I was chatting with Michael Bühler-Rose (who, if you haven’t noticed, is currently holding down the fort for Laurel) and we got to talking about this installation piece posted on VVORK. “You just can’t look away,” Michael said. Seeing Mai Hofstad Gunnes’ piece made me think of the work of French photographer George Rousse. Which reminded me… Georges Rousse’s work is pretty incredible.

Russelheim, 2003
© Georges Rousse

© Georges Rousse

A nice description of his process, via Wikipedia:

Rousse’s work, from the 1990s to today, generally appears at first glance to be photos of desolate or abandoned spaces (buildings, rooms, parking garages or streetscapes) often on their way to the wrecking ball, on which the artist has superimposed precise geometrical shapes or squiggly graffiti.

However, this is an intended illusion: what Rousse does is to paint these designs onto the abandoned spaces before taking the photo, correcting for such things as the slope of floors or the interruption of beams, so that the painted designs come together to produce the illusion of a simple, flat design floating on the surface of the photo.

A few more examples:

Réel, 2003
© Georges Rousse

Köln, 2002
© Georges Rousse

Dravert, 2007
© Georges Rousse

© Georges Rousse

Take a look at more of his photographs here (in a film about his work), here, here and here. I also highly recommend picking up Contacts (Vol. 3) to hear him talk about his work. And if you’re into Rousse, you’ll probably like Felice Varini.

Popularity: 13% [?]

David Byrne’s Playing the Building, 2008
© Justin Ouellette

To say that David Byrne is a prolific artist is an understatement. The work just keeps coming. His latest piece, a 9,000-square-foot, interactive, site-specific installation entitled Playing the Building, “transforms the interior of the landmark Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan into a massive sound sculpture that all visitors are invited to sit and ‘play.’”

The project consists of a retrofitted antique organ, placed in the center of the building’s cavernous second-floor gallery, that controls a series of devices attached to its structural features – metal beams, plumbing, electrical conduits, and heating and water pipes. These machines vibrate, strike, and blow across the building’s elements, triggering unique harmonics and producing finely tuned sounds.

Brilliant. Check out this video to see/hear it in action.

Find out more about Playing the Building here (don’t miss the interview).

UPDATE: Here is another interview with Byrne where you can hear him talk about the piece (thanks Sarah!):

Popularity: 25% [?]

still from Office Baroque, 1977 (16mm, color, sound, 44 minutes)
© Gordon Matta-Clark

For those of you interested in the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, you’ll be happy to find that a number of his films are available on UbuWeb. I believe the video of Splitting, Bingo/Ninths, and Substrait (Underground Dailies) (1974-1976) was added just yesterday.

See them all here.

Popularity: 34% [?]

L: Entrance to Women’s Bathroom, Mercado Flores Magón, Naucalpan, Mexico State, 2005
R: Entrance to Men’s Bathroom, Retiro Train Station, Recoleta, Beuneos Aires, 1987
© Jim Dow

If you’re in the Boston area tonight, don’t miss photographer and Museum School professor Jim Dow’s opening for Capital Architectures, photographs from Buenos Aires and Mexico City. Jim has been working on this project for over ten years, having made in those years fifteen trips to Argentina and Mexico. The show will be on display at Harvard’s DRCLAS.

Jim will be giving a brief talk at 6pm followed by the opening with music by Sol y Canto. If you miss tonight’s event, the work will still be up all the way through January 31, 2008.

Jim Dow: Capital Architectures (Buenos Aires / Mexico City)
David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies
CGIS South Building, Second Floor
1730 Cambridge Street
Cambridge, MA

Popularity: 31% [?]

Untitled, 2004 (from “Confession”)
© Michel Bonvin

Michel Bonvin has lots of good work, but I’d recommend looking at Confession, Michel’s images of confession booth design.

Popularity: 17% [?]

(from “Exurbia”), 2005
© Ryan Boatright

(from “Exurbia”), 2005
© Ryan Boatright

Ryan Boatright’s project entitled Exurbia considers the formal commonnality of design inherent in the architecture of middle to upper-middle class American houses. Ryan refers to these structures are being “fortress-like,” and is interested in how the builders construct homes of similar design for “occupants who in turn conform to neighborhood codes and restrictions.”

When I envision familial relationships, I picture the spaces around them, the spaces that mold them. For twenty-one years, I lived in the same suburban neighborhood in Louisville, Kentucky. I vividly remember these surroundings. Unfortunately, as I departed, my parents relocated to a large exurban neighborhood twenty-three miles outside of the city; because my definition of ‘home’ was altered, I began to critique my parents’ situation and the American phenomenon of moving “up and out.”

See more from this series here.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Every… Bernd and Hilla Becher Gable Sided Houses, 2004 and Every… Bernd and Hilla Becher Spherical Type Gasholders, 2004
© Idris Khan

Working with the photographic imagery of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Idris Khan superimposes the architectural photographs, drawing from their various Typologies, to create a single image. The result is a sort of hybrid of photography and gestural drawing that is, in regard to other similar appropriation work (that of Jason Salavon’s Every Playboy Centerfold or Megan Gould’s Go Ogle), not as much about abstraction as it is about visualizing the similarity of form and the minor discrepancies of architectural detail.

What Idris Khan is attempting to emphasize and, interestingly, what is often most striking about the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher to me, is the quality of design that characterizes each set of these functional industrial structures.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Water Towers, 1980
© Bernd and Hilla Becher

It was reported that last Friday, German photographer Bernd Becher (1931-2007) died in a Rostock hospital while undergoing a complicated heart surgery. Becher was 75 years old.

Bernd Becher, working alongside his wife Hilla, was most known for his collection of industrial building images, examining the similarities and differences in structure and appearance. It was in 1959 when Bernd first collaborated with Hilla on a project aiming to document the disappearing German industrial architecture. In 2004, the Bechers received a Hasselblad Award, one of the highest international honors in photography. Their Typologies (images of barns, water towers, storage silos, and warehouses) have made a major impact on the history of photography and contemporary photographers.

As a professor at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Bernd was also known as the influential teacher and mentor of most of the members of what has become known as the “German School” or even the “Becher School” of photography—Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, and Elger Esser, among others.

I’m saddened by this news and not quite sure how to celebrate the life of a great photographer in any way other than taking some time to open up one of his books and spend a few moments with the photographs.

UPDATE: Interestingly, English press hadn’t covered this event until today. Just released, in fact, is the New York Times article on the event. They may want to consider hiring me to write for their Arts section, hm? I wish.

Popularity: 37% [?]

In the recent discussion of ‘Different vs. The Same’ or what may more accurately be called ‘Series vs. Sequence’ (sparked by Albrecht Tübke’s Heads), Carey left a comment proposing that “repetitious projects are,” very simply, “about making visual comparisons.”

(from “Shack”)
© Scott Peterman

(from “Shack”)
© Scott Peterman

(from “Shack”)
© Scott Peterman

What better illustrates this idea than the work of Scott Peterman. With his series Shack, Peterman has isolated each ice fishing shack in the white of winter with a precise formal (and minimalist) approach from image to image, asking us to consider the color, architecture and, ultimately, the meaning of these constructions. Peterman deploys a similar approach with City and Land, but the effect of his examination of the shacks really made me reconsider sameness—and, interestingly, the importance of looking at difference within a set of similar images.

Popularity: 13% [?]