artcodex reblog

[Image: Front Studio. “Sunflowers aid in the bio-cleansing of land in preparation for crop farming”].

Last month, Front Studio architects gave a talk at the University of Pennsylvania Department of City & Regional Planning. There they outlined “Farmadelphia,” their now widely known proposal for the transformation of Philadelphia, in which that city’s vacant and abandoned lots are turned into a thriving agricultural zone – complete with crops grown for local consumption and soil remediation, and with an eye toward future tourism, including surreal petting zoos, hay rides, and even corn mazes.

[Image: Front Studio].

Philadelphia would become “an ‘edible landscape’,” we read, “with vast crop fields, and free roaming farm animals.”

[Images: Front Studio. “Free roaming city cows graze on locally owned pasture” (top); chickens hang out amidst lettuce (bottom)].

The project would also address – or is intended to address – “the rehabilitation of the existing city fabric by proposing ideas for vacant buildings that would allow the present-day character to remain while creating new uses.”

[Images: Front Studio].

From the project description:

For example, an abandoned building could have its walls and ground lined with a non-permeable membrane to prevent soil contamination for new plantings. Then layers of a weed barrier, soil bed, loam and mulch are added on top. The nurseries would provide: year-round job opportunities, high profit yields from selling flowers and the adaptive reuse of abandoned buildings.

Whole sections of the city would thus be deliberately cultivated. Or, from a slightly different perspective, it’s the controlled re-wilding of the city.

[Image: Front Studio. Philadelphia’s “urban voids interwoven with agricultural patchwork”].

This urban re-wilding would also include “the rehabilitation of abandoned buildings into stables to house animals.”

[Images: Front Studio].

“Looking into Philadelphia’s past,” Front Studio writes, one finds “a green legacy dating back to William Penn’s pastoral vision of a ‘green countrie towne’.”
But what about Philadelphia’s green future – not its past or some distant legacy it’s passively inherited?
How might Philadelphia actively re-green itself for the future?
Some appropriate crops for the proposed agricultural stabilization of the city might include the following, the architects suggest:

—start with low maintenance, easy to grow, and profiting crops; consider perennial crops such as asparagus, shallots, garlic and herb varieties
—other crops include shade tolerant, easy to grow kale, sweet potatoes, lettuce
—other crops that do well in Philadelphia climate: collard greens, broccoli, mustard greens, corn, raspberry bushes

Those plants, in particular, would form a biosystem that could help push the city onto a seven year agricultural plan – after which this newly implanted ecosystem would level off, forming something like a cultivated permaculture.

[Images: Front Studio’s seven year plan for agricultural stabilization].

More about the project can be found on Front Studio’s own website (under “Work” and then “Competition”).
See also Roof-farming southeast London, earlier on BLDGBLOG, as well as Going Agro.

(And don’t miss Sarah Rich’s write-up of the project, nearly 2 years ago, over on Inhabitat).

Originally by Geoff Manaugh from BLDGBLOG

Detail of the poster “Passerelles” by Think Experimental.

Originally by mail from VVORK on December 9, 2007, 2:23am

“The Tree”, a 10-meter high, real magnolia tree planted in the center of Chile’s National Stadium. By Sebastian Errazuriz.

Originally by mail from VVORK on December 6, 2007, 7:03pm

DELAWARE, “Sneakers in the Snow”, prepared digital print

Installation shots, screen shots, and a GIF from the “Bitmap: As Good As New” show at vertexList gallery are here. Also in PDF form (33 MB). “The alternative Biennial for the abject geek set.” –some dude

From the vertexList blog.

Originally by tom moody from tom moody on December 3, 2007, 7:44am

Originally by joy garnett from NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Originally by joy garnett from NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Mathematicians who design knitwear based on math! Link

Originally by cat from microRevolt reBlog on December 3, 2007, 5:04am

Bambino and I were interviewed recently by a charming and very smart young writing duo who are working on a how-to book for artists that’s being published by a major publishing house soon-ish. We’ll give you plenty of info when it’s closer to the time that you can get a copy for yourself. It does sound as if it will be very helpful.

One of the questions that came up during the interview, though, dealt with representation contracts, and I made some statements about them that I only later realized were perhaps only my opinion and not representative of how artists and other galleries feel. So I thought I’d solicit other folks’ feelings about the use of such documents.

