[Brookside]

A Place for the NEW




Hey, have you heard? There's a little something happening on the Bowery in New York City. After nearly 30 years as scrappy also-ran, the New Museum is re-opening in a brand new building on the Lower East Side. NY Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff is a fan. "The kind of building that renews your faith in New York as a place where culture is lived, not just bought and sold," he writes, it "succeeds on a spectacular range of levels: as a hypnotic urban object, a subtle critique of the art world and a refreshingly unpretentious place to view art."

The six story aluminum-mesh clad building was designed by the Japanese firm SANAA whose conception of rectangular boxes precariously perched atop one another mirrors the rough and tumble cutting edge art inside. Times art critic Roberta Smith says the inaugural exhibition,
"Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century," is "a gauntlet thrown down to other New York museums. It says: get your nerve on."


"New Look for the New Museum," by Nicolai Ouroussoff
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/30/ar...0newb.html?8ur
"In Galleries, a Nervy Opening Volley," by Roberta Smith
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/30/ar...0newm.html?8ur

[1ster]

I have to admit: that's pretty brilliant in context. Much like Gehry's designs, you don't want a whole city full of this stuff, but it offers a welcome reprive from its surroundings.

I'm curious what the exterior material actually is.

[NJKSC27]

Thats Great! I have to look more into this

[Brookside]

Originally Posted by 1ster

I have to admit: that's pretty brilliant in context. Much like Gehry's designs, you don't want a whole city full of this stuff, but it offers a welcome reprive from its surroundings.

I'm curious what the exterior material actually is.

Visitors waiting for the New Museum to open.

“The museum serves as a hinge between these two worlds. As it rises, its floors shift back and forth like a pile of boxes stacked ever so carefully. Its protective armor of shimmering aluminum mesh is a great ornamental screen. Exquisitely detailed, it is backed by a second layer of metal panels, giving the surface a subtle depth.

What results is a striking expression of the neighborhood’s warring identities. When the building is approached from Prince Street, the contrast between the instability of the forms and the uniformity of the aluminum gives it a strangely enigmatic glow, evoking both a fading past and a phantom future. As you get closer, the skin becomes tougher and more industrial, echoing what’s left of the neighborhood’s grittier history.” NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF/NYT

[Brookside]

Meanwhile, inside the museum...Unmonumental...an exhibit of 30 sculptors including Jim Lambie's (Scotland)
"Used Wig Thing"....?....where's the wigs?



and Urs Fischer's riff on the Arthurian sword in the stone legend.
The nude in the background is a life-sized wax candle...it'll burn throughout the run of the show until melted.
That is so cool. Fetishism, exorcism,mild sadism...rings my bell.:biggrin:

[Brookside]

More Urs Fischer Burning Women...these (earlier versions from the series of works titled "What if the Phone Rings") were taken at the foundry where he puts them together.
I have no idea what they sell for....lots- maybe the msrp of a 335?....just a guess.:biggrin:






What If The Phone Rings 2001/2003
Urs Fischer made the originals of the life-size woman-shaped candles in Styrofoam. The solid casting of each piece requires 250 kg of paraffin and microwax and is equipped with a branched system of wicks. The coloured areas in the finished pieces are created by pouring coloured wax directly into the negative moulds. As the sculptures are burnt, they are transformed by the creation of unexpected deformations and craters. Those who buy these sculptures, which are meant to be burn and melt, have a lifelong option to purchase a new sculpture at the production price.




Early version with multiple wicks- 2 in the buttocks. Burn Baby Burn.
Check out that they are posed either atop a makeshift sarcophagus or Romanesque plinth.

[Brookside]

CAN YOU DIG IT?



Urs Fischer, "You," Oct. 25-Dec. 22, 2007, at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, 620 Greenwich Street, New York, N.Y. 10014

Right now this guy is everwhere in NYC....Urs Fischer has reduced Gavin Brown’s gallery to a hole in the ground, and it is one of the most splendid things to have happened in a New York gallery in a while. A 38-foot-by-30-foot crater, eight feet deep, extends almost to the walls of the gallery, surrounded by a 14-inch ledge of concrete floor. A sign at the door cautions, THE INSTALLATION IS PHYSICALLY DANGEROUS AND INHERENTLY INVOLVES THE RISK OF SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH; intrepid viewers can, all the same, inch their way around the hole. Fischer’s pit is titled You, and it took ten days to build, costing around $250,000 of Brown’s money. (Heaven only knows what his landlord thought of it.) The gallery’s ground-level garage doors facilitated the jackhammering and removal of the concrete floor and the use of a backhoe to excavate tons of dirt and debris, after which a crew closed off the space with immaculate white walls.
Jerry Saltz/ArtNet

[Brookside]

Little House on the Bowery




Jerry Saltz/Artnet

I can’t remember there ever being more hope and goodwill toward an art institution than there is right now for the New Museum, as it moves into its new $64 million building on the Bowery. Partly this is because the New Museum, despite having been something of a local mascot over the 30 years since its founding, has never quite hit its stride; it has usually bounced between being audacious and being annoying. Partly it’s because other New York museums have been so uneven about contemporary art. MoMA is adrift, the Guggenheim’s leaders continue to make terrible decisions, and the Brooklyn Museum is a giant wasted opportunity. The general feeling is, this is the New Museum’s last best chance to get it right.


Installation view of "Unmonumental: The Object of the 21st Century at the New Museum
Photo by David Rager