​Exploratorium Artist-in-Residence Nina Katchadourian works crosswise over different media—including photography, sculpture, video, and sound—joining perky juxtapositions and reasonable turns to incite us to re-see ordinary normal and social wonders. 

Her new work for the Exploratorium is Floater Theater, a personal showy condition that eccentrically prompts members to investigate the intriguing, usually experienced the wonder of eye floaters. 

Katchadourian's two-year engagement in the Exploratorium's research facility like condition, took as its purpose of takeoff her experience as a guinea pig in the supposed Marshmallow Test. Directed by Walter Mischel at Stanford University's Bing Nursery School in the mid 1970s, this notorious review examined the limit with respect to postponed gratifica­­tion in youngsters. Katchadourian's understanding as a guinea pig, and her recollections about whether she opposed or gave into allurement as a four-year old, have been a long lasting distraction. 

​While Katchadourian started examining the social conduct encompassing postponed delight amid her residency, she got to be distinctly inquisitive about weariness. Are the wanderings of the mind important to creativity? What do we do when we’re bored? She considered how the marvels that we connect with weariness, and additionally the particulars that we end up thinking about when we need incitement—tidy, exhaust rooms, background noise—really be very interesting. This prompted to an investigation of eye floaters, and the dialect used to portray this discernible marvel in our visual field that others can't straightforwardly involvement. 

Katchadourian's work has been exhibited locally and globally at PS1/MoMA, the Serpentine Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, Turner Contemporary, Artists Space, SculptureCenter, the Palais de Tokyo, and De Appel. In June 2006, the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs showed a ten-year review of her work and distributed a going with monograph entitled All Forms of Attraction. The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego exhibited a performance show of late video establishment works in July 2008. In February 2010, she was the Artist-in-Residence at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in Dunedin, New Zealand, which finished in a performance indicate entitled Seat Assignment. She as of late finished work on a prize-winning perpetual open piece, Grand State of Maine, charged by the GSA for an outskirt crossing station between the United States and Canada. In April 2013, the monograph Sorted Books was distributed by Chronicle Books on the 20-year commemoration of Katchadourian's Sorted Books extend. Another video work by Katchadourian is as of now on view as a component of the show Explode Every Day at MASSMoCA. In spring 2016 the Museum of Modern Art in New York will present Katchadourian's sound-construct extend in light of the subject of tidy as a major aspect of their program "Specialists Experiment." In Spring 2017, a visiting solo gallery show of Katchadourian's work will open at the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas. Katchadourian is on the personnel at New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She is spoken to by Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco.

Watch the video  below :

​by Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal

DANCE LIKE the possessed girl from The Ring. The haunted house of hip-hop, birds dropping dead—these are some of the ways I've heard Nina McNeely's style of choreography described. I have taken her experimental contemporary dance class almost every week for two years. The class was recently named "The Witching Hour," a title with cultish overtones. The instructor—a choreographer, dancer, animator, and artist—often wraps herself in black fabric. Her long hair has been various shades of green, black, and blonde. Her pointed acrylic nails accent her often incantatory gestures. 

The studio is called the Sweat Spot. Its appearance in a 2009 New York Times article about workouts for Los Angeles hipsters had kept me away (perhaps in denial), but I eventually became, and am now, a regular.  At first I didn't know fourth position from fifth, but I instantly appreciated choreography's distinct jouissance: freedom through constraint. For every class, McNeely picks hicuppy, intricate music with heavy bass, a brooding blend of electronic and hip-hop. But she's just as likely to play a new track by Rihanna, one of the pop stars who have used McNeely's choreography onstage and in videos. McNeely likes distinct layers of sound (many options to move to): a rattle, a rhythmic voice, an errant screech. 

At each class, she makes the same brisk introductory speech, admonishing us to keep our knees over our toes when we plié. "Don't pull yourself over, just hang, let the weight of your body bring you down," she says, as we lower our hands to our toes. The warm-up is always the same, to songs whose melodic synthesizers and beat-dropping crescendos I now know by heart. The moment of rest before the start of the real instruction is always the same as well, and McNeely always says, "don't fidget." As a good student (and a rather short person), I learn each month's combinations from the front row. They're only about twenty or thirty seconds long. 

McNeely likes twisted shapes, tiny hand adjustments, and fast footwork in low pliés, all of which look as bizarre as they feel. She likes sharp, "schizophrenic" contrasts in dynamics: slow, "juicy" body rolls on one count and a convulsive twitch on the next, from countering imagined resistance as though "moving through Jell-O" to collapsing "like dead weight." 

Over time, I've become attuned to her embodied vocabulary, internalizing the metaphors she gives us, mostly with a laugh: "wizard hands" are swirling circular gestures, "sparkle fingers" are like Bring It On's famous spirit ones, to "snake it up" is to writhe from plié to standing. She also uses language borrowed from technology: a quick inhalation, expanding the chest in a jolt, is a "glitch"; moving side to side like a wave interrupted by locking stops is a "video missing a few frames."

Often, there are imaginary props: snatch something out of the air, throw it up like it's a feather and catch it like it's a rock; contract as if something punched you in the chest; follow the slinky working its way down the stairs. I've imagined myself as a statue coming to life then crumbling into ash, a puppet yanked by strings, a doll awakening while my owner is asleep. McNeely asks us to experience our bodies as weight, animated by the music or possessed by the movement. Every week I bask in the endorphins of exercise, practicing a sport I have few other words for besides "cool." Or else, every week I learn an artwork that evokes a cultural history of labor, sexuality, race, art, and entertainment. 

McNeely shuttles between the music industry and the art world. With Jasmine Albuquerque and Kristen Leahy, she is a member of the dance trio WIFE, which has performed in Los Angeles at the Museum of Contemporary Art among other venues, and has honed a signature style. Animated images (often of New Age symbols and flora and fauna) are projected onto the trio's bodies as they perform restrained, staccato gestures, as small as the flick of a wrist . 

McNeely contributes the illustrations and animations; the trio collaborates on choreography, costumes, sound, and theme. WIFE's use of projection mapping allows whatever metaphor might have motivated their movements to appear literal. If, in class, McNeely instructs us to conjure a ball of energy and crumble it in our fingers, in WIFE's performances the ball exists, a black form that floats above the dancers' open palms before decomposing down their sides. 

In Past Lives (2015), which the trio has performed at various venues, the three dancers perch on plinths. They are costumed in white, with large headpieces that expand their bodies as projection surfaces. Images of three hourglasses line up with their three forms, and as the sand drains, their bodies collapse, evacuated like balloons. Branches snake up their bodies and bloom into flowers. Green, red, and yellow lights bathe each performer as they strike poses to a sequence of bass hits. Red bursts of smoke appear as if from their mouths. Triangles layered on top of each other become pentacles on their chests. Their bodies are X-rayed into skeletons. They grab their breasts where blood begins to spurt. 

WIFE's work is most successful as an exercise in self-imposed constraint: they dance while sitting down, or keep their erect frames completely still in order to direct all attention to a single gesture, illuminated by the projector. 

I admit to tiring of WIFE's allusions. The New Age iconography they employ, borrowed from seemingly every religion, can read as a symptom of an unattached and ahistorical neoliberal spiritualism rather than a real engagement with ritual. One of their most ambitious works is Enter the Cave (2016), which the trio performed at the Hammer Museum. The production was recently expanded into a three-part work with a larger company at a warehouse in the Frogtown neighborhood of Los Angeles. I rolled my eyes at the hooded creatures carrying canes, whose job it was to lead us between three linked performance spaces. Priestly figures perfumed the venue with incense. One trio of dancers, standing atop a platform in a large fabric cone and wearing gauzy white gowns, resembled a three-headed bride, their faces caked in white makeup. They danced impeccably, timing twists of their heads and contortions of their arms like puppets tethered to a single string. I delighted most of all in recognizing them from the real ritual, McNeely's weekly class, where I gladly trade the animated visualization of her imaginary to embody it myself.

"ENTERTAINMENT IS making art to survive," McNeely tells me over coffee and a joint. She doesn't seek value in being called an "artist," but in being paid for her work-and paid in the kind of currency she can use to buy food. McNeely credits her interest in mysticism to the Catholic Church, whose religious pageantry relies on chants, candles, and timed swings of incense: "shock and awe," as she puts it. McNeely was often praised for her piety as a child, having recognized piety as something one could perform. She locates her penchant for the life of inanimate objects in the saints, "statues that have power over you." 

McNeely's was a ballerina's rebellion. She defected to modern dance, then to hip-hop and burlesque. She declared her initial burlesque performance an "effective accident." Not knowing how to emulate the swift athletics of other dancers, she slowly, simply crawled across the stage. No one moved. No one talked. The restrained movement captured the audience's unwavering attention: they were, as she put it, in "a trance." In the art of seduction, one application of sexuality is control.

Seductive and repulsive, caring and sadistic, manipulated and manipulating, cast as ugly, turned grotesque, sexuality in McNeely's work is never simple self-expression. It extracts attention. I'm reminded of the eighteenth-century category of the "vagrant" in English law, which criminalized as equals sex-workers, beggars, witches, and entertainers. Vagrancy laws prohibited unauthorized kinds of work that entertainers and witches did, work that involved exerting control. I'm also reminded that the etymology of "entertainment" includes the Latin root for "to hold."

