No, I'm not talking about the most underrated Pere Ubu album of all time. I'm talking about two things I love in very different ways: Creative Time and (Hold for it . . .) David Patrick Columbia's New York Social Diary. The latter is the only obsession I have that's weirder than the one I have for The Hills. In my regular check of NYSD over the weekend it was a kick to see Creative Time's benefit gala get the full DPC treatment. The link is here. Scroll down for the pics. (Above, the scene. Below, the seen.)
Very, very occasionally my television delivers an utterly transcendent moment of music. It happened last night when Cat Power played on Letterman. Chan Marshall, who is Cat Power (and almost as importantly, a huge Mary J. Blige fan), is known on the Creative Time cruise ship because of the part she played in Doug Aitken's Sleepwalkers. Fuck yeah, man. THIS is how you deliver the mail.
William Kentridge's 59th Minute installment, Shadow Procession, was running when I passed through Times Square on Sunday. The black and white images played in sharp contrast against the bleeding lights of Times Square magnifying the weight.
Recently I came across two Creative Time alumni on magazine covers. The amazing Os Gemeos, of The Dreamland Artist Club fame, is on the cover of BOMB. And inside the magazine they're covered by another CT alum, Vic Muniz. Um, awesome.
Diamanda Galas has Creative Times 80's and 90's covered, and proves her enduring ass-kicking cred by appearing on the cover of this month's Terrorizer, the extreme Metal magazine. Hell, yeah. Double barrell prayer, indeed!
No. Really. It was. It was rainin' like a mofo. And the pouring started just moments before Cai Guo-Qiang's Light Cycle went off in 2003. This Creative Time project still burns brightly in my brain. One of the things that I loved most about it was that it was so NOT what people expected. I think that people went to the event to relive some kind of 4th of July memory. Bad move. Light Cyclewas very much about the present, about exploring the beauty of that moment. In some ways it reminded me of Song Dong's mesmerizing exploration of the temporal in Times Square in 2005.
It would be easy to say that the weather didn't cooperate, but I'd take issue with that. I'd say that the low ceiling of the sky added to the beauty. It contained the light in an unexpected way. That containment seemed to intensify the afterimage imprinted directly onto the back of my skull. Thank you big dark cloudy sky.
Why am I mentioning this now? Cai Guo-Qiang has a retrospective opening at the Gugg tomorrow, and I have a strong feeling that it just might rock. Here's Roberta Smith's review from the Times today.
Forget all the great top 10 lists that Creative Time projects made this year. We got a shoutout from the ever-excitable MAO in the process of him going all appropriately apeshit about Spencer Finch and his upcoming project for Creative Time, The River That Flows Both Ways. Notice I didn't say OVER-excitable. Chairman MAO's got mad taste so it's always an honor to get some praise from his corner.
On a related note, while poking around the Googlesphere I came across a connection that Finch has to another Creative Time alum . . . choreographer William Forsythe! Finch did a light installation for Forsythe's Three Atmospheric Studies in 2005.
Oh, and extra bonus points big time to those of you who got the Burning Star Core reference in the title of this post! Plus, I love you.
This isn't a Creative Time project, BUT it certainly was something that made me think of their motto, "Art Where You Least Expect It." I came across this handmade note in an issue of Art In America last month. I posted something about it on my art blog, Heart As Arena. A couple weeks later a friend of the note slipper found his way to my blog via the Creative Time blog where he saw the picture of his friend's name. That nicely drawn circle here. The internet is too cool.
About the author
Brent Burket has his own art blog, Heart As Arena. He also occasionally writes for
Fallon and Rosof's Artblog.
Brent has been a member of Creative Council since January 2005.
