If you’ve walked through Union Square recently, you’ve likely come across Miranda July’s Eleven Heavy Things. The cast fiber-glass, steel-lined sculptural works (although July herself rarely refers to them as sculptures) invite viewer participation: a series of pedestals in ascending height read The Guilty One, The Guiltier One, and the Guiltiest One; an otherwordly hanging shape made of lace creates an intricate, alien headdress; a series of tablets with holes invite the insertion of arms, legs, and a finger (which reads, “This is not the first hole my finger has been in, nor will it be the last”). Another pedestal built for two people reads, “We don’t know each other, we’re just hugging for the picture.”
     July seeks here to bring organic performance on the part of the viewer, rather than simply display works of art. And the beauty of these pieces lies in the interactions that they successfully create: tourists and native New Yorkers alike can be seen at all hours of the day posing for pictures as the Guiltier One, poking limbs through bizarre holes, and hugging strangers “for the picture”. A simple search through Flickr for “eleven heavy things” is enough to reveal how extensive public participation has already been in this project.
     Originally created for the Venice Biennale, Eleven Heavy Things is presented in New York by Deitch Projects as its last and final public project. The exhibit will be on display until October 3, 2010 in Union Square.

From my regular column in AnOther magazine.

This week in New York City is a busy one for Irina Lazareanu. Her birthday was on Tuesday, and today she hosts a star-studded benefit – something she pretty much threw together on the fly. It’s a release event for Corduroy magazine and a benefit for Kiva.org, a charity that provides micro-loans around the world to help alleviate poverty. Although the logistics were handled by event organisers, you can credit Irina for the main attractions. Can you imagine Pete Doherty and Sean Lennon jamming together on the same stage? Well, Irina can – and she can also call them both up and tell them to start rehearsing. They did so by emailing practice sessions back and forth across the Atlantic. However, getting Pete himself across the ocean proved more challenging. “I think the hardest thing was getting Pete’s visa,” Irina says. “When they asked if he’d ever had any infractions, we had to answer, ‘um, well, yeah, like 27.’” Apparently, it’s harder for Pete Doherty to get into this country than most would-be terrorists, even though he’s only ever veered toward self-destruction, not mass-destruction. But that’s a whole other matter best left to the tabloids. Besides, Irina succeeded at getting him in. So it’s all set for Thursday, the hottest ticket in town.

When he was just starting out four years ago, Steve Lazarides was the man behind the man. Considering many of his artists work under the cloak of secrecy, you’d think that would’ve left him in relative obscurity. But with a stable of names such as French street art godfather Invader, Radiohead’s long time artist Stanley Donwood, Banksy, and Brooklyn wheatpaste kings Faile, he has become the focus of increased attention across the art world. Next week, his upstart UK gallery, Lazarides, will begin the second phase of its five-month LA stint with the awesomely named Eurotrash — a group show including breakout JR, Antony Micallef, Conor Harrington, and Vhils. Lazarides’ eye for talent and new forms of renegade, sometimes vandal art feels like a renaissance of Tony Shafrazi’s legendary ’80s New York gallery, which launched the careers of Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Futura 2000. Here in LA, he fits in with the city’s most ambitious impresarios with this pop-up spectacle. An 8,000 square-foot space in the heart of posh Beverly Hills, it feels like both an attack on the upper crust and perhaps a provocative statement of art nouveau riche. The visit opened back in April with a daunting solo show from misfit David Choe, which could’ve been four separate shows (oil painting, drawings, huge inflatable “sculptures”, and XXX graffiti) and continues through September.   Like the legendary Banksy show Lazarides staged four years ago, it’s an event that will still have people talking once it’s gone. 

Eurotrash opens June 8 at LAzarides, 320 N Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills, 90210

Tonight sees the North American release of Beyond the Street: The 100 Leading Figures in Urban Art, which we reviewed several weeks ago and which collects for the first time 100 of the biggest players in the world of contemporary street art in one giant book. It juxtaposes artists with galleries, auction houses with collectors, and in so doing attempts to capture the sense of community integral to the ever-growing street art scene. The heavy tome consists of 400 pages of interviews and photos with such illustrious names as Wooster Collective, Shepard Fairey, and Juxtapoz Magazine. Present at tonight’s signing will be featured contributors Dzine, Elbow-Toe, MOMO, Labrona, WK Interact, José Parlá, Gaia and more.

Book release and signing for Beyond the Street will take place tonight, 6-8 pm at Dietch Projects, 18 Wooster St., New York, NY. RSVP at rsvp@gestalten.com.

