As part of Clerkenwell Design Week clutch and tote designer Lulu Guinness (first photo) created this enormous pin-screen similar to the popular 80s toy. As an interactive art piece participants are invited to step up to the device and press their bodies into it, creating all manner of hilarious, touching, and inevitably obscene body portraits. See dozens more images on their Facebook page. (via notcot)
(click images for detail)
Last November German conceptual artist Hans-Peter Feldmann was named the winner of the eighth Biennal Hugo Boss Prize, a bi-annual award bestowed by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for significant achievement in contemporary art, with an attached honorarium of $100,000. In a unique gesture to the museum Feldmann proposed the idea of creating an installation that would involve tacking 100,000 $1 bills to the walls of a large gallery off the Frank Lloyd Wright ramp. Via the NY Times:
“I’m 70 years old, and I began making art in the ’50s,” Mr. Feldmann said in a telephone interview from his studio in Düsseldorf. “At that time there was no money in the art world. Money and art didn’t exist. So for me $100,000 is very special. It’s incredible really. And I would like to show the quantity of it.”
It took museum art handlers roughly 13 days to pin the out-of-circulation bills to the wall and to condense the surface area required by so much currency the dollars were slightly overlapped. The exhibition will be up May 20–November 2, 2011. The photographs above by David Heald were provided courtesy the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.
Canadian artist and designer Tobias Wong died last year at the young age of 35, or more specifically, 13,138 days. In tribute, his friend Frederick McSwain created this immense portrait of Wong entitled Die using 13,138 dice as part of the BrokenOff BrokenOff exhibition at Gallery R’Pure in NYC in memoriam to the artist during NY Design Week. McSwain via Core77:
The idea of a die itself was appropriate—the randomness of life. It felt like [a medium] he would use. Because [Tobias] was a very street-level force, I thought it was appropriate [to install] the portrait on the floor. Its not something I wanted to suspend on the wall; I wanted it to be right there on the floor where you almost interact with it.
The idea of every decision you make and everything you’ve done in your life, defines who you are. All of those days symbolically makes up the image of Tobi.
The dice were first meticulously organized into individual sheets of 361 pieces and then laid to rest free on the floor without adhesive. The time lapse above shows the process in detail. A big thanks to Frederick for providing the photos of Miller Taylor for this post. (via core77)
Cradle is a sculpture installed on the exterior wall of a parking lot in Santa Monica, California by Ball-Nogues Studio, originally designed by Frank Gehry.
An aggregation of mirror polished stainless steel spheres, the sculpture functions structurally like an enormous Newton’s Cradle – the ubiquitous toy found on the desktops of corporate executives in Hollywood films. Each ball is suspended by a cable from a point on the wall and locked in position by a combination of gravity and neighboring balls. The whole array reflects distorted images of passersby.
I’d pay a nickel to watch this piece from afar during an earthquake. (via journal du design, contemporist)
A few days ago I stumbled onto a 2007 article over on Creative Review about a special exhibit called Global Cities held at Tate. As part of the exhibition Angus Hyland and William Russell from Pentagram designed these brilliant wooden population density mounds that represent Mumbai, London, Mexico City, and Cairo. Via Creative Review:
“The brief was to find a way of representing the mass of statistical information in the Turbine Hall that would engage and invite people to explore it,” says Pentagram’s William Russell, who designed the exhibition with Angus Hyland. “We were trying to approach an audience that’s not necessarily an architectural one. I don’t think it dumbs down the information but makes it understandable and clear.”
Incredibly clear. Not only are they engaging as sculptural pieces but also act as physical infographics, something I’m personally a huge fan of. A huge thanks to Ed Reeve and this Flickr account for providing imagery for the post.
The latest thread installation from artist Gabriel Dawe (previously) is on display through the end of this weekend at the Pump Project Art Complex as part of the Texas Biennial in Austin.
Argentinian conceptual artist Marta Minujin has constructed this massive tower of books at Plaza San Martin in Buenos Aires in reference to UNESCO’s recent nomination of the city as the World Book Capital in 2011. The myriad books were donated by libraries, readers, and over 50 embassies around the world and the structure can be climbed through May 28th after which it will be dismantled. Photos linked to their sources. (via flavorwire)
Behold the latest installation by French artist Cyprien Gaillard who constructed this 72,000 bottle pyramid of beer in cardboard boxes (a beeramid, if you will) at KW Berlin. After signing a waiver participants are free to climb, open, and consume as many bottles of “Efes” beer as they desire, making this, in my eyes, the pinnacle of modern art as we know it. Though in all seriousness the pyramid is meant to act as a monument and its consumption is intended to illustrate the hyper-destruction of architectural relics that are often relocated to Berlin:
By using the monument – by climbing the sculpture and drinking the beer – its destruction is already initiated. The barbaric removal of single architectural elements that have been transported from their original location to Berlin, embodies both the concept of displacement and a tourist colonialism.
Gaillard’s pyramid will be gradually consumed through May 22. Art Observed notes:
The pyramid is now dilapidated, though one can still make out its general form. The corridor leading to the piece is lined with empty beer bottles, while the floor surrounding the former monument is covered with broken glass and half-smashed beer bottles.
(via we find wildness, art observed)
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