A couple of weeks ago, the X-initiative in New York City organized “No Soul for Sale: A Festival of Independents,” bringing to its galleries —in the former Dia building on 22nd Street in Chelsea— dozens of international independent art spaces and American nonprofit organizations devoted to contemporary art. Kadist Art Foundation from Paris was one of the participants. Having done a curatorial residency there last year, they enlisted me to organize their presentation at X’s week-long and event-filled exhibition. I’ve posted some photographs of the installation in Flickr.

At Kadist’s designated space at X was a single artwork, Awaiting Enacted by Roman Ondák, a 16-page newspaper composed of various articles in different languages fully illustrated with images of people queuing. This is one of several artworks by Ondák in Kadist’s collection, not unrelated to his performance, Good Feelings in Good Times, where people, simply, queue. Read an article by Max Andrews about this work at Tate, etc.

“No Soul for Sale: A Festival of Independents” is closed, but if you’re in New York you can experience another of Ondák’s works. As part of their performance series, The Museum of Modern Art is currently showing his Measuring the Universe, whereby participating visitors names and height are penciled on the gallery walls. Considering the hundreds of visitors MoMA has daily, the etchings promise a quite diverse yet minimal portrait of its public.

Above, installation view of Roman Ondák’s work at Kadist Art Foundation’s space at X-initiatve. Special thanks to Jose García.

This afternoon, my sister and I were given an architectural tour in Mexico City by Fabianita and J.P. Banks from Antidomingo. The tour focused on architect Teodoro González de León. His architecture is characterized for its monumentality. Most of his commissioned projects are public buildings, cultural centers and large business complexes. His staple architectural elements are wide angular murals, ample plazas, and ‘cemento martelinado’. The latter is a technique that involves repeated stomping on wall and floor surfaces made from a combination of cement, pebbled-gravel and sand. The Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, where I began working a couple of weeks ago, was designed in this style by Abraham Zabludovsky with González de León. These textured cement facades—which some come in gray, as in the museum; sandy pink as in their Auditorio Nacional, or white, as in the new Reforma 222—are without doubt a signature of these two mexican architects.

Zabludovsky and González de León collaborated in a number of public buildings during the 1970s and 80s, including designing the offices of Delegación Cuauhtémoc and INFONAVIT, a Banamex franchise in Mexico City’s historic center, and a large building complex including the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, Colegio de México, and the headquarters of the Fondo de Cultura Económica. (The last of these was designed and built in the 1990s, and by González de León alone.) Their most-known collaboration, however, is the 1992 refurbishing of the Auditorio Nacional, located in Paseo de la Reforma, a historic avenue commissioned by Maximilian I, emperor in Mexico from 1863 to 1867. Also along that avenue is Reforma 222, a new high-structure designed by González de León including a hotel tower, shopping mall and business center.

We didn’t make it today to González de León’s recently opened Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo at UNAM, since I had paid a visit last weekend, nor to the commercial center El Conjunto Arcos Bosque, known as “El Pantalon,” which he designed with J. Francisco Serrano. But we did visit the Centro Nacional de las Artes, consisting of a complex of ten buildings designed by different architects of renown including Ricardo Legorreta, Enrique Norten and Luis Vicente Flores. In this monumental building complex devoted to the study and practice of fine arts, theatre, cinema, dance and music is González de León’s Conservatorio Nacional de Musica.

The site-visits to Teodoro González de León’s buildings in Mexico City comprise one of several tours on modern and contemporary architects in Mexico that I’m doing this summer. Images of today’s tour can be found in Flickr.

After a couple of year in planning and construction, the permanent outdoor sculpture The parliament of reality by Olafur Eliasson opens in just a couple of weeks at Bard College in New York. An art commission done in collaboration between Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies and the Luma Foundation, Eliasson’s sculpture consists of an island with a pond at its center that is accessed through a passageway turned tunnel by a latticework structure. The parliament of reality is inspired by the Icelandic Althing, an outdoor assembly considered one of the first parliamentary institutions ever. It is also inspired by the fact that it’s a sculpture made for a college, a space for constant discussion and public debate.

