The purpose of design began to shift in the late 20th century from utility toward a more holistic combination of purpose and meaning. Contemporary designers do not just provide function, form, and meaning, but also must draft the scripts that allow people and things to develop and improvise a dialogue.

New branches of design practice have emerged in the past decades that combine design’s old-fashioned preoccupations—with form, function, and meaning—with a focus on the exchange of information and even emotion. Communication design deals with the delivery of messages, encompassing graphic design, wayfinding, and communicative objects of all kinds, from printed materials to three-dimensional and digital projects. Interface and interaction design delineate the behavior of products and systems as well as the experiences that people will have with them. Information and visualization design deal with the maps, diagrams, and tools that filter and make sense of information. In critical design, conceptual scenarios are built around hypothetical objects to comment on the social, political, and cultural consequences of new technologies and behaviors.

Talk to Me explores this new terrain, featuring a variety of designs that enhance communicative possibilities and embody a new balance between technology and people, bringing technological breakthroughs up or down to a comfortable, understandable human scale. Designers are using the whole world to communicate, transforming it into a live stage for an information parkour and enriching our lives with emotion, motion, direction, depth, and freedom.

Selected Artists from the exhibition:

“We [have used] earrings as symbols of distinction since time immemorial,” the designers of kawamura-ganjavian tell us, “however they are not particularly useful items.” In response they have designed the Earshell—a sound-enhancement device that is also an elegant adornment and dramatizes the interest of the listener.

Phantom Recorder, 2010

Revital Cohen, Design Interactions Department,  Royal College of Art

The Phantom Recorder explores the phenomenon of the phantom limb: an amputee’s sensation that a missing limb is still attached to the body and functioning. This device could be activated to record or cause particular sensations. The potential for new ways to understand the communication between mind and body goes further, Cohen says: “Could we use this technology to record illusions of the mind? What if our imagination could be captured through our nerves?”

Communication Prosthesis Portrait Series (Cyclist, Actress, Chef, Craftsman, Midwife, Politician, Model), 2009

Sascha Nordmeyer

The prosthetic “smile” that is intended to empower anyone who feels awkward socially. This rigid prosthesis, shown in a series of portraits, covers the lips and exposes the gums, making communication easier and more explicit by forcing automatic facial expressions, almost grimaces. It was conceived for people who feel insecure about their appearance and their social skills and are therefore compelled to be excessively smart and communicative in every circumstance.

Short++, 2010

Adi Marom,  Interactive Telecommunications Program, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University

Designs by Adi Marom and Hans Hemmert explore how daily functions and especially face-to-face communication can change simply by tweaking and tinkering with people’s height. Marom’s robotic footwear extends and contracts via an iPhone application, so that the wearer becomes taller or shorter to fit various needs and moods— from reaching a higher supermarket shelf to smelling a flower on a tree branch; height thus becomes what the designer calls an “interactive variable.”

Talk to Yourself Hat, 2006

Kate Hartman, Interactive Telecommunications Program. Tisch School of the Arts &  New York University

The Talk to Yourself Hat transmits sounds from one’s mouth directly into one’s ears via a conspicuous, trunk-like tube. As such, it playfully encourages a user to actually speak out, without worrying about privacy, when in conversation with herself. The hat also acknowledges, communicates, and legitimizes an act that is sometimes regarded as shameful.

EyeWriter, 2009

Zach Lieberman, James Powderly, Evan Roth, Chris Sugrue, TEMPT1 , and Theo Watson.

In 2003 TEMPT1, a Los Angeles–based graffiti artist and activist, was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which soon left him entirely paralyzed except for his eyes. The team equipped a pair of inexpensive eyeglasses with eye-tracking technology and custom-developed software that could capture TEMPT1’s eye movements. From his hospital room, wirelessly connected to a laptop and laser-tagging apparatus installed in downtown LA, the artist can paint graffiti tags in color, which are then projected at a superhuman scale in real time— so that viewers see the glowing tag as it is created—on buildings.

Rubik’s Cube for the Blind, 2010

Konstantin Datz

Konstantin Datz has reimagined the popular Rubik’s Cube for people who cannot see the toy’s original colors. Datz stuck white panels embossed with the Braille words for each color over the squares, transforming the game from a visual puzzle into a tactile one.

