OLD NEWS

CYGNUS AND THE SOLITARY TREE
<https://tinyurl.com/heyz2s4e> _NASA

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LOUISE BOURGEOIS’S BODY CLOCK
<https://tinyurl.com/3d3m4yv7>
The door of an ovular steel-meshed cage stands open. Inside, flesh-coloured sacks are suspended from the ceiling like deflated breasts or soured bedsheets hung up to dry: they sag, slouched as though they gave up long ago. Alongside them are metal chains, cold and hard, and small textile figures hung upside down from string. A tower of stacked white pebbles reaches upwards from the wooden-boarded floor, curving slightly like a spinal column or an impossible cairn while an animal-fur collar sits precariously on top. Still, absent of life, but with the possibility of movement, there’s something fragile about this arrangement, like everything could collapse at any moment, though you’re not quite sure whether the function of the cage is to protect the viewer from the objects, or the objects from the viewer. This ambiguity raises a further question. If this is a physical manifestation of ageing, then what needs protection: the mind from your body, or the body from your mind? And are those stones a metaphor for tallying up your days, or counting them down? Either way, the work leaves you with the sense that time is something to be endured, not overcome, like an inescapable cycle rather than the space between the starting gun and finish line.
<https://tinyurl.com/ykcydky5>
Ageing is one of the central themes in Louise Bourgeois: Echoes of the Morning, an exhibition at the year-old PoMo museum (the name derives from the original function of the building as a post office, rather than any art-historical-ism) in Trondheim. Centring on a series of gouaches that the French-American artist made during the last four years of her life and presented in dialogue with some of her largescale works, including the gargantuan bronze arthropods of Spider Couple (2003), this is a substantial yet focused show that offers an obvious psychoanalytical reading of Bourgeois’s maternal anxieties alongside a more material examination of her practice as an interrogation of time and the human body.
While that ovular cage, Peaux de lapins, chiffons ferrailles à vendre (2006), occupies centre stage on entry to the groundfloor gallery, the majority of the exhibition takes place upstairs on the first floor, unfolding across several intimate rooms to allow for a closer reading of the works in tandem, with various sculptures positioned beside paintings and installation. Nature Study #5 (1995) is a hollowed basin carved from a thick slab of pink marble, its surface veined with soft blue lines, a series of smooth, udderlike forms growing inwards from its edges. It sits on the floor in front of The Feeding (2008), a roughly rendered gouache in red of an anonymous embryonic figure surrounded by five breasts facing inwards. The number five is a recurring motif in Bourgeois’s work and references the total number in her family unit, though in the hard stone, the breasts multiply and merge into 11, or perhaps more, transforming an image of offered nourishment into something more ambiguous or even faintly hostile – as though the maternal body has been turned back on itself, caught between the weight of obligation and the freedom of withholding. The result is as beautiful as it is frightening.
<https://tinyurl.com/437ndvxu>
The gouaches themselves are visceral and often violent things. The exhibition text explains that Bourgeois used a ‘wet on wet’ technique, ‘introducing an element of chance to the final result’, suggesting they were created at speed, in one take, with the pigment bleeding of its own accord into patterns resembling arteries or blood blots. In their shades of magenta on white paper, they present obvious associations with menstruation and childbirth, evoking the cycle from conception to birth to family that is frequently referenced throughout Bourgeois’s practice. Indeed, Bourgeois spent a significant part of her life working with the second-generation Freudian psychoanalyst Henry Lowenfeld to interrogate her own well-documented childhood trauma, and considered her art to be a way of accessing her unconscious workings. The gouache series is a key example of this method, displayed on the walls beside text from several of her reflective writings.
These instinctive, bodily fluid-like paintings stand in stark contrast to the careful stitching in the artist’s tapestry works, including Eternity (2009), a fabric embroidering of a 12-hour clockface with each number aligning with a painting of an aroused male body facing a pregnant female, created using digital print and drypoint techniques on a bedsheet. It is displayed opposite Self-Portrait (2009), which expands the clock digits to 24 beside diaristic drawings referencing sex, pregnancy, childbirth and, as the numbers mount, more equivocal references to dysmorphia and death. Her initials are elaborately rendered below the clock in cursive white stitching. Bourgeois’s family made a living restoring antique tapestries, and the layers of biography – from her relationship with her mother to raising her own son – are sewn into this work with a depth of nuance of which the previously viewed gouaches, many created the year prior in 2008, only scratched the surface.
<https://tinyurl.com/t84kzz9t>
Louise Bourgeois has become something of a touchstone for a generation of feminist contemporary artists emerging from the 1990s with a particular focus on body politics and psychological trauma, and is a well-known crowd-pleaser for Trondheim’s fledgling museum. Her gouaches, in particular, reveal a deeply intimate insight into the psyche, offering viewers a compelling entry point into her catalogue. Whether the exhibition actually breaks new ground is another matter, though it certainly succeeds in hitting a particularly current nerve as we see increasing extremes of antiageing protocols entering the mainstream vernacular – for men, but still most notably women, who are well socialised to resist time and perform a kind of eternal youth. Bourgeois’s work, however, insists we do otherwise. The body carries time inescapably: it is etched into its memory, its knowledge, its flesh. We can attempt to outrun it, but our cycles, periods and maternal rhythms mark us insistently, delineating the contours of our identities, whether we like it or not.
_Chiara Wilkinson _ArtReview

