In 1859, game hunter, sheep farmer, and horse trainer Thomas Austin released twenty-four wild rabbits on his estate in Western Australia. In ten years, those rabbits had become several million, denuding a landscape that had never before faced the scourge of such determined herbivores. The Royal Commission formed to deal with “The Rabbit Question” came up with a solution called the No.1 Rabbit Proof Fence—2,023 miles of barbed wire right across Australia, sealing off the rabbit-infested western coast, and requiring constant patrolling. Over a century later, seeing a small portion of that fence replicated this month in Lisbon for the exhibition Utilitas Interrupta: An Infrastructural Index of Unfulfilled Ambitions, makes the urgent efforts of an entire continent seem pitifully ludicrous.

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By co-opting a time zone as its title, the multi-venued, collective event called Pacific Standard Time demonstrates its dynamic breadth and depth. Beginning with the post-war year 1945, it encompasses exhibits that span 35 years to 1980. The shows, exhibits, and events explore not simply art, but politics and social movements as expressed by activists, artists, community leaders, filmmakers, and musicians from different social, economic, and racial groups. The events are sited all over Southern California, from the  Watts Tower Arts Center in Downtown Los Angeles to San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art, East to San Gabriel Valley’ Pomona College’s Museum of Art and North to San Fernando Valley’s Cal State Northridge Art Galleries. The venues range from museums, art and film galleries to street festivals and music theatres.

The Lifted X (1965) image via pacificstandardtime.org

Yet viewing this merely as a series of aesthetic exhibitions trivializes its import and impact. Between 1945-1980, Los Angeles was the site for some of the most powerful, controversial, and historically significant social and political movements in the country, movements that reverberated far beyond its borders. Pacific Standard Time maps those dynamic political, social, and artistic expressions. From Black Power rallies and crackdowns by the police, to protests on Free Speech, nuclear power, and the rights of locally-born colored men and women, Los Angeles has been a location of profound change. Many of these exhibits document the movements that wrought those changes.

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Nineteen Rooms for September 11, by Jill Magi; part of InSite: Art+Communication

In our September issue, we closely consider the task of memorializing both Ground Zero, and the events of September 11, 2001. Philip Nobel wonders if the official memorial at ground zero sufficiently addresses the memory of the event, while a photo essay documents the DIY and ad hoc monuments around the city—raw expressions of New York’s grief.  But for the tenth anniversary of the attacks, institutions and individuals are finding their own ways to explore and come to terms with the memory of the traumatic event:

Ten Years After 9/11: Remembrance and Reconciliation Through Poetry, by Poets House; part of InSite: Art+Communication

InSite: Art+Commemoration
Through October 11, New York
The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council invited artistic and community response to a decade of recovery and change in Lower Manhattan. You can find their listing of performances, poetry, and ideas on their web site, which also acts as a repository of some of the artistic works. Read more…

Le Corbusier designed a chaise longue, Mies van der Rohe had his Barcelona chair, and a bench by Frank Gehry was auctioned at an estimated $150,000 last year at Sotheby’s. Starchitects don’t just design buildings, and Zaha Hadid is no exception. An exhibition of her product designs, Zaha Hadid: Form in Motion, will open at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) on September 17th.

Lacoste Shoes in leather and rubber, designed in 2008 by Zaha Hadid.

Hadid is no stranger to solo exhibitions—two very large ones were mounted at New York’s Guggenheim museum and London’s Design Museum in 2006 and 2007 respectively. And some of the objects on display at the PMA have been part of those exhibitions—Hadid’s Mesa Table, an organic branched table designed for Vitra in 2007 was displayed at the Design Museum show. But this will probably be the first exhibition to solely focus on her product design work, and as such is an unusual recognition for a major architect.

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German Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, March 22, 1944
Pavel Petrovich Sokolov-Skalya
Multicolor brush stencil on newsprint (pieced), laid down on tan Korean lining paper,
1872 x 845 mm (click on images to enlarge).

While here in the United States, the Bureau of Graphics at the Office of War Information was cranking out World War II posters by the hundreds of thousands, its Soviet counterpart took a far more artisanal approach. The exhibition Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941-1945, on view at the Art Institute of Chicago from July 31, will present 157 posters created by the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) during World War II. All of these posters are between five and ten feet tall, and each of them was painstakingly painted by hand!

