Oct. 4, 2007 

ART + DESIGN FAIR BOWS IN NEW YORK
The first big New York art fair of the fall season is Brian and Anna Haughton’s International Art + Design Fair 1900-2007, Oct. 5-10, 2007, at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan. Almost 60 exhibitors are on hand, with a large contingent from France and Scandinavia, including Doumonteil and Martin du Louvre (Paris), Modernity (Stockholm) and Antik, Demisch Danant, Historical Design, Mark McDonald, Macklowe, Maison Gerard and Jason Jacques (New York).

"With the international dealers, the field feels deeper, more like a global community," said Kim Hostler of Antik, whose store in Tribeca has recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. "We just want to make sure that everyone decorates with modern!" Antik’s large booth at the Art + Design fair features softer, classic Scandinavian designs, and is also featuring the biomorphic wood sculptures of the late Ralph Dorazio, a long-time collaborator with dancer Eric Hawkins.

The Art + Design loan exhibition, organized by Ronald T. Labaco, boasts works by the legendary 99-year-old ceramist Eva Zeisel. The opening night gala on Oct. 4 benefits the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture.

PERFORMA 07 ROCKS NEW YORK
The month-long Performa 07, the second installment of the performance art biennial spearheaded by curator RoseLee Goldberg, takes place in New York City, Oct. 27-Nov. 20, 2007. Ten major new commissions and works by 90 artists at 50 venues are included. Herewith, some highlights:

* Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli has featured in his films everyone from Bernard-Henri Lévy and Gore Vidal to Sharon Stone and Benicio del Toro, and his one-time-only staging of Luigi Pirandello’s Right You Are (If You Think You Are) at the Guggenheim on Oct. 27, 2007, promises "an extraordinary cast of top-billed actors."

* British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien presents the U.S. premiere of Cast No Shadow, a Performa commission that combines Julien’s triptych of films (True North, Fantôme Afrique and Small Boats) with dance choreographed by Russell Maliphant, on stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Nov. 6, 2007.

* The late artist Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, originally presented in 1959 at the Reuben Gallery downtown, is recreated at the Deitch Studios in Long Island City, Nov. 5-11, 2007.

* Stuttgart sculpture professor Christian Jankowski presents Rooftop Routine, a "unique form of morning calisthenics," visible from the roof of his Chinatown apartment building, Nov. 3, 2007.

* The actress Barbara Sukowa with a musical group including her husband Robert Longo, the artist Jon Kessler and musician Anthony Coleman perform Devouring Time at the Highline Ballroom on West 16th Street on Nov. 18, 2007.

* The Berlin-based art collective Wooloo Productions is conducting a "Life Exchange" in the Chelsea apartment of Nancy Weber (at 449 West 24th Street), Oct. 31-Nov. 6, 2007, during which people can enter and exchange identities with other visitors.

* Legendary avant-garde filmmaker and dancer Yvonne Rainer debuts RoS Indexical, a work inspired by the 1913 premiere of the Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky and Vaslav Nijinsky, at the Hudson Theatre in the Millennium Broadway Hotel, Nov. 18-19, 2007.

For more information, and to buy tickets, see www.performa-arts.org.

YAHOO, LOUDEN IN VARA DISPUTE
Artist Sharon Louden (represented by New York dealer Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery) is suing Yahoo over its handling of Reflecting Tips, a public art installation in front of the company’s headquarters in Sunnydale, Ca. The work, a $100,000 commission installed in 2001, consisted of clumps of 2,500 white wires toped with reflectors and surrounded marsh-like grass, so that they blended in during the day and captured the light of passing cars during the night. Apparently, the grass around the wires became unsightly to locals, causing the Yahoo groundskeeper to take a weedwacker to the artwork, severing many of the wires along with the offending turf. Talks to restore Reflecting Tips broke down when former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel intervened, saying he wanted it removed, and in April 2007 the company "improved" the site by mowing away the grass and adding a border of perennial flowers -- presumably destroying the confusion of wires with grass that was integral to the original piece. Louden is suing Yahoo, saying its actions violate the Visual Arts Rights Act.

"They turned my art into a bad miniature golf course," she told the Wall Street Journal.

ONE ARTIST, 12 NAMES
Back in the early 1970s, the New York artist Ed McGowin undertook a curious conceptual project -- he legally changed his name a dozen times, and made different artworks under each identity and exhibited them at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Alva Isaiah Fost came into being on Oct. 1, 1970, and made abstract low reliefs in muted colors with vacuum-formed plastic. By Nov. 9, 1970, Fost had become Lawrence Steven Orlean, who made illustrated books presented like sculptures in black Formica frames. Irby Benjamin Roy built large-scale installations of car wrecks and country cabins, while Nathan Ellis McDuff was a performance artist -- he had himself documented blowing up an ice cream cone.

