Interview

As evidenced by Katharine Harmon's new book The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography (Princeton Architectural Press) map-related artwork is hot right now. But of the 150 artists in her new tome–including Ed Ruscha, Julian Schnabel, Olafur Eliasson, Maira Kalman, William Kentridge, and Vik Muniz–one is particularly intriguing: Florent Morellet. As you might know, the famed Meatpacking District restaurateur was born into an artistic family–his father, abstract minimalist painter Francois Morellet, has many pieces in MoMA's permanent collection and is currently installing seven new permanent window installations at the Louvre in January. (IMAGE: FLORENT MORELLET; EMPTY LICHEN)

"I'm so obsessed with maps," says Morellet, who's been making maps since he was 10 years old. "My work is insane, it's completely conceptual–and realistic." To wit: In a 1997 show in Paris years back, he imagined the City of Light from five different vantage points–think Cairo superimposed over the Seine–and five different climates, complete with tongue-in-cheek almanacs detailing the imagined political, economic, and educational landscapes. For this book's accompanying art show, opening tonight at New York's Christopher Henry Gallery, Florent put Harmon in touch with Soho gallerist Christopher Henry to cull maps from a dozen artists including Morellet, who has created 11 new pieces, including a series in tribute to his late patron and friend Roy Lichtenstein. Though Florent doesn't have any new designs on another restaurant at the moment, he may be forging a new path into the hospitality game soon.


MICHAEL SLENSKE: Hello, how are you?

FLORENT MORELLET: Great, how are you?

SLENSKE: Great. So how's it been preparing for this show?

MORELLET: I did a dozen pieces. Most of them I did recently in the past couple of months. I mean I was working to the wire. I've been working every day and every night for the past week. In the book what Kaite chose are three pieces I did with lichen, you know the moss. I did a picture together with a graphic designer I've been working with for 20 years named Douglas Riccardi. He helped me work on the pictures digitally to isolate the light away from it's background and turn it into a nice image. I was seeing maps everywhere and lichen really looks like the map of an island, especially a volcanic island.

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Richard Phillips is best known—and most criticized—for his realer than real portraits of high profile women, their sexuality pouring forth like so many handbags in a Louis Vuitton ad. In a new series, "Five Most Wanted Men," he demonstrates how male celebrities make their own sales pitch. We go in for a studio visit.

Read the full interview at Art in America.
Photo by Noah Becker, editor of Whitehot Magazine.

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Paris-based artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster is all about being in the moment. An enigmatic practitioner of various mediums—film, photography, and spatial installation among them—Gonzalez-Foerster seeks to create live moments in time when people and places can interact. For Performa 09, the third iteration of New York's performance art biennial, she will stage an opera called K.85—in collaboration with Berlin-based composer and performer Ari Benjamin Meyers—inspired by two dark urban films: Orson Welles' drama The Trial and Martin Scorsese's black comedy After Hours. It will be staged at various secret locations across lower Manhattan (we'll let you in on one: Katz's, the famous Lower East Side deli). We asked Gonzalez-Foerster for her favorite performances of visual art. (Left: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Riyo, 1999. Film still. Courtesy of Jan Mot, Brussels and Esther Schipper, Berlin.)

 
1. John Cage cooking mushrooms on stage, Maison de la Culture, Grenoble, France 198?. "Something completely unexpected on stage."

2. Richard Foreman's Café Amérique with Daniel Emilfork, Maison de la Culture, Grenoble, France, 1981. "Confusion and hysteria on stage."

3. Marina Abramovic & Ulay's Nightsea Crossing, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1981.
"Incredible concentration and tension without stage."

4. Alain Bergala, Cinematheque Francaise, Paris, 199?. "Lecture, orality and projection, cinema and revelation."

5. Il Tempo del Postino, Manchester and Basel. "Onstage, our stage, to be continued..."


Dominique Gonzalez-Foertser performs November 18 and 19 at the Abrons Center, which is located at 466 Grand St, New York.

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Formerly a food writer and party planner, Jennifer Rubell has recently endeavored toward food eventing, an invented media that has naturally garnered her a specific niche in the art world. At a 2007 event at Art Basel Miami Beach, Rubell—daughter of the Miami-based pack of collectors, and niece of Studio 54's Steve Rubell—greeted guests with a deconstructed take on breakfast, featuring enormous platters of hard-boiled eggs, croissant and bacon, with only surgical gloves as service. On Friday, Rubell's agenda was to provide sustenance to 500 attendees of the opening celebration of the fourth Performa Biennial, the vast, three-week performance art invitational founded and overseen by Roselee Goldberg that this year features 170 artists and 25 curators (not to mention not-by-invitation satellite performances). Rubell's dinner included an experience that played out, in descending order, over three floors, and many of the art world's most famous faces were faced with food and drink at its most conceptually liberated.

Read the full article on Art in America. Photo by Aimee Walleston.

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