"How can you catch something if you're too busy looking at yourself in the mirror? Focus!" McNeely often tells us in class to make our movements smaller. "Don't yell at me with your body," or, because movement is a language, "Stop dancing in all caps." Make it tiny, she offers, modeling a tiny shift in the position of her right hand and her neck, or a fast chain of arms, hands, and elbows-out, in, grab, pull-held close to her body, as if protecting her chest. You want the audience to be "like this," she always says:  "this" looks like a stiff body leaning forward, smoothly, slowly, as if sucked toward the dancer, spellbound, as if dance were something you could fall into like a well. 

IN ADDITION TO working as a teacher and an artist, McNeely is a commercial director and choreographer for live performances and music videos. She's collaborated with pop stars including Eve, Selena Gomez, and Fitz and the Tantrums. For Dillon Francis's "Candy" video, released last year, two white dancers make a humping duet. Decked out in tattered outfits like zombies, they pierce the air and strike mirrored shapes with their arms. In Yogi and Skrillex's "Burial" (2015), a black dance troupe, its double-jointed members wearing stockings over their faces, improvise skin-crawling contortions of their shoulders with break-dancing slides and flips. At one point they form a many-armed creature like an Indian god, before, inexplicably, Dennis Rodman chases them away. 

In McNeely's commercial choreography, as in her classes, pedagogy is central. The dancers have to do a routine she invents. Unlike other pursuits in the art world, where learning has taken on astronomical costs and increasing uncertainty of purpose, teaching is built into the structure of choreography itself. And here, there is no hiding art from its market. McNeely's labor has value in both use and exchange—videography is commercial work (music videos are advertisements for albums and concert sales, establishing a performer's brand); I pay about fifteen dollars a class.

McNeely choreographed Rihanna in the video for "Sledgehammer," a song she contributed to the soundtrack for the movie Star TrekBeyond (2016). Rihanna appears in flowing red fabrics on a craggy desert planet beneath a spectacular starry sky. With part of her hair stuck up like a Mohawk, the middle of her face painted with made-up symbols, she hops easily into the trope of the Africanized alien (see: Avatar). Forcing visible tension into her fingertips, she draws her arms together, summoning a swarm of birdlike, CGI spacecraft, which fill up and then fly off the screen. She draws her hands in a circle beside her, and the sand rises to meet her palms. She conjures a ball of light and juggles electricity. At the video's end she seems to have dissolved into a constellation (a step up, perhaps, from a star). 

Rihanna's circular hand gestures, jagged poses, and tweaked shapes bear McNeely's influence. She told me that to shoot the video, she and Rihanna established a vocabulary of shapes. As the camera rolled, McNeely danced behind it, offering her movements for Rihanna to mirror, if she chose to. This isn't merely puppeteering—the exchange was more an improvisational feedback loop.

TO CHOOSE A song for her class , McNeely studies the graphic sound waves presented on Soundcloud, the music streaming service, looking for a dip and a burst. The music is always first, and the dances follow: every single movement has a sound. To make a dance, many choreographers improvise movements, sketching their combinations before fixing the steps. McNeely stares at the empty space of her room, choreographing herself from outside. This visualization process works its way into her movements: bodies appear to be convulsing, possessed, or animated by some external force. McNeely's choreography involves a kind of bodily ventriloquism.

Multiple ways of thinking about the animated body converge in McNeely's practice. Her performances with WIFE evoke the religious experience of possession: dancers move as if compelled by an alien presence. But her style is also intelligible in terms borrowed from political economy, the jolting, repetitive movements suggesting the condition of alienated labor. Animated by capital, put to work, the human is less an agent than an instrument, a body, receptive to control.

Of course, political economy is inseparable from histories of gender and race, in which women and black people have been viscously treated as pliable. Highlighting unfunded, unauthorized performance—a legacy of vagrancy—McNeely puts "black street performers" and "strippers" on the "same level as ballerinas." Mexican, Filipino, and Irish, McNeely identifies jokingly as "dulce de leche." When I ask her if she's concerned with the politics of borrowing from black music and dance she answers, true to character, "I use what moves me." 

Black people often stand in our contemporary imagination as figures of what it means to survive total commodification.Does hip-hop function in McNeely's practice to emphasize this exploration, citing its "underprivileged" source, or am I merely trying to defend my investment, in other words, my implication? 

IN HER CLASSES, McNeely promotes stealing. By the end, after drilling us in the routine at least a dozen times, she chooses smaller groups of dancers to perform in the center of the room. (For the record, I was chosen once, and screamed like I was about to thank my mother.) The dancers she picks always variously kill it, meaning they look like they are doing next to nothing. I have come to pick some favorites: a lanky, curly-haired white woman who performs like a creature, a black man whose moves are so sharp it makes the spaces between them seem eternal. The rest of the class is meant to "take" or "translate" the movements that they see. "You learn by trying to copy, it doesn't matter what the copies look like," McNeely says. The translations, in my case, feel bleak, or pale, but I press on anyway, knowing that trying on other bodies for size erupts in failures, misalignments, and falsehoods.

 McNeely said her style solidified when she was forced, as a teacher, to choreograph dances for nondancers, stripping out ballet's rigid shapes. She also "surrendered" to her influences-hip-hop street dance, circus, and burlesque-when she "let them in." Here, McNeely lets us in on a paradox of animation: making the puppet move often has the effect of mechanizing the puppeteer.

Her emphasis on possession and animation amounts to an ambivalence about subjectivity. Her puppetlike movements reflect how the systems and logic of capitalism can be embodied. At the same time, her work shows that defying that logic—creating a gap between individuals and the forces that animate them—doesn't have to look like escape or transcendence; it can look like doubling down and experimenting with the weird tensions, twitchy resistances, and downright magic within. It is only fitting that I find McNeely's project most compelling not when it has been codified as "art" but when it appears most like a commodity—a class that I pay for, or a form of entertainment. 

At the end of the half-dozen WIFE performances I've seen, the stage goes black, and McNeely and her collaborators disappear. There is no curtain call. The audience claps to a closed curtain, to an empty stage, to themselves. But at the end of every class, she takes a bow.   

The article first ​was published in www.artinamericamagazine.com

​Barbara Kasten’s restless innovation and unique artistic vision come to the fore in Intervals at Thomas Dane Gallery, London. The exhibition encompasses both historic and recent work that highlights the Chicago-based artist’s distinctive approach to multidisciplinary compositions. Her practice, described as “painting in motion” marries sculpture, photography and film in a poignant exploration of light and space. Meticulous planning and intricate detail go into the assemblies, with the use of glass, mirrors, acrylic and metal elements adding an extra dimension of depth into each.

​Kasten takes inspiration from a wide range of sources, from postmodern design and architecture, constructivism, alongside the lives and works of Kazimir Malevich and Lázló Moholy-Nagy. Furthermore, she is deeply informed by the 1970s California Light and Space Movement, and as a trained sculptor and painter, began to challenge the conventional notions of these disciplines through lens-based practice.

​A chronological approach to her oeuvre reveals a manipulation of space  through elegant style and complex compositions. For example, in Construct, developed in the late 1970s, Kasten captures the transformation of building materials into tableaux with a Polaroid camera. A similarly adventurous approach can be seen in her recent series Transpositions (2014-2016) and Collisions (2016), in which she uses Plexiglas elements to create large-scale installations. The use of this material imbues each piece with its fascinating properties, the combination of its transparency and vivid colour fuse the foreground and background as one abstract surface. In amalgamating a meticulous treatment of materials and an inherent interest in the mysticism of light, Kasten evokes questions concerning the nature of the image-making process. With the descent of physical photographs and the rise of digital pictures, the tension between the substantial and the flat surface adds a poignant and increasingly topical dimension to her oeuvre.

Barbara Kasten: Intervals, Thomas Dane Gallery,  London

​www.thomasdanegallery.com

​by Sarah Williams Goldhagen​

Once finished, any change in the built environment has a way of settling in quickly to become the new normal. A new park or high-rise or bridge takes so long to build that we get habituated to its existence within months of its official opening, indeed sometimes days after the construction workers clear away the orange cones or peel the protective film off glass doors. This, combined with the fact that we tend to pay little mind to that which is static and seemingly immovable, means that we often don’t fully consider the design of preexisting structures or public works, rarely wonder how they might have been different from what we behold. Moreover, unless they impinge directly on our daily routine, even extraordinary, life-altering changes to our surroundings can be overlooked or insufficiently examined.

For most of the past seventy-five years, New York was an introverted city. Residents could be forgiven if they barely registered that four of the city’s five boroughs were on islands, collectively featuring 578 miles of coastline. Most New Yorkers led landlocked lives, as the city offered few opportunities to engage meaningfully with its harbor or waterways. After all, the final portion of Battery Park City’s splendid mile-long esplanade, with its expansive views of New York Harbor, opened only in 1996. The first segment of 550-acre Hudson River Park was completed in 2003. Before the plan for Freshkills Park was drafted in 2001, the Fresh Kills estuary in Staten Island was the site of the world’s largest landfill. Governors Island, the Coast Guard’s local base of operations until 1995, sat wholly out of sight and mind. Sure, we could take in the splendor of the Upper Bay from Brooklyn—but mainly when perched high above it, on the promenade in Brooklyn Heights. To actually feel the spray of water on our faces—without heading to a beach in the outer reaches of Brooklyn or Queens—all we could do was catch a ride on the Staten Island Ferry, just for the fun of it. 