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The caption was promising. “Cloud is a work of experimental architecture,” it said, “a floating roof made simply from helium gas, water and soap; an instantly deployable canopy for conversation in the shade.” In reality, it wasn’t quite so deployable. Little clouds of soap foam did rise into a net spanned over Asif Khan’s installation—but they sadly yielded to gravity before even getting close to building up a canopy. Unsurprisingly, nobody chose to have a conversation in the dripping soap, except for children.

The British architect Asif Khan was one of three winners of Design Miami/Basel’s Designers of the Future Award. While the world’s most exclusive design fair nominates one established Designer of the Year in its Miami edition every December, it presents the most talented newcomers of the year in its Basel venue in June — and commissions them to present a specific piece for the show. Read more…

Large Baths, Hadrian’s Villa, Tivoli; Louis I. Kahn, 1951; Pastel on paper; 7 ½ x 8 ½ inches.

Looking through the Metropolis magazine archives, I recently came upon a quote from Eero Saarinen, “To me, the drawn language is a very revealing language; one can see in a few lines whether a man is really an architect.”

Reading this quote, I nodded, internally, certain that I knew what he meant. Saarinen’s own sketches on the same page were composed of graceful, precise pencil lines sweeping in curves that betrayed an intimate knowledge of volume and structure. The thin strokes were surely the same ones that composed his elevations and floor-plans, because he was really an architect.

Then there is Louis I. Kahn. Visiting the collection of Kahn’s drawings and sketches at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, my expectation of rigid perspective and those thin pencil lines, that only architects use so well, expired at the door. The finality of Saarinen’s quote evaporated.

Kahn doesn’t draw like an architect. Read more…

Photo: Tom Hennes, Thinc Design.

When you walk into the Park Avenue Armory over the next two days you are likely to gasp at your first glimpse of  Infinite Variety: 3 Centuries of Red and White Quilts, 651 American quilts on loan from collector Joanna S. Rose. Suspended invisibly from the 8 story high ceiling of the 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, the quilts hang in three tiers, back to back, arranged in 13 round “pavilions.” From any vantage point, the entire collection may be seen at once. At the center of the hall, directly opposite the entrance, eight chairs sit in a polite circle, evoking a quilting bee, as a tornado of quilts spirals upwards directly above them. The effect calls to mind a Harold Edgerton strobe photograph of playing cards tossed up and frozen in mid-air. In the fairly dark room, the dramatically illuminated quilts have a commanding presence. The collection’s unified color scheme and dazzling array of patterns inspires feelings of awe and even evokes the sublime. Sponsored by the American Folk Art Museum, the show will be on display until March 30.

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Five years after the Indian businessman Ratan Tata first claimed that he would build a car for under $2,200, we’re still trying to figure out how he did it. Tata is one of Cornell University’s most distinguished alumni, and he will return to the Ithaca, New York, campus next week to speak at a symposium organized in conjunction with the exhibition, Unpacking the Nano. Both the exhibition and the symposium seek to understand the phenomenon that is the Tata Nano: how it was conceived, engineered, and designed, but also how it has managed to capture the imagination of India and the world.

This is not the first time we are seeing the Nano in the U.S.: It was on display at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in March 2010, and then travelled to the Detroit Road Show that year.  But this time, the little car is baring its guts. At the heart of the exhibition, in Cornell’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, is a completely disassembled Nano, every single one of its 2,000 parts on display. One of the key strategies in driving the cost of the car down was its innovative assembly – parts are combined and connected in smart ways, and in some places they were just glued together with high-performance adhesives.

But the low cost is only one aspect of the Tata Nano. Read more…

The gaggle of four year-olds was absolutely delighted with the legendary Spanish designer Javier Mariscal. Before the kids began their school trip to an exhibition of Mariscal’s work at the Casa Mila in Barcelona, their teacher had instructed them to be very quiet. Little did she know that the designer himself would be present that morning.  Mariscal first told the kids that they absolutely must not listen to their teacher. Then he began drumming on the nearest available installation—stacks of colorful, oversized metal letters. Soon everyone was drumming.

Javier Mariscal has had a long and illustrious career, and his design studio continues to produce their characteristically irreverent and playful work. But no matter how consistent the house style is, it would be hard to bind together an exhibition that includes an Olympic mascot, New Yorker covers, a Memphis trolley, an altar to the Spanish king, textiles for Nanimarquina, and a Moroso armchair. But the design team at the Mariscal Studio found the key—kids. Read more…