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Artnet News
7/5/01
WARM UP 2001 AT P.S. 1
P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens hosts its fourth annual DJ series, "Warm Up 2001," a nine week long festival of music, art, dance and even architectural installation that begins on Saturday, July 7, 2001, from 3-9 p.m. This weekend's lineup, selected by Jonathan Rudnick of Giant Step, features the bands Nortec Collective featuring Fussible, Plankton Man and Terrestre and Los Amigos Invisibles. In the P.S. 1 gymnasium is "Summer Dance Warm Up," a series of shows by 30 new dancers. Outside in the courtyard is subWave, a tropical fantasy of wading pools, hammocks, fans and misters devised by the architectural firm Roy. Art on view includes "Uniform: Order and Disorder," "Transportable City" by Los Carpinteros, "Kim Sooja: A Needle Woman" and "Buzz Club: News from Japan," featuring more than 100 contemporary Japanese art videos in an enormous honeycomb. For more info, go to www.ps1.org.
ROLLING STONE PAINTS CELEBRITY MURAL
Cats art patron Andrew Lloyd-Weber has commissioned Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood to paint a 15 x 8 foot panorama of 30 regulars at the tony Ivy restaurant in London, according to the Sunday Times. Among the stars are Elton John, Pet Shop Boys lead singer Neil Tennant, Brit broadcaster Janet Street-Porter, Elizabeth Hurley and Hugh Grant. Dubbed London Dining, the painting is expected to hang in Drury Lane Theater and end up in the Tate Modern (!). Lloyd-Weber comments, "[Restaurants are] where many colorful powerbrokers from all walks of life don the nosebag... to the best of my knowledge nobody has painted anything of ordinary contemporary London life."
FONDA FOLK ART
Along with all her other interests, it seems that celebrity superstar Jane Fonda is a folk art enthusiast. She recently bought 50 percent of Tinwood Books, an Atlanta-based press that specializes in publications on African-American folk artists. Tinwood cofounder William Arnett told Publishers Weekly that Fonda's investment "is more than a business deal." Fonda may take a direct editorial role in the firm, and has expressed interest in the works of Thornton Dial and Lonnie Holley. Tinwood was established last year and has published Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art.
WEST FOR WEXNER
Austrian artist Franz West is designing new furniture for the Wexner Center Café and the adjoining "videotheque" at the Wexner Center in Columbus, Oh. The installation -- actually part of an exhibition called "Notations/Franz West: 2topia" that opens July 20 -- features more than 150 of the artist's trademark chairs made of welded rebar and covered with patterned West African printed fabrics, plus more than a dozen tables, bookcases, divans and even a jukebox. "Sitting down would be boring, if it were not an artwork," the artist said. The West project is the first in the Wexner's new "Notations" series, designed to present artists' works in nontraditional sites.
FINALLY, NEW QUARTERS FOR KUNSTHALLE WIEN
The new quarters for the Kunsthalle Wien in Austria were officially opened June 11, 2001 after a decade of disagreement over the design for the building. Brothers Laurids and Manfred Ortner had won the commission in an architectural competition, but their plans were delayed as every detail of the project was met at some point with intense scrutiny and opposition. The resulting construction, one of the world's ten largest cultural sites at 60,000 square feet, is a mixture of ornate Baroque and minimalist Modern design.
DESTE PRIZE 2001
The 2001 Deste Prize, first awarded to a contemporary Greek artist in 1999 by Dakis Joannou's Deste Foundation in Athens, has gone to performance artist Georgia Sagri. The artist receives a cash prize of 2,500,000 drachmas and a 500,000-drachma travel grant (about $7,500). For her winning work, titled In the Shop Window, Sagri moved her bedroom into the display window of a downtown store and inhabited the space for a week. Other finalists for the price were Christos Athanasiades, Sia Kyriakakos, Dimitra Lazaridou, Eleni Lyra, Andreas Savva and Despina Christou.
PROJECT ROOM AT SANTA MONICA MUSEUM
The Santa Monica Museum of Art inaugurates its new Project Room, dedicated to experimental contemporary art, on July 28, 2001, with an installation by Lara Schnitger. The Dutch-born, Los Angeles-based artist is known works that that stretch patterned nylon pantyhose into large-scale, architectonic installations; she shows in New York at Anton Kern gallery and was included in the "Statements" section of last month's Basel Art fair. The Santa Monica installation is up through Sept. 2.
FLOOD RELIEF FROM NEA
The National Endowment for the Arts and the Texas Commission on the Arts have jointly established a $60,000 relief fund for arts organizations hit by Tropical Storm Allison, which hit Houston on June 5. Nonprofits can apply to the TCA (using its online system for up to $10,000 for technical assistance, to replaced damaged equipment or to address other flood-related needs. Allison flooded much of Houston's downtown theater district, and also wreaked havoc on the Houston Museum of Fine Arts education office. Individual donations to the relief effort can be made to the Texas Commission on the Arts, PO Box 13406, Austin, Tx. 78711.
SUCCESS AT BUTTERFIELDS MUSEUMS AUCTION
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco took in about $1.5 million from its spring-cleaning deaccessions through the "American Museums Auction" at Butterfields auction house in San Francisco on June 25-26, 2001. The results were $500,000 over expectations, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle. Butterfield's sold about 95 percent of the 1,500 lots in the sale, which came from Denver Art Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago as well as the San Francisco Museum.
Top lot was an 1837 Dutch-school oil painting by Belgian artist Eugene Verboeckhoven, which went to a European dealer for $63,375 (est. $40,000-$60,000). A late 19th century painting by American Impressionist Joseph Raphael bought at $55,000, well over its top presale estimate of $35,000. And a sculpture of a group of does by Anna Hyatt Huntington soared to $18,775 (est. $3,000-$5,000).
In the decorative arts, an 18th-century northern Italian gilt mirror once owned by the late San Francisco socialite Whitney Warren sold for $49,250 (est. $10,000-$15,000); and a 17th-century English oak paneled room from a manor house in Exeter was bought by the Exeter City Museum for $34,875, double its presale estimate. Someone got a bargain on the Louis XVI French Room, which sold for $29,125, somewhat under its estimate of $60,000.
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