Strange Fruit: Arcimboldo-style Heads at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens

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The Atlanta Botanical Gardens currently features four portrait busts representing Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter by contemporary artist Philip Haas towering 15 feet above its green lawns. These enormous  fiberglass Seasons are equally as bizarre as the Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526-93) paintings that they derive from. Although the original format of these portraits was small and intimate, it seems in tune with Arcimboldo’s Baroque style to place them as large garden ornaments.

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The busts retain the curious mix of expressiveness that teters between exuberant and menacing. The looming size no doubt adds to the menacing aspect. Of the four, hoary and regal Winter was my favorite–rather than mere fancy, he looks like a tree come alive. Should you have a chance to visit the gardens though, a second exhibition called “Imaginary Worlds” shows you even more anthropomorphic vegetation. Large animals and such have been formed out of shaped vegetation, continuing the Baroque fantasy on the grounds. Both exhibitions are up through October.

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Sheep before Condos: Lalanne Sheep Station in Chelsea

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Aside from the obviously pleasing incongruity of sheep in the middle of Manhattan, what’s going on here? These epoxy stone and bronze moutons are on one hand iconic sculptures by deceased French artist François-Xavier Lalanne. Sheep in Manhattan: charming and a bit surprising, even if they are cartoonish sheep elevated vis-a-vis art. Less surprising is that the Getty Filling station that used to mark this corner of Chelsea has been transformed — partially into a public art space– but more purposefully as the ground floor cornerstone to a “premier collection of luxury residences.” No doubt the art and the adjacent High Line will only add to the attractions of this future luxury development by Michael Shvo.

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Not that there is anything wrong with that. Art in New York (in the world but especially in New York) hardly exists in an art-for-art’s-sake vacuum. I hesitate to imply there should be guilt rather than the pure candor of the press release which spells out this relationship, linking commercialism and social status to art in ways that no doubt everyone is already more than aware of. But how does it make you feel about the sheep, hanging artificially onto a carefully-watered patch of grass in the midst of the vast metropolis?

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An Expanded Take on Film: Cinematic Scope at Georg Kargl, Vienna

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The exhibition “Cinematic Scope” at Georg Kargl brings together the work of 6 artists who take a broad view of film, its aesthetics and presentation, in their artistic practice. In the work on view, projectors themselves become part of the medium or hanging flat screens adopt sculptural status. Above and below are installation shots of Wolfgang Ploger’s Texas Loud Texas Proud, where 16 mm film features text of the last words of executed Texas prisoners, illegible as it is projected on the wall but readable on the silkscreened film.

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It highlights the mediation of information and the technology used with subject matter that is distinctly different. Rather than as medium, the projectors become important as sculptural objects with the film strips exaggerating this effect by stretching from floor to ceiling.

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Tobias Putih’s Pre-projection takes film to its most distinctly sculptural iteration in the show, as it uses an enormous black pyramid to funnel an image onto the curve of a spoon on the gallery floor.

Manuel Knapp uses computer animation to create geometric planes of space which move and overlap to create spaces that seem almost three-dimensional. In this video projected onto the wall of a dark room, “film” as such seems irrelevant. The graphics form a moving sculptural element.

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Construction/Dismantling by Andreas Fogarasi centers around a never-realized architectural project, the three films surveying a desolate construction site, a temporary carnival, and the sweeping of a street. The most contemporary and quiet presentation, doing away with calls of attention to the means of presentation, never the less floats the three staggered screens and their content, demanding a consideration of them as objects.