“Living Room Corner Arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine, Sr.,” a 1984 photograph by Louise Lawler. (Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art)

This holiday season, deck the halls with delightful juxtapositions à la Louise Lawler. The artist and photographer was granted full access to the home of 20th-century art collectors Burton and Emily Hall Tremaine in 1984, just a few years before much of their collection was dispersed at Christie’s. Armed with only a 35mm camera and a sharp eye, Lawler captured pairings such as a Jackson Pollock canvas and an elaborately decorated soup tureen, and this living room scene, in which a Roy Lichtenstein sculpture-turned-lamp appears to grab the attention of Stevie Wonder, all under the watchful eye of a Robert Delaunay disque painting. The festive trio goes on view tomorrow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as part of an exhibition of photographs from its permanent collection.

We bring glad tidings of Breton-striped joy, fashion fans: the Jean Paul Gaultier exhibition is coming to the Brooklyn Museum next fall. Organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (where it debuted in June 2011), “The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk” spans the designer’s 37-year career, featuring examples of couture and ready-to-wear as well as film, dance, and concert costumes (including Madonna‘s Blonde Ambition tour ensembles) and photographs by the likes of Richard Avedon, Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, and Mario Testino. The Brooklyn presentation will also include new material not shown in previous venues, including looks from recent runway shows.

The oldest living enfant terrible‘s creations come to life on creepy unique mannequins. Topped with wigs and headdresses by Odile Gilbert, their faces are animated with audiovisual projections, an innovation developed by Denis Marleau and Stéphanie Jasmin of Montreal-based UBU Compagnie de création. A dozen celebrities, including Gaultier himself, have lent their faces and often their voices to the project. In addition, many of the mannequins revolve to display all angles of each ensemble, while some circulate on a moving catwalk. The Gaultier exhibition, on view through January 6 at The Fundación Mapfre – Instituto de Cultura in Madrid, opens in Brooklyn on October 25, 2013 after stops in Rotterdam and Stockholm.

A car from Normal Bel Geddes’ “Futurama” exhibit at the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair and the designer exiting a Chrysler Airflow car.

The interdiscliplinary types of today have nothing on Norman Bel Geddes (1893–1958), who designed everything from stage sets and costumes to buildings and streamlined “motor cars” that resembled elongated teardrops with wheels (tail fins optional). The life and career of the self-taught polymath, who straddled the line between visionary and pragmatist, is the subject of Norman Bel Geddes Designs America, published by Abrams in conjunction with a major exhibition now on view at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. It will travel to the Museum of the City of New York early next year. We asked design historian Russell Flinchum, author of Henry Dreyfuss, Industrial Designer: The Man in the Brown Suit, to give us his take on the new Bel Geddes bible in advance of the show’s arrival in Gotham.

New Yorkers have an exceptional chance to immerse themselves in modernity’s past at the Museum of the City of New York, which last week opened “Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s,” an exhibition that originated at the National Building Museum in 2011. Following relatively hot on its heels will be “Norman Bel Geddes Designs America,” from which most of the latter show’s contents have been gleaned. Moving from the earlier exhibition’s overview to the first in-depth look at Geddes should prove instructive, to put it mildly. No single exhibit from the fairs of the ‘30s is better known or more celebrated than Geddes’s “Futurama,” properly the “Highways and Horizons” exhibit for General Motors at the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair. We will finally have a chance to understand exactly what Geddes achieved, and why he merits such curatorial scrutiny.

Donald Albrecht, curator of architecture and design at the Museum of the City of New York, has edited an impressive catalogue that covers Geddes’s output in 17 chapters that carry us from theatrical design through furniture, housing, and graphic design and everywhere in between (perhaps most notably in his three-dimensional designs for Life magazine illustrating the battlefronts of World War II, which merited an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art). The authors of these individual chapters range from UT professor Jeffrey Meikle, whose Twentieth Century Limited of 1977 did more than any single book to focus academic interest on American industrial design of the 1930s, to some of his former students and even current doctoral candidates at Austin.
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“Tell me about yourself, and you might mention where you’re from, the music you prefer, perhaps a favorite writer or filmmaker or artist, possibly even the sports teams you root for. But I doubt you’ll mention brands or products. That would seem shallow, right? There’s just something illegitimate about openly admitting that brands and products can function as cultural material, relevant to identity and expression. It’s as if we would prefer this weren’t true.