 

The exhibition, organized by The Costume Institute, celebrates the late Alexander McQueen’s extraordinary contributions to fashion. From his Central Saint Martins postgraduate collection of 1992 to his final runway presentation, which took place after his death in February 2010, Mr. McQueen challenged and expanded the understanding of fashion beyond utility to a conceptual expression of culture, politics, and identity. His iconic designs constitute the work of an artist whose medium of expression was fashion.

The Romantic Mind

Coat
Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims (MA Graduation Collection), 1992
Pink silk satin printed in thorn pattern lined in white silk with encapsulated human hair

“You’ve got to know the rules to break them. That’s what I’m here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.”
—Alexander McQueen

McQueen doggedly promoted freedom of thought and expression and championed the authority of the imagination. In so doing, he was an exemplar of the Romantic individual, the hero-artist who staunchly follows the dictates of his inspiration. “What I am trying to bring to fashion is a sort of originality,” he said. McQueen expressed this originality most fundamentally through his methods of cutting and construction, which were both innovative and revolutionary.

Romantic Gothic and Cabinet of Curiosities

“Coiled” Corset
The Overlook, autumn/winter 1999–2000
Aluminum

One of the defining features of McQueen’s collections is their historicism. While McQueen’s historical references are far-reaching, he was particularly inspired by the nineteenth century, especially the Victorian Gothic.Like the Victorian Gothic, which combines elements of horror and romance, McQueen’s collections often reflect opposites such as life and death, lightness and darkness. Indeed, the emotional intensity of his runway presentations was frequently the consequence of the interplay between dialectical oppositions. The relationship between victim and aggressor was especially apparent, particularly in his accessories. He once remarked, “I . . . like the accessory for its sadomasochistic aspect.”

Romantic Nationalism

Dress
The Horn of Plenty, autumn/winter 2009–10
Black duck feathers

McQueen’s collections were fashioned around elaborate narratives that are profoundly autobiographical, often reflecting his Scottish heritage. Indeed, when he was asked what his Scottish roots meant to him, he replied, “Everything.” McQueen’s national pride is most evident in the collections Highland Rape (autumn/winter 1995–96) and Widows of Culloden (autumn/winter 2006–7). Both explore Scotland’s turbulent political history.

Romantic Exoticism

Ensemble
No. 13, spring/summer 1999
Corset of brown leather; skirt of cream silk lace; prosthetic legs of carved elm wood

“I want to be honest about the world that we live in, and sometimes my political persuasions come through in my work. Fashion can be really racist, looking at the clothes of other cultures as costumes. . . . That’s mundane and it’s old hat. Let’s break down some barriers.”
—Alexander McQueen

McQueen’s romantic sensibilities expanded his imaginary horizons not only temporally but also geographically. As it had been for Romantic artists and writers, the lure of the exotic was central to his work. Like his historicism, McQueen’s was wide ranging—India, China, Africa, and Turkey all sparked his imagination. Japan was particularly significant to him, both thematically and stylistically. The kimono, especially, was a garment that he reconfigured endlessly. Remarking on the direction of his fashions, McQueen said, “My work will be about taking elements of traditional embroidery, filigree, and craftsmanship from countries all over the world. I will explore their crafts, patterns, and materials and interpret them in my own way.” As with many of his themes, however, McQueen’s exoticism was often expressed in contrasting opposites. That was the case with It’s Only a Game (spring/summer 2005), a show staged as a chess game inspired by a scene in the film Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001), which pitched the East (Japan) against the West (America). Films often inspired McQueen, as did contemporary art.

