In the News
frieze.com’s regular round-up of recent and breaking arts-related news.
Mark Wallinger’s proposal for a public sculpture of a 50-metre high white horse has been announed as the winner of a commission for the Ebbsfleet Valley in Kent. Based on a painting by George Stubbs, the proposed work has inevitably been dubbed the ‘Angel of the South’, after Antony Gormley’s 20-metre Angel of the North (1998) in Gateshead. At a cost of £2m, the white horse will be the UK’s most ambitious piece of public art to date and is expected to be seen by some 60 million people every year. The popular proposal beat entries from Christopher le Brun, Daniel Buren, Richard Deacon and Rachel Whiteread.
Somewhat fittingly, on the same day of the announcement Wallinger’s own racehorse, Riviera Red, won its first race – the 2.40pm at Lingfield – after years of bad form. (Riviera Red shouldn’t be confused with A Real Work of Art, the horse that Wallinger bought and named as part of a Turner Prize-nominated exhibition in 1995.)
Wallinger is curating ‘The Russian Linesman’, a group show that will open at the Hayward next week. (From issue eight of frieze, first published in January 1993, read ‘Fools and Horses’, Adrian Searle’s monograph on Wallinger here.)
It’s been a mixed week for public sculpture, as it was announed that B of the Bang, Thomas Heatherwick’s monument to the 2002 Commonwealth games, is soon to be dismantled due to ‘technical difficulties’. Several of its large metal spikes had fallen off or required removing. The ill-fated work was originally delivered two years behind schedule and, at £1.42m, cost twice as much as was originally planned. Heatherwick’s studio eventually paid Manchester city council £1.7m in an out-of-court settlement over subsequent safety problems.
The eighth edition of Manifesta, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, will take place in the region of Murcia in southern Spain in autumn 2010. This follows previous editions in Rotterdam (1996), Luxembourg (1998), Ljubljana (2000), Frankfurt (2002), Donostia-San Sebastián (2004), Nicosia (2006 – cancelled) and Trentino-Alto Adige last year. The International Foundation Manifesta (IFM) announced that Manifesta 8 will aim to explore the edges of Europe while engaging with Northern Africa. The biennial’s board is not inviting individual art professionals to fill the position of curator – it is instead inviting curatorial groups, artistic and interdisciplinary collectives, as well as institutions to be part of the biennial’s curatorial team.
A fire started by an illegal fireworks show in Beijing engulfed Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren’s CCTV complex on Monday night and was not extinguished until early Tuesday morning. The flames didn’t strike the torqued CCTV tower but an adjacent 34-storey structure in which a Mandarin Oriental Hotel was due to open later this year. A spokesman for Koolhaas’s firm in Rotterdam, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, called the fire ‘a great tragedy.’
Tate has announced that Miroslaw Balka will be the 10th person the receive the annual Turbine Hall commission. The Polish artist will follow Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster divisive TH.2058. Vicente Todoli, director of Tate Modern, described Balka as a ‘master poet’ – several of Balka’s works are already in the Tate’s permanent collection. Twenty million people have visited the Turbine Hall since it opened nine years ago – previous years have seen work by Doris Salcedo, Carsten Höller, Rachel Whiteread, Bruce Nauman, Olafur Eliasson, Anish Kapoor, Juan Muñoz and Louise Bourgeois.
The future of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative is in doubt after a property dispute has added to the troubles of the financially stricken organization. Last month, the New York-based cooperative received an eviction notice from their P.S.1-controlled office space and archive in TriBeCa. The space may be turned over to Alanna Heiss, who founded P.S.1 in 1972 and was its executive director up until last year, who will use the space for Art International Radio, an internet-based radio station. Talking to the New York Times, Jonas Mekas said, ‘We can’t understand why they are giving her so much space for a project that is just being formed and has not proved itself of any service to the arts community, and at the same time throwing out the only organization that independent filmmakers have to distribute their work.’ Founded in 1962 by a group of experimental filmmakers that included Mekas, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative has a collection of some 5,000 works made by some 900 artists.
frieze.com’s regular round-up of recent and breaking arts-related news.