The underlying discomfort is something I’ve noted over many years spent writing about brands and products. One reader comment clarifies the dilemma. In a column about products and companies that exist only in the fictional worlds of books and movies, I categorized such things as ‘imaginary brands.’ Harrumph to that, this reader replied: All brands are imaginary.

I saw his point, but he’d missed mine. The ambiguity in the relationship between our selves and the brand-soaked world we navigate is exactly what’s worth taking seriously, not waving away. When such consideration is filtered through an open and unpredictable mind, anything seems possible. Willfully imaginary brands and products can be considered as a medium, expressive of joy, fear, humor, unease, ambivalence–very real stuff, in other words.”

-Rob Walker on “As Real As It Gets,” the medium-is-the-marketplace exhibition of fictional products, imaginary brands, hypothetical advertising, and speculative objects that he organized. The ersatz emporium is open through December 22 at apexart in NYC.

“Lost Time” by Glithero for Perrier-Jouet at Design Miami 2012. (Photo: Petr Krejci)

Chairs, glorious chairs, are everywhere at Design Miami, but no one sits for long. Collectors, dealers, journalists, and the odd celebrity (who knew Will Ferrell was a design buff?) stream through the fair at different speeds and with varying agendas: see Maarten de Ceulaer’s latest “mutations,” close the sale on the Nakashima bench, locate a friend and a chocolate dulce de leche pie ($7 at the catering stand), nab a seat for Stefano Tonchi’s on-stage chat with Diane von Furstenberg, load up on free magazines. A welcome pause from this year’s frenzy was offered by Glithero, the design duo of Tim Simpson and Sarah van Gameren.

The London-based studio was commissioned by Perrier-Jouët to create an installation that honored the champagne house’s Art Nouveau heritage (that famous flowered bottle was the result of a 1902 collaboration with artist Emile Gallé). “We sought to work with a designer that has the Art Nouveau dimension in his or her DNA,” Axelle de Buffevent, brand style director for Martell Mumm-Perrier-Jouët, told us in Miami. “With Glithero, you immediately see that their work is very inspired by nature, by the processes of nature.”

Long fascinated by processes ranging from artisanal craftsmanship to industrial production methods, Simpson and van Gameren responded to Perrier-Jouët’s commission by creating “Lost Time” (pictured), a darkened chamber strung with skeins of shot beads that dripped from the ceiling like glamorous ghosts of stalactites—or champagne flutes. The swooping volumes, inspired in part by Gaudí’s Sagrada Família, were reflected in a shallow pool of water, an infusion of moisture that heightened the cave-like atmosphere (and winked at the humidity that awaited on the other side of the air-conditioned tent).
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Bob Dylan’s “Playboy Magazine: Sharon Stone” and “Baby Talk Magazine: Strengthen Your Baby” (both 2011–12), on view in an exhibition of new work by Bob Dylan at Gagosian Gallery.

“I tried studying these canvases for secret messages. They couldn’t just be half-hearted parodies of magazine covers. No way. I scanned dates and images and the names and residences of the addressees (subscriber mailing labels are printed in the corners of most of the pieces). I searched for a ‘Mr. Orville‘ residing at 573 Tuxedo Terrace and found no listing. I tried to convince myself that ‘Richard Staehung‘ was a coded identity and not just an immature dick joke. All I could come up with was a conspiracy theory cooked up by a friend, that both of Mr. Dylan’s shows at Gagosian are actually the work of Richard Prince using ‘Bob Dylan‘ as a pseudonym, making the ultimate statement on art and artifice, and proving once and for all that Bob Dylan is whoever you want him to be.”