Romantic Primitivism

Dress
It’s Only a Game, spring/summer 2005
Lilac leather and horsehair

“I try to push the silhouette. To change the silhouette is to change the thinking of how we look. What I do is look at ancient African tribes, and the way they dress. The rituals of how they dress. . . . There’s a lot of tribalism in the collections.”
—Alexander McQueen

Throughout his career, McQueen returned to the theme of primitivism, which drew upon the ideal of the noble savage living in harmony with the natural world. It was the focus of his first runway collection after graduating, Nihilism (spring/summer 1994). He said of the collection, “It was a reaction to designers romanticizing ethnic dressing, like a Masai-inspired dress made of materials the Masai could never afford.” It famously included a latex dress with locusts, McQueen’s statement on famine. Many of the pieces were coated with mud, a conceit the designer repeated in Eshu (autumn/winter 2000–2001), a collection inspired by the well-known deity in the Yoruba religion. The clothes, including a coat of black synthetic hair and a dress of black horsehair embroidered with yellow glass beads, came close to fetishizing materials. This fetishization also occurred in It’s a Jungle Out There (autumn/winter 1997–98), which was inspired by the Thomson’s gazelle. The collection was a meditation on the dynamics of power—in particular, the relationship between predator and prey. Indeed, McQueen’s reflections on primitivism were frequently represented in paradoxical combinations, contrasting “modern” and “primitive,” “civilized” and “uncivilized.” The storyline of Irere (spring/summer 2003) involved a shipwreck at sea and was peopled with pirates, conquistadors, and Amazonian Indians. Typically, McQueen’s narrative glorified the state of nature and tipped the moral balance in favor of the “natural man” or “nature’s gentleman” unfettered by the artificial constructs of civilization.

Romantic Naturalism

“Spine” Corset
Untitled, spring/summer 1998
Aluminum and black leather

Nature was the greatest, or at least the most enduring, influence upon McQueen. It was also a central theme, if not the central theme, of Romanticism. Many artists of the Romantic movement presented nature itself as a work of art. McQueen both shared and promoted this view in his collections, which often included fashions that took their forms and raw materials from the natural world. For McQueen, as it was for the Romantics, nature was also a locus for ideas and concepts. Inspired by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), it presented a narrative that centered not on the evolution of humankind but on its devolution. For the Romantics, nature was the primary vehicle for the Sublime—starry skies, stormy seas, turbulent waterfalls, vertiginous mountains. In Plato’s Atlantis, the Sublime of nature was paralleled and supplanted by that of technology—the extreme space-time compressions produced by the Internet. It was a powerful evocation of the Sublime and its coincident expression of the Romantic and the postmodern. At the same time, it was a potent vision of the future of fashion that reflected McQueen’s sweeping imagination.

Ensemble
Eclect Dissect, autumn/winter 1997–98
Dress of black leather; collar of red pheasant feathers and resin vulture skulls; gloves of black leather

Each year MONUMENTA invites an internationally renowned contemporary artist to appropriate the 13,500 m² of the Grand Palais Nave with an artwork specially created for the event. This year the Indian-born British artist Anish Kapoor was invited to create “Leviathan”, an aesthetic and physical shock, an experience of colour that is simultaneously poetic, thoughtful and formidable, one on a scale with the verticality and light of the Nave.

Like the Biblical sea-monster of the same name, Anish Kapoor’s Leviathan embodies a sense of extraordinary, dark power. Leviathan is emblematic of death by drowning in the depths of the ocean, and a force capable of summoning giant waves and tempests. The great beast became synonymous with political metaphor following the publication of Thomas Hobbes’s classic text Leviathan in 1651, presenting the ‘war of every man against every man’ that inevitably prevails in humankind’s primordial ‘state of nature’.

The artist describes the work he is creating for MONUMENTA as follows: “A single object, a single form, a single colour.” “My ambition”, he adds, “is to create a space within a space that responds to the height and luminosity of the Nave at the Grand Palais. Visitors will be invited to walk inside the work, to immerse themselves in colour, and it will, I hope, be a contemplative and poetic experience.” Designed using the most advanced technologies, the work will not merely speak to us visually, but will lead the visitor on a journey of total sensorial and mental discovery. A technical, poetic challenge unparalleled in the history of sculpture, this work questions what we think we know about art, our body, our most intimate experiences and our origins. Spectacular and profound, it responds to what the artist considers to be the crux of his work: namely, “To manage, through strictly physical means, to offer a completely new emotional and philosophical experience.”