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INK
<https://tinyurl.com/ye7t77ze> _DavidShrigley

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55. DIZZY GILLESPIE TRUMPET by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/y8xznam8>
The flattened fifth is a half-step down from one of Western music’s most stable, consonant intervals. It sounds sinister. Medieval theorists called it diabolus in musica (”the devil in music”) and banned it from sacred music. Dizzy Gillespie loved it.
The flattened fifth creates a moment of harmonic friction before resolving somewhere unexpected, and in the early 1940s, Harlem musicians including Gillespie and Charlie Parker were gathering after hours to build an entire music around exactly that kind of tension. They pushed jazz into bebop: faster, more complex, virtuosic, and improvisational. A sound built for listening. The flattened fifth was one of its signature tensions—the musical equivalent of the rug being pulled.
But bebop was hard to dance to, and Gillespie refused to make the false choice between experimentation and audience. “If you want to make a living at music, you’ve got to sell it,” he said. He continued to push beyond bebop with Afro-Cuban rhythms, helping to found Latin jazz. In the 1980s, he led the United Nations Orchestra, a big band drawn from musicians across the globe.
His bent trumpet was a happy accident that became his signature. In 1953, after a comedian accidentally sat on his horn, he had others built the same way. The 45-degree bell altered projection, throwing sound up and out rather than straight ahead. It fed the sound back to his own ears, and the horn became as much a part of his image as his puffed-out cheeks, beret, and horn-rimmed glasses. _TheImpatientReader