How different the city is becoming. A few decades into an ongoing waterfront reclamation and park-building spree, New York might soon lay claim to being America’s greatest water city. Freshkills Park in Staten Island, which at a gargantuan 2,315 acres will be New York’s largest green space after Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, is to open in stages over the next three decades, with Schmul Park, Owl Hollow Fields, and the bike paths of the New Springville Greenway, all bordering Staten Island’s residential neighborhoods, already completed. Freshkills’s 21-acre North Park Phase 1 is expected to open in 2019, and the 482-acre East Park, one year later. Manhattan-based James Corner Field Operations designed the park’s master plan. On Governors Island, which can be reached by a five-minute, 800-yard ferry ride from Manhattan’s southern tip, 40 acres of new park and public spaces, designed by New York and Rotterdam–based West 8, opened last summer. And the 1.3-mile-long, 85-acre Brooklyn Bridge Park by local firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA), which begins north of the Manhattan Bridge and snakes southward along the East River’s shoreline to end at Atlantic Avenue, is open, and nearly finished. 

Collectively, these large urban parks are thoroughly transforming not just how New Yorkers experience their city but also our understanding of what urban life can and will be in the twenty-first century. So it is important to consider how these parks came to be and what they are. After all, landscape architecture is design, which means that it comprises a series of decisions that could have been made otherwise.  

There are many reasons why New York’s harbor and waterways have become hot sites for urban revitalization. Most immediately, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Vision 2020 plan included mandates to improve the city’s water quality, restore degraded waterfront habitats, and address the anticipated effects of climate change. Parks advance all these goals. They expand the variety of habitats for flora and fauna (including water creatures), thereby fostering species diversity. They increase the city’s permeable surfaces, mitigating flooding caused by heavy rain that can pollute the city’s waterways through effluent overflow. Because parks shift the ratio of absorbent to reflective surfaces, they also help combat New York City’s substantial urban heat-island problem: heat-retaining asphalt and concrete make city temperatures skew hotter than those in the surrounding countryside.

New York’s waterfront park-building campaign epitomizes a reorientation of major cities around the globe toward their aquatic edges, which they increasingly view as valuable public amenities. In the United States and abroad, similar projects are underway from Austin to Los Angeles, from Hamburg to Shanghai. The principal historic factor driving this phenomenon is the consolidation of the shipping and cargo industry: the most profitable container ships today are supersize behemoths, which can dock in only a handful of deepwater ports. The Port Newark–Elizabeth Marine Terminal in New Jersey, the busiest on the East Coast, has been leeching business from countless smaller urban ports for decades, including those that once lined the East and Hudson rivers. Combine this with the more recent reversal of long-standing demographic trends: more and more people are choosing cities over suburbs.1 That has created a generation of urban dwellers who crave the kinds of services and life experiences for themselves and their families that suburban playgrounds and yards once offered them. ​

Most of New York’s shorelines, long in desuetude, were already held in the public trust. So they came to be regarded as obvious sites for major urban redevelopment, and parks were the choice. Mustering the political will to build a new public park is easier than convincing people to build, say, prisons or affordable housing, and a less controversial enterprise than turning land over to private developers. ​

Given the immense financial pressures on public resources today, not only in New York but nearly everywhere, one might reasonably maintain that it scarcely matters what a new public park looks like. Grass, trees, water, playground equipment . . . it’s all good, right? Well, maybe. But there’s good, and then there’s better than good, or even great. Frederick Law Olmsted’s extraordinary 843-acre Central Park—still the gold standard, since 1858—exemplifies the sizable urban park that offers much more than patches of green respite from the asphalt jungle. Designed by Olmsted in collaboration with architect Calvert Vaux, Central Park simultaneously enhances and substantively shapes people’s experience of Manhattan. And while not every park should be Central Park, Olmsted’s masterpiece still offers valuable lessons that can be extrapolated and used to evaluate contemporary park design. ​

​Olmsted’s sculpted, carefully constructed hills, dales, open lawns, and smaller, more protected glades and clearings greatly expand Central Park’s sweep, both literally and perceptually. They create an array of middle grounds between foreground and background, spaces where people compose themselves into discrete tableaux for our delectation: ambling lovers, a father playing Frisbee with his kids, a klatch of mothers with strollers finding relief from the heat under the shade of a tree. Over the course of an hour-long stroll, these vignettes unfold, then change at regular ten- or fifteen- minute intervals. The park’s panoramas befit the shifting, glancing, surveying character of our vision, felicitously coupling monumental vistas with more intimate and protected places where we and our eyes can rest. Here is Olmsted’s brilliance: Central Park is designed to work with human minds and bodies. From the Great Lawn to the Ramble to the lightly managed wilds of the North Woods, the park’s deliberately sculpted topography resonates with our walking feet, scanning eyes, and narrative compulsions. The shifting elevations and vantage points offer up little green scenes from which to construct a variety of memorable images. It all adds up to an immensely rich, layered experience of place.

​We should expect no less of New York’s three most important new or forthcoming parks on Fresh Kills 
and Governors Island, and along the shoreline under the Brooklyn Bridge. Indeed, given the substantial public resources pouring into them and the impact they will have on generations of New Yorkers—if not, through their influence, on parkgoers worldwide—our expectations for this new spate of parks should be sky-high. How will their designs shape our experiences of one of the world’s greatest cities?

The responsibility for designing large urban parks falls on the shoulders of landscape architects. This is a tiny profession—the roster of the American Society of Landscape Architects counts fifteen thousand members, many fewer than the American Institute of Architects’ eighty-eight thousand—and one that has undergone a revolution of sorts in the past two decades. Before the turn of this century, if the phrase “landscape architect” evoked any image, it was of a soil-encrusted WASP designing precious gardens for private clients. The profession seemed engaged in a less-than-urgent enterprise. But the maritime trade’s withdrawal from urban waterfronts, along with declining industry in Rust Belt cities—all those empty lots in Detroit—have left monumental swaths of unused land ripe for redevelopment. Add concerns about climate change and catastrophic weather events like Hurricane Sandy, and the question of how best to design and make use of cityscapes is now being shoved into every urban policy maker’s face. Landscape architecture, once an effete and marginal practice, has become a frontline design profession.  ​

The lead designers of the new parks on Fresh Kills and Governors Island and by the Brooklyn Bridge are three of landscape architecture’s luminaries. British-born James Corner, founder of James Corner Field Operations, shot from obscurity to celebrity nearly overnight with a single gemlike project, the High Line, for which he led a large team of designers that included Diller + Scofidio (Renfro came to the firm later) and Piet Oudof, a Dutch designer of sublime gardens. Field Operations now has dozens of commissions for parks and public spaces around the United States as well as a handful of important projects abroad. Adriaan Geuze leads West 8, which earned early fame for its let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom master plan for defunct docklands in the Borneo-Sporenburg neighborhood in eastern Amsterdam. More recently, West 8 completed Madrid Rio, a major new park on a 3.7-mile stretch along the Manzanares River in the southwestern portion of the Spanish capital. Michael Van Valkenburgh of MVVA snagged the commission for the Brooklyn Bridge Park in 2005 after having prepared its preliminary plan. At that time, his firm was best known for achingly poetic smaller projects such as Wellesley College’s Alumnae Valley and Battery Park City’s Teardrop Park, but since then MVVA has taken on many other gritty large-scale projects, including the Maggie Daley Park in Chicago and the Corktown Common on the Don River in Toronto. For all three firms, designing a major waterfront park in New York was the commission of a lifetime. ​

​Corner, Geuze, and Van Valkenburgh preside over very different constellations in the firmament of contemporary landscape design ideas and sensibilities. Considering each firm individually clarifies their differences in approach; considering all three together reveals some of the most important themes and patterns that dominate discussions about how best to negotiate the natural world’s increasingly fraught, necessary role in urban life.