On Saturday, May 16, the opening day of The parliament of reality, a number of presentations and discussions by artists and scholars take place on-site Eliasson’s sculpture. Participants include: Andrea Zittel, Anri Sala, Eliasson, of course, as well as Felicity Scott (Colombia University), Molly Nesbit (Vassar College) and Peter Galison (Harvard University), among other scholars. The day before, the Human Rights Project at Bard College, which is directed by Thomas Keenan, is also hosting an event on-site. This one focuses on the use of music for torture—a “technique of interrogation and punishment by U.S. military forces and intelligence agencies.” The participant list is not confirmed yet, but knowing past programs of Keenan, it promises to be a quite eclectic and interesting group of people from different fields.

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Some weeks ago, while in Tokyo, I had the opportunity of visiting Yu-un, a private guesthouse and museum-like space of art collector Mr. Obayashi. Yu-un, which translated to something like a place to retreat or a site of wonder, is designed by the renowned Japanese architect Tadao Ando. At the start of the project, Obayashi and Ando commissioned a handful of artists to create works on site. One of the commissions was Olafur Eliasson. Invited to create a work for the courtyard, pictured above, the artist proposed cladding the walls with a platinum-glazed version of his “quasi brick” tiles. (Eliasson first used this brick in his installation in the Dutch Pavilion of the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003.)

Andreas Eggertsen, who worked in Eliasson’s studio while this art commission of Yu-un was in production, explains that the quasi brick “is a space filling geometry based on ‘fivefold symmetry’: a mathematical description of a quasi-chaotic geometry, which was found by a physicist in the 80s. The bricks can be rotated into 6 different positions, and put together randomly they create a very complex pattern.” To read more about Yu-un, and to see better images of Eliasson’s commission other than my amateur snap shot, above, check out Lucy Birmingham’s feature article on Yu-un for Architectural Digest; the article is illustrated with photography by Robert McLeod, showing interior and exterior views of the house.

The everyday in Tokyo, I loved it all: its handsome men, beautiful women, the androgyny of some, their sense of respect and modesty, but also their conspicuous consumerism. The city’s old places. New architecture. Sparkling metro. Cherry Blossoms. The weight of history, sight of futures and melancholy peeking felt at once. Much enjoyed. Flavors with tamed exoticism, constant rituals, the expansive urban ‘scape and population density. That intensity. And more than anything, the cultural opacity yet indeterminate lightness.

Visits to what became preferred sites felt like village secrets. The largest city in the world suddenly shrunk, more personable in its less popular spaces, in places of exquisite taste and intimate surroundings. Memorable: lunch of soba noodles at Keyaki Kurosawa, one of four restaurants in Tokyo inspired by the family recipes of the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. Known not only for his legendary films like Rashomon (1950) and Seven Samurai (1954), Kurosawa, I learned then, was famous for his deep interest and practice of native culinary art. I realized, though, that I probably better understand Kurosawa films than Japanese food, and that my eyes are better trained than my paladar. Memorable, too: late-night drinks at a private bar, allegedly, Nagisa Yoko’s, sited in small alley in Shinjuku Sanchōme neighboring various petite membeship clubs of the kind.

Another delight: Center for Cosmic Wonder, a space founded by Osaka-based artist Yukinori Maeda. Since the mid-1990s, Maeda has been creating artworks all the while making a fashion line that goes by the name Cosmic Wonder Light Source. The space combines his practice with collaborative productions, such as Cosmic Wonder Free Press, of which three issues have been published by Nieves in Switzerland. The first space opened in Osaka, and a couple of years ago another one was established in Tokyo’s Aoyama, in one of the many alley streets behind the avenue where Issey Miyaki, Prada and Comme des Garçons and other high-end boutiques are sited.

