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This week Duncan and Richard interview Monica Bonvicini about her work and her show Light Me Black which is the current Focus show at the Art Institute of Chicago. Well, it was largely Richard as he would not shut up and Duncan had to be wheeled into the interview on a gurney due to his case of swine/bird/monkey flu/pox, and therefore did not have the strength to lift the stun gun of containment which is typically used in these situations.

The following text was shamelessly lifted from the Art Institute’s web site.

November 20, 2009–January 24, 2010
Gallery 182

Overview: Equal parts beautiful and menacing, Monica Bonvicini’s sculptures, installations, videos, and drawings provoke an acute awareness of the physical and psychological effects of institutional, particularly museum, architecture. Favoring industrial materials that reference the modernist canon, such as metal and glass, often combined with the trappings of sexual fetishism—leather, chains, and rubber—Bonvicini confronts the power structures and contradictions inherent in built environments.

Text quoted from a variety of sources, including literature, psychoanalytic theory, popular music, and architects’ own words, adds yet another layer to her wry commentary. More than any other artist working today, her projects aim to expose the disparity between the sexy, utopian, and avant-gardist claims of certain—largely male—“starchitects” and the realities of the spaces they create.

The first Focus exhibition in the museum’s new Modern Wing, Bonvicini’s project brings together three works that directly engage the Renzo Piano–designed building both formally and conceptually. Created specifically for the Art Institute, Light Me Black, an immense sculpture comprising 144 custom-made fluorescent lighting fixtures suspended from the ceiling, recalls the emphasis on light throughout the Modern Wing. In the now-iconic 1998 installation Plastered, re-created at the Art Institute, the entire gallery floor is constructed out of unfinished drywall panels that progressively crack and fragment as visitors move through the space.

The third part of the exhibition consists of three glass panels depicting altered renderings of earlier sculptural projects by Bonvicini and invoking the building’s glass-curtain façade—replicated in a smaller scale in Gallery 182. The three discrete elements work together to acknowledge the aesthetic achievements of the building while hinting at its potential vulnerabilities. [Read more]

Mode Studios designed and installed four 35ft long Interactive Installation Art Screens throughout the International Headquarters of Microsoft. The screen is made up of a horizontal series of hanging vertical tubes with LEDs built into them to create a solid image. The visual display is completely procedural without any prerecorded interactions or video. Everything that is shown is a byproduct of multiple variables from room traffic, weather, noise and heat in the focus locations in the room to create the movements or subjects on the screen with the potential of never showing the same interaction twice. The video of the installation is below and apart from the promotion hard sell it is a good example of art installation tech that is growing now.

Kelly Crow with the Wall Street Journal kicks off the new Weekly full color arts coverage in WSJ magazine with “Out Size Art” an article that explores the influence that the recession has on consumers desire to invest in large-scale art installation pieces. As buyers scale back, large pieces are the first to go asking are they more of a headache then a dramatic statement.

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First, Duncan and Richard present a horribly off-track intro which consists largely of talk of herpes and sleeping around. Eventually they get around to discussing what is really important, this week’s show!

Steve Litsios, an artist from La Chaux-de-Fonds in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, is interviewed this week by Mark Staff Brandl. Litsios is known for his vast paper installations, wall objects, smaller sculpture, and web-work, all of which are elegant, restrained, and yet puckish in their surprising flirtation with elements of garishness. His work has recently begun to incorporate political content into his formerly abstract approach. The artist also plays in several roots blues and skiffle bands.

Then, in the closing, Duncan calls out Joseph Mohan. Other wackiness ensues. [Read more]

Artist Benjamin Verdonck is currently nesting on the Rotterdam Weena Tower. His performance “The Great Swallow” involves a nest, man, and a gaint egg.

Here’s the YouTube video clip:

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