We must start with the sites for these three parks. Fresh Kills, an extraordinarily beautiful and, in Corner’s words, “strange” place,2contains wetlands, salt marshes, trees, and meadows, all abutting the large William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge. Governors Island’s new 40-acre park occupies the south side of the 172-acre island, and the Brooklyn Bridge Park runs along the shore of the East River. However great the ecological and topographical differences among these sites, Geuze, Corner, and Van Valkenburgh faced similar challenges. All three projects were prepared amid heightened concern about climate change, owing in part to the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy. There remains a palpable sense of urgency to the cause of reconfiguring fragile coastlines. And none of the sites is remotely “natural.” Freshkills Park sits on a monumental pile of fetid garbage that will continue to emit methane and other noxious gases for years. Governors Island more than doubled in size and acquired its current oblong configuration after decades of having landfill dumped along its southern edge, much of it excavated during the construction of the Lexington Avenue subway line and the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel. The mile-plus-long shoreline of the Brooklyn Bridge Park featured six piers of decrepit warehouses and docks that were severed from surrounding neighborhoods by the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway. ​

Beyond their commitment to enhancing public life, Corner, Geuze, and Van Valkenburgh have little in common when it comes to building on postindustrial sites. Corner made his name as the leading intellectual figure in landscape urbanism, a movement promoting the importance of ecology and the management of open spaces in city planning. In a succession of conference presentations and treatises laced with postmodern jargon, Corner has argued the somewhat obvious case that the best design is a “dynamic, open-ended matrix [that] can never be operated upon with any certainty as to outcome and effect.”3 The landscape urbanism he champions “escapes design”: the right scheme will magically emerge when data collected using various disciplines and methods—forestry, marine biology, graphic design, environmental engineering, acoustics—is inputted into a parametrically sophisticated program of sufficient computational power. Corner’s is a broad-brush approach: nature and people, he maintains, will fill in the details over time. ​

Geuze, too, associates himself with landscape urbanism, but in practice his approach is quite different. The Dutch have traditionally taken a heavy hand when it comes to sculpting landscapes, since much of the Netherlands sits on dike-protected reclaimed land below sea level. Despite echoing Corner to criticize colleagues who, he feels, do “too much design,”4 Geuze brings a rather conventional sensibility to his appointed task, with an interest in narrative and strongly modeled views, in the spirit of formal European gardens. His designs for waterfront parks in Toronto and Madrid feature simple oppositions, large monochromatic planes, aggressively repetitive patterns, and nakedly iconic gestures such as torquing and trussed bridges painted bright red. ​

Van Valkenburgh, by contrast, deeply believes in the redemptive power of design, and unapologetically approaches landscape architecture as an art. If Corner’s approach is top-down, Van Valkenburgh’s is bottom-up. He combines an encyclopedic knowledge of ecology with a dogged focus on human sensory experience that is informed by intuition, along with occasional assists from environmental psychology. His complexly layered, topographically varied landscapes feature curving paths, constructed hillocks, and mystery-laden sequences culminating in surprises, like a monumental view or a rough-hewn, rocky amphitheater. ​

What are New Yorkers getting in their new waterfront parks? Freshkills Park, by dint of both its enormity and the complexity of its challenges, differs substantially from the other two. Even though very little of Corner’s design has been executed, Freshkills Park is an exceptionally beautiful place. At sea level, a linked series of wetlands, freshwater creeks, and tidal saltwater flats stretch over 3.4 square miles to create a meandering, many-fingered landscape of marshy, soft edges. It is kayaking heaven. From these waterways rise first swamp grasses, then intermittent woodlands, and finally, the four hills comprising fifty-plus years of New York’s garbage. Each one rises over one hundred feet. The city sanitation department sealed the trash mounds (except for the West Mound, which will be capped by 2021), then spread dirt around them and planted grass seeds. In most of the park, the only visible remnants of the site’s malodorous past are the occasional leachate-monitoring wells and landfill gas-well header pipes, which are capped metal tubes protruding knee-high from the ground. Today, Freshkills features astonishing, unbounded expanses of meadows where tall, wheat-colored, red-tinged grasses sway in breezes, layered above meandering waterways and beneath the big skies one associates more with the western plains than with the East Coast, much less Staten Island. ​

Corner describes his vision for Freshkills as “more of a national park kind of experience” than a conventional urban park.5 Nature over time will be his coauthor. Everything Field Operations has proposed for this site treads lightly on the land, and rightly so. The North Park Phase 1, which borders the West Shore Expressway, the Travis neighborhood, and the Davis Wildlife Refuge, will run along the base of the North Mound in a long, lazy arc edged by a screen of trees, slowly rising to culminate in a lightly wooded plateau with a simply designed bird-watching tower. For the 482-acre East Park, expected to open in 2021, Field Operations envisions open grasslands with a wetland boardwalk, a picnic area, and a kayak launch. ​

​However well or poorly Corner’s less-is-more approach works in other Field Operations projects, it suits the manifold challenges of Freshkills precisely. Enhance these wondrous offerings by making them accessible, and otherwise leave them alone. Even though it remains closed to the public, Freshkills is already accruing substantive ecological benefits for the region, foremost among them enhancing species diversity, which is woefully absent in New York’s overbuilt environment. The New York City Parks Department has already counted many species that have reappeared on the site long after fleeing the region, such as deer, northern snapping turtles, gray squirrels, raccoons, weasels, and foxes. Returning bird species include the American kestrel, turkey vulture, ring-necked pheasant, red-winged blackbird, tree swallow, American goldfinch, osprey, and red-tailed hawk. The birds disperse seeds in the meadows, helping propagate more indigenous plants. For the meadows, Corner envisions fields of native flora: switchgrass, yarrow, goldenrod.

​If Freshkills Park will serve as New Yorkers’ refuge from the city, Governors Island and Brooklyn Bridge Park both offer refuges in the city. The uninhabited thirty-three-acre northern portion of Governors Island features a historic district and national monument anchored by Fort Jay (1806–09) and the semicircular, hewn-sandstone Castle Williams (1811), both administered by the National Parks Service. This area also contains Colonel’s Row, a collection of late nineteenth-century historic homes arrayed around a small grassy knoll, as well as Nolan Park, which has the feel of a New England village green, and the enormous U-shaped Liggett Hall, originally a 350,000-square-foot army barracks, designed by McKim, Mead & White and completed in 1930.

West 8’s new park begins at Liggett Terrace, a public plaza by the hall, and spreads from there to occupy nearly all of the island’s southern tip, which sits about one thousand yards from Liberty Island. Geuze organized a collection of petal-shaped, low-slung green-and-brown areas that progressively increase in size, with plantings and play equipment arranged in a variety of visual patterns.Near Liggett Terrace, low, tightly floriated hedgerows trace out little paths. Further out, a long, linear climbing structure encourages kids to hoist and swing themselves while their parents loll about on its suspended nets. On a third, larger, grassy section, fifty red hammocks stretch between tree trunks. This so-called Hammock Grove doesn’t look like much now, but when the trees mature and spread their leafy crowns, it could offer an appealingly idle way to spend a pleasant summer afternoon. ​

The curvilinear zones are accessible via wide, asphalt-paved pathways lined with white pillowed curbs in patterned concrete. Everything points toward the main event, the Hills, which opened to the public in July. Four artificial mounds, ranging in height from twenty-five to seventy feet, first hide, then reveal views of the harbor and—voila!—the Statue of Liberty. Geuze’s instinct to sculpt at least a portion of Governors Island’s pancake-flat topography into a more three-dimensional landscape repeats Olmsted’s modeling of Central Park. But here the gesture feels simplistic. A forty-acre park should offer much more than a show-stopping main event. Indeed, it’s not even certain that such a place needs a single climactic moment. (Leslie Koch, former president and CEO of the Trust for Governors Island, would likely disagree, as she reasoned that only something extraordinary would convince people to get on the ferry to make the trip out there in the first place.)

Consistent with Geuze’s interest in narrative, the sequence we travel from Liggett Terrace to the Hills gradually unfurls a view of the Statue of Liberty, spatially telling a story about the anticipation of democratic tolerance symbolized by the monument. But that’s a tale that all of us already know and don’t really need to hear again. Overall, the problem with West 8’s design is that it’s a single, banged-out chord rather than the symphony of high notes and low notes that characterizes a really great urban park. It doesn’t offer the shifting rhythms that make us want to return again and again, knowing that we will find something new. It’s telling—and damning—that Geuze, happily envisioning people’s experience on Outlook Hill, says, “We expect people will take a selfie there.”7 Although the long chutes on Slide Hill invite more sustained engagement, at least for kids, not much else does. It’s all too one-shot, or snapshot. The Hills are little more than a view-production device. Rachel Whiteread’s otherwise haunting Cabin (2016), a concrete cast of a wooden hut on Discovery Hill, exacerbates rather than mitigates the impression. A house that no one can enter, this is a piece of public art that deflects rather than invites engagement, let alone exploration. Once you’ve seen this place, you’re done. ​

There are other disappointments in West 8’s design. Geuze reportedly spent a quarter of the budget raising the level of the park site by sixteen feet, warning of its imperilment by flooding; in the process, he fortified the bastionlike quality of the shoreline rather than breaking it up. Sure, it’s a vulnerable site. But to maximize ecological benefit of such reclamation projects, sloping inclines and soft, fuzzy edges work best, because they foster species diversity in a way that raised, hard edges don’t. (To be fair, the depth of the surrounding waters may have made softening the park’s descent to the water prohibitively expensive.) Either way, the oddest things about West 8’s design remain its contextual disconnects. Here you stand on an uninhabited island in New York Harbor, in a funky but mannered update of a formal European garden. And your relationship to the water is never more than purely visual, a pictorial scene rather than a three-dimensional, embodied immersion in the landscape. The whole composition feels abstracted from the site. ​

It would be challenging to imagine a greater contrast to either the Hills or Freshkills Park than the new $355 million park in Brooklyn. Complex, urbane, ecologically rich, and experientially layered, Brooklyn Bridge Park represents a triumph so astonishing that Olmsted may no longer need to serve as the touchstone for all that landscape architecture can accomplish and be. Van Valkenburgh could be the Olmsted that our twenty-first century needs.  ​

​We should start by considering the site as it looked in 2005, when MVVA completed the master plan: an asphalt-paved shoreline cleaved from the city by the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway and strung with a monotonous series of deteriorating concrete piers. Reconceptualizing this as a major urban park took grit, along with a good deal of imagination. Matthew Urbanski, the lead designer on the project under Van Valkenburgh, told me that during the design process, he constantly asked himself one question: for this park’s projected users, what experiences are missing from the city that landscape architecture can realistically provide?8 In interviews and publications, Van Valkenburgh frequently recounts one early community “visioning” meeting, when an elderly woman said that she lived on a fixed income and owned no country house where she could escape the summer heat. She wanted a place where she could go at dusk, take off her shoes, and stand in the East River while gazing up at the moon.

