Interview

Hans Ulrich Obrist is part curator, part critic, and part irrepressible mad scientist. He's also co-director at London's Serpentine Gallery, founder of the Museum Robert Walser and this year he's artistic advisor, with design legend Peter Saville, of the Manchester International Festival, which runs through July 19. Obrist, Saville and MIF director Alex Poots have come up with a tour de force lineup of music, performance and visual arts exhibitions to match the city's history of nurturing (or provoking) all things innovative, inventive and radical (lest we forget that they produced bands like Buzzcocks, Joy Division and New Order, The Smiths, The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, among many others).


MC: At the inaugural Manchester International Festival (MIF) in 2007, there were high profile works, like the art opera you organized, "Il Tempo Del Postino," and Chen Shi Zheng and Damon Albarn's "Monkey: Journey to the West." But the MIF didn't seem to get the attention it deserved. Do you think this year will change that? And do you think Manchester will begin to rival London as an arts center, considering the amount of arts students they have here?

HUO: There's a place in England for more cities to become centers. The MIF can be a catalyst for a stronger [art] city. Thousands of students are here, and [they'll] see Il Tempo, Marina [Abramovic's exhibition], Kraftwerk and Reich, etc. It's a very big impact. You only see this a couple of years later. This is a long-term leverage. The festival has an immediate impact, a global impact but also for long-term effect. These young people will see this and it might change their life.

MORE »

Graphic by Brendan Griffiths

In 1977, when American artist Bruce Nauman was invited to participate in an exhibition called Sculpture Projects in the German city of Münster, his proposal for a work entitled "Square Depression"—an enormous inverted, hollow pyramid with a 82-by-82-foot square base, sunk into the courtyard in front of the University of Münster-was rejected (the same year residents demanded that the city refuse a sculpture donated by George Rickey because they thought it was an eyesore). Münster, on the northwestern Dutch border city of Germany and derisively referred to by fellow Germans as the national capital of the conservative, German petit-bourgeoisie, was clearly not ready for modern art. Thirty years later, in 2007, "Square Depression" made its premiere at this decade's Sculpture Projects. Corruption by contemporary art was inevitable.

Apply this to New York, and the 172-acre island called Governors Island, just off of Manhattan's southern tip. From 1783 to 1966, the island was a United States Army post, and then from 1966 to 1996 the island served as a major United States Coast Guard installation. It wasn't until 2003, when President George W., Governor Pataki, and Mayor Bloomberg (on behalf of the United States) sold Governors Island to the people of New York for a mere $1, that the island was accessible to civilians.

MORE »

Day 1:
A show by Argentine photographers Jorge Miño and Christian Bordes opened at the Ernesto Catena Contemporary Photography Gallery in the hip Palermo Viejo neighborhood of Buenos Aires. In Bordes's series of works titled "Intimate Dimensions," he plays between fiction and documentary style photography, an eerie dialogue between the place, the atmosphere and the objects within the context of the scene. Miño's photographs, on the other hand, work not with what's in the photo but with what's not in the photo: His enormous photographs capture places that appear like a world without survivors. It was a fabulous-looking crowd, with many people—like this young Chilean artist we met (pictured)—having just arrived for the first day of ArteBA. (LEFT: SCULPTURE AT ERNESTO CATENA GALLERY)

MORE »

Courtesy of Jake Dyson

The International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) kicks off tomorrow, bringing the whole lot from last month's Il Salone del Mobile stateside. In Milan, we saw an exhibition stand made up from thousands of pieces of American Tulipwood (Established & Sons), a chair that is also a room (Studio Makkink & Bey), a lounge based on a drop of water (Amanda Levete), and Milan's streets designed with sand (Muurbloem). We also saw a room-sized light show-meets-art installation, a collaboration by lighting artist Jason Bruges and lighting designer Jake Dyson. It was a mesmerizing light display where light oscillated between narrow and wide-angle beams, creating shapes and variant degrees of light and shadow on the walls-a timeless light kaleidoscope. The fluid art installation demonstrated the possibilities of Dyson's exciting new light, the Motorlight a constantly changing light source he predicts will be seed to a lighting revolution.
 
Dyson's father is Sir James Dyson, inventor of the "Dual Cyclone" bagless vacuum cleaner, and if junior stands out among a new generation of great inventors, it's no doubt due at least in part to the inspiration and encouragement of his father, whose vacuum took nearly 20 years to reach the global market but upon arrival was a massive success. The Central Saint Martin's graduate left the well-regarded art and design school with the intention of becoming an interior designer-though he's quick to point out that he's "an engineer, not a stylist"-and it was when designing interiors that he got his bright idea: "If you look at all the lights available in the high-end designer market, they're [based] purely on beauty and aesthetics. [Lighting companies] haven't really focused on what a light can do [and] the function of the light coming out of it," he says. "I think that you should be able to offer something more from the product of a light fitting than just its beauty."

MORE »