Blog Metro

Portable Classic. Ancient Greece to Modern Europe (Venice, May 9–September 13) is an exhibition curated by Salvatore Settis and designed by OMA for Fondazione Prada. Taking place in Ca’ Corner della Regina, the show investigates the reception of classical sculpture from the illuminating perspective of reduced-size copies of masterpieces.

Already popular during antiquity, these “miniaturized” copies are symptomatic of a refined, sophisticated taste, and in the Renaissance they were coveted, collected and imitated, as ancient styles were updated according to contemporary tastes.

In setting up this exhibition OMA has, room by room, adhered to the size and atmosphere of a Renaissance studiolo: not in the sense of a piece of furniture (like the studiolo commissioned by Nicolò Orsini), but in the sense of a study where it was customary to collect precious objects, from manuscripts to small antiquities. Contemporary materials (polycarbonate walls, acrylic vitrines) act as a filter between the sumptuous domestic spaces of Ca’ Corner della Regina and the exhibition objects, diffusing light and heightening the qualities of the artworks on display.

The mission statement of the CLUI is to "increase and diffuse knowledge about how the nation's lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived."[3]

Programs and projects
The CLUI also executes exhibitions, research projects, and public programs. The Center's programs and projects cover many types of land uses in the US, including those related to agriculture, energy, industry, mining, communication, waste management, water resources, transportation, commerce, housing, recreation, and defense and preparedness.[4]

The organization produces exhibitions about land use phenomenology in the US, and displays them at its exhibit locations and at other museum and non-commercial and educational venues. The CLUI produces publications, online resources, tours, lectures, and other public programs across the country. Activities of the Center are summarized and discussed in its annual newsletter, The Lay of the Land, in print and online.[5]

The CLUI's main office is in Los Angeles where it operates a display space open to the public.[6] It also operates other facilities and interpretive sites throughout the US, including in Wendover, Utah, at a former military facility, where the CLUI operated an artist residency program from 1996-2016; and the Desert Research Station in Hinkley, California.[7][8][9][10]

CLUI is also the lead agency for the establishment of the American Land Museum, a network of exhibition sites in various interpretive zones across the country, which together form a dynamic portrait of the national landscape.[11] According to Coolidge, the "man made landscape is a cultural inscription that can help us better understand who we are and what we are doing."[12]
The CLUI organizes public field trips to sites of interesting and unusual land use. This has been documented in the book, Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation.[13][14]

Troublemakers unearths the history of land art in the tumultuous late 1960s and early 1970s. The film features a cadre of renegade New York artists that sought to transcend the limitations of painting and sculpture by producing earthworks on a monumental scale in the desolate desert spaces of the American southwest. Today these works remain impressive not only for the sheer audacity of their makers but also for their out-sized ambitions to break free from traditional norms. The film casts these artists in a heroic light, which is exactly how they saw themselves. Iconoclasts who changed the landscape of art forever, these revolutionary, antagonistic creatives risked their careers on radical artistic change and experimentation, and took on the establishment to produce art on their own terms. The film includes rare footage and interviews which unveil the enigmatic lives and careers of storied artists Robert Smithson (Spiral Jetty), Walter De Maria (The Lightning Field) and Michael Heizer (Double Negative); a headstrong troika that established the genre. As the film makes clear, in making works that can never be possessed as an object in a gallery, these troublemakers stand in marked contrast to the hyper-speculative contemporary art world of today.

Troublemakers points out that land art was rife with contradiction and conflict, a site where architecture, landscape, sculpture, technology, archaeology and photography would all converge. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, Cold War anxieties and other political uncertainties of the nuclear age, land artists often subscribed to a dystopian view of the future that questioned the military-industrial complex, consumerism and the banalities of modern life and culture.