Kapoor’s sculpture overflows with geographical specificities in a continual enriching dialogue between visual art traditions. He presents himself as an explorer, opening shut-up spaces, or re-creating immensity in a closed-in volume, radically sidestepping the laws of the material world. Anish Kapoor lives in a geographically offset place he calls “the in-betweeness”, playing on each identity to avoid getting locked in, in any way.

Francis Alÿs uses poetic and allegorical methods to address political and social realities, such as national borders, localism and globalism, areas of conflict and community, and the benefits and detriments of progress.

Alÿs’s personal, ambulatory explorations of cities form the basis for his practice, through which he compiles extensive and varied documentation that reflects his ideas and process. As one of the foremost artists of his generation, Alÿs has produced a complex and diverse body of work that includes video, painting, performance, drawing, and photography.


Rehearsal I (Ensayo I)
2002. Two-channel video (color, sound), 12 min.

This exhibition draws on the Museum’s unique and important collection of Alÿs’s work, highlighting three recent major acquisitions—Re-enactments (2001), When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), and Rehearsal I (Ensayo I) (1999–2001)—which include video installations, paintings, drawings, collages, photographs, and newspaper clippings. These works present an investigation of methods of social action, from rehearsals and re-enactments in urban environments that address the politics of public space to large-scale communal participation where the culmination of many small acts achieves mythic proportions.

Re-enactments
2001. Two-channel video (color, sound), drawings, maps, newspaper clippings, photographs, tables, lights.

The exhibition, which is conceptually grouped around these three thematic bodies of work, also includes additional artworks that the artist has developed around the idea of rehearsal and re-enactment in relation to progress in art and everyday life.

Modern Procession
2002. Two-channel video (color, sound), 12 min.

La Malinche
1997. Oil on gelatin silver print, 9 3/4 x 6 1/2″ (24.8 x 16.5 cm).

Video artist, performance artist, composer and visionary: Nam June Paik (1932-2006) was one of the most innovative artists of the 20th century. Tate Liverpool, in collaboration with FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) present the first major retrospective since the artist’s death, and the first exhibition of Paik’s work in the UK since 1988.

The exhibition celebrates Paik as the inventor of media art. At a time when television was still a novelty, Paik foresaw the future popularity of this new and exciting medium. Thought provoking works like TV Buddha (1989) explore the clashing cultures of east and west, old and new, while Video Fish (1979 – 1992) considers nature versus the man made featuring both television sets and live fish in aquariums.

With artworks ranging from scores of early music performances and Paik’s involvement in the Fluxus movement to TV works, impressive robot sculptures and large-scale video installations; Tate Liverpool’s exhibition will both entertain and inspire.

The exhibition continues at FACT. Focusing on Paik’s innovative use of creative technology, FACT will showcase the major laser installation Laser Cone (1998) for the first time in the UK, along with sixteen single channel video works, including Global Groove 1973 and groundbreaking satellite videos Good Morning Mr Orwell 1984 and Bye Bye Kipling 1986

In recent years, television’s reality shows and talent competitions have offered people a conflicted chance at fame, while various kinds of Web-based social media have pioneered new forms of communication that people increasingly use to perform their private lives as public theater. During the same period, governments worldwide have asserted vast new powers of surveillance, placing unwitting “participants” on an entirely different kind of stage.

Against this backdrop, The Talent Show examines a range of relationships between artists, audiences, and participants that model the competing desires for notoriety and privacy marking our present moment. Ranging from seemingly benevolent partnerships to those that appear to exploit their subjects, many of the works in the exhibition animate the tensions between exhibitionism and voyeurism, and raise challenging ethical questions around issues of authorship, power, and control.

Selected Artists:

1. Andy Warhol

“Robin”
1965. 16mm film, black and white

“Screen Tests,” this four-minute 16-millimeter film portraits of famous, semi-famous and unknown subjects. Projected wall-size here is the nearly static image of a young woman named Robin, who sat for her film portrait in 1965. She was not a celebrity, but there seems no reason to think she could not have been another superstar had she been more self-assertive.

2. Piero Manzoni

Base magica – Scultura vivente
1961. wood 60 x 79.5 x 79.5 cm

A pedestal called “Magic Base — Living Sculpture” (1961) by Piero Manzoni invites people to step up on it and exhibit themselves as works of live art.