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/mttwantn> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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‘NEW HUMANS’ AND THE STRANGE END OF CONTEMPORARY ART AS WE KNOW IT by Ben Davis
<https://tinyurl.com/vyrewed8>
My takeaway from the opening of “New Humans: Memories of the Future” is that the project of “contemporary art” may be ending.
Sorry, that’s a big statement for a piece that’s just meant to be a first reaction to this giant exhibition, which is meant to show off the newly expanded New Museum. I have to spend more time there, but I enjoyed the new NuMu’s spiffy addition from the firm OMA.
As for the show, it’s a trip, and not at all what I had expected. It has a lot of highlights, just a few dead spots, and much to chew on.
<https://tinyurl.com/467cvpkr>
Well, what did I expect? The pitch for “New Humans” was that it would confront us with “what it means to be human in the face of sweeping technological changes.” That might suggest a zeitgeist-chasing show of art trying to capture tech anxiety about the topics of the day: chatbots and brainrot, AR glasses and Polymarket.
There are the barest traces of that sort of subject matter here, and it feels as if the show has hit them with a petrification ray. I’m thinking of Judith Hopf’s statue Phone User 5 (2021–22), a blobby concrete selfie-taker, and Simon Denny’s all-white sculpture based on an idea for an alarming cage-like workstation for warehouse workers that Amazon patented. (Mercifully, the mega-corp abandoned the idea.)
<https://tinyurl.com/527b6wvn>
It’s probably for the best that “New Humans” is not a show clapping back at au courant tech clichés—but, then, what is it doing? The show proves to be about “visions of the future” in a sense so broad that most art involving imagining things could be here. There’s a gallery about architecture; there’s a gallery about becoming an animal. There’s an awful lot of surreal-ish contemporary painting, which feels like it’s just there.
And then to a startling degree, “New Humans” is about Modernism. The “new humans” are actually the old humans, and ever-present here is the 20th-century “tradition of the new” in art, of artists trained in painting, and sculpture, and performance, responding experimentally to the changing forms of life 100 years ago as a parallel to changes we are grappling with now. (That explains the “Memories of the Future” subtitle.)
<https://tinyurl.com/43yvrxs6>
There’s a room with works by Constantin Brancusi, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, and Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven. There are tributes to Constructivist and Situationist architecture. There’s a room re-staging and judiciously expanding the Museum of Modern Art’s 1959 “New Images of Man” show, showcasing examples of Modern art trying to capture the intensity of the nuclear age and the struggles of decolonization through violent abstraction, from Alberto Giacometti to Ibrahim El-Salahi.
Fans of New Museum curator Massimiliano Gioni will recognize the poetic admixture of scientific images, and curiosities, and fine-art faves from different eras. “New Humans” may be about all kinds of things—the future or technology or the body or the post-human condition—but before anything else it is about this specific, pungent form of contemporary taste-making. Defining itself by indifference to historical and genre categories, it maintains a sense of refinement through an eye for the specific and the special, and attention to overall mood. It’s hard to pull off. When done right, as it is here, it’s hard to top.
<https://tinyurl.com/3nvetuj5>
Because it’s a Gioni signature, you might not even notice how striking it is that this is the mode that this institution makes its refreshed case for itself to the world with. When legendary curator Marcia Tucker launched the New Museum in 1977, it defined itself against a Modernism become staid and institutional and backwards-looking. It was, above all, a space for art that whose history was not yet written and whose rules were still in formation. Today, the New Museum sells a line of merch that says “New Art, New Ideas” and bills itself as “Manhattan’s only dedicated contemporary art museum.” But the pitch of “New Humans” is to look beyond both the “contemporary” (as in: the art of the present) and “art” (as in: stuff made for art spaces) for inspiration.
In Gioni’s catalogue essay, he proposes that the show’s historical-collage style is, paradoxically, the very thing that makes it most relevant for now. The model flows, he says, from how it mirrors networked thinking defined by technology. “New Humans,” he writes “envisions the museum less as a space of purity and contemplation and more as a dynamic research lab or a device for distributing images, with an endless series of tabs and desktop windows all open at the same time. Accessible and inherently nonhierarchical, the exhibition recasts the museum—so often an ivory tower—as a control room.”
But neither the tempo nor the tonality of “New Humans” evoke the clicky rush of current screen life. It may aspire to escape the “ivory tower” of art history’s narratives, but its aura is serious, its juxtapositions deliberate.
<https://tinyurl.com/44e7suh7>
The digital is the most stereotypical market of recent culture, a main way the marketers explain generational differences of sensibility. “The digital” feels a notably minor thread among the 150-plus artists. There’s a Cao Fei digital video of a body permeated by tentacles, and Vitória Cribb‘s BUGS (2023), an animation showing a waxen digital female body encrusted with barnacle-like eyeballs.
There are digressive video-essay installations by Hito Steyerl and Christopher Kulendran Thomas, where A.I.’s impacts on realty is teased out.
<https://tinyurl.com/32m2c7pf>
In the Modern period, photography was important as an artistic technology, creating new connections of human and machine, as various projects here show. Notably, still images \ all but vanish as a contemporary art medium as we approach the present in “New Humans.” I only say one project that might count: Aneta Grzeszykowska‘s 2018 color photo series, Mama, which shows the artist’s daughter playing with a life-like doll she made of herself.
Digital photos are the defining medium of the smartphone age, so ubiquitous that they flow as constantly as speech—and because they are so much a part of contemporary life, their ability to stand on their own as art, it seems, has collapsed.
<https://tinyurl.com/463227vw>
The most-remembered contemporary moments of this show, by contrast, will almost certainly be artworks that activate your sense of being a body in the presence of another body: Cato Ouyang‘s violent sculptural tableau of a monstrous figure gouging the eyes out of a prone woman with scissors; Precious Okomoyon’s animatronic faun shifting around in a pink grotto hidden in the stairs; even Anicka Yi’s drone-powered jellyfish floating above your head in the airy double-height fifth-floor galleries.
The show’s climactic moment is the pink-carpeted “Hall of Robots” gallery on the fifth floor, full of funky humanoid sculptures by a variety of artists, each more captivating or unsettling than the last, all playing off one another. Truly, there are too many highlights here: Franz Tshakert‘s 1935 anatomical dummy with glass skin; H.R. Giger’s crouched obsidian xenomorph; Teresa Burga‘s strange mannequin in a box; Andro Wekua‘s surreally levitating jogger with its twitching, cyborg arm. If it was just this, it would be a “tell your friends” show.
<https://tinyurl.com/3vvhrfu4>
At its center is special effects designer Carlo Rambaldo’s 1981 animatronic body for E.T., from the Steven Spielberg blockbuster of the same name. The E.T. robot skeleton sits there, frozen under glass, as it reaches out to you with his long magical finger.
The undecidable emotional charge of this artifact, here, is the best kind of positive case for Gioni’s post-contemporary vision. In the “New Humans” context, you see the expressive robotics of E.T. as a work of skilled craft on its own, as well as understanding it as a spooky work of sculpture in way that wasn’t intended. It taps a cache of sincere pop-culture affection, even as it makes you reflect on how much emotion you have embedded in a purely manufactured creature. That little moment of self-reflection is, in turn, very relevant at a moment when corporations are pounding people’s psychic defenses with new forms of emotional technologies.
<https://tinyurl.com/2jhk424f>
How to think about what it means “to be human in the face of sweeping technological changes” today? The signature cultural condition of the present is that every experience is always competing with trivially available, constantly new, super-cheap digital content, dragging the value of everything it touches toward zero. This is particularly relevant in the case of the New Museum now, as it opens an $82 million addition. Physical space is expensive and much less changeable than the digital, giving it a permanent disadvantage to when trying to symbolize “the contemporary.”
“New Humans” may want to be as open and adventurous as digital culture, but it also shows art running away from digital culture. It has to meet it and match it. All art institutions have to do both at once. Cultural objects with real pasts and objects that directly activate your sense of being a body in physical space with others: These are what make experiences feel like “art” right now. _artnet