Olmsted maintained that great parks offer a wide range of experiences for the many different people who use them in various times and seasons. Brooklyn Bridge Park, now 90 percent complete, does that in spades. MVVA parceled out a variety of spaces for passive and active recreational pursuits. Pier 1, to the north, features spacious, sculpted lawns, a waterfront promenade, terraces paved with variegated stone, including a twenty-nine-foot-high amphitheater built from rough-hewn granite blocks where you can look out on the bay and take in the skyline of lower Manhattan. At Piers 2 and 5, jocks young and old congregate, using the basketball and handball courts, an in-line skating track, and the playing fields for soccer, field hockey, and lacrosse. Pier 3, which has a projected completion date of spring 2018, will feature the kind of undulating, highly controlled, seemingly naturalistic landscapes that earned Van Valkenburgh his reputation: hillocks and gently sloping dales bordered with shrubbery and trees to define a central lawn. A serpentine labyrinth garden at Pier 3’s northern edge is reminiscent of MVVA’s stunning Monk’s Garden at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. ​

Everywhere in Brooklyn Bridge Park topographical relationships are precisely planned, carefully managed. During the design process, Van Valkenburgh climbed up on a ladder at the site to gauge the projected height of slopes and refine the design of the paths up and down constructed hills. Again and again, spatial sequences lead us from compressed, heavily planted, winding paths to an explosive release, where horizontal vistas offer up grassy expanses, paved promenades, and monumental waterfront views. As in Olmsted’s parks, the design starts from the individual human body, walking and scanning, listening, touching and imagining touching, anticipating. ​

Upland from the natural outcroppings and the piers, a green spine connects it all. One section of the park’s central Greenway sits quite close to the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway, so MVVA designed a thirty-five-foot-high berm, called the Ridge, that redirects the highway’s deafening drone, cutting noise in the park by 75 percent. (Last summer, goats could be spotted grazing on the Ridge.) Proliferating along the Greenway is an appealingly wild composition of trees, shrubs, grasses, and flowers, many of them native to the area. Between the piers, riprap attenuates the East River’s waves, as will floating boardwalks when funding is secured. A sloping shoreline offers all manner of inviting amenities: a sinuous kayak launch, marshy wetlands, a pebble beach where elderly women and everyone else can stand in the water and gaze at the moon. ​

Urbanski told me that Brooklyn Bridge Park’s design is guided by faith in complexity.10 This park is full: full of ways for people to use and enjoy and regard the city and its harbor, together and alone. It is also full of sustainability and resilience: green roofs, recycled materials, soft edges. It’s full of varied ecological habitats, including a saltwater lagoon and marshes, a shallow subtidal pebble beach, a dune, a wildflower meadow, a freshwater swale, wetlands, and a coastal forest with dense berried shrubbery to attract birds along the Atlantic flyway. It is full of public art. It is full of social initiatives, like the barbecue pits and picnic tables that draw people from neighborhoods geographically close to but economically distant from tony Brooklyn Heights. And most of all, Brooklyn Bridge Park is full of people: in 2014, the yet-unfinished park received an estimated  4.5 million visitors between May and August alone.  ​

MVVA embraced the site’s industrial past, starting from the preexisting twenty-five acres of concrete pier slabs, working alongside and with their detritus. On the piers, the firm demolished the warehouse sheds but retained their steel frames, painting them sky blue. These serve as scale-giving devices that help visitors visually reconcile the enormity of the bay with the smallness of human bodies on the ground. Tens of thousands of feet of longleaf yellow pine were harvested from the demolished cold storage building on Pier 1 and recruited for use in park benches, small structures, and wood decking. The waterlogged, rotting wood pilings were left in place, offering a poignant anthem to Brooklyn’s ferrying, shipping past. ​

​The zenith of the park’s design is the 1.6-acre Children’s Playground, located near the Atlantic Avenue entrance, which Urbanski designed in collaboration with environmental psychologists Nilda Cosco and Robin Moore at the Natural Learning Initiative. It features multifarious opportunities for children of all ages to explore, wonder, learn, and play. There’s a marsh garden scaled to little feet and hands, as well as a jet field and a “water lab,” which includes teaching structures such as the large wood-and-metal contraption that funnels a stream of water with propulsive force to rotate a pinwheel made of cups in various sizes. There is a valley of swing sets sized for young bodies, ranging from infants to teens, and a two-story slide that ends in a large sandbox. The box is dotted with wooden, metal, and rope-climbing structures in striking geometric shapes, and populated with stone animals as sentinels. The last time I visited, on a hot midsummer day, the playground was crammed with children and their guardians, clad in cutoff jeans and kippas and hijabs and whatever passed that Saturday for Brooklyn casual chic. Brooklyn Bridge Park is the very democratic social condenser that only a great urban park can provide.

Van Valkenburgh, like Corner, grounds his design in research drawn from a variety of disciplines and methodologies. What his Brooklyn Bridge Park shows is that research, though necessary, will never be sufficient. You need something more. Van Valkenburgh calls it heart. What he means, though, is that the landscape architect—like any architect—must have a deep appreciation for the complex, multisensory nature of human experience. Seeing and selfies matter. But so do sounds, tactile sensations, and memories cultivated over time. Moreover, Van Valkenburgh understands that great landscapes offer different things to different people, as well as different things to the same people over time: in darkness and light, in winter and spring, on quiet days and noisy ones. ​

Brooklyn Bridge Park has been fifteen years in the making. It will take perhaps twice that long for the same kind of progress to be visible at Freshkills Park. But slowly, these landscape architects and their projects are utterly reconfiguring New Yorkers’ relationship to the city’s extraordinary harbor, that protected deepwater estuary that helped make New York what it is by offering first explorers, then traders, access to both the ocean and the wide, navigable Hudson River. Today, life in the big city includes navigating through oaks and hickories, sighting barn swallows and chimney swifts high in the sky or herons and egrets at the water’s edge, listening to the sounds of cattails in the breeze and the rustle of squirrels foraging for elderberries. ​

​Who knew? Perhaps life in the hyper-dense global cities of our age will be something worth treasuring after all.

​SARAH WILLIAMS GOLDHAGEN is an author and architecture critic based in New York.

Only a day after the planner's off-timetable show in Kaliningrad, Russia, Super Sunglasses has discharged the promoting effort for its cooperation with Gosha Rubchinskiy. ​

Coordinated and altered by one of Rubchinskiy's long-term colleagues, Julian Klincewicz (the 21-year-old skater, artist, originator, picture taker and movie producer), the film highlights a few diverse solo moves. One artist (presented above) performs on the shoreline wearing one of the planner's SS17 tracksuits made in a joint effort with Italian sportswear mark Kappa. ​

​Portrayed by Super as like "an expressive dance", the film brings the universes of move and design together, shot in Klincewicz's mark lo-fi stylish. Concerning the shades themselves, they take after oversize wrap arounds, in dark and in white with yellow-tinted focal points.

Rubchinskiy has collaborated with a great deal marks in his time – from Reebok, Supreme and Vans, to Fila, Kappa, and Sergio Tacchini for SS17. At yesterday's show, the fashioner divulged an unexpected coordinated effort with German sportswear monster adidas. Drawing motivation from footballers' on-field and off-field garbs, the accumulation saw a combination of soccer and skate style. ​

“In the 90s or 80s, it was separated: football fans were football fans and skaters were skaters,” the designer said post-show. “But now things are changing, you see skate kids wearing football clothes and you can see football fans wearing skate stuff. Cultures mix, subcultures mix.

​The theme of the carnival has always been one of the most important for Mikhail Shemyakin - mystical carnival, gofmanian. The artist started out as befits Soviet nonconformist, a janitor and a loader work at the Hermitage, with expulsion from school at Repin Institute, and then out of the country. Since Shemyakin received worldwide fame and returned to Russia, but its gloomy ambiguous (could not tell people or dolls) characters have not changed. It seems natural that his first theatrical performance was staged by Dmitri Shostakovich opera "The Nose", on which the artist worked at the Leningrad Conservatory studio in 1967. Since then have been a series of graphic works and sculptures with distinctive characters and, most importantly, ballet gofmaniana Shemyakin - costumes and scenography "Nutcracker" performances (2001), "The Princess Pirlipat" (2003) and "The Magic Nut" (2005) at the Mariinsky Theatre. It works for these performances are the basis of an opening at the St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music Exhibition. They complement the work of others, one-act ballets, costumes march "Great Embassy of Peter the Great," which Mikhail Shemyakin, together with Vyacheslav Polunin set for the carnival in Venice, lithographs from the series "St. Petersburg Carnival". Interestingly, the heroes of the Shemyakin graphics and scenography broke in volume: in porcelain (represented by a series created by the Imperial Porcelain Factory), Christmas toys, miniatures (in conjunction with the jewelry house Sasonko). The organization of the exhibition participated Fund - Mikhail Shemyakin.

The exhibition is open from 16 February until April 9 ​

​The book collected closest friend of the artist, the master of performance Vladislav Mamysheva Monroe (1969-2013) Elizaveta Berezovskaya, include sufficient numbers of memoirs evidence.