3. Chris Burden

Wiretap
1972. Mixed media installation

Chris Burden’s performances from the early ’70s did much to shift attention from things artists make to the artist as a quasi celebrity. Here three of Mr. Burden’s actions are memorialized in reliquarylike plexiglass boxes, with mementos resting on purple velvet cushions. One offers only a printed card stating: “I disappeared for three days without prior notice to anyone. On these three days my whereabouts were unknown.” I want to say as I write this, “Well, no one knows where I am right now,” but then I am not the object of a personality cult.

4. Adrian Piper

Context #7
1970. Mixed media installation

Adrian Piper’s contribution to “Information,” the influential exhibition of Conceptual art at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971, was a binder full of blank pages on which visitors were asked to write or draw whatever they liked. A selection of those sheets is displayed around the walls of one gallery. They included political commentaries, feeble japes like “You are all under arrest” and crude cartoons. The most incisive is a drawing of two people, one saying to the other, “You know Clyde, this exhibit’s better when you’re stoned.”

5. Amie Siegel

My Way 2
2009. Video (color, sound); 12 minutes

Compilation of  YouTube clips of girls and young women singing “Gotta Go My Own Way” from the movie “High School Musical 2,” on the one hand, and men singing the Frank Sinatra chestnut “My Way” on the other.

6. Sophie Calle

The Address Book
2009. A portfolio of prints: 28 pages, each with text and photographs

In 1983, Calle produced her most controversial work of art, Address Book. She had found an address book in the street, photocopied it and sent the original back to its owner. She then visited and interviewed the people listed, in order to build up a profile of its owner from their descriptions and anecdotes. The results were published in Liberation. At around the same time Calle herself became the willing subject of such investigations. In 1981 at Calle’s request, her mother hired a private detective to follow her daughter, photograph her in secret and record her every movement. It was, in Calle’s words, an attempt ‘to provide photographic evidence of my own existence’.

In the fall of 2009, Simmons ordered a customized, high end Love Doll from Japan. The doll, designed as a surrogate sex partner, arrived in a crate, clothed in a transparent slip and accompanied by a separate box containing an engagement ring and female genitalia. Simmons began to document her photographic relationship with this human scale ‘girl’. The resulting photographs depict the lifelike, latex doll in an ongoing series of ‘actions’, shown and titled chronologically from the day Simmons received the doll, through to the present.

The photos reveal the relationship Simmons develops with her model. The first days depict a somewhat formal and shy series of poses with an ever increasing familiarity and comfort level unveiled as time passes. A second doll arrived one year later. This new character, and the interaction between the two, reveal yet another dynamic in composition – both formally and psychologically.

The Love Doll Day 31 (Geisha), 2011

In search of a stage for her Love Doll, Simmons turned to her own home, transforming it into an artfully staged, color coordinated, oversized dollhouse. The Love Doll series is not only a reminder of Simmons’ past examinations of the dollhouse, but also engages with adult fantasies and fetishes, infused with an even more potent sense of desire and regret.

The Love Doll Day 11 (Yellow) 2010

Widely known for her work with human surrogates (dolls, puppets, cut outs, etc), this body of work is Simmons first attempt to portray a life-sized non-human subject. A central figure in the Pictures generation, artists who came to prominence in the late Seventies and early Eighties, Simmons’ work has been featured in major international museums and collections for over three decades. Her Objects on Legs remain iconic photographs from this time.

The Love Doll Day 25 (The Jump) Fuji Matte print, 2010

Other works by Laurie Simmons

EARLY BLACK & WHITE 1976 – 1978

Woman Purple Dress Kitchen, 1978

EARLY COLOR INTERIORS 1978 – 1979

Woman Opening Refrigerator Milk to the Right, 1979

WALKING & LYING OBJECTS 1987 – 1991

Magnum Opus II (The Bye-Bye) 1991

Walking House (Color) 1989

Walking Gun, 1991

Walking Cake II (Color) 1989

THE INSTANT DECORATOR 2001 – 2004

The Instant Decorator (Pink and Green Bedroom_ Slumber Party Really Crowded), 2004

The Instant Decorator (Plaid Living Room) 2004

Performance art is generally experienced live, but what documents it and ensures its enduring life is, above all, photography. Yet photography plays a constitutive role, not merely a documentary one, when performance is staged expressly for the camera (often in the absence of an audience), and the images that result are recordings of an event but also autonomous works of art. The pictures in this exhibition, selected from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, exemplify the complex and varied uses artists have devised for photography in the field of performance since the 1960s.

