Eva Hagberg

Art Goes Apocalyptic (Wallpaper*)

Published in Wallpaper* November 2008

New Yorkers love to practice the destruction of their city. The Will Smith-fights-vampires movie I Am Legend showed, again and again, a desolate Times Square, lions ripping up deer flesh while grasses whispered in a space currently alive with five-abreast tourists gawking at Sex & the City ads. J J Abrams’ Cloverfield imagined a monster ripping through the city with the force of a thousand furies. And the War of the Worlds had Tom Cruise just across the river, watching cracks in the streets open up for attacking aliens. It’s a post-9/11 condition, this desire to rehearse, prepare for and control our destruction before it happens. At the same time, we’ve become obsessed with the Greenmarket, with eating locally, seasonally, with sustainable futures, with trying to be as close to a Michael Pollan version – “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” -- of an omnivore as we can. It seems like two completely separate channels, but three art events this summer only showed that our love for nature and our obsession with the apocalypse are, in fact, closely entwined.

After Nature is a brilliant show put on by the New Museum, suddenly a big hitter since the opening of their SANAA-designed building last December. Organized by Massimiliano Gioni and curatorial assistant Jarrett Gregory, After Nature uses a Werner Herzog film and a W.G. Sebald essay as starting-off points for a series of pieces that explore how the world might be, once nature is something we remember rather than look forward to. The works span aesthetics and media, sharing only polemic drive. A tree sawed apart and put back together with massive brackets and screws by the artist Zoe Leonard makes you realize the inanity of the idea that nature needs our help to survive, while a piece by Tino Sehgal in which a series of dancers writhe on the floor -- changing every two hours with a few minutes of synced-up overlap – is, through its face-to-face (or body-to-body) communication, about the translatability of oral history. It implies that, one day not so far away, person-to-person contact might be the only technology we’ve got.

Luck of the Draw (Wallpaper*)

Published in Wallpaper* November 2008

Alan Aldridge is so LA. It’s taken a while for him to become so LA – answering the door to his La Brea Park apartment in bare feet, hair dyed black and slicked back, stereo playing music that would fit just as well in a raucous yoga class as in this spare art-decorated space – but he made it. It’s taken a few career shifts, a few absurd stories, and one self-described Machiavellian move, but Aldridge is settled in this fair city of angels. And, after years as a Hollywood screenwriter, Aldridge is back to his art.

Aldridge designed this month’s magazine cover and, when we speak a bright August afternoon, is about to start designing the word “Wallpaper.” He doesn’t really have a plan for how it’ll go – “when it’s right it just hits” – and he’s not really worried about having to get ready for a big retrospective of his work slated to open this October at the Design Museum London –“it’s not a problem.” Mostly, right now, he wants to tell the story of how he got here.

John Powers: Captain America

John Powers: Captain America

Maiden Lane Exhibition Space, 125 Maiden Lane, New York

Up through January 30, 2009

Home McMakin (Wallpaper*)

Published Wallpaper*, August 2008 (full version)

It’s Thursday in Seattle and it’s gray. It’s been gray since Tuesday night, and it will be gray again on Friday. This particular Thursday morning, it’s gray outside but busy inside at William and Ruth True’s house. It’s a typical morning: Ruth steaming milk for her and Bill’s nine-year-old daughter Sophie, Bill checking out an emerging artist’s website, Sophie avoiding her homework. And there are the dogs, Butter and Honey. Butter’s bigger than Honey, a Greater Swiss Mountain Dog where she’s a (of course) honey-colored Labradoodle. The dogs are both excited, jumping around, up and down and over, and Honey jumps up on the sofa and knocks into Sophie, holding the cup of warm steamed milk fresh from Ruth’s gleaming espresso maker, and the milk spills.

It spills onto art.

There’s a lot of art in the True house. There’s a sculpture of a guy crouching down under the stairs, and two photographs by Malerie Marder over the other stairs. There’s a Kiki Smith piece on the side table in the formal living room, and there’s a Brian Jungen on top of the cabinets in the informal kitchen. Even downstairs, in a desolate hallway that leads to the guest bedroom (itself a commissioned work of art), there’s a Claude Zervas and then, even right next to the laundry room, there’s another piece, The Quiet Ticking of Dreams, by New York-based sound artist Ben Rubin of the beloved Listening Post –“We tried to buy it but there was just no way,” Bill True says – project that sat in the basement of the old pre-Piano New York Times building.

Continue reading "Home McMakin (Wallpaper*)" »

In 1987 philanthropists Mike and Penny Winton decided that they needed a guesthouse to complement their Philip Johnson-designed home in Orono, Minnesota. In 2007 owner-developer Kirt Woodhouse decided that the University of St. Thomas needed that same guesthouse for its Daniel C. Gainey Conference Center campus in Owatonna, Minnesota. In the 20 years since the Wintons hired an up-and-coming Santa Monica-based architect sho seemed to be onto something with his use of vernacular materials and mishmash approach to buildings, the name Frank Gehry has gone beyond household, and the guesthouse has become more than just a place to sleep.

The Winton Guest House comprises a 2,300-square-foot collection of discrete shapes that form one building (one can see in its separate cohesion a precursor for Mississippi’s Ohr-O’Keefe Museum). It is clad in brick, plywood, and black and galvanized sheet metal—the same types of materials Gehry used on his own Santa Monica home, the design that launched the Frank O. Gehry Associates frenzy.

EXTENDED: John Powers: Empire, Virgil de Voldere, 526 West 26th St, Rm 416, New York, February 21-April 25

Published June 1, 2007 (link)

For a site-specific project on a private California art ranch, minimalist sculptor Richard Serra made a series of hyperdense Cor-Ten steel blocks. They are so heavy that they have their own gravity, or at least, when you walk past them, that’s how you feel: as though you might very well fall over, and into them.

Mobile Home? (Metropolis)

In 1987 philanthropists Mike and Penny Winton decided that they needed a guesthouse to complement their Philip Johnson-designed home in Orono, Minnesota. In 2007 owner-developer Kirt Woodhouse decided that the University of St. Thomas needed that same guesthouse for its Daniel C. Gainey Conference Center campus in Owatonna, Minnesota. In the 20 years since the Wintons hired an up-and-coming Santa Monica-based architect sho seemed to be onto something with his use of vernacular materials and mishmash approach to buildings, the name Frank Gehry has gone beyond household, and the guesthouse has become more than just a place to sleep.

The Winton Guest House comprises a 2,300-square-foot collection of discrete shapes that form one building (one can see in its separate cohesion a precursor for Mississippi’s Ohr-O’Keefe Museum). It is clad in brick, plywood, and black and galvanized sheet metal—the same types of materials Gehry used on his own Santa Monica home, the design that launched the Frank O. Gehry Associates frenzy.

John Powers at Virgil de Voldere

EXTENDED: John Powers: Empire, Virgil de Voldere, 526 West 26th St, Rm 416, New York, February 21-April 25

Richard Serra at MoMA (wallpaper.com)

Published June 1, 2007 (link)

For a site-specific project on a private California art ranch, minimalist sculptor Richard Serra made a series of hyperdense Cor-Ten steel blocks. They are so heavy that they have their own gravity, or at least, when you walk past them, that’s how you feel: as though you might very well fall over, and into them.