Art and the City

The Athens Biennial is opening today, and in parallel tons of cool things are happening. Best in town is the ReMap KM project, a selection 0f 16 international galleries in guerrilla spaces in the Kerameikos / Metaxourgeio areas, coordinated and art-directed by lovely Chloe Vaitsos. Here's what I loved, by gallery of course:

"Athens" byMustafa Hulusi at Rodeo gallery

Rebecca Camhi: Spooky colorful Claire Woods,
Angelo Plessas' TheHistoryofADecadeThatHasNotYetBeenNamed.com, a week before it goes online. This is part of Angelos' Website Triangle project, in my entirely unbiased opinion the coolest project
The great Uwe Henneken at the Breedera fabulous roof painting by Federico Herrero at Blow de la Barra
and crazy cypriot turkish greek flag by Carolina Caycedo
and super spooky and dark DestroyAthens.com by Angelo Plessas (launched online yesterday)
over at Peres Projects we got a great tour of the huge space by super cute Javier. I loved the Nate Lowman / Dan Colen piece, because I always love Nate

Terence Koh presented classical sculptures with really big dicks, a historical correction we have been waiting for for centuries...
somehow I got distracted by the sun hitting the cheap plastic railing.. visiting these buildings was totally half the fun
Dean Sameshima's Andrew Cunanan, from his Gay Serial Killers, right on time for the 10 years of Gianni Versace (watch Fashion Victim today!)downstairs at Andreas Melas a drawing but I dont know by who, as part of the PaperRad show.

this is a bad photo of the great painting by Graham Anderson at Nice & Fit.

a chinese parthenon
Anastasia Douka's low tech sci-fi at Loraini Alimantiri
and right outside, Angelo Plessas' hypnotic NotOnlyPossibleButAlsoNecessary.com (the title of the Istanbul Biennial) presented by Rodeo Gallery Istanbul in an outdoors projectionand finally, somebody seems to be doing a biennial on Second Life.

Moving/ Modern

some titles from Jenkcs Modern Movements in Architecture
the curazy furniture Frank Lloyd Wright did for Price Tower
Herbert Greene: Prairie House, Norman Ocklahoma

Desert House, Paolo Soleri
(lets get high and listen to death from above?)

the book itself on the bad leopard carpet of some boat or other this summer
(is there bad leopard? of course not)my leopard sock from a few days ago
(yes, I've had LOTS to drink tonight, this will be a post to regret)the corridor at the new Forever Laser, under construction

a detail of the Ilias Lefas furniture, but more on this when I'm sober

A walk in the park

Finally a day off in Geneva,
glad to be walking around the super lovely Parc des Bastions
where they have wi-fi and the best trees everlike Sequoiadendron Giganteum F. Pendulum

otherwise known as Wellingtonia Pleureur, from California then I was off to Plain Palais, to the Saturday Flea Market

where I obviously found treasures I didn't needand the famous KNIE circus. I don't really know why it's famous but the tent was greatand further down there is a skate park where I witnessed some accidental acrobatics.

Right next to Plain Palais is the MAMCO, where everything seemed to be about interior space, starting from the super funny "apartment" where minimalist works were used to "furnish" an "apartment".

On the other hand the whole thing looked a little bit like Ikea, and I'm not sure if the relationship of Donald Judd, James Turell and Daniel Buren to Ikea was totally within the curators' intentions, but there you have it.on the desk, the best calender by On Kawara

in the permanent collection of Mamco, more interiors like the great piece by Sarkis,
his studio since 19830 (it's art, not reality)

with a piano that melts cassette tape?

In another room, the seminal project by Martin Kippenberger, the MOMAS (Museum of Modern Art Syros) which exists as an unfinish monument to museums on the barren Greek island.and a container-labyrinth by Gordon Matta-Clack which the museum is in the process of buying. Meanwhile somebody scrawled " Nobody is Perfect, My name is Nobody".

I heard a parade and some Swiss Romande hip hop (god have mercy)
so I had to get out of there

on the way back I passed the super cute brutalist UniDufour building, which has been decorated with art on the outside (a piece by Tatsuo Miyajima I think, which I find a little unnecessary , though this blog is really only about things I like, so its ok. At night it's red and you see numbers.

Aldo van Eyck

One of my favorite floor plans ever (this week) is the temporary pavilion by Aldo Van Eyck. I really got into van Eyck this summer because I was re-reading a lot of Charles Jencks (just impulse), and of course Mr Jencks loves Mr van Eyck, though probably not as we want them to love each other but whatever (and also Aldo passed away in 1999). Anyway, I found out that this pavilion, which looks like a really great space to look at art, or even a space that could be art , and was temporary in 1967, was re-built last year for another show, and as usual I didn't read the whole thing so I don't know exactly why, but its kind of disappointing because the place looks so inspiring in a 70's way in the grainy photos from Jencks' book, while in the new photos it looks nice but a little bit like a public toilet, though now that I see this in print maybe thats a good thing in an entirely different way.

A short video from the Blue Wave exhibition, a few years back in Holland

More from the archives: Blue Wave was an exhibition I did in 2005 at MU in Eindhoven. The exhibition was actually a 1-1 prototype for the public space next door to MU, which we were trying to get built together with Ton Van Gool from MU. The project fell through, and I think some of the pieces are still hanging out in the Eindhoven city hall, or ended up in some culture dumpster.

Holidays in Hell

As Greece is burning and I'm looking out to a nuclear sunset, I stumbled upon this book promoting tourism in Greece in 1974. The dream was of metabolist light resorts, modernist sea-scapes and fun nights spent at the hotel disco. Everybody was ugly in the 70's but that didn't seem to stop them from having too much fun. Now that metabolism is no longer an architectural movement but the reason your diet doesn't work, we spend our vacations next to concrete supermarket Parthenons (why not?) and we keep searching for the ideal abandoned beach that nobody else knows about (they do, they're all there). The promise of architecture on the islands did become a traditionalistic (sic) compromise lost somewhere between a huge misunderstanding and the greedy vernacular.On the plane today I saw the 60's Mon Parnass resort, surrounded by the burnt forest of Parnitha, which should probably go in to the Tourist book of hell from this summer of non-stop forest fires

World of Darkness

Been browsing my archive a lot recently, and under 2003/Projects I found these photos from the Bronx Zoo. We'd gone there a day after the big Northeast Blackout, around this time of year in 03, which was really scary especially up in Harlem. There were helicopters flying around with flood lights, police cars, people going wild in the total darkness. In the zoo they keep all the night animals in a black building called, of course, World of Darkness. The bats were all sleepy and quiet, probably they were all jet lagged from having to pretend it's night time during the day just to please us jaded humans. But everything was super pretty in the various colored infrared lighting and desert-Gothic mini landscapes.