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RAINBOW VIDEO PAW PAW, MI
<https://tinyurl.com/2a99dvzd> _RuralIndexingProject

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PHOTO: LUCAS MUSEUM WATERFALL by William Poundstone
<http://tiny.cc/8tl0101>
The account of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has posted a photo of its new waterfall feature in operation. Designed by Mia Lehrer/Studio-MLA as a passive cooling system, and replacing standard air conditioning, it connects to 765 geothermal wells running 350 ft beneath the building.
<http://tiny.cc/atl0101> _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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ARCHANGEL JOSEF ALBERS WAS BORN ON THIS DAY IN 1888!
Preparatory drawing for Graphic Tectonics, pen and ink with green grid, 1941:
<https://tinyurl.com/yyd463uh> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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PRESTIGE OR RISK? WHY KOREAN CITIES RACE TO HOST BRANCHES OF WORLD'S TOP MUSEUMS
<https://tinyurl.com/3t27jfyh>
The name Centre Pompidou, the iconic Parisian arts complex, has surfaced with striking frequency in Korea’s art world over the past few years.
At the center of the buzz is the opening of the Centre Pompidou Hanwha, the French landmark’s first outpost in Korea. The four-story space — designed by Jean-Michel Wilmotte, the same architect behind renovations at the Louvre — will occupy parts of the 63 Square skyscraper in Yeouido, Seoul.
With access to Europe’s largest collection of modern and contemporary art, the Seoul branch will debut in June with a selection of Cubist masterworks, headlined by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.
Yet Seoul may not be the country’s only metropolis to claim the Pompidou name. In 2024, Busan Metropolitan City unveiled plans to establish its own branch in an effort to boost the port city’s global profile. The two parties aim to conclude final negotiations by March 31.
If realized, the presence of two Pompidou outposts in a single country would be without precedent — one backed by a corporate partnership, the other driven by the municipal government.
<https://tinyurl.com/yc6ezd8r>
Busan’s move appears to have emboldened others. In January, Seoul’s Dongjak District announced that it had signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to pursue a satellite of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), calling it a “strategic decision to place world-class cultural assets at the heart of the city.”
Whether these ambitions ultimately materialize or not, a larger question lingers: Why are Korean municipalities racing to stamp their skylines with the names of the world’s top museums?
Experts note that the momentum is part of a global shift that has gathered pace since the late 1990s: an alignment between cities navigating economic and demographic change and legacy Western institutions seeking more resilient revenue streams.
For municipalities confronting population decline or industrial transition, culture has become an important economic strategy. For major museums in Europe and North America, their vast collections strain storage capacity while funding grows less predictable. International branches offer a possible solution by putting stored works back on display, generating licensing revenue tied to institutional brands and extending museums’ global footprints.
<https://tinyurl.com/54ssrj9w> _KoreaTimes