Mark Wallinger’s proposal for a public sculpture of a 50-metre high white horse has been announed as the winner of a commission for the Ebbsfleet Valley in Kent. Based on a painting by George Stubbs, the proposed work has inevitably been dubbed the ‘Angel of the South’, after Antony Gormley’s 20-metre Angel of the North (1998) in Gateshead. At a cost of £2m, the white horse will be the UK’s most ambitious piece of public art to date and is expected to be seen by some 60 million people every year. The popular proposal beat entries from Christopher le Brun, Daniel Buren, Richard Deacon and Rachel Whiteread.
Somewhat fittingly, on the same day of the announcement Wallinger’s own racehorse, Riviera Red, won its first race – the 2.40pm at Lingfield – after years of bad form. (Riviera Red shouldn’t be confused with A Real Work of Art, the horse that Wallinger bought and named as part of a Turner Prize-nominated exhibition in 1995.)
Wallinger is curating ‘The Russian Linesman’, a group show that will open at the Hayward next week. (From issue eight of frieze, first published in January 1993, read ‘Fools and Horses’, Adrian Searle’s monograph on Wallinger here.)
It’s been a mixed week for public sculpture, as it was announed that B of the Bang, Thomas Heatherwick’s monument to the 2002 Commonwealth games, is soon to be dismantled due to ‘technical difficulties’. Several of its large metal spikes had fallen off or required removing. The ill-fated work was originally delivered two years behind schedule and, at £1.42m, cost twice as much as was originally planned. Heatherwick’s studio eventually paid Manchester city council £1.7m in an out-of-court settlement over subsequent safety problems.
The eighth edition of Manifesta, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, will take place in the region of Murcia in southern Spain in autumn 2010. This follows previous editions in Rotterdam (1996), Luxembourg (1998), Ljubljana (2000), Frankfurt (2002), Donostia-San Sebastián (2004), Nicosia (2006 – cancelled) and Trentino-Alto Adige last year. The International Foundation Manifesta (IFM) announced that Manifesta 8 will aim to explore the edges of Europe while engaging with Northern Africa. The biennial’s board is not inviting individual art professionals to fill the position of curator – it is instead inviting curatorial groups, artistic and interdisciplinary collectives, as well as institutions to be part of the biennial’s curatorial team.
A fire started by an illegal fireworks show in Beijing engulfed Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren’s CCTV complex on Monday night and was not extinguished until early Tuesday morning. The flames didn’t strike the torqued CCTV tower but an adjacent 34-storey structure in which a Mandarin Oriental Hotel was due to open later this year. A spokesman for Koolhaas’s firm in Rotterdam, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, called the fire ‘a great tragedy.’
Tate has announced that Miroslaw Balka will be the 10th person the receive the annual Turbine Hall commission. The Polish artist will follow Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster divisive TH.2058. Vicente Todoli, director of Tate Modern, described Balka as a ‘master poet’ – several of Balka’s works are already in the Tate’s permanent collection. Twenty million people have visited the Turbine Hall since it opened nine years ago – previous years have seen work by Doris Salcedo, Carsten Höller, Rachel Whiteread, Bruce Nauman, Olafur Eliasson, Anish Kapoor, Juan Muñoz and Louise Bourgeois.
The future of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative is in doubt after a property dispute has added to the troubles of the financially stricken organization. Last month, the New York-based cooperative received an eviction notice from their P.S.1-controlled office space and archive in TriBeCa. The space may be turned over to Alanna Heiss, who founded P.S.1 in 1972 and was its executive director up until last year, who will use the space for Art International Radio, an internet-based radio station. Talking to the New York Times, Jonas Mekas said, ‘We can’t understand why they are giving her so much space for a project that is just being formed and has not proved itself of any service to the arts community, and at the same time throwing out the only organization that independent filmmakers have to distribute their work.’ Founded in 1962 by a group of experimental filmmakers that included Mekas, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative has a collection of some 5,000 works made by some 900 artists.