​Here, among other things, you can find extensive and penetrating lyrics Nina Mamysheva (mother of the artist), fine essays prominent art critic Ekaterina Andreeva (a fellow member of his affairs at St. Petersburg), essays by Alexander Borovsky, Olga Sviblova and a host of other precious materials. There is a book and stupid like small fragments of memoir Andrey Bartenev, who showed that Mamyshev Monroe also held in the Department of jokes.

​Meanwhile, it is not. Of course, the Monroe loved fun, outrageous, wore a beautiful and expensive things, and did everything to get into high society, whose members are often bought his work (at least it is constantly referred to in the various posthumous publications).

​But Monroe, unlike Bartenev was not just a showman in the celebration of life. His varied work combines virtuosity and handicraft, united by the desire to show that human beings desperately empty and needs filling.

That's why (nature, as we know, abhors a vacuum) so he needed masks and decorations: three-layer makeup, formal suit, royal coat and other simulative accessories.
​

That's why it's so important to find, invent itself double, for example, in the face of the legendary actress, whose life has not yet been solved: how much pain it was for all of her novels and luxury style ...
​

What do we expect from the memoirs of a memorial book about one of the key characters of his time?
​

Firstly, the accuracy in the image of the hero contradictory. Monroe loved and knew how to stay in the memory of anyone, even accidentally encountered a person forever: for him, they say, it was impossible to remain indifferent.
​

​Secondly, of course, expect from such a collection of absorption at a time when the main character and his friends were young and live it in full.

​This book is quite a lot, but not enough to block the moment in which, in contrast to the main character's memoirs, alive and all his reminiscing and talking about it.

​The three museums: the Museum of Moscow's State Tretyakov Gallery and the State Museum of Fine Arts. Pushkin - open this winter exhibition of the most energetic of the Soviet era. Fine arts, architecture, science, poetry, cinema, fashion - all aspects of Khrushchev's lifetime will be presented in the exhibition. And in the exhibition marathon will attend about 30 institutions, and it is unprecedented in our museum practice.

​​The first exhibition - "Moscow thaw: 1953-1968" at the Museum of Moscow - was launched in December. Chronologically, it counts the time since the death of Joseph Stalin and the first steps to a warming of the political climate in the Soviet Union, which began even before the famous XX Party Congress in 1956, where the general secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Nikita Khrushchev first denounced the cult of personality. One of the main tasks of the curatorial group (it included Eugene Kikodze, Sergey Nevsky, Olga Rosenblum, Alexander Selivanov and Maxim Semenov) would dive into the atmosphere of the time. The exhibition is arranged like a labyrinth, it exhibits - and their exhibition of nearly 600, - if the peaceful atom, are combined into one molecule of the exposition. Each section visualizes structural vectors age: mobility, transparency, grille, capsule, organic - common rhythms invisible waves combine things from completely different areas of life. Clocks, porcelain, sculpture, clothing, pictures, paintings, posters, and architectural models are included in the free exhibition improvisation, a pulsating rhythm in jazz.

​Bright stylish dresses emotionally close abstraction Leo Kropivnitskogo "sad irresponsibility." Spiral contemporary sculpture Nikolay Silis rhyme with a model of the monument to the first artificial Earth satellite. Portrait of a nuclear physicist Lev Landau Vladimir Lemport does not contradict the wedding mini dress from the then fashionable synthetics. A picture of slender rows of five-storey Khrushchev rhythmically coincide with the geometric abstraction on fabrics factory Pilot bureau "red rose." Their author Anna Andreeva was obviously familiar with the works of Russian avant-garde artists like: its fabric with geometric pattern reminiscent of the 1920 samples Varvara Stepanova.

​The word "experimental" label found on the show frequently. The very thaw experiment was fantastic in all areas of life. The close alliance of physicists and poets made possible the most daring experiments, and because the art at the time such pseudo-scientific and scientific achievements - so beautiful.

​Experimental electronic music studio at the firm "Melody" has developed the first ANS synthesizer, the exhibition presents his photographs. Photoelectric optical synthesizer was elegant, like a piano, and at the same time remained a model of the latest technologies. In 1960-1970-ies it wrote musical tracks to films on the space theme, including "Solaris" by Andrei Tarkovsky. A first Soviet electronic computer UM-1 HX released Leningrad electromechanical plant, recalls the Swiss Jean Tinguely sculpture. At the same time painting a circle of artists of the magazine "Knowledge - force" Hulot Sooster and Yuri Sobolev - a scientific treatises, clothed in artistic form.

​Thaw - this new organization of life. For the first time avant-garde artists are engaged in the professional development of residential spaces. In 1960, everywhere: in movies, exhibitions, magazines - there are examples of new interiors. In the Soviet Union developed the design. Armchair, coffee table, floor lamp become indispensable triad of new intellectual life. Watch "Dawn" at the exhibition - a sample of high style, created by Soviet designers. Already in the 1950s, in the diplomas of students of the Architectural Institute develops new stylish interiors, industrial and residential, the main trends coincide with the global trends.

​In the 1960s, it flourished, and the second Russian avant-garde, inspired several exhibitions of Western art in Moscow. Soviet modernism initially was imitative, yet raised in the original phenomenon. Early works by Yuri Sobolev, in the future, the main artist of the magazine "Knowledge - force", in the early 1960s, more reminiscent of the late Pablo Picasso, and the first abstraction Vladimir Nemukhin - drippingovye Suites Jackson Pollock.

​The sixties can not be imagined without space theme. Yuri Gagarin Cult and enthusiasm for the first spaceflight joined millions of people, which is reflected in popular culture. Hosts were limited by several important artifacts. Sweets "Moon", "Belka and Strelka", models of monuments, issue of the newspaper "Izvestia" with the title "It is finished!" And a few rare photos give a vivid impression of the start time of the conquest of space.

​​February 16 the exhibition takes the baton Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val. There will be opened the exhibition "The Thaw" supervised by Cyril Svetlyakova, Julia and Anastasia Vorotyntseva Kurlyandtsevoy where epoch appear not only as a period of total optimism, but also in all its contradiction. It will show paintings flagships time: Erik Bulatov, Anatoly Zverev, Helium Korzheva, Ernst Unknown, Tahir Salahov. An interesting comparison of the two will be areas of the Soviet abstraction: Yuri Zlotnikov scientific and lyrical Belutin Eliya. Next to the work of professionals can be seen artistic experiments Atomic physicists have become key figures in the era. Among the amateur artists turned academician Dmitry Blokhintsev, director of the Joint Institute for Nuclear researchers in Dubna.

​Another hit of the exhibition are sketches of the interiors of the Soviet spacecraft designer Galina Balashova, until recently classified. In the works of the painter and sculptor Nicholas Vechtomova Vadim Sidur touched a painful subject of war injuries. The fragments landmark for 1960 films will be raised questions about the relationship between private and public, the formation of a new elite and the changing notion of philistinism.

​The exhibition in the Tretyakov Gallery will accompany the lecture series "Pushing the Limits. Art after World War II. Europe and the Soviet Union. " Prepared in the museum and festival called "Mayakovsky Square" with performances was located there in 1960-1970-ies the theater "Contemporary", and the film festival "The war is over."

​Finally, in March, will present his version of the thaw of the Pushkin Museum. The exhibition "Facing the future. European Art 1945-1968 "will bring together 200 works of different artists from 18 European countries. In the framework of the six round tables will be held with the participation of foreign experts.

​But that's not all. In February, it planned to hold a party at a skating rink in Gorky Park, where everyone is welcome. The only condition: it is necessary to dress in the style of the 1960s. In April, the Museum of Gorky Park will open the exhibition of household items, clothing, accessories and sports equipment. In May, the festival will join the cinema "Pioneer", where films will be screened, as well as lectures on fashion and meeting with the park staff who worked there in the 1960s. And finish the whole cascade of events thaw in June with a grand concert in Gorky Park with the hits of the 1960s and with the participation of the theater "Contemporary" actors.

​Moscow City Museum
Moscow thaw: 1953-1968
until March 31,

​State Tretyakov Gallery
Thaw
February 16 - 11 June

​State Museum of Fine Arts. AS Pushkin
Facing the future. Art in Europe 1945-1968
7 March to 21 May

KW Institute for Contemporary Art is enchanted to declare the performance presentation by South-African artist Ian Wilson (born 1940 in Durban, ZA). Ian Wilson has been investigating the stylish capability of talked language since the late 1960s. His continuous assemblage of work—starting with "oral correspondence" and in the end including his mark Discussions—started in 1968 with the spoken word "time". The artist, who started as a painter, soon changed the demonstration of dialog into his sole creative medium. More than four decades, the concentration of these trades has moved from time to the way of learning and non-information, and consciousness of 'the Absolute'. His works are not recorded or captured at all, and exist just the length of the discussion itself. Wilson's longing for deliberation initially showed as works of art that investigated and tried the points of confinement of discernment. In spite of the fact that Wilson's initial artistic creations and models are unmistakably physical items, they additionally flag a slant to make decrease and deliberation one-stride further, to the point of freeing specialty of physical properties out and out.

