Longitudes

Longitudes cuts across Latitudes’ projects and research with news, updates, and reportage.

James Yamada's Public Art Fund Project, New York


Unveiled on Monday "this new sculpture by James Yamada entitled Our Starry Night, will be on view at Doris C. Freedman Plaza at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street. Built from powder coated aluminum and punctuated with 1,900 colored LED lights, Our Starry Night is a 12-foot-tall sculpture that acts as an interactive passageway to Central Park."

As visitors to the park walk through the Public Art Fund Project sculpture at all hours of the day and night, it will illuminate in response to each person individually. When visitors walk through the portal in the piece, they trigger a metal detector hidden inside the structure's casing. This activates the LED lights that perforate the exterior of the sculpture. Common everyday metal objects such as cell phones, keys, belts, jewelry, cameras, computers, and the like will trigger the lights; the luminosity and the light patterns seen in the piece will correspond to the quantity of metal detected. Our Starry Night is literally activated by the public, reinforcing the notion that art — and particularly public art — is dependent on the people around it." (until October 28, 2008)

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'Greenwashing' in Artforum Critics' Picks

Below you can read the review of the 'Greenwashing. Environment: Perils, Promises and Perplexities' exhibition by Emily Verla Bovino in Artforum Critics' Picks. The project website (www.greenwashing.lttds.org) has also been updated with links to press articles (ongoing) and a photogallery with a selection of installation shots.

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"Greenwashing"
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
Via Modane, 16
February 29–May 18


“Cyclus Offset,” “KeayKolour Recycled May,” “Shiro Alga Carta”: A series of “all natural,” “ecological” papers color the catalogue for “Greenwashing” in a muted rainbow of earthy greens, yellows, and pinks. Designed by the exhibition’s curators—Ilaria Bonacossa and Latitudes’s Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna—the volume offers its own version of “green sheen.” Are the Fondazione and the organizers self-consciously engaging in the same banal posturing they set out to critique? Or do they see the printing of an art catalogue on recycled paper as a step in the direction of philosopher Félix Guattari’s exhortation to “think transversally,” toward a reconciliation of the nature/culture dichotomy? Like most of the show’s twenty-five participating artists, the organizers are uncompromising in their ambiguity: They neither propose grand solutions nor shy away in passive resignation. An ambitious project that occasionally falters, “Greenwashing” is largely successful in broadening and interrogating the narrow views that dominate environmentalist debates.

Works by Jorge Peris, Lara Almarcegui, and Chu Yun provide the most exemplary models of this approach. For Fairy, 2008, Peris bolted slabs of wet clay to the walls of a back room, transforming the space’s frigid architecture into a musty den of soft, sweating walls kept moist by a network of sprinklers. Like Peris’s installation, Almarcegui’s slide show and postcards, titled A Wasteland: Rotterdam Harbour, 2003–2018; Genk, 2004–2014; Arganzuela Public Slaughterhouse, Madrid, 2005–2006; Peterson Paper Factory, Moss, 2006–2007, documents microenvironments that are at once constructed and deconstructed, simultaneously additive and subtractive. In A Wasteland—wilderness by design—the artist negotiated with municipal authorities and landowners to preserve the atmosphere of disuse in a selection of urban lots, sparing them from the restoration and clean-up of urban planners. In Chu’s Constellation, 2006, various appliances set to “sleep” mode are arranged in a dark room. Their twinkling red, blue, and green lights are the stars of a heaven inhabited by obsolete electronics, including VHS players and soon-to-be-outmoded technologies, like CRT television monitors. While Chu’s work evokes what Andrews calls the “‘What can I do?’ responses to climate change,” it also explores the seductiveness of the spectacular apocalypse scenarios frequently invoked in environmentalist rhetoric. Such eschatological visions aren’t the province of environmentalists alone, however. As Noam Chomsky affirms in Cornelia Parker’s video, Chomskian Abstract, 2007: “About a third of the population probably believes it doesn’t matter what we do about global warming . . . because Jesus is coming and so . . . what’s the difference? . . . Those of us who are saved will rise to heaven, and everyone else will be massacred—and it’ll be wonderful.”

Emily Verla Bovino

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Thomas Hirschhorn's 'Poor tunning' in kurimanzutto, Mexico City



'Poor Tuning' at kurimanzutto, Mexico City continues until April 27: "Thomas Hirschhorn’s current exhibition, “Poor Tuning,” presents ten pimped-out race cars..." (Artforum) more...

While 'Stand-alone' at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, which continues until May 18, presents a three-room rendering of a kind of demonic fireplace inspired by a student occupation of a university campus.
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