exhibitions

Before we depart UnBeige HQ for a long weekend of fireworks, nationalistic cupcakes, and multiple viewings of Kieślowski's three colors trilogy, we wanted to leave you with something nice to look at: Fred Tomaselli's "Sept. 15, 2005" (2009), a gouache on printed watercolor paper. Think NYT on LSD. In her excellent feature on Tomaselli in the July issue of W, Julie Belcove describes the artist's recent "hallucinatory treatments of front pages from The New York Times" as "bold juxtapositions of cold reality and formal abstraction." For Tomaselli, they're a way of "talking back at the news."

The talking back began with doodling—on the Times' March 16, 2005 front-page photo of Bernard J. Ebbers, the disgraced former CEO of WorldCom, leaving a New York courthouse with his wife and a string of fraud convictions. "Even though he was a wretched man, I was touched by him holding hands with his wife," explains Tomaselli in W. "This sort of Paradise Lost seemed to have the relationship to paradises involved with taking LSD." The result was "Guilty" (2005), a trippy reimagining of the Ebbers' exodus. See more of Tomaselli's multilayered world next month, when the Aspen Art Museum mounts a mid-career survey of his two-dimensional works that will be on view through October 11 before traveling to Skidmore College's Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery and the Brooklyn Museum in 2010.

(Photo: Erma Estwick)

Just give the giant green rabbit your garbage and nobody gets hurt. The five-foot-tall bunnies stationed through September at London's Covent Garden and Holland Park actually come in peace, bearing trash bags. Toss in your garbage and their ears light up. The bunny bins were designed by the multitalented Paul Smith as one of 15 projects commissioned for London by the city's Design Museum. "I tried to keep my idea simple and hopefully interesting. I am always amazed how bad people are about litter and how they are so thoughtless," said Smith. "My exhibit is hopefully a tiny step towards making people be better with their rubbish."

While Smith injected his trademark whimsy into rubbish bins, David Adjaye smartened up London's bus shelters, Thomas Heatherwick gathered up quotidian lampposts into a "chandelier" bouquet, and Zaha Hadid, well, she whipped up an entire vision for the city of London. Other top designers who answered the museum's call to give something back to London include Tom Dixon, Neville Brody, and Ron Arad. All 15 projects are on view through October 4 in the Design Museum's "Super Contemporary" exhibition, which is co-sponsored by Beefeater gin. You'll need to remember that last part when the guards give you trouble for drinking gin—make that Beefeater 24 "luxury gin"—in the museum. Just tell them the green bunnies made you do it.

If we can share with you a little something we were lucky enough to catch the other day right now, we hope you'll appreciate it. Last Thursday night, we stayed up way past our usual bedtime (5:30pm) to head over to Mies van der Rohe's beautiful S.R. Crown Hall on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology. We were there to see "Lighting Crown Hall," a collaboration between artist Jan Tichy, students at ths School of the Art Institute and the Illinois Institute of Technology, the Mies van der Rohe Society, and members of the Bauhaus Lab. The collective had turned the famous building into something like a huge light box, projecting random bits of video and the occasional still photo onto the windows. It was really remarkable. And because we're such fans over at Coudal Partners, where this writer spends his days, we brought along our camera and put together this short video. While there, we ran into the mighty terrific Edward Lifson, who is always a joy to talk to. As we knew he would, he put together this great post on his site about the "Lighting" project, as well as his own video interviewing Jan Tichy, which comes highly recommended. All in all, a terrific night and if they ever do this or something similar again and you're in the area, you owe it to yourself to catch it next time around.

After all the hubbub surrounding the Venice Biennale has subsided and the celebrities all gone back to their celebrity caves, we always enjoy checking in with New York's Jerry Saltz, he of the tell-it-like-it-is variety. And tell it he does, with very few positive things to say about the whole fair, handing out a slew of disappointed complaints from start to finish. He did enjoy Bruce Nauman's winning pavilion, as well as that of the British, but for the rest of it, he spends most of his time finding the Biennale one huge downer. He even dedicates a particularly lengthy section to hand out his "Worst in Show" awards, which was a tie between Australia, Japan, and France. If you're a fan of funny negative criticism, here's the best:

France's Claude Leveque, who built a cruciform of four intersecting hallways painted with gold sparkle, edges those two out for sheer mindlessness. At the end of each of his hallways are prison bars and a black flag being blown by a fan. A text plaintively asks, "Are the black flags quivering in the distance the rising image of a radical hope of a possible other world?" No, they're flags of surrender -- the pavilion wants to kill itself for housing such bad art. I have four words for Leveque: Get a job, dude.

On a more positive note, but still one with negatives, to help keep our theme going here, make sure you don't miss the video of artist Mike Bouchet's pre-fab house piece, which he needed to float down Venice's canals to reach the Biennale, but which sank along the way. Fortunately, Bouchet wasn't too upset, seeing it as perhaps an even better piece of symbolism for the American housing market than he'd originally intended.

Speaking of starchitects, one of the members of the unsuccessful anti-Prince Charles cabal, Zaha Hadid, has run into a bit of a snag on a project we've been excited about since the start of the year: her pavilion for the 100th anniversary of the Burnham Plan here in Chicago. The pavilion was supposed to open this upcoming Friday, but due to trouble the manufacturer is having building the thing, it looks like we're still another few weeks out. The other pavilion, made by Ben van Berkel, is all ready to go, but the organizers want to launch the two at the same time, so it sits in wait while Hadid's chugs along toward the finish line. But we suppose one doesn't get to be a starchitect by being on time for things. Or maybe it's all due to the higher gravity here on Earth, as opposed to the spaceship she designs these things in.