Many artists have experimented with the camera to test the physical and psychological limits of the body. Not all performances exert such dire demands on the body, although many have entailed a sustained emotional engagement on the part of the artists: Bas Jan Ader photographed himself crying for the camera, and Adrian Piper used photography to chronicle a physical and mental state induced by fasting and writing in isolation.

Adrian Piper
Food for the Spirit. 1971.
Gelatin silver prints, printed 1997, 14 1/2 x 14 3/4″ (36.8 x 37.5 cm) each.

Some artists enlisted the camera as an accomplice in experiments with identity.Vito Acconci used photography to record and then reflect on his attempts to feminize his body by plucking his body hair and hiding his genitals between his legs; and Lorna Simpson turned to the photographic archive as source material, combining found 1950s pinups with her own performative self-portraits, in which she emulates the poses, outfits, and settings of the earlier photographs.

Lorna Simpson
May, June, July, August ‘57/’09 #8
2009. Gelatin silver prints, 5 x 5″ (12.7 x 12.7 cm) each

The exhibition also presents political dissent enacted with the photograph in mind. Ai Weiwei took pictures of his hand, middle finger extended, in gestures of disrespect toward national monuments typically photographed by tourists, and Robin Rhode appears to interact with objects drawn in charcoal on dilapidated walls, exploring rites of consumerism and dispossession in his native South Africa.

Ai Weiwei
Study of Perspective – Eiffel Tower. 1995–2003. Top right: Ai Weiwei. Study of Perspective – Mona Lisa. 1995–2003. Bottom left: Ai Weiwei. Study of Perspective – Tiananmen Square. 1995–2003. Bottom right: Ai Weiwei. Study of Perspective – White House.
1995–2003. Gelatin silver prints, 15 5/16 x 23 1/4″ (38.9 x 59 cm) each.

Staging Action attests to the complex ways in which photography, with its ability to both freeze and extend a moment in time, pushes against the grain of mere documentation to constitute performance as a conceptual exercise that can be appreciated in the absence of a performing body.

Selected Artists:

1. Ana Mendieta

Untitled (Facial Cosmetic Variations)
January–February 1972
Chromogenic color prints, printed 1997, 19 1/4 x 12 3/4" (48.9 x 32.4 cm) each

2. Bruce Nauman

Studies for Holograms
1970. Portfolio of five screenprints,20 5/16 x 26" (51.6 x 66 cm) each

3. Rong Rong

East Village, Beijing, No. 8
1995. Zhang Huan performs Metal Case, Beijing, June 1995. Gelatin silver prints, 21 3/16 x 14 1/2" (53.8 x 36.8 cm) each.

4. Rong Rong

East Village, Beijing, No. 81. 1994. Zhu Ming performs in Beijing, September 1994. Gelatin silver print, 21 3/16 x 13 1/8" (53.8 x 33.3 cm).

5. Valie Export

Action Pants: Genital Panic
1969. Screenprints, 26 3/8 x 19 5/8" (67 x 49.8 cm) each.

6. Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman.

Untitled
1980. Chromogenic color prints, 15 x 23" (38.1 x 58.5 cm) each.

7. Lucas Samaras

Auto Polaroid
1969–71. Black-and-white instant prints, 3 3/4 x 2 15/16" (9.5 x 7.4 cm) each

8. Matthew Barney

Cremaster 3: Gary Gilmore
2002. Chromogenic color print in plastic frame. 53 1/2 x 43 1/2" (135.9 x 110.5 cm).

9. Laurel Nakadate

Lucky Tiger #151. 2009. Top right: Laurel Nakadate. Lucky Tiger #169. 2009. Bottom left: Laurel Nakadate. Lucky Tiger #181. 2009. Bottom right: Laurel Nakadate. Lucky Tiger #186.
2009. Chromogenic color prints with ink fingerprints, 4 x 6" (10.2 x 15.2 cm) each.