We don’t use representation contracts in our gallery. We have an open and ongoing discussion about what representation means, and we do use consignment forms in most circumstances, but the notion that an artist is legally bound to remain with the gallery if that’s not their desire strikes me as counterproductive to what we’re trying to do.

Mind you, I’ve talked with lawyers and even attended panel discussions where all kinds of horror stories were told warning of the dire consequences of not having contracts, but I’ve concluded that most of those situations were only horror stories because of the amount of money involved, and, well, our gallery is still young enough that we’re not seeing the sorts of prices that necessitate such contracts yet (I can hear the lawyers gasping from here).

The long and short of my own aversion to such contracts has been the sense that they’re kind of like pre-nuptial agreements. Good perhaps if you’re talking small private fortunes, but perhaps a pointless symbol of mistrust if you’re not. Also, knowing that no amount of discussing what representation means before one signs a contract can anticipate all the possible reasons one might want a change down the road, and, well, I have enough aggravation in running a small business without adding resentment like that to the mix.

Still, I realized that even though I feel this strongly about representation contracts and have discussed them here before, I’ve never actually sat down to draft one. What should/do they contain? I found a list of what they might contain on the New York Foundation for the Arts website. They recommend:

Formal contracts should be signed prior to the start of your representation. Here are all of the possible points that need to be covered. Not all areas may be relevant to your situation. Customize a contract that suits your individual needs.

• Parties Involved in the Contract – (the gallery and you).
• Duration of the Contract – (fixed term, contingent on sales, options to extend the term of duration).
• Scope of the Contract – (media covered, past and future work, gallery’s right to visit the studio, commissions, exclusivity, territory, studio sales, exchanges, charitable gifts).
• Shipping – (who pays to/from the gallery, carriers, crating).
• Storage – (location, access by artist).
• Insurance – (what is protected, in-transit, on-site).
• Framing – (who pays for framing).
• Photographs – (who pays, amount required [color and b+w], ownership of negatives and transparencies, controls of films).
• Artistic Control – (permission for book/magazine reproduction, inclusion in gallery group exhibits, inclusion in other exhibits, artist’s veto power over purchasers).
• Gallery Exhibitions – (dates, work to be shown, control over installation, advertising, catalog, opening, announcements/mailings).
• Reproduction Rights – (control prior to sale of work, retention on transfer or sale of work, copyrights).
• Damage or Deterioration – (choice of restorer, expense/compensation to artist, treatment for partial/total loss).
• Protection on the Market – (right of gallery to sell at auctions, protection of works sold at auction).
• Selling Prices – (should address who bought your work, the selling price, initial scale, periodic review, permission discounts, negotiation of commissioned works, right to rent vs. sell).
• Billing and Terms of Sale – (extended payment, credit risk, allocation of monies as received, division of interest changes, qualified installment sale for tax purposes, exchanges/trading up, returns).
• Compensation of the Gallery – (right to purchase for its own account).
• Income from other Sales – (rentals, lectures, prizes/awards, reproduction rights).
• Accounting/Payment – (how often, right to inspect financial records, currency to be used).
• Advances/Guarantees – (time of payment, amounts and intervals, applications to sales).
• Miscellaneous – (confidentiality of artist’s personal mailing list, resale agreements with purchasers, rights of gallery to use artist’s name and image for promotional purposes).
• General Provisions – (representations and warranties, applicable laws, arbitration).

Although I fully agree with all but one of those areas being discussed in full before the gallery and artist agree to representation, I have never had a situation where I thought a contract would have led to a better outcome for either the gallery or the artist when an issue came up. I can see the day when that might change though. The item on the list that makes me uncomfortable is the second one: Duration of the Contract.

OK, so that’s my take on them. What’s yours? Do you want a written contract with your artists/gallery? Do you have any anecdotes that would change my mind about them? What does it say to artists if a gallery insists on a 5-year contract, for example. Is that attractive (because it demonstrates their commitment to your career) or off-putting (because it suggests you might be locked into a bad situation)?

Originally by Edward_ from edward_ winkleman on November 13, 2007, 4:46am

Art bubbles are great.

Art bubbles suck money into the art world.