The period was also marked by the release of the first image of the entire earth. Produced by NASA, such images turned the conceptual space of earth into a two-dimensional sphere; an object on which to conceivably draw, design and create. The most compelling land art sites offered viewers a means to imagine and negotiate the scale of the human body with the enormity of our planet. Land artists were exploring a larger canvas to work on while simultaneously seeking to create works that induced awe in the viewer, thus producing a new kind of pilgrimage and a new kind of visceral viewing experience. The film shows how nature performs in these works and alters them over time, sometimes radically reclaiming them, creating an ongoing competitive dialogue between artist and the natural world.

Using original footage produced with helicopters and rare re-mastered vintage footage from the period, Crump’s cinematic journey takes viewers on a thrill ride through the most significant land art sites in California, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah, an immersive and physically transportive experience that movie goers will not forget

Titled succinctly with the capital letter “K,” this exhibition is to be understood as a story, not unlike a parable, about the “darkest concerns of human life,” as Walter Benjamin once described the theme of Franz Kafka’s literary oeuvre. That oeuvre is dominated by fragments of Kafka’s three great unfinished novels—Der Verschollene or Amerika, Der Prozess, Das Schloss—which alone are worth more than entire libraries of finished novels. These three texts are perpetuated and interpreted in Martin Kippenberger’s large-scale work The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika,” in Orson Welles’ film adaptation of The Trial, and in Tangerine Dream’s album inspired by The Castle. Altogether, the three novels by Kafka form the “trilogy of loneliness,” according to his executor Max Brod. Seen in this light, we may also view “K” as a triptych, an exhibition that resembles a tripartite or a triple-layered picture. Its structure is therefore similar to that of a traditional altarpiece, with Amerika occupying the large central panel and The Trial and The Castle the side panels. The three parts can be read together as a remarkable allegory of the vicissitudes of life, or, in the writer’s words: “all these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already.” Presented entirely separately from one another in the exhibition, both in space and time, the three parts are each accorded their own assigned, atmospherically predestined place. The artistic sculptural installation is set in a glass-walled, floodlit arena-like performance space, the cinematic epic in a theater completely sheltered from daylight, and the symphonic compositions in a walled, fortress-like sound space. Visitors are invited to embark on what amounts to an excursion into the realms of art, film, and music—straight into the heart of vibrant life with all its ups and downs! But please do not rush things. Do not jump to conclusions. First try to see and hear as much as possible.

The Whole Earth Catalog was a cultural touchstone of the 1960s and 1970s. The iconic cover image of the Earth viewed from space made it one of the most recognizable books on bookstore shelves. Between 1968 and 1971, almost two million copies of its various editions were sold, and not just to commune-dwellers and hippies. Millions of mainstream readers turned to the Whole Earth Catalog for practical advice and intellectual stimulation, finding everything from a review of Buckminster Fuller to recommendations for juicers. This book offers selections from eighty texts from the nearly 1,000 items of suggested reading in the Last Whole Earth Catalog.

Il nome di Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978) è intrinsecamente legato alla storia dell'arte, al gusto e alla museografia del XX secolo, tanto che negli anni settanta lo storico dell'arte francese André Chastel scriveva: "Molti di coloro che viaggiano in Italia lo conoscono senza saperlo: è il più grande allestitore di mostre d'arte lì e forse in tutta Europa". Ancora oggi occupa un posto d'onore nel pantheon di quanti - nonostante le forti resistenze e il provincialismo diffusi all'epoca - hanno rivoluzionato i musei nel dopoguerra trasformandoli in avamposti dell'avanguardia. Dopo il successo clamoroso dell'impianto concepito per ospitare l'opera di Paul Klee alla Biennale del 1948 se ne succedono molti altri, in rapida sequenza. Le mostre monografiche di Piet Mondrian e di Marcel Duchamp, le collaborazioni con Lucio Fontana e Arturo Martini e gli interventi su numerosi monumenti storici tracciano il percorso di un architetto originale che ha saputo svecchiare il modo di esporre imponendo un modello che, con libertà quasi insolente e incomparabile poesia, si affranca dalla magniloquenza dei luoghi preesistenti favorendo uno stile spoglio e leggero. La sua carriera abbonda di leggendarie soluzioni trovate "in situ", sempre nell'urgenza e nonostante una grande parsimonia di mezzi, in simbiosi con la maestria degli artigiani che lo circondano.