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WALK OFF
<https://tinyurl.com/4wjayx9p> _ON&ON / Jeff Weiss

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MET MUSEUM TO ACQUIRE REDISCOVERED RENAISSANCE PAINTING ADMIRED BY VASARI
<https://tinyurl.com/56ffccbr>
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced Thursday that it had acquired a recently rediscovered Renaissance painting of significant art historical importance.
Layers of paint were removed during a recent conservation to reveal the figure of Saint John the Evangelist in the canvas’s lower-right portion. With the overpaint now gone, the painting has now been identified as Madonna and Child with Saint John the Evangelist (1512/1513) by 16th-century painter Rosso Fiorentino. The painting’s attribution had previously been questioned, with some scholars assigning it to Rosso and others to a contemporary; it had also been dated to 1520 and titled Madonna and Child.
In his foundational text Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Giorgio Vasari, often credited as the first art historian, describes Rosso as having secured his first major commission, a fresco of the Assumption of the Virgin (1513) at the Chiostrino dei Voti at Santissima Annunziata in Florence by presenting the work’s patron, Fra Jacopo of the Servite Order, with “a painting of the Madonna and Child with a half-length figure of Saint John the Evangelist.”
“Paintings by Rosso are exceedingly rare, numbering only about two dozen, and many of his most celebrated works remain undocumented or unfinished,” Stephan Wolohojian, curator in charge of Met’s European painting department, said in a statement. “The discussion of this painting in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, often described as the first book of art history, gives the work the added distinction of having been part of art-historical discourse since the discipline’s inception.”
Vasari called his and Rosso’s approach maniera moderna, or “modern style.” That term would eventually become Mannerism.
In typical Mannerist fashion, Rosso’s renderings of the painting’s subjects have exaggerated features. This is often seen as a response to, and in some cases even a critique of, the sense of harmony and proportion engineered by Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael during the High Renaissance. Though seemingly garish at first, Madonna and Child with Saint John the Evangelist has flourishes that appear intentionally off—for example, the coy smirk on the baby Jesus’s face and his extremely muscular butt.
“With his unusual placement of the figures and daring postures, Rosso transforms a familiar devotional type into a charged encounter that draws the beholder into a complex interplay of seeing, feeling, and believing,”
Giovanni Battista di Jacopo, who would later called Rosso Fiorentino, or “Florentine Redhead” for his red hair, was born in 1494 in Florence and enrolled in the artist guild Arte degli Speziali in 1517 when he was 23 years old. The following year, he would receive his breakthrough commission, the Santa Maria Nuova Altarpiece, from 1518. With that work, he would establish himself as one of the era’s most important Mannerist artists.
Little is known of the artist’s early life, though he spent the first decade of his career before moving to Rome and finally France, where he died in 1540, at 45. In France, he became a court painter to Francis I, establishing, with Francesco Primaticcio, the First School of Fontainebleau. _ARTnews

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TOOLONDO TOTALITY TRAILS
<https://tinyurl.com/zrev7vx7> _NASA