McGowin’s other identities -- a project undertaken to explore the dimensions of art-world fame -- are Eure Ignatius Everpure, Isaac Noel Anderson, Nicholas Gregory Nazianzen, Thorton Modestus Dossett, Ingram Andrew Young, Melvill Douglas O’Connor, Edward Everett Updike and, finally, William Edward McGowin again. The names were chosen by anagram, the artist says, with the first letters of each name being determined by the first letters of each word in the sentence, "A line in time is being made for me and you."

Now, the fruits of the Name Change project go on view at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, opening Oct. 6, 2007. The dozen personas continue to have a public life: "Thornton is hot right now. Harvard U. recently bought one of his pieces," McGowin writes in an email. "Alva was in a show in Geneva and the museum bought 26 prints and a vacuum formed piece this year. McDuff is dead but the rest continue to produce." For further details, see www.edmcgowin.com.

The exhibition at the Ogden is accompanied by "Art and Paradise," a show of the collection of self-taught art assembled by McGowin and his wife, the artist Claudia DeMonte.

CHARITIES BENEFIT THE RICH: CLINTONITE
Charitable contributions largely benefit the rich people who make them, according to an opinion piece published in the Los Angeles Times by former Clinton administration Department of Labor head Robert B. Reich. Of the $200 billion in 2007 charitable donations -- which cost the U.S. Treasury about $40 billion -- a big portion goes to "culture palaces. . . where the wealthy spend much of their leisure time," Reich writes. As it turns out, only 10 percent of charitable deductions actually benefit the poor. His modest solution? Allow donors to the arts to deduct only half of their contributions. 

CHEWING THE SCENERY AT TATE MODERN
What, London is short on venues for avant-garde theater, so they have to bring the hammy stuff to Tate Modern? Apparently so, as the museum inaugurates the fall season with "The World as a Stage," Oct. 24, 2007-Jan. 1, 2008, a selection of artworks that "investigate ideas of ‘theatre’." Curators Jessica Morgan and Catherine Wood are overseeing the drama-fest, which features works by Pawel Althamer, Jeremy Deller, Trisha Donnelly, Andrea Fraser, Jeppe Hein, Rita McBride, Tino Sehgal, Catherine Sullivan and nine other artists.

MARISOL AT NEUHOFF EDELMAN
Earlier this year, longtime dealer Heidi Neuhoff, whose gallery is located in the Fuller Building on East 57th Street, went into a new partnership with art collector and financier Asher Edelman to form the new Neuhoff Edelman Gallery. The new space has started off with a bang, exhibiting works by the Pop master Marisol, Sept. 20-Oct. 27, 2007, organized by art critic Carter Ratcliff. The show includes iconic sculptures from the 1960s as well as new works that are being seen for the first time. For details, click here.

AL HELD DOES (STAINED-GLASS) WINDOWS
Watercolors by the late, great abstract painter Al Held, who died in 2005, were used to design six new stained glass windows in the new George C. Young U.S. Courthouse and Federal Building in Orlando, Fla., which opened on Oct. 1, 2007. A commission of the General Services Administration Art in Architecture program, the commission -- titled Gravity’s Spring -- uses more than 100,000 pieces of colored glass, blown in Germany and cut and assembled in China. 

MOLAA AWARDS $50,000
The Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, Ca., has awarded $50,000 in prize money to seven Latin-American artists for the purchase of their works. The winners are Mario Opazo ($25,000), Veronica Riedel ($10,000), Tristan Reyes Alvarado ($6,000), Julio Cesar Peña ($4,000), Tatiana Parcero ($4,000), Ricardo Benaim ($1,000) and Oliver Krisch ($1,000).

HOUS PROJECTS IN SOHO
Add another stop to your SoHo gallery rounds -- Hous Projects at 31 Howard Street. Founded by Elizabeth Houston, former director of Jenkins Johnson Gallery, and John Houshmand, a furniture designer, sculptor and co-owner of Clark Construction, the gallery opened with "Human," Sept. 6-Oct. 13, 2007, a show of seven Australian artists. Coming up are solo exhibitions by Marian Drew and Charles Robb. For further details, contact info@houseprojects.com

NEW MOMA CURATOR
National Gallery of Art curator Leah Dickerson has been appointed curator in the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. Dickerson is co-curator of "Dada" (2005), curator of "The Cubist Paintings of Diego Rivera" (2004) and co-curator of "Aleksandr Rodchenko" (1998). She succeeds Joachim Pissarro. Falkenberg succeeds Jessica Hough, who is now director of the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland.

NEW ALDRICH CURATOR
Parrish Art Museum curator Merrill Falkenberg has been named curator at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn. She had previously served as a curator at the San Jose Museum of Art and taught art history at Vassar College and the San Francisco Art Institute.

HERBERT MUSCHAMP, 1947-2007
Herbert Muschamp, 59, architecture critic for the New York Times from 1992 to 2004, died of lung cancer in Manhattan on Oct. 2. A flamboyant writer who championed architects like Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, he was a habitué of Andy Warhol’s Factory while a college student, studied and later taught at Parsons School of Design, and wrote for the New Republic, Vogue, House and Garden and Artforum.

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