Who gets hurt in an art bubble? Greedy artists; stupid collectors.

Who else? Nobody with their wits about them gets hurt in an art bubble.

—Dave Hickey, “Schoolyard art: playing fair without the referee,” a keynote speech delivered at the Frieze art fair this year (as edited on The Art Newspaper).

Being egocentric, I would have answered the question “Who gets hurt in an art bubble?” with “Young galleries; careless collectors.” Maybe that’s because I don’t work with any greedy artists (we’re very careful about prices in our space, for this very reason: to ensure they don’t get hurt).

Friends of mine who attended Hickey’s lecture at Frieze came back raving about it. I only got snippets from their reports (the snarkier snippets), and immediately my guard went up. How dare this heretic? Condemning the art market at one of its most holy sanctuaries? No, no, no, my friends reported. He was funny!

And reading the lecture online, I see he was that and much more. Hickey weaves around and then dashes straight through the issues of the contemporary art market in a fashion as entertaining as it is insightful. And he spares no one in this critique of how ridiculous the system has become, not even himself:

The art market in the 20th century is first of all a finite market which means there are always more works of art than there are people to buy them.

What does that mean? It means, as Leo says, that somebody has to buy two.

Somebody has to buy four or five.

If the art does not change, nobody’s going to buy two.

To maintain itself in public vogue, art needs perpetual reinvestment, an artist needs one show after another show, one essay after another essay—all these are occasions for stylistic development.

If I happen to have written about your frog paintings last year and if you put up another show of frog paintings, I’m not coming by.

But, if Barbara [Gladstone] calls me and says: “You haven’t seen the salamander paintings, Dave,” then I’m going to rush right over.

Where he gets really interesting, however, is in his diagnosis of why we’re stuck here, in this suspended stage of no stylistic development:

In 1968 Bruce Nauman invented the plywood box.

Do you remember the plywood box? I’ve been in every plywood box in the universe.

You could not make the plywood box go away.

I’ve been in plywood boxes with coal on the floor, with cotton on the floor, I’ve been in plywood boxes you climbed into with a ladder, I’ve been in plywood boxes in which there was nothing there except for, written on the wall, the tiny word “boogie”.

All of this created a steady-state market place in which there was nothing to drive style change.

The logic of an institutional market is: “We don’t care.

We’re just filling up this hole in our schedule.” It’s really more important [to institutions] if the person building the plywood box is a Zuni [Native American] warrior than if we’ve ever seen the plywood box before.

And the presumption is: We don’t have style development anymore because history is over.

I date the end of history to the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in 1968.

When they shot JFK everybody said “Oh God, it’s so terrible it’s the end of the world.” When they shot Bobby, everybody said: “Oh no, not again.” And the end of history is pretty much marked by: “Oh no, not again.” The problem is that even though history may be over—time keeps on going.

Not having history doesn’t disable ennui.

The art world works on ennui, that’s the only thing that makes it go.

I am bored with giant cibachrome photographs of three Germans standing behind a mailbox.

It doesn’t mean it’s bad, it just means I’m fucking bored with it.

Entertaining as it is, Hickey’s final conclusion is merely a more sophisticated routine from a seasoned captain of the art market deathwatch cheerleaders:

One day one dealer may say to himself: “I’m going to gather power the way Leo did, I’m just going to show stuff I really believe in.” That’s going to really change things.

And the art world as we currently know it will disappear.

As exciting as this moment is now, imagine how exciting the collapse is going to be.

It’s really something to look forward to.

Boom! Thousands of Icari plummeting into the surf.

Eventually all the windows where you sell your soul are going to be closed.

This ending is disappointing. As it is with all deathwatch cheerleaders, Hickey seems to be longing for the next new thing, not because he can even assume it will be better than what we have now, but merely because it will be new, something to look forward to, and he won’t be so fucking bored by it. That’s not a good enough reason for me. First and foremost, whether Hickey agrees or not, I know dealers who truly believe they are only showing stuff they truly believe in. So if that’s all it took, Hickey would have his change now. What I think Dave is really arguing for here is for someone else to end his ennui. The old Pet Shop Boys lyrics spring to mind: “We were never feeling bored, cause we were never being boring.”

Originally by Edward_ from edward_ winkleman on November 1, 2007, 5:14am