo

via Whiskey River

"To the Masses" @ Scion, LA 8/25/07

If you're going to be in LA this weekend, be sure to check the opening at Scion Space on Saturday night. Gonna be great!  -d.

Scion Installation gallery goes big with a new show curated by Giant Robot's Eric Nakamura and featuring work by Caroline Hwang, Olaf Ladousse, and a tight group of international post-design artists who spend their days changing the way our world looks. (SND)

Note: This exhibition remains on display through Sat 9.8 (Wed-Sat: 11am-6pm).

via Flavorpill

http://www.scion.com/space/

Nancy Davenport Awarded DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art Grant

This photograph made me immediately think of this email I found in my Inbox:

Les maçons désoeuvrés venaient par habitude tourner chaque jour autour des
chantiers. Les mains dans les poches, chaussés de lourds sabots, ils arrivaient
piane-piane...

[The unemployed masons had the habit of coming, each day, to hang around the
work yards. Hands in the pockets, wearing heavy wooden clogs, they slowly
arrived...]

--from "Mémoires de la Société d'agriculture, commerce, sciences et arts" by
Société d'agriculture, commerce, sciences et arts de la Marne

And big congrats to Nancy for getting this:

DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art is delighted to announce its very first production grant to New York based Canadian artist Nancy Davenport. The grant helps Nancy to complete a project titled Workers for the 2007 Istanbul Biennial. DHC/ART is committed to initiating and supporting the production of new work by Canadian artists in a variety of media through an annual commission or grant.

Workers is an ambitious media installation which laterally tackles the representation of labour and issues arising from globalisation by connecting Norwegian workers to their out-sourced Chinese counterparts in a seamless, multi-screen DVD environment. At the centre of this merged, moving frieze of animated portraits of both sets of workers is an image of a factory -- itself subjected to digital enhancements where workers gather at the gates or rocket into outer space referencing film pioneers the Lumière brothers and
Georges Méliès.

via French Word of the Day and NancyDavenport.com

Ron Mueck's Fiberglass Resin Creepiness @ MOMA Ft. Worth Through October

Found this in my inbox today. Get down to Ft. Worth People. Thanks Sassy...

Ron Mueck is a London-based photo-realist artist. Born in Melbourne,Australia, to parents who were toy makers, he labored on children's television shows for 15 years before working in special effects for such films as Labyrinth, a 1986 fantasy epic starring David Bowie. Eventually Mueck concluded that photography pretty much destroys the physical presence of the original object, and so he turned to fine art and sculpture. In the early 1990's, still in his advertising days, Mueck was commissioned to make something highly realistic, and was wondering what material would do the trick. Latex was the usual, but he wanted something harder, more precise. Luckily, he saw a little architectural decor on the wall of a boutique and inquired as to the nice, pink stuff's nature. Fiberglass resin was the answer, and Mueck has made it his bronze and marble ever since.

Hieronymus Bosch Action Figures: China Lead Paint? Who Cares!

Don't know if these will make the recall list too, so you better get yours now! I saw these the other day and just could not get them out of my mind! I must have them all...

via Your Daily Awesome

get em HERE!

William Gibson on "The Future"

Sunday August 12, 2007
The Observer

The present has recently caught up with William Gibson. The great prophet of the digital future, who not only coined the word 'cyberspace' in his debut novel Neuromancer in 1984, but imagined its implications and went a long way to suggesting its YouTube and MySpace culture, has stopped looking forwards. 'The future is already here,' he is fond of suggesting. 'It is just not evenly distributed.'

more