The Center for Cosmic Wonder is neither an art gallery nor boutique, nor is it Light Source’s signature shop or a concept store by Maeda. But it seems to function like all of them at one point or the other. In its minimal white-cube garage area is a video projection of a Cosmic Wonder performance in Paris. Trough the back door, a garden trail connects that gallery with a high-ceiling, bright-but-soft-lit space that has rotating perimeter walls hiding closets; a large mirror cube placed on the ground that like a vault carries jewelry; a rack made of a rock sculpture with bended steel holds a handful of clothing items. The space has occult references no doubt, and is openly theatrical. Its air brings to mind a de-saturated Kenneth Anger sky, and arrangements an adaption set in Scharder’s Mishima—but, in any case, in movement by a play of light, conceptual transparency and willful opacity.

Thanks to the people who introduced me to these sites, Andrew Maerkle, Mami Kataoka, Elisa Uematsu and Jeffrey Rosen, and to Doryun Chong for helping me find places in town.

I just returned from Japan, where I traveled to participate in a program of the 101 Tokyo Contemporary Art Fair. It was a short but intense trip, and got a chance to make multiple site visits to galleries and museums in Tokyo, plus do some sightseeing around town. The gallery Take Ninagawa held the first solo exhibition of the young sculptor Yuuki Matsumura, an artist schooled in Kyoto, whose sculptures made of broken, crashed or crumpled materials are simulacrums of minor disasters and common figures. This gallery, which was founded only a year ago, is one of the notable emerging commercial galleries in Tokyo. Other galleries founded in recent years by a young generation of art dealers, and which I sadly didn’t get to visit, are Misako & Rosen and Arataniurano.

The Mori Art Museum was exhibiting an elegantly installed showcase of works from the Thyssen-Bornemisza art collection, and the Museum of Contemporary Art a minimal yet stunning exhibition of media artist Ryoji Ikeda. Also elegant were the museum’s collection galleries—and, to my surprise and great delight, with works that had little if nothing to do with new media art and with just a few examples rubbing off anime or manga. There are big names and big works in the collection, from local and international artists alike. I was more drawn to discrete works by Japanese artists. Collection highlights include an ample set of like color-book drawings by Shinro Ohtake, a series of almost monochromatic landscape photographs by Naoki Ishikawa, and a conceptualist instruction-based work made into a multi-channel video and sound installation by Koki Tanaka.

The Japan Times journalist Donald Eubank was the organizer of the series of public programs for the 101 Tokyo Contemporary Art Fair. The topic of the panel discussion I participated in centered on the discursive support to the arts, or lack thereof, particularly in Tokyo. Issues around the local production (and export) of cultural identity, arts education and scholarly publications and public programming were addressed in what turned out to be a lively discussion. Panelists included Doryun Chong, curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; Mami Kataoka, senior curator at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and international curator at the Hayward Gallery in London; Yichiro Kurata, president of Shinwa Art Auction Company in Japan; Yusaka Imamura, director of Tokyo Wonder Site; and myself. The panel moderator was Tokyo-based art critic Andrew Maerkle, author of the incisive introduction to the Japanese art scene for the 2009 Almanac of ArtAsiaPacific magazine.

In it’s second version, 101 Tokyo Contemporary Art Fair was quite small, with around 20 Japanese galleries and less than 10 international more as exhibitors. It also had a project space featuring an exhibition of artworks by local artists and from abroad on loan by another group of select galleries. A thoughtfully designed space and with a strong backing of sponsors, the fair has potential. Because it’s specific to contemporary art—even if some galleries included did not display the most qualitative—it competes only minimally with the couple-years-older and more established art fair, Art Fair Tokyo. This other fair, which ran concurrently last weekend, combines modern and contemporary art galleries with businesses of traditional arts and artifacts, such as nihonga. In principle, I find interesting the idea of combining different traditions and historical periods under one roof, but less so if it’s spatially organized in a separatist standard manner. Anyway, on Sunday, in the plaza separating Art Fair Tokyo’s main venue to its hall of younger galleries, there was a great flea market, showcasing primarily twentieth century domestic items and decorations of colonial times, old Western art books, Japanese traditional cloths and clothing, and native religious artifacts. This roving collection of images and things was another engaging viewing and eclectic shopping experience.