10. William Pope.L

Foraging (The Air Itself/Dark Version)
1995. Iris print, printed 2001, 34 1/2 x 31 1/2" (87.6 x 80 cm).

Belgian artist Carsten Höller has turned a contemporary art museum in Berlin into a zoo! 24 canaries, 12 reindeers, eight mice and two flies, are what visitors to the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art will be lining up to observe this month.

Höller’s installation, named Soma, is inspired by the myth of a magical drink. According to the beliefs of Vedic nomads in northern India in the second millennium BC, soma gave those who drank it special powers and brought them closer to their gods. Nobody knows what went into the drink, though some research suggests that soma may have contained fly-agaric mushrooms — Amanita muscaria — a poisonous, red-capped mushroom which has hallucinogenic effects.

But Carsten Höller has not always been an artist. To begin with he studied agricultural science in Kiel, Germany and habilitated 1993 in Phytopathology. Parallel to his work as a scientist he began his artistic career and integrated the experiment as a method into his artistic work.

The animals are part of an installation by Belgian artist Carsten Höller. The installation, named Soma, is inspired by the myth of a magical drink.

Höller’s work is all about encouraging contemplation of questions such as: “How do we achieve enlightenment? What role is science given in our society, and what role myth?”

New Photography 2010 presents four artists—Roe Ethridge, Elad Lassry, Alex Prager, and Amanda Ross-Ho—whose photographs mine the inexhaustible reservoir of images found in print media and cinema.

Roe Ethridge:

Ethridge takes his pictures in “editorial mode,” directly borrowing from commercial images already in circulation, including outtakes from his own illustrational magazine work. Lassry defines his practice as one consumed with pictures, meaning with generic images lifted from consumer society, such as Hollywood publicity stills and design illustrations.

Old Fruit, 2010.
Chromogenic color print, 50 x 40″ (127 x 101.6 cm)

The pictures acquire their meaning from the salient way in which they have been shuffled, sequenced, and laid out in nonlinear narrative structures. Combining and recombining already recontextualized images, Ethridge at once subverts the photographs’ original roles and renews their signifying possibilities.

Debora Muller with Tripod 2008.
Chromogenic color print, 43 x 33″ (109.2 x 83.8 cm).

Elad Lassry:

Elad Lassry defines his practice as consumed with “pictures”—generic images culled from vintage picture magazines and film archives. Tapping the visual culture of still and motion pictures, he engages traditions of story-building with images and the ghosts of history that persist in images long after they have been lifted out of their original contexts.

Eagle Glove, Falcon (Kodak). 2008.
Chromogenic color print, 14 x 11″ (35.6 x 27.9 cm).

“I’m fascinated by the collapse of histories and the confusion that results when there is something just slightly wrong in a photograph,” he has said. Lassry challenges the means by which a work is structured visually. His vibrant pictures—still life compositions, photocollages, and studio portraits of friends and celebrities—never exceed the dimensions of a magazine page or spread and are displayed in frames that derive their colors from the dominant hues in the photographs.

Nailpolish. 2009
Chromogenic color print, 14 1/2 x 11 1/2″ (36.8 x 29.2 cm).

Alex Prager:

Alex Prager, a self-taught photographer, takes her cues from pulp fiction, the cinematic conventions of movie directors such as Douglas Sirk and Alfred Hitchcock, and fashion photography. Resembling movie stills, her unnerving photographs—crisp, boldly colored, shot from unexpected angles, and dramatically lit—feature women disguised in wigs, dramatic makeup, and retro attire.

Desiree. 2008.
Chromogenic color print, 36 x 48 1/2″ (91.4 x 123.2 cm)

Despair, Film Still #1. 2010.
Chromogenic color print, 16 x 20″ (40.6 x 50.8 cm)

Prager’s images explore the construction of images that are intentionally loaded, reflecting her fascination with and understanding of cinematic melodrama.

Julie. 2007.
Chromogenic color print, 36 x 47 1/2″ (91.4 x 120.7 cm).