The exhibition inaugurates the main period of executive Krist Gruijthuijsen's aesthetic program at KW, which looks at Wilson's work through three comparing solo introductions by Hanne Lippard, Adam Pendleton, and  Paul Elliman. Wilson's work will be physically and adroitly inserted inside every display, filling in as a structure for investigating parts of language and communication, and the more extensive criticalness of collaboration between people. The display is consequently in consistent flux and changes progressively over the span of its term.

source: www.kw-berlin.de

This intriguing presentation, curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath in participation with Bernard Blistene and Catherine David of the Center Pompidou, is committed to the Surrealist artist and essayists assemble Art et Liberté. It introduces somewhat known part in the tasteful battles and the political activism in Egypt in the vicinity of 1938 and 1948. Energizing behind the Egyptian Surrealist writers Georges Henin and Albert Cossery's 1937 declaration "Long Live Degenerate Art," which remained contrary to Hitler's assault on modern art in Munich, the group thought about Surrealism as a characteristic masterful articulation of contemporary issues outside of Fascism, Communism, and Capitalist belief system.

Art et Liberté was founded in Cairo at first to challenge the profoundly enthusiastic yearly Salon du Caire, which  organized artists by nationality. The group countered with Surrealist presentations and works that rejected the relationship of art and nationalism; they expelled the famous stylish streams, running from Symbolism to Naturalism. The Art et Liberté artists, writers, photographers, and filmmakers joined with dislodged artists who had international affiliations, in this manner permitting Art et Liberté to extend its compass to Paris, London, Athens, and San Francisco.

It characterized its central goal as  making art  that would be a vehicle for social change. In that way, they adjusted themselves to André Breton and Leon Trotsky's 1938 pronouncement "For an Independent Revolutionary Art." In the meantime—like their partners in Eastern Europe and Latin America—they demanded that Egyptian Surrealism had local roots in people stories and specialties and in addition in Coptic religious art. Out of this, Art et Liberté advanced its own meaning of Surrealism, trusting that, notwithstanding being a  art movement, its fundamental mission was “social and moral revolution.”

The painter Ramses Younane, for instance, needed to take Surrealism beyond Dalí and Magritte, whose work he considered excessively unsure, excessively figured, and excessively restricted in extension, making it impossible to take into consideration unconstrained creative ability. He additionally thought to be programmed composing and drawing excessively self-included and ailing in social mindfulness. Rather, Art et Liberté detailed a style called Subjective Realism, whereby artists consolidated recognizable symbols in works inspired by imagination.

In this specific circumstance, that standard subject of naturalist writing and social-realist art, the whore in the city, turned into a noteworthy concentration for issues of social disparity and financial misuse. 

Pioneering women in the group—Amy Nimr, Nata Lovett-Turner, and Natalija Tile—made feminism a central concern in their own publications, such as the Arabic language al-Tatawwur and the French Don Quichotte. In paintings depicting fragmented bodies, emaciated, distorted, or dismembered figures the female body expressed the society’s harrowing injustice. Photographers, like Lee Miller, Ida Kar, Hassia, Rami Zolgomah, Khorshid, and Van Leo, used solarization and photomontage to deconstruct the human form and created surrealist juxtapositions that were commentaries on colonialism and the Fascist exploitation of Pharaonic Egypt.

Before the finish of World War II, in 1946, Art et Liberté was separated by a disagreeing association, the Contemporary Art Group, which no longer related to Surrealism and needed to build up a genuine Egyptian Art. Out of this gathering rose some of Egypt's driving present day artist, including, Abdel Hadi el-Gazzar, Hamed Nada, and Samir Rafi. This show gives a novel point of view on the chronicled and social many-sided quality—the artistic, intellectual, and political life of a culture we now see as diminished to religious and political philosophy. It additionally clarifies the sudden appearance on the international art scene  of the sculptures and paintings of Saloua Raouda Choucair, who was Lebanese and of the Druze Religion. Her work evolved amid the turmoil in Beirut, Lebanon—once considered the Switzerland of the Middle East.

​Alexander  R. Galloway 

​In the early 1990s François Laruelle wrote an essay on James Turrell, the American artist known for his use of light and space. While it briefly mentions Turrell's Roden Crater and is cognizant of his other work, the essay focuses on a series of twenty aquatint etchings made by Turrell called First Light (1989-1990). Designed to stand alone as prints, First Light nevertheless acts as a kind of backward glance revisiting and meditating on earlier corner light projections made by Turrell in the late 1960s, in particular works like Afrum-Pronto (1967). For the exhibition of First Light at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1990, “the aquatints [were] arranged in groups based on the white shape that hovers in the dense black field of each print. In the installation, with light projected onto the images, the shapes appear to glow and float; viewed in sequence, they seem to move. The effect, from print to print, is tracelike and mesmerizing.”

“I am dealing with no object,” Turrell said in a lecture a few years after producing First Light. “I am dealing with no image, because I want to avoid associative, symbolic thought... I am dealing with no focus or particular place to look. With no object, no image and no focus, what are you looking at?” Indeed the object of First Light is perception itself, as Turrell was the first to admit.

No object, no image, no focus—no wonder Laruelle was drawn to First Light. It represents the very core principles of the non-standard method. For Laruelle, Turrell's art work poses a basic problem. “Light makes manifest,” he acknowledges. “But what will manifest the light?” Systems of representation reveal aspects of the world to perceiving subjects; this is how light makes manifest. But is it possible to see light in itself, not in relation to a perceived object? Is it possible to manifest the rigorously immanent genericness of light itself?

Laruelle's essay on Turrell makes two essential claims, one about perception and the other about light. Regarding the former, Laruelle asserts that we must think perception not think about perception. Regarding the latter, Laruelle wishes to discover the non-orientable nature of light. As he admits, there is a light of orientation, a philosophical light. But there is also a light that does not seek to orient perception along a particular set of lines. It is this second kind of orientation that Laruelle seeks and that he sees evident in the work of Turrell. (Taking advantage of a play on words, Laruelle sometimes labels this kind of non-standard orientation “occidental” to differentiate it from what he sees as the endless orientalism of philosophy.)

Laruelle explores these two essential claims by way of three different themes stemming from Turrell's work: discovery, experimentation, and identity. Just as Deleuze did in his book on Francis Bacon, Laruelle assumes from the outset that Turrell and his art are performing theoretical work as such. Laruelle's is not a theoretical interpretation of a non-theoretical art work; the work itself is enacting the non-standard method. Turrell “has discovered a new aesthetic (and theoretical) object: light as such, the being-light of light.” Thus in Laruelle's view, Turrell himself discovered a non-phenomenological solution to the problem of light.

In an attempt to describe what he means by discovery, Laruelle draws attention to the subtle differences in meaning embedded in Turrell's title. “Turrell's title 'First Light' is ambiguous and can be interpreted in two ways. In the weakest sense it means just what it means, first light, the first among many, its own relative position in a continuous order in which it is included. In the strong sense it means light first, all the light given at once, without residual or supplement, without division or 'plays-of-light.'”

This second sense, the strong sense, is most appealing to Laruelle, for it indicates the identity of light as a kind of first givenness, light as raw discovery or invention without supplement. Part of Laruelle's aim is to move away from the conventional way in which light appears in philosophical discourse, for example in phenomenology, which tends to think of light through a process of withdrawing and revealing. Laruelle's light is thus not white but black, absolutely black. “The black immanence of this light [...] lets it escape from all phenomenology stemming from the greco-philosophical type.”

In order to describe the radical nature of Turrell's non-standard art, Laruelle poses a hypothetical scenario:
Imagine a photographer tired of using light to fix his "subject" or whatever other objects were before him. Imagine that this photographer was crazy enough to want to fix the light as light. If so, this would not be the light from distant stars, but a light without stars, without source no matter how distant or hidden, a light inaccessible to the camera. Should the photographer abandon his technique and find another? Or should he generalize his technique across the various forms of the darkroom, the white cube, and the camera obscura in order to proliferate the angles, the frames, the perspectives, the openings and shutters used to capture (or perhaps to seduce) the light itself? Would he not be making, in essence, the kind of work that Turrell makes?

Turrell's light is a light that doesn't come from the stars. Laruelle gives it an unusual label; he calls it a photic materiality.

Being both non-cosmic and non-ontological, Turrell's light does not orient the viewer. Instead, according to Laruelle, Turrell's light performs experiments on perception and retrains it according to alternative logics. This mode of experimentation produces what he calls an aesthetic generalization of perception in order to unilateralize the conventional prohibitions placed on perception by philosophy. Instead of philosophy or photography setting the agenda, “light acts instead...like a drive that has its own 'subjectivity,' or like an a priori force.”9 Turrell's experimental mandate, therefore, is to allow both the artist and the viewer to test perception, not to probe the limits of perception, not to mimic the way in which perception is normalized by philosophy, not to think about perception, but to think according to perception.

In this sense the artist and the viewer are strictly identical, allowing for an auto-testing of perception. It is not that one party—be it artist, viewer, or critic—is in a privileged position to arbitrate Turrell's aesthetic experiment. Instead, all parties are identical.

