hen the parasite sets in, small white bubbles rise up. They are warm, transparent and may appear anywhere. Cases have been documented in Boston, Cambridge and New York and the number is increasing. The appearance is not on the skin but on the sidewalks. New York artist Michael Rakowitz is the engineer of paraSITE, a temporary living space for the homeless. We may see homeless citizens every day, but now we see them unexpectedly, living inside what looks like a space-age tent. paraSITE uses the warm air that escapes buildings to inflate and to provide night-time shelter. The cities and their buildings become hosts for the homeless, providing a short term solution for an ongoing condition. Rakowitz presents paraSITE in a new co-edition by onestar press • Dena Foundation for Contemporary Art. Circumventions includes preliminary drawings, photos and an interview by Carolyn Christoph-Bakergiev, chief curator at Castello di Rivoli. The new book also reviews Rakowitz’ other projects including one in which he successfully relocated the aroma of a Chinese bakery up into a gallery. This November, Rakowitz will receive the 2003 Dena Art Award. A paraSITE is also planned for Paris.
R.W. (Paris)
eady to Change is Polonca Lovsin’s (b. 1970) contribution to the 25th International Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana. Presented on a platform conceived by Allen Ruppersberg (along with four other titles by Slovenian artists), the book gets her art across as assuredly as any installation could have. Lovsin is interested in how people apply savoir-faire, technology or special know-how to their lives. In this way, the book catalogues a suite of discoveries arranged in categories (building/ growing / adapting / changing / exchanging / collaborating) of which the simple list would outrun the remaining inch of this column. Take an inventor’s fair, a cooking-at-home and a home-improvement television series, a do-it-yourself store and a survival manual, then elevate all of it to a life-style!
n March 2003, Rainer Ganahl invited people to graffiti a wall with their opinions on US politics, transforming a booth in New York’s Armory Art Fair into a pictorial poll. Visitors were asked to respond to the phrase, “Please write your opinions on US politics…” The resulting dicta show a dawning group awareness of the immanent attack on Iraq. The comments would, at first, seem to be most comprehensible in the context of March 2003’s political circumstances; but as the booth’s walls filled up with opinions, a more reactional rather than reactionary discourse charged the stall into an active space, drawing a direct contrast with the passive viewing spaces traditionally associated with an art fair’s booths. Ganahl’s platform for this expression suggests an experiment rather than a document embodying an interesting non-reciprocal relationship between artist and audience. Maria Fusco (London)
r.Neen, as we might call Miltos Manetas for the word he famously had coined by Lexico Branding, has put his virtual finger in the digital socket with this book of e-mails selected from his hard drive by his assistant and presented here. He’s the radical outsider who is shifting the center of attention from the official cultural bull’s eye to the artistic periphery, namely Mr. Neen himself. But for all the exciting digital progress, he’s really doing it the old-fashioned way: by making us think hard about who we are and what we’re all about. Is it the contradictions in Manetas’s work that fascinate? Is he a kind of digital Yves Klein? A Chris Burden for the Apple crowd? Or a Greek Andy Warhol? His pseudo-philosophical nomenclatures (like Telic and Neen) seem like amusing fig leaves for chaotic appreciation andartistic vision. But maybe they are more serious than they appear at first. At least this is not an artist who is going to paint himself into a corner, because in Neenville there is no more paint and there are no corners. And while we’re in Neenville, let’s not forget the simple pleasure of being voyeurs, of overhearing certain exchanges with the likes of Vanessa Beecroft or Rafaël Rozendaal. And what about those few places where the artist himself has obliterated text, scratching it out with a pencil? Intriguing…RD (Paris)
ooking for that perfect present for the art lover who has everything? Got an impossible-to-please collector on your gift list? Or just want to give yourself an emotional lift with a little impulse shopping? Help is here, in the form of Lawrence Weiner’s favorite pillow. Mr. Weiner has outdone himself for this onestar press multiple. It is carefully designed and crafted for long-lasting comfort around the house. Martha Stewart might freak out, but your art friends will be green with envy. At any rate, this politically incorrect pillow is guaranteed to get people talking. It will stir up emotions, and, who knows? Maybe more.
lease meet Philippe Buschinger, a man transformed by the power of digital photography. You might even say that the digital explosion acted on Phil the way that first atomic explosion acted on Bruce Banner,turning him into the Hulk of digital photography. Phil bought a Nikon Coolpix 990 a couple of years ago and his hard drives now contain more images than professional photographers used to produce in a lifetime. Phil’s life-long academic interest in concrete poetry (the subject of his Ph.D thesis) suddenly found a way to express itself creatively. But wait, that’s not all: Phil has used the digital revolution to turn himself from a high-school German teacher in Paris into a grantwinning artist, published with pride by onestar press. His Typographical Safari, one of onestar’s best-sellers, catapulted Phil onto planet art, where his maniacal observations of the way languagevisually informs the urban environment surprised and delighted everyone. Here’s his second book at onestar press. Check it out.