Fiber, one of the most ancient natural materials, is currently enjoying somewhat of a renaissance. Used for craftwork, utilitarian items, clothing, and contemporary art, fiber today serves as “a resilient and easily sourced material for many of today’s sustainable design solutions”. Re-fashioning, recycling, or reusing natural fiber is gaining in popularity, as a new wave of eco-crafting hints at the ways in which fiber is working to reconnect artists and consumers to one another as well as to our threatened natural world. A synecdoche for a more environmentally-conscious world, environmental and textile artist Abigail Doan’s upcoming Tribeca exhibit examines new ways of considering fiber “in relation to the natural environment, our patterns of consumption, and contemporary definitions of fashioning self”.
     According to Doan, (Re)Fashioning Fiber will include “collaborative environmental fiber art from Iran; handcrafted vegetation jewelry from Bulgaria; sustainable, locally-minded fashion and drawings by Eko-Lab; no-waste textile fashion by Study NY; recycled ‘flotsam fiber’ from the streets of NYC; handmade books spinning tales about a global pilgrimage; crochet tower structures infused with sound”, and much more.

(Re)Fashioning Fiber opens tomorrow, May 20, 6:30-8:30pm at Green Spaces NY, 394 Broadway, 5th Floor. The exhibit will be on view through August 13, 2010.

Spend a few hours at a local skate park, and it becomes clear that the dynamism of the halfpipe’s gravity-defying techniques often gets lost in translation from reality to a two-dimensional photograph. Long confined to the realm of motion picture spectacles, German photographer Sebastian Denz uses 3-D imagery to capture “a hybrid space that is in between virtual and real,” one kickflip at a time. Armed with a custom built apparatus assembled by camera specialist Dr. Kurt Gilde, Denz has been on the road with streetwear brand Carhartt’s European skateboard team for the past three years, capturing the athletes in “hyper-reality.” Unlike the comfort of a dark theater, however, these spatial photographs are not about audience passivity, but rather “creating [one's] own construction of reality within these spaces” – a far cry from, say, the lush escapism of Pandora in IMAX.

Carhartt Presents Skateboarding.3D is on display at the Carhartt store in Rome from May 7 through May 26.

Sustainable Exchange, a series of weekend workshops, installations and exhibits featuring artists who work within the sustainability movement will take over TODA Design Studio on West Broadway to demonstrate and explore the versatility and possibilities of sustainable consumption in the fields of art and design. Featuring performance artists, textile artists, fashion designers and musicians—plus many more—the gallery exhibition and workshops are offered free and open to the public 12-6pm daily. The range of workshops is wide: beginner finger crochet (no hooks necessary); the art of dyeing cloth with natural sources such as spices, teas, and roots; fashion illustration and collage; a seminar on sustainable business practices; cooking local seasonal fare with reknowned sustainable foods chef Anne Apparu. The three-day event aims to create a veritable labaratory of ideas and practices—mixing together public participation and the ideas and creations of long-standing sustainable artists, the project hopes to collectively nurture the growth of the sustainability movement.

Sustainable Exchange: Methods and Practices for Collaborative Partnerships will be open for public participation on May 7th-9th from 2-6pm at TODA Design Studio, 250 West Broadway, 6th Floor.

The numbers are numbing. The January 12 earthquake in Haiti left approximately 1.2 million people homeless, 600,000 of them in the capital city of Port-au-Prince. As the rain and hurricane season begins this month many are still living in shelters constructed from scrap wood and tarps, in informal settlements without adequate power and sanitation.
     While the Haitian government oversees long-term redevelopment, private and non-governmental agencies (NGO’s) are taking the lead to provide housing. Some are focusing on overarching strategic work, using their expertise to support other organizations. Architecture for Humanity has developed open-source guidelines for rebuilding, established Community Resource Centers to support NGO builders in the field, and is planning to rebuild schools. The San Francisco based organization Build Change has established simple technical standards for earthquake-resistant construction to guide local and NGO builders.
     Many NGO’s are working directly to put up housing. The initial drive is to provide temporary shelters so that people can survive the hurricane season. Teams are searching for quick and economical solutions to help the greatest number of people. Habitat for Humanity began its relief work by distributing thousands of  emergency kits packed with twine and tarps to the country. A Home in Haiti, an Atlanta organization that ships camping tents purchased by individual donors directly to the country, has intensified its outreach in recent weeks to beat the impending storms.

Loomstate Organic, an ecologically minded clothing company based in New York, brings Earth Day back to its psychedelic roots with a unique celebration of the environmental holiday’s 40th anniversary this Wednesday.
      Forty drummers — led by Hisham Akira Bharoocha of Soft Circle and including musicians from the bands Aska, Oneida, and Lichens, among others — will take part in a drumming ceremony to commemorate the occasion, followed by DJ sets by Chris Taylor of Grizzly Bear. Opportunities to explore a “twenty-foot-tall pyramid interactive psychedelic installation” abound alongside carnivalesque offerings such as face painting and psychic readings.
     All interested Earth lovers in NYC can celebrate forty years of Earth Day in the free-wheeling atmosphere of its original decade with free shuttle service from the Bowery to the event location in Midtown.
     Our Magnificent Earth will take place at Good Units on Hudson, 356 West 58th St (between 8th & 9th Ave.) this Wednesday, April 14 from 7-10 p.m. All interested in attending should notify RSVP@loomstate.org for free bus pick-up every 30 minutes from 6:30-9 p.m. from Rogan Store, 330 Bowery St. (corner of Bond).