Joseph del Pesco recently invited me to participate in Artists Space’s Webcast, a curatorial initiative for making internet- and computer-based cultural content. For this, he invites artists, designers and other curators to participate in two kinds of platforms: one is Typecast, in which new typefaces are commissioned and made available for free (there are five to date, including a beautiful design by Mungo Thompson); the second one is the self-explanatory Youtube Commentary, for which voice-overs are made for videos drawn from this ever-growing online collection. My contribution was in this latter platform. I selected a video clip from P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia, and took it as an excuse to speak about Tom Cruise, as a scene to reflect on fan culture, and simply as a moment to consider degrees of insanity, all of which are embedded on Youtube.

Today, The New York Times reported on what is likely one of the most creative fundraising efforts that the Queens Museum of Art has ever done—and a form of fundraising that will surely become more prevalent. The museum launched an “Adopt-a-Building” program using The Panorama of the City of New York. For those who’ve yet to visit the museum, its Panorama is an architectural model including every single building constructed before 1992 in Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Bronx, Queens and Staten Island. There are almost a million structures. How can this be possible? It’s simply huge. The area dimension of the model is 9,335 square foot; that’s 2,845 meters.

Now, to the gist of the program: the Adopt-a-Building initiative invites people to “invest” in the museum by playing real estate. Some pointers: loans don’t apply, so foreclosures need not be suffered; part of the funds raised go to the museum endowment and capital campaign, parts get re-invested in the model; and so on. This is sort of how The Panorama market looks like:

For $50, “purchase” your apartment. For $500, “name” your school, library or firehouse. Real Estate tycoons may donate up to $10,000, to “own” a landmark building or fund a significant update of the model.

(The quotes are theirs, to remind the speculator that this is just that, real money on hypothetical property; to remind that this is something like a gift economy in role play.)

The infamous Robert Moses—whose work on parks and recreations was in fact explored by the Queens Museum through a critical three-part exhibition they co-organized not too long ago—commissioned The Panorama in the early 1960s. It was rumored to be his working model of the city, but on paper it was made as a piece on display in the 1964 World’s Fair, which took place in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park (again, at Moses baton). The Panorama is now part of the collection of the Queens Museum, which is located in a former fair pavilion at this park.

In the last couple of decades, the museum has commissioned several people to activate The Panorama. For example, the original model makers, Lester Associates, updated the model in the early 1990s. Around that time, architect Roberto Viñoli designed the gallery where it is displayed, to be specific, the model’s platform and surrounding multi-level ramp. A sound and light show was most recently added to the room, a piece scripted by The Panorama expert Blagovesta Momchedjikova. (I am not a fan of this multi-media component. It was incorporated only a couple of years ago, and already looks and feels dated, unlike the model itself.) Visual artists have also created temporary site-specific work in The Panorama. In 2002, visual artist Michael Rakowitz used the model to identify the film locations of popular New York City films—Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing, Mike Nichols’ Working Girl, etcetera. Miniature video cameras placed on the film locations (on the model) were connected to television monitors (on the ramp) transmitting live video-feed. These close-up static images of The Panorama street corners or buildings were dubbed with the original movie soundtracks.  These are only a handful of examples in which the museum has dealt with conservation, interpretation and public engagement of The Panorama. And this does not even consider the countless docent tours and regular civic-minded and aficionado programs.

While the Queens Museum Adopt-a-Building program is a fundraising initiative, it has the potential of becoming quite an experimental economic cultural project on its own. I imagine this as I contemplate some of the challenges that the initiative may encounter. From what I can project, it seems to raise only interesting questions, whether these are about technical issues (Can membership sustainability be modeled on property taxation?) or more philosophical ones (How do public museums develop the so-called American Dream of private property?). My fascination with the program also lies in its curatorial edge: it seems to be conceived by approaching a work, and imagining its public—what are we looking at, and how can we present it so the public can become part of its history and potential. In the case of the Adopt-a-Building, the museum proposes that one way this can happen is by literally (i.e. financially) investing in and within a piece of the model. I am curious to see what happens.

