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Art Capturing Art Capturing Art Capturing... (New York Times)

Arts & Leisure (link)

ST. LOUIS -- In the autumn of 2004, the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer went to Berlin to work on a libretto for the opera called “Seven Attempted Escapes From Silence,” about prisoners who have lost the power of speech. But his mind was at least partly on another version of silence — one found in a set of photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto he had been carrying around.

Taken the previous summer, the images were of “Joe,” a sculpture by Richard Serra that was named in homage to Joseph Pulitzer and sits in the courtyard of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts here. Tadao Ando, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect who designed the foundation’s home, collaborated with Mr. Serra on the placement of the sculpture.

This summer Mr. Sugimoto’s photographs of Mr. Serra’s sculpture in Mr. Ando’s courtyard were published in a book titled “Joe” (Prestel), along with a prose poem by Mr. Foer that follows a protagonist also named Joe. Mr. Sugimoto’s photographs are on view through Oct. 14 at the Pulitzer Foundation, just steps away from their subject.

Got all that?

When Emily Pulitzer opened the Pulitzer Foundation in 2001, she conceived of it as a gesamtkunstwerk — Wagner’s term for the synthesis of multiple art forms — and “Joe,” in all its permutations, lives out the notion to dizzying effect. As Mr. Ando, Mr. Serra, Mr. Sugimoto and Mr. Foer have engaged with one another’s work, they haven’t collaborated so much as converged. And sometimes it seems as if they haven’t converged so much as collided.

The Art of the Deal (New York Times)

Sales offices for condominium developments are usually nondescript, temporary structures. But in the artsy West Queen West neighborhood of Toronto, the London-based architect Will Alsop has created an Urbancorp/Landmark showroom that looks like a speckled red box. Made of marine plywood, it has amoeba-shape windows and an egg-shape conference room. The office will be used to sell apartments in two buildings designed by Baird Sampson Neuert Architects and a tower by Mr. Alsop. Once the apartments are sold, the 3,000-square-foot office will have a second life as an art gallery run by Ben Woolfitt, an artist and art-supply store owner. Mr. Woolfitt lent the project's developer, Alan Saskin, the land for the sales office; in exchange, he gets to keep the building.

Searching for Answers and Discovering That There Are None

Essay: Rwanda, The New York Times

During my first semester of college, in the mid-90's, I went with a dozen classmates on a two-week junket to Berlin, sponsored by the German government with the intention of improving relations with American Jews. One afternoon, we were taken to a villa in the suburb of Wannsee, where we were ushered politely into an elegant dining room and offered juice and mineral water. A historian sat down with us at an enormous wooden table and explained that in that very room in 1942, 15 Nazi bureaucrats planned the genocide of the Jews.

Suicide Watch

The New York Times, Arts & Leisure, 3/20/2005
Timeline

The board of directors of the Golden Gate Bridge recently voted to explore installing a barrier that would jeopardize the bridge's least welcome claim to fame: its status as the world's most popular place to commit suicide. That decision was the result of a distinctively San Francisco process in which psychiatrists, lesbian activists and-- perhaps most surprisingly --documentary filmmakers had a direct impact on the making of public policy.

Building A Better Soundtrap

The New York Times, Arts & Leisure (link)

In his classic book "The Experience of Place," Tony Hiss describes the sensation of stepping into the concourse at Grand Central Terminal: "I felt as if some small weight suspended several feet above my head that I had not till then even been aware of, had just shot 15 stories into the air." But, Mr. Hiss stresses, he knew this not by sight but by sounds, smells, even a subtle change in his own breath.

The White Zone is for Loading and Unloading Art (The New York Times)

At the Toronto Airport, Air Canada Shares Space With Richard Serra and Sol LeWitt
Arts & Leisure - March 28, 2004

TORONTO - People don't often go to an airport for the art, but that might begin to change next month when travelers start hustling by Gate 122 of the new Terminal 1 at Pearson International Airport in Toronto. Here, working from high up on a scissor lift, the German artist Katharina Grosse spray-painted a 75-foot-long burst of color on the gleaming white walls. Unruly abstract clouds of orange and pink climb up into the skylights and surround the windows as if this Air Canada gate were an Abstract Expressionist chapel. Ms. Grosse thinks her mural "looks like a child has gone mad with a felt pen." But really it looks like artists have taken over the building.

A Serra Sculpture Emerges From Its Tomb (The New York Times)

A Richard Serra sculpture sat behind a wall. Talk about a permanent collection.
Arts & Leisure

SAN FRANCISCO - The art-world gods must have a strong sense of irony: how else to explain why our greatest living sculptor of walls would find his work behind one? That was the case from 1998 until last month, when Richard Serra's sculpture "Gutter Corner Splash: Night Shift" lay entombed behind a wall in the fourth-floor galleries of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - totally inaccessible, slowly collecting dust. This is "permanent" collection indeed.

But the fates of Mr. Serra's "splash pieces" - made in situ by splashing molten lead against the place where the gallery walls meet the floor - haven't always been assured. The first, created in 1968 at the Castelli Warehouse in New York, was quickly dismantled. "The lead went right back in the hopper," Mr. Serra recalled recently by phone from Nova Scotia. "When you're first starting out, very few museums or clients - or for that matter anyone - is going to say, `Yes, do a permanent piece in splashed lead in my museum.' That's just not going to happen."

How to Make a Building Fly (New York Times)

Will Alsop, who designs unhumble buildings for humble clients, hits new heights of audacity in Toronto.

We could have built four or five floors on the vacant parking lot," the English architect Will Alsop says of the $30 million building he designed for the Ontario College of Art and Design. "But there's no magic in that, there's nothing to raise the spirit." So he raised the building nine stories on multicolored stilts.

The Modern's Other Renovation

The New York Times, Arts & Leisure
What happens when one of the world's most visually aware institutions redesigns how its name is written?

On vacation in Greensboro, Vt., in the summer of 1966, Alfred H. Barr, the Museum of Modern Art's first director, had an epiphany. The museum's official abbreviation - long "MOMA" - would, Barr thought, be better served by a lowercase "o": "MoMA." In letters sent from the city, his colleagues took issue with his holiday musings; "it gives me terrible visual hiccoughs," one wrote.