-The New York Observer‘s Michael H. Miller reviewing “Revisionist Art: Thirty Works by Bob Dylan,” on view through January 12 at Gagosian’s uptown NYC gallery.

(Photo: Colin M. Day)

“It’s a term I hear often… It scares the living daylights out of me. Street artists need to get back to actually doing things on the streets, instead of in the galleries where they all seem to be ending up. I hope this term street artist falls from the face of the earth, in my honest opinion. They are taking up precious space outdoors, which is normally reserved for tagging and thoughtless vandalism.”

-San Francisco–based artist Barry McGee in conversation with Chris Johanson for Paper. A McGee retrospective is on view at the Berkeley Art Museum through Sunday.
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Artists and gallerists, here’s the trio you want to make sure is at the top of your holiday card mailing list: (pictured, from left) Stuart Comer, Anthony Elms, and Michelle Grabner, the freshly crowned curators of the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Opening in early March of next year, it will be the seventy-seventh in the Whitney Museum’s ongoing series of Annual and Biennial exhibitions and the last to fill its Marcel Breuer building. The Metropolitan Museum of Art will take over the building in 2015 when the Whitney moves into its new downtown digs designed by Renzo Piano.

The Whitney is looking to leave its Brutalist beacon on a high note, with a new curatorial structure that places the Biennial in the hands of three curators from outside the museum. “By flinging open the museum’s doors metaphorically, we hope to create a platform in which voices from outside the Whitney can enliven the conversation around contemporary art in the United States,” said Donna De Salvo, the Whitney’s chief curator and deputy director for programs, in a statement issued by the museum late yesterday. “Hailing from Chicago, Philadelphia, and London, each curator will bring a personal approach to the process, creating an exciting mix of emerging and established artists that is the Biennial’s hallmark.”
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Detail from “San Francisco Project: Inhabiting the Quake, Quake City,” a 1995 drawing by Lebbeus Woods. (Courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will commemorate the career of architectural visionary Lebbeus Woods, who died last month at the age of 72, with an exhibition of his drawings and models. Scheduled to open February 16, “Lebbeus Woods, Architect,” will take a thematic approach to represent Woods’ wide-reaching interests in the political, ethical, social, and spatial implications of built forms. Among the 75 works on view will be those addressing cities damaged by nature (we’re looking at you, Sandy), such as his San Francisco earthquake drawings. “As the museum embarks on its own physical transformation, the exhibition marks an opportunity to consider the meaning and implication of such a shift,” said SFMOMA curator Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, alluding to the $555 million Snøhetta-designed expansion that will get underway in the summer of 2013. “There could not be a more fitting body of work to present at this moment.”
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Ori Gersht, “Pomegranate” (2006). Courtesy Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art.

“‘Pomegranate,’ started with my imagining a bullet going through the fruit and causing it to bleed. My initial associations were with pomegranates in old masters painting and their Judeo-Christian symbolism. A [Juan] Sánchez Cotán painting and [Harold] Edgerton photograph then emerged from my unconscious. The final film is a fusion of these three elements.

For the production, I worked with a film-commissioning group in London called Film and Video Umbrella. With their production team, I constructed a wooden window in the studio and hung the fruit and vegetables from the top frame. When we lit the vegetables, very simply, and looked at them through the camera lens, the transformation was instant: they looked very painterly. For the shooting, we consulted with a special-effects expert, who constructed a special gun and devised a mechanism that allowed us to control the speed of the pellets.

After the filming, I realized that the fusion between the Cotán painting and the Edgerton photograph was also the fusion between opposite ends of a spectrum. Cotán was attempting to achieve compositional equilibrium through painstaking mathematical calculations, while Edgarton, who was trying to freeze time, captured a perfectly balanced composition from an event that happened in a flash, conceivable only through the mediation of the camera.”

-Photographer and artist Ori Gersht in an interview with Ronni Baer that appears in the catalogue for “History Repeating,” the first full survey of Gersht’s work. The exhibition is on view through January 6 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.