* * *

As a side, I wanted to note that today the Times also reported on a proposed legislature bill to prevent museums in the state from deaccessioning artworks to cover operating expenses—no doubt the most questionable form of fundraising. The economic recession has obviously put art and cultural institutions in a difficult position. And so, the shrinking art markets, endowments and sponsorships are of concern. While I think the Queens Museum has a unique fundraising program, I recognize it’s such because of the particularities of The Panorama. I do believe, however, that one can generally “model” a fundraising campaign upon anything. But for it to be creative and meaningful, it has to methodically, thematically or even structurally approach existing resources.

A couple of other interesting development programs in New York museums are the current ‘station domination’ of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the ‘chocolate bar’ of the New Museum. Even if these have less of head in creative fundraising than in strategic marketing, they are quite noteworthy. The MoMA has a temporary exhibition throughout the many platforms of the Atlantic Pacific subway and commuter train station. The project runs from February 10-March 15, 2009, and is made by the museum as “a gift” (their word) to busy New Yorkers and commuters. It includes seminal artworks in the collection reproduced in decals and prints for light-boxes; it also includes posters and signage promoting discounted membership fees. This concept of station domination –when a single buyer purchases all advertising space in a subway station—is pretty intense. It makes the site into their venue. And knowingly, the museum calls this project its MoMA Atlantic Pacific site; it has even stamped the station’s entrance and exit turnstiles.

The New Museum’s “New Chocolate Bar” is radically more downscale and intimate. As you may imagine, purchasing the chocolate comes with museum membership. The idea is drawn from the fiction film Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, whereby the owner of the chocolate factory creates a playful scheme to identify his corporation’s inheritor. The scheme consists in secretly packing a select number of chocolate bars with a prize. In Willy Wonka, the prized holders get a tour of the factory, and then one of them is selected as the inheritor to the corporation, which is in good standing and desirable and all that of course. In case of the “New Chocolate Bar,” there is only one part to the award, a membership upgrade, and while it’s better than a museum tour it’s far from inheriting the institution!

Above, picture of The Panorama’s Midtown Manhattan, drawn from the Queens Museum website.

My first l.a.Eyeworks’ frames were called Cheeks. These were thin and geometric, in aluminum red. Its surface slightly changing colors depending on light, discretely iridescent, just like a can of Coca-Cola. They looked… tasty. I was introduced to l.a.Eyeworks and their Cheeks by Alex Gray, who was my supervisor (and early mentor) during a summer internship at ArtPace in San Antonio, Texas. Cheeks were difficult to wear. They were, literally, in your face. And weird. But he convinced me. That was ten years ago.

It was a nice surprise to learn that visual artist Emily Roydson, who I worked with another summer, the one of 2004, just made a pair of l.a.Eyeworks frames. Titled Surprise… you’re pregnant!, Emily considers them a conversation piece: “Making the gaze manifest, the person wearing this work has their perspective elaborated for all to see. Provoking conversations about gender and recognition, objecthood and form, dominance and self-possession, the piece elicits a revisioning of how we read and approach each other.”

l.a.Eyeworks was established in 1979 by Gai Gherardi and Barbara McReynolds, who remain the primary creators of these handcrafted designs. Not long after their start, their frames became ubiquitous stylizing props in movies and music videos – and their stores have served as film locations, too. Not surprisingly, they’re also close to the art world, starting with their ad campaign launched in 1981 in Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine.

Oh, and about Alex. He eventually moved to New York, where he opened his own art gallery: Alexander Gray Associates. He represents artists that emerged in the seventies, eighties and nineties and that were, for some time, for many reasons, largely left unattended by the marketplace. The exhibition program is strong. And he’s never been more convincing. His upcoming exhibition centers on early and current work by one New York’s best artists: Paul Ramirez Jonas.

Image: Emily Roydson, in collaboration with l.a.Eyeworks, Surprise… you’re pregnant! (2007-2009), acetate.

Some weeks ago, Manhattan saw the arrival of Hypnotic Show, one of Raimundas Malasauskas’ latest curatorial projects and certainly one of his most mesmerizing. The inaugural Hypnotic Show took place last year at Silverman Gallery in San Francisco. I experienced its second iteration, which took place at Artists Space in New York.

