Environmental
Gabriel Orozco’s Asterisms – Deutsche Guggenheim Museum
The Deutsche Guggenheim presents Asterisms, a two-part sculptural and photographic installation by the Mexican-born artist Gabriel Orozco and the eighteenth project in Deutsche Guggenheim’s series of commissions
Carsten Höller: Experience at The New Museum
October 26, 2011–January 15, 2012
www.newmuseum.org
Carsten Höller was born in 1961 in Brussels, Belgium, to German parents. He studied agricultural entomology at the University of Kiel where he received his doctorate in 1988. By the 1990s, he began to make artworks and eventually abandoned science as profession to pursue a career as an artist.
Höller is frequently inspired by research and experiments from scientific history and deploys these studies in works that alter the audience’s physical and psychological sensations, inspiring doubt and uncertainty about the world around them. His work often draws on social spaces outside of the museum such as the amusement park, zoo, or playground, but the experiences they provide are always far from our usual expectations of these activities.
Giant Triple Mushrooms, 2010
Höller’s art takes the form of proposals for radical, new ways of living by creating sculptures and diagrams for visionary architecture as well as transportation alternatives, such as his renowned slide installations. These concepts may seem impossible in the present day, but suggest new models for the future.
Each floor of the exhibition explores a different general theme within Höller’s work to provide a carefully choreographed journey through the building and the artist’s oeuvre.
Mirror Carousel (2005)
The fourth floor focuses on the theme of movement—featuring the artist’s spectacular Mirror Carousel (2005), which provides riders with a notably different physical experience than the traditional fairground merry-go-round, while at the same time reflecting and illuminating the space surrounding it.
The third floor gathers together works that seek to provide an altered or utopian experience of architectural space. For example, his Giant Psycho Tank (2000) invites viewers to float weightlessly in the water of a sensory deprivation pool, providing a tenebrous, out-of-body experience.
Giant Psycho Tank, 1999
Over the years, the artist has employed psychotropic drugs, flashing lights, and other stimuli to potentially alter the viewer’s mental state. His new site-specific installation on the second floor, Double Light Corner, flickers back and forth on a central axis, creating an immersive, hallucinatory experience.
Light Room, 2008
The work is paired with a recreation of Höller’s Experience Corridor in which the viewer is given the choice to undertake a number of self-experiments.
Functioning as an alternative transportation system within the Museum, one of Holler’s signature slide installations will run from the fourth floor to the second, perforating ceilings and floors, to shuttle viewers through the exhibition as a giant 102-foot-long pneumatic mailing system.
Untitled (Slide), 2011
The sculptures, Giant Triple Mushrooms (2010), icons of the kind of personal exploratory journey that his work has always centered on, will also be on view.
Giant Triple Mushrooms, 2010
Taken as a whole, Höller’s work is an invitation to re-imagine the way in which we move through the world and the relationships we build as he asks us to reconsider what we think we know about ourselves.
Christo & Jeanne-Claude
Like his contemporaries, Christo rebelled against abstraction, seeing it as too theoretical and proposing in its place a manifestly physical art composed of real things. Christo began by wrapping everyday objects, including tin cans and bottles, stacks of magazines & furniture.
In 1961 he started collaborated with his wife, Jeanne-Claude, using industrial materials like polypropylene sheeting, canvas & ropes to wrap objects. The use of fabric sometimes involved wrapping an object, sometimes a bundle; these coverings partly obscured the object’s contours and hampered its function, thus transforming it into an aesthetic presence.
In 1964, just after moving to New York, this repertory of forms was augmented by a series of life-sized store fronts, for example Store Front (1964) the view through their plate-glass windows blocked by hanging fabrics or by sheets of paper stretched across their fronts, again rendering their function uncertain.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle at MASS MoCA
Gravity is a Force to be Reckoned With
Dec 12, 2009–Oct 31, 2010
MASS MoCA
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s project Gravity Is a Force to be Reckoned With (download gallery guide), is based upon Mies van der Rohe’s uncompleted project, the 50×50 House (1951), a square structure open to view on all four sides through glass walls. In Manglano-Ovalle’s work, the house will be constructed at approximately half scale and inverted, the ceiling of the original becoming the sculpture’s floor, the floor becoming the ceiling, and all interior elements such as Mies-designed furniture and partition walls installed upside down.
This singular mysterious tableau provides a touchstone linking the glass house to what is widely regarded as the first science fiction novel; Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921). Set in a futuristic world where individual freedom does not exist and all inhabitants live and work in transparent buildings, the novel tells the story of a state-employed engineer who falls in love with a terrorist and ultimately finds himself in a political and emotional state of desperation culminating in his futile attempt to destroy power and banging his head on glass walls.