Era il 1957 quando questa “piccola architettura da tasca”, scritta e plasmata da Gio Ponti in ogni suo dettaglio iconografico e tipografico, venne pubblicata da Vitali e Ghianda. La casa editrice genovese aveva chiesto all’allora sessantacinquenne architetto di ripensare L’architettura è un cristallo, uscito nel 1945. Erano i primi anni del boom economico, si sentiva l’urgenza di portare avanti un’opera di rinnovamento e nel suo campo Ponti era l’uomo giusto per farlo. Profondamente animato da uno spirito moderno incarnato nell’estetica della leggerezza, il maestro era anche un grande comunicatore, dote indispensabile per diffondere l’entusiasmo per il nuovo e contagiare un pubblico vasto. Il prezzo di Amate l’architettura fu tenuto basso e la tiratura si spinse a 3.000 copie, tante per un libro sull’argomento. Il volume fu un successo, tradotto in inglese e giapponese, ma venne penalizzato in seguito dai circuiti della distribuzione, che gli impedirono per decenni di arrivare a una seconda edizione. Anche la ristampa del 2004 a opera di CUSL (Cooperativa Universitaria Studi e Lavoro) non ha saputo restituirgli la giusta visibilità. Tutti elementi che rendono ancora più interessante l’operazione fatta da Rizzoli con questa nuova versione, rispettosa dell’originale e arricchita da un’appendice che ne documenta la gestazione editoriale (lettere, schizzi e disegni d’archivio). A distanza di quasi sessant’anni si può finalmente riassaporare questa sintesi del pensiero pontiano, costellata di aforismi e narrazioni brevi, organizzata in capitoli dai titoli accattivanti anche per un pubblico di non addetti ai lavori. Il libro “è una collezione di idee”, ed “è stato fatto come si dipinge: a riprese, a ritocchi, a particolari”, scrive l’autore nella prefazione. Amate l’architettura è un’autobiografia sviluppata attorno a concetti come il tempo, il colore, l’arte, l’estetica e i materiali, ma anche un diario illustrato impreziosito da carte di diverso colore e grammatura che lo rendono ancora più piacevole al tatto. Del resto, Ponti era un uomo dai mille talenti e non sorprende che il volume in questione sia anche uno splendido oggetto di design.

In her new book of essays, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, Tolentino writes about how social media shapes identity, public discourse and political engagement, particularly for millennials such as herself. "The Internet has obviously been an incredible ground for social movements being organized," she says. "You saw the Parkland kids did it, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo ..."

But she warns that expressing opinions online can feel misleadingly meaningful. "It's always a starting place, it can never be an ending place," she says.

The Medium is the Massage is a unique study of human communication in the twentieth century, published in Penguin Modern Classics Marshall McLuhan is the man who predicted the all-pervasive rise of modern mass media. Blending text, image and photography, his 1960 classic The Medium is the Massage illustrates how the growth of technology utterly reshapes society, personal lives and sensory perceptions, so that we are effectively transformed by the means we use to communicate. His theories, many of which are illustrated in this astonishing inventory of effects , force us to question how modes of communication have shaped society. This concept, and his ideas such as rolling, up-to-the-minute news broadcasts and the media Global Village have proved decades ahead of their time. How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever. Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher and scholar - a professor of English Literature, a literary critic and a communications theorist. McLuhan s work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory.

With this book Paul Virilio inaugurated the new science whose object of study is the "dromocratic" revolution. First to use the concept of speed as a definining concept for contemporary civilization, Virilio unveils his theories of dromodology here for the first time.