Technically speaking, there are differences between mesmerizing and the practice of hypnotizing. But in today’s vernacular these terms are used inter-changeably. The first term derives from the name of Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), who is known as a predecessor of hypnotism. Working primarily in Paris, his used magnets for curing, and his trance, which is referred since as mesmerism, were based on some kind of universal magnetic fluid that, according to him, existed between people and was bound to gravity. This idea was highly debated during his lifetime.

By the nineteenth century, when the word hypnosis became current, the medical study of trance shifted to a study in psychology and away from physics. Hypnosis was used to study a patient’s physical and mental response while asleep. Some of the more successful experiments of deep trance are attributed to the late work of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) in his research of neurosis and hysteria. After some period of questioning and debunking, it was in the twentieth century, particularly after World War II, that hypnosis was again embraced by the medical community, not surprisingly, by military doctors.

While there were many other practicioners of mesmerism, hypnosis and other forms of trance, it was Mesmer and Charcot’s peculiar medical practices that the popular image of the hypnotic séance is modeled from. The showmanship around hypnosis, however, has increasingly grown since Mesmer’s times. It is the dependence, the interest-filled and willing submission, really, of the patient to the hypnotizer that is raised to the level of awe or spectacle.

For Hypnotic Show, Raimundas commissioned several artists to create immaterial artworks to be tangibly experienced under hypnosis. While only a couple of contributions are drawings or images, the main submissions are succinctly drafted text pieces. These are descriptive texts detailing encounters with phenomena and art, written as instructive walks or detailed travels. The hypnotized wanderer enters in and out of scenes, encountering images, objects, and situations of different kinds. Like in dream state, many times these encounters suggest the hypnotized to define or name things, even on occasions to take authorship of certain artworks or moments that they come across.

This is how you begin to experience Deric Carner’s artwork: You are walking down a path. You are watching where you place your feet. There are loose rocks. You are surrounded by vegetation. It’s dark and dusty. The work continues until you recognize an object that is mysteriously rising from the horizon but that is, you think, quite clearly not the sun. The hypnotizer then transitions to another work, the contribution by Will Holder. This time you encounter an image of Elvis Presley. A poster that becomes three-dimensional. You find yourself interacting with Elvis.

These are only two of more than a dozen artworks commissioned by Raimundas, who hands the exhibition as script to a professional hypnotizer, Marcos Lutyens. To experience the exhibition, then, the public convenes at a gallery for the séance. In the backdrop, a video by Patrizio di Massimo rendered a seal in fade-ins and close-ups. In the foreground, the curator and hypnotizer lead the event. At Artists Space, there were about ten people who volunteered for hypnosis; they were in fact audience of the exhibition. The rest of us there, the majority, were merely spectators bearing witness to their experience. And while not in a state of trance, at least imagining what it could feel to be in that place.

In the press release—a document written as a responded list of Frequently Asked Questions—the curator described this unconventional and allegedly immaterial exhibition as “a temporary social structure for engaging into creative cognitive acts through shared practices of art and hypnosis.” At the end of the séance at Artists Space, Raimundas explained that he sought to place an exhibition in the brain. The weight given to physical site is interesting. It opened a discussion that is less about memory or imagination, than about sense and sensibility, or as he suggested, of neurology.

The windows quaked. Car alarms triggered. My heartbeat rises, and body shivers. The image on TV has suddenly changed to snow. I’m in the equatorial zone, and assume the roar is thunder announcing the start of a tropical storm. But now the sound is not of wind but of helicopter wings. I peek out and see. The clouds are made of smoke.

That thing I heard was a rumble from a bomb. There’s a building crumbled to the ground.

I am only in the fourth floor. I think. Blink. I chose to take the stairs. And there we are, the only handful of its guests of this almost empty hundreds-room hotel. Just there, standing in a high-ceiling lobby furnished in the fifties clinging to its forgotten grandeur with nostalgia. Us, in a rundown-downtown, now with chaos all around.

Earlier at the airport, I thought I’d missed the flight. Far from sweet is this evening in the valley of sugar cane.

Image: Pasado mañana (2008) by Judi Werthein, installation view at “Urgente! 41 Salon Nacional de Artistas” in Cali, Colombia.