Category: visual

The Dead Sea Scrolls go on display in Montreal this week, and if you think that’s not a big deal, you ought to have a word with the curator who had to get them there. From the Palestinian uprising in 2000, to the 9/11 attacks, to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, global events have conspired to keep the scrolls out of Canada for years, and no one in Montreal dared believe that their exhibit would actually go off as scheduled until the scrolls physically arrived this month. The Montreal exhibit marks the first time that all three scrolls have been exhibited together outside of Israel.

“The humidity and the extraordinary heat were inescapable. The gardens at the tip of Venice, home to the biennale’s national pavilions for most of that event’s life, became a giant sauna. Even worse than the gardens were the miles of art in the nearby, cavernous Arsenale, the medieval network of shipyards and workshops where the Venetian fleets were once built and where the work of emerging artists is on view. Overwhelming amounts of art were displayed in raw factory spaces and amid relentless heat intensified by the power needed for lighting and video installations. These conditions sent even the most die-hard art lovers fleeing to their hotels during part of each of the three preview days held before the public opening on Sunday.”

In Denver, where an abandoned railroad yard long considered a blight on the downtown area has been transformed into “a vibrant new inner-city neighborhood with a mix of offices, residential units and retail businesses,” architect Todd Johnson and his Design Workshop are being celebrated as shining examples of the New Urbanism. At the heart of the Denver design was the notion that it is no longer enough just to build an urban landscape and expect people to flock to it. But the tired notion of getting suburbanites to return to downtown by bringing the suburbs to the city hasn’t worked either. The key to a successful urban design, says Johnson, is to create a space that makes people want to move around in it, preferably on foot, with lots of other people.

Can’t make it to Venice to make the Biennale this summer? Here’s a gallery of photos of artwork from the Biennale to look at…

Few people think of architecture as a job requiring much in the way of crisis management skills. But a recent symposium in Boston examined the way that architects and engineers have handled some of the most devastating architectural crises in recent decades. From a collapsed hotel balcony in Kansas City, to a Manhattan skyscraper that could have toppled in a high wind, the all-too-human reactions to tragedies of human error changed the way many in the architectural trade view their jobs.

A dozen top street painters converged on the Bay Area to re-create Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. The painting will be “about half the size of the original. Parts of the ceiling have been done at various international festivals, but this 75-by-25-foot work is apparently the first to re-create the entire biblical epic, which contains more than 300 figures arrayed in a richly detailed architectural setting of spandrels and pendentives and putti-adorned pilasters. It took Michelangelo from 1508 to 1512 to complete the great work for Pope Julius II. These artists are replicating it in six days. ‘We want to make it as true to the actual ceiling as possible, but allowing each artist to bring their expression into it’.”

J. Seward Johnson Jr. makes three-dimensional sculptural versions of famous Impressionist paintings. “The experience sounds risible, more the stuff of amusement parks than sculpture parks or museums. But there’s an uncanny quality to seeing a familiar painting expanded into real space, and being able to walk through the picture plane is positively weird. It heightens the physicality of the motifs in the composition and thereby underlines the artifice and skill that went into transforming them into a painting. Also, I have to confess, wandering around in the three-dimensional paintings is really a lot of fun. And with no restrictions on photographing or touching the works, who can doubt the show is going to be a riot for grown-ups and an absolute paradise for children?”

First reports from Iraq said the National Museum had been looted of 170,000 artifacts. That was wildly off the mark. It was untrue. “What happened? The source of the lie, Donny George, director general of research and study of the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities, now says (Washington Post, June 9) that he originally told the media that “there were 170,000 pieces in the entire museum collection. Not 170,000 pieces stolen. No, no, no. That would be every single object we have! Of course, George saw the story of the stolen 170,000 museum pieces go around the world and said nothing – indeed, two weeks later, he was in London calling the looting “the crime of the century.’ Why?”

Miss that special someone? Now you can keep them around, even after they’re dead. A Seattle artist is “making urns from human ashes, following a formula Josiah Spode invented in 1797, producing fine English china glaze by adding calcinated cow bone to the company’s clay mixture. Friends and relatives of various deceased gave him the ashes he’s using in his human urn sculptures. Each comes in an edition of two, one piece for the commissioning parties and one for him.”

“On Tuesday night, in what is believed to have been the latest in a long line of highly organised ‘stolen to order’ art heists, a gang of thieves escaped with a haul of precious items worth hundreds of thousands of pounds from Waddesdon Manor, home of the world-famous Rothschild Collection. Thames Valley police confirmed that a gang of five men, disguised in boiler suits and balaclavas, broke into the National Trust-owned stately home near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, and made off with more than 100 gold boxes and a number of other valuable pieces including several works of art.”