Erik Gongrich lecture Sunday November 2

If you happen to be in Berlin this weekend, starting at noon on Sunday there will be a 25min. lecture every hour until 11:00p.m. as part of the exhibition Megastructure Reloaded
Molkenmarkt 2 / Berlin - Mitte
Sunday the 2.nov. is also the last day of the exhibition Megastructure Reloaded.

12 hours "megaminis" are lectures about...
...found architecture and monuments
...sculptures that are transformed into living houses
...the beginning of the misunderstanding
...billboard-house-clusters with private messages
...close encounters and the real
...mobile monuments and fountains
...influencing reality by using the image of Brasilia
...placing an island in the middle of São Paulo
...duty free shops displays and public space in exhibitions
...interventions in public space
...projections offering escape
...searching the mega in big houses and the Tirana-Durres-strip

New Orleans Report

Sent from CalArts Alum Sean Boyle:

I've been working as an assistant on this project of Mark Bradford's for about 18 months. The ark sits in the Lower Ninth Ward at Caffin Ave and N. Miro on what used to be the Chalumette Funeral Home.
The project title, Mithra, is a mythical allusion to a bull that was sacrificed and from the blood of its loins sprang the flora and fauna of the earth.
I think that it's fitting that the community has embraced it as a symbol of hope while the media, art world, and 'up-towners' are keenly aware of its criticism of the failed power systems that New Orleans represents, particularly at this juncture in American history.

Breton at In & Out

Walking out of an In & Out burger restaurant in Los Angeles recently, we happened upon this scene: a guy in a truck placing his order. The total ridiculousness of the scene prompted us to pause, take the photo, and relish the juxtaposition of the elements. It was a kind of inspirational moment, a Surrealist intersection of forces relocated from the Parisian streets of Breton to the sunny drive-thru culture of contemporary Los Angeles. This combination of ingredients might come to express something deeply idiosyncratic to the LA environment, that of bringing together what usually does not meet, and in doing so allowing certain fantasies to surface - LA might be a site for the potential exaggeration of form, nurturing fantasy and granting space for their manifestation (Hollywood becomes the quintessential example: it is the very sign for such potential and promise). Here at In & Out it might be read in the very site itself, tucked alongside the LA airport with its own park across the street used for viewing incoming aircraft, and further, to the truck itself, as the expression of certain vehicular imagination, and to the final meeting, of the In & Out attendant dressed in a costume that aims to recall some notion of early fast food culture, where burgers and fries meets rock n roll and fast cars of the 1950s. With the sun covering the scene in its glow, we might begin to appreciate LA as a landscape of disproportionate scale, which in itself inaugurates a formal realignment of the senses.

Stars in New Plymouth

Coming to New Plymouth in New Zealand one rainy and grey day, for an event at the Govett-Brewster gallery, I was pleased to come upon this public sculpture nestled amongst the coastline. By the New Zealand artist Len Lye, the sculpture, known as Wind Wand, perches on the coast and bends inland, oscillating and riding the winds as they blow in from the ocean. Measuring 45 meters high the sculpture uses related ship-mast engineering technology to express its arc, and its flexibility, to allow the sculpture a soft form of kinetic actions. It was not until later in the evening, after the event and hanging outside the gallery waiting to venture forward into the night, that I further appreciated the work - as its transparent bulb at the top glowed a brilliant red, adding a crimson star to the darkness.