This brings us to the final theme in the essay, identity. The key question for Laruelle is how to see light itself, light's identity. For Laruelle the only way to answer the question is to break the vicious cycle of worldly self-manifestation. “There is a paradox at the heart of aesthetic sentiment,” Laruelle remarks. “The paradox is the following: on the one hand light remains to a certain degree in itself. It does not lose its identity in an object [...] but on the other hand, light 'radiates.'” There is no solution to the paradox, of course, since it belongs to the basic generative paradox fueling of all philosophy. Nevertheless the paradox provides Laruelle with raw material for non-standard intervention. Simply unilateralize the paradox and put both light and its radiation into immanent superposition. Such a move defangs the transcendental tendencies added to light by philosophy and reveals a purely immanent light.

Give the unusual and somewhat counter-intuitive nature of the non-standard universe, Laruelle is forced to speak in circumlocutions: light is a radiation-without-rays, or light is a reflecting-without-reflection. This might sound like jargon, yet Laruelle's “without” structures are necessary in order to designate the superimposition or unilateralization of the rivenness of the world. They aim to show “light discovered in its radical identity.”

Yet even with this brief gloss of Laruelle's Turrell essay, Laruelle's aesthetics remains elusive. So I want to expand the discussion of light by looking at Laruelle's writings on photography. By the end I hope to show that Laruelle is essentially a thinker of utopia, and that the best way to understand Laruelle's aesthetics, and indeed his larger non-standard method, is as a theory of utopia.

Laruelle's two books on photography, The Concept of Non-Photography and Photo-Fiction: A Non-Standard Aesthetics, include material written over a span of two decades.12 Intended as companion pieces, the books pose a number of questions. What is seen in a photo? What is light? What is the photographic stance? And, perhaps most enigmatic of all, what does Laruelle mean by fiction?

“Aesthetics was always a case of tracing art within philosophy, and likewise of art understood as a lesser form of philosophy.” For Laruelle aesthetics involves a convoluted interaction between art that asks to be contemplated and contemplation that seeks its art. Art and philosophy co-constitute each other in terms of lack, for each completes the other: “without art, philosophy lacks sensitivity and without philosophy, art lacks thought.” This kind of mutual distinction is part and parcel of the philosophical process. Art and philosophy are separated and reunited, then policed as conjoined but distinct. A strange logic indeed, yet for Laruelle the logic is evident in everything from Plato's Republic to Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy?
Photography is “a knowledge that doubles the World,” he writes in the first book. As an aesthetic process, photography is philosophical in that it instantiates a decision to correlate a world with an image taken of the world. When photography doubles the world, it acts philosophically on and through the world.

Laruelle does not discuss light much in The Concept of Non-Photography. But light appears in the second book, Photo-Fiction, particularly in the context of philosophical enlightenment and the flash of the photographic apparatus. Laruelle uses two terms, éclair and flash, to mark the subtle variations in different kinds of light. Laruelle associates éclair more with the tradition of Greek philosophy. “The flash [éclair] of Logos,” he remarks, “is the Greek model of thought.” While he uses flash more commonly when discussing the physical apparatus of the photographic camera. Although it would be hasty to assume that Laruelle poses the two terms in normative opposition--éclair bad and flash good—for by the end he specifies that both kinds of light are philosophical, and that both need to be non-standardized.

As in his other writings, Laruelle accomplishes this by subjecting photography to the non-standard method. He proposes a Principle of Aesthetic Sufficiency and shows how art and aesthetics have traditionally been allied with philosophy. Likewise he describes a Principle of Photographic Sufficiency, indicating how photography is sufficient to accommodate all possible images, at least in principle. In an echo of how deconstructivists spoke of philosophy in terms of logocentrism, Laruelle labels photography's sufficiency a photo-centrism, and discusses how philosophy conceives of thought itself as a kind of photographic transcendental.

The process of non-standardization goes by several names and is defined in different ways. In recent writings Laruelle has begun to speak of the non-standard method in terms of fiction. Fiction means performance, invention, creativity, artifice, construction; for example, thought is fictive because it fabricates. (Although Laruelle always specifies that such fabrication only happens in an immanent and real sense).
​
Fiction might seem like a strange word choice for an anti-correlationist, yet Laruelle avoids the vicious circle of correlationism by devising a type of fiction that is non-expressive and non-representational. Laruelle's fiction is purely immanent to itself. It is not a fictionalized version of something else, nor does it try to fabricate a fictitious world or narrative based on real or fantastical events.

“Non-standard aesthetics is creative and inventive on its own terms and in its own way. Non-standard aesthetics is a fiction-philosophy [philo-fiction], a philosophico-artistic genre that tries to produce works using only pure and abstract thought. It does not create concepts in parallel to works of art—like that Spinozist Deleuze proposed, even though Deleuze himself was very close to embarking on a non-standard aesthetics.”

To subject philosophy to the non-standard method is to create a fiction philosophy. Likewise to subject photography to the same method produces a similar result. “The fiction-photo [photo-fiction] is a sort of generic extension or generalization of the 'simple' photo, the material photo.”

As he said previously in The Concept of Non-Photography, “the task of a rigorous thought is rather to found—at least in principle—an abstract theory of photography—but radically abstract, absolutely non-worldly and non-perceptual.”

This begins to reveal the way in which Laruelle's views on photography synchronize with his interest in utopia. Photography is not oriented toward a world, nor is it a question of perception. Rather, by remaining within itself, photography indicates a non-world of pure auto-impression. Bored by the peculiarities of particular photographic images, Laruelle fixates instead on the simple receptiveness to light generic to all photography. Yet receptiveness does not mean representability or indexicality. That would revert photography back to philosophy. Instead Laruelle radicalizes photic receptiveness as such, focusing on the non-standard or immanent nature of the photographic image.

Rather than a return to phenomenology's notion of being in the world, Laruelle proposes what he calls being-in-photo. By this he means the photo that remains radically immanent to itself. Such a photograph produces a kind of objectivity without representation, a radical objectivity, an “objectivity so radical that it is perhaps no longer an alienation; so horizontal that it loses all intentionality; this thought so blind that it sees perfectly clearly in itself; this semblance so extended that it is no longer an imitation, a tracing, an emanation, a ‘representation’ of what is photographed.”

But it is not simply the photograph that is recast as non-standard immanence. So too the photographer, the philosopher who thinks photographically about the world. Laruelle elaborates this aspect through what he calls the photographer's stance [posture]:
“Stance”—this word means: to be rooted in oneself, to be held within one’s own immanence, to be at one’s station rather than in a position relative to the “motif.” If there is a photographic thinking, it is first and foremost of the order of a test of one’s naive self rather than of the decision, of auto-impression rather than of expression, of the self-inherence of the body rather than of being-in-the-World. A thinking that is rooted in rather than upon a corporeal base.

Here is further demonstration of Laruelle's theory of utopia as immanence. He inverts the conventional wisdom on utopia as a non-place apart from this world. Laruelle's utopia is a non-world, yet it is a non-world that is entirely rooted in the present. Laruelle's non-world is, in fact, entirely real. Revealing his gnostic tendencies, Laruelle's non-standard real is rooted in matter, even if the standard world already lays claim to that same space. The non-standard method simply asserts the real in parallel with the world.

In Laruelle the aesthetic stance is the same as the utopian stance. In the most prosaic sense, non-philosophy describes a kind of non-place where conventional rules seem not to apply. To the layman, the non-philosopher appears to use complex hypotheses and counter-intuitive principles in order to journey to the shores of another universe. Yet that doesn't quite capture it. As Laruelle says, insufficiency is absolutely crucial to utopia: “We are not saying one has to live according to a well-formed utopia... Our solution lies within an insufficient or negative utopia.” The point is not to construct bigger and better castles in the sky, transcendental and sufficient for all. Rather, utopia is always finite, generic, immanent, and real.

But non-philosophy is utopian in a more rigorous sense as well, for the structure of the human stance itself is the structure of utopia. Utopia forms a unilateral duality with human imagination; our thinking is not correlated with the world but is a direct clone of the real. This begins to resemble a kind of science fiction, a fiction philosophy in which the human stance is rethought in terms of rigorous scientific axioms. It makes sense, then, that Laruelle would call himself a science fiction philosopher, someone who thinks according to utopia.

“There are no great utopian texts after the widespread introduction of computers,” Fredric Jameson remarked recently, “the last being Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia of 1975, where computers are not yet in service.”

Today, instead of utopian texts,we have the free-market deliria of cyberpunk, which assumes that capitalism is itself a kind of utopia of difference and variety. I think this failure of imagination on the left can be attributed to the assumption that computers are enough to “take care” of totalization: that the well-nigh infinite complexities of production on a global scale, which the mind can scarcely accommodate, are mysteriously...resolvable inside the computer’s black box and thus no longer need to be dealt with conceptually or representationally.

The end of the utopian text thus signals for Jameson an end to representation. Or at the very least it indicates that representation—as complicated or flawed as it might be under otherwise normal conditions—has been interrupted and outsourced to another domain entirely.
​
Laruelle's work confirms a particular kind of historical periodization: if indeed utopia perished as narrative or world or image, it was reborn as method. Such is the key to Laruelle's utopianism. For him utopia is a technique, not a story or a world. Utopia is simply the refusal to participate in the Philosophical Decision, a refusal to create worlds. Counterintuitively, then, Laruelle's refusal to create alternative worlds is what makes him a utopian thinker, for his non-standard world is really a non-world, just as utopia is defined as “non-place.” To refuse the philosophical decision is to refuse the world, and thus to discover the non-standard universe is to discover the non-place of utopia.