In case you missed the news late last week, this Saturday marked the launch of mega-street artist Banksy's first show in his home turf of Bristol in the UK, or more specifically, at the City Museum and Art Gallery. It looks similar to several of his other, rare exhibitions (though we've yet to hear anything about an elephant, like he had in Los Angeles), but what makes the exhibit perhaps most interesting was that the museum kept the entire thing a secret up until the day before it opened, even from the city council who provide the museum's funding, realizing that there would be quite a bit of bureaucratic back and forth if they proposed it earlier, what with Banksy's history in the city (half seem to love him, half seem to hate his work popping on random walls). In addition to the linked story above, the show's opening has resulted in a bunch of video, of course, including this piece which we enjoyed:

Are you getting excited for SANAA's Serpentine Pavilion? We certainly are, as you'll recall us telling you all about back in February, when the Japanese firm was selected, and in early April, when the first illustrations for the pavilion were released. If you just can't wait until July, when it's finally finished and open for the public, we highly recommend hitting up the Olll Architecture Gallery site, where they have dozens upon dozens of photos of the ongoing construction. Not much info to read, or any really, but we think you'll find browsing through all the shots and dreaming of what's soon to be time well spent. But if it is reading you're after, and you demand that it must be about this topic, might we suggest learning that actress Tilda Swanson really wants to get back to her collaboration with artist Cornelia Parker on their 1995 Serpentine piece The Maybe, which found Swanson sleeping in a big glass box for days on end in front of thousands of people, resulting in her contracting shingles? Well there you go. Enjoy.

We're excited for all the upcoming things to see here in Chicago when the Burnham Plan's 100th anniversary celebrations start (including the landing of Zaha Hadid's latest spaceship). Now, upon learning of its building, we're eager to see the scale model of the city being constructed by the Chicago Architecture Foundation, which will be placed in the lobby where the Foundation is located, in the South Loop, from June 11th to November 20th. We're suckers for scale models of most anything (visit this writer's parents' house to see a very large collection of poorly assembled model airplanes), and seeing a three foot tall Sears Tower sounds like the nerdy field trip we've been dreaming about since we were in short pants. But perhaps the best part about learning of the model's existence was learning why it was commissioned: our beloved Mayor, Richard Daley, saw some scale models in Beijing and Shanghai and decided we needed one too. You'd probably have to be a little familiar with our avuncular, goofy Mayor to understand why this seems so fitting and so great, but if you know the man, you can almost hear him in a meeting saying "Did you see those city models those guys had?! We have to have one of those! They have them! I mean, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon, let's get a city model!" After the Olympics and the Sox winning the pennant, we imagine that this is the third most excited he's ever been about something.

Today is Frank Lloyd Wright's birthday, and while we've been busy transforming a tower of fondant and Heath bars into an elaborate Fallingwater-themed cake, New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is celebrating the 142nd anniversary of Wright's birth with a global design contest. The Guggenheim has teamed with Google (a match-up that we can't help but refer to as "Googlenheim") for today's launch of the Design It: Shelter Competition, which invites amateur and professional designers to use Google Earth and Google SketchUp application to create and submit designs for virtual 3-D shelters for a location of their choice anywhere on Earth (anywhere? anywhere!). Submissions will be accepted through August 23. Two prize winners (one will be chosen by a jury that includes architect Neil Denari and Pentagram's Lisa Strausfeld, the other by public voting on ten finalists selected by students at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture) will be announced on October 21, the 50th anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum's opening. Our advice? Get inspired by visiting the Guggenheim's stellar "Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward" exhibition and then head to the museum's Sackler Center for a companion exhibition of shelters designed, built, and lived in over the past seven decades by students of Taliesin, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture in Arizona and Wisconsin.

(Shaun Gladwell, "Colour Test: Mundi Mundi Plains," 2009, production still. Cinematography by Gotaro Uematsu. Photography by Josh Raymond.)

Lace up your Superga sneakers and stock up on sunscreen, because it's Venice Biennale time! The 53rd International Art Exhibition, entitled "Making Worlds" and directed by Daniel Birnbaum, opens Sunday at the Giardini, the Arsenale, and assorted other locations around the city. In addition to the sprawling main show of work by more than 90 artists, a record 77 countries (you go, Montenegro!) are participating, and we'll be checking in with many of their pavilions over the next six months. First up is Australia, which is offering up artist Shaun Gladwell's Mad Max-meets-the-outback video series, which will be accompanied by sound, photographic, and sculptural works. In the "MADDESTMAXIMVS" project, Gladwell brings urban activities and extreme sports to the Australian hinterland. His predilection for slow motion encourages viewers to scrutinize the scorched landscape and attempt to impose order on the oozing action. In one video, a leather clad-motorcyclist brakes to give some roadkill kangaroos a ritualistic burial. In another, he surfs the desert by standing atop a moving car. A vibrant production still from the project is our Friday Photo. Learn more about Gladwell and the Australian pavilion in a PDF version of the booklet that will be distributed in Venezia.