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    Unexpected Art: Serendipitous Installations, Site-Specific Works, and Surprising Interventions
    Unexpected Art: Serendipitous Installations, Site-Specific Works, and Surprising Interventions
    Unexpected Art: Serendipitous Installations, Site-Specific Works, and Surprising Interventions
    Ebook233 pages1 hour

    Unexpected Art: Serendipitous Installations, Site-Specific Works, and Surprising Interventions

    By Florentijn Hofman and Christian L. Frock

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    About this ebook

    Graffiti made from cake icing, man-made clouds floating indoors, a luminous moon resting on water. Collected here are dozens of jaw-dropping artworks—site-specific installations, extraordinary sculptures, and groundbreaking interventions in public spaces—that reveal the exciting things that happen when contemporary artists play with the idea of place. Unexpected Art showcases the wonderfully experimental work of more than 50 innovative artists from around the world in galleries of their most astonishing artworks. An unusual package with three different-colored page edges complements the art inside and makes this tour of the world's most mind-blowing artwork a beautiful and thoughtprovoking gift for anyone interested in the next cool thing.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChronicle Books Digital
    Release dateMar 17, 2015
    ISBN9781452144078
    Unexpected Art: Serendipitous Installations, Site-Specific Works, and Surprising Interventions
    Author

    Florentijn Hofman

    Florentijn Hofman is a Netherlands-based artist internationally renowned for his giant sculptures based on everyday objects.

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      Book preview

      Unexpected Art - Florentijn Hofman

      Copyright © 2014 by Chronicle Books.

      Preface text © 2014 by Florentijn Hofman.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced

      in any form without written permission from the publisher.

      Page 172 constitutes a continuation of the copyright page.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

      ISBN: 978-1-4521-3548-9 (hc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4521-4407-8 (epub2, mobi)

      Design by Matthew Rezac (matthewrezac.org)

      This book has been set in Programme (optimo.ch)

      Chronicle Books LLC

      680 Second Street

      San Francisco, CA 94107

      www.chroniclebooks.com

      CONTENTS

      6 Preface

      8 Introduction

      12 Adel Abdessemed

      14 Tanya Aguiñiga

      16 Ball-Nogues Studio

      20 Robert Barta

      22 Amanda Browder

      24 Nick Cave

      28 Jenny Chapman and Mark Reigelman

      30 Miguel Chevalier

      32 Michel de Broin

      34 Patrick Dougherty

      36 Suzan Drummen

      38 Alejandro Durán

      42 Janet Echelman

      44 Leandro Erlich

      46 Christine Finley

      50 FriendsWithYou

      52 Joost Goudriaan

      54 Ann Hamilton

      58 Lynne Harlow

      60 HENSE

      62 Florentijn Hofman

      68 HOTTEA

      72 Gyun Hur

      74 Institute For Figuring

      78 Kaarina Kaikkonen

      80 Erik Kessels

      82 Tetsuo Kondo Architects

      84 Tomoko Konoike

      86 Cornelia Konrads

      88 Joris Kuipers

      90 Hitoshi Kuriyama

      92 William Lamson

      94 Christopher M. Lavery

      96 Myoung Ho Lee

      100 LILIENTHAL|ZAMORA

      102 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

      104 Toshihiko Horiuchi MacAdam

      106 Russell Maltz

      108 Marshmallow Laser Feast

      110 Rowena Martinich

      112 Mademoiselle Maurice

      114 Shelley Miller

      118 Mihoko Ogaki

      122 Kimihiko Okada

      124 Soo Sunny Park

      126 Paola Pivi

      128 Malene Hartmann Rasmussen

      130 Marc Andre Robinson

      132 Rub Kandy

      134 Álvaro Sánchez-Montañés

      138 Mary Sibande

      140 Berndnaut Smilde

      144 Gerda Steiner & Jörg Lenzlinger

      148 Swoon

      152 Leonid Tishkov

      156 Michal Trpák

      158 Serena Garcia Dalla Venezia

      160 Phoebe Washburn

      164 Artist Bios

      172 Photo Credits

      About the Author

      PREFACE BY FLORENTIJN HOFMAN

      You don’t have to buy a ticket to a public space. It’s yours. It’s not like going to a theater or a museum, where you are choosing to be exposed to a type of art. It is my job as an artist, if I am allowed the use of a public space, to connect the audience to my work. You have to involve the people. The audience is not only the spectators—it is part of the art.

      Recently, I visited my hometown. It’s a small place, the kind of place where everyone knows one another. The neighbors were happy to see me; they’ve been keeping up with my career as I have become more well-known. One neighbor came up to me and said, Do you remember, Florentijn, when you used to build scenes out of soapboxes and come around asking us to see what you had made? As a child of six or seven, I would create little worlds, adventurescapes, fantasy lands, out of soapboxes and take them around the neighborhood asking, Have you seen what I made?

      I always had the sense that if I was going to make art, it had to be big, and it had to touch many people. From my days as an art student, when I started a small business with two friends painting murals each summer, public artwork is what I fell into naturally. After I graduated, I continued my work with public space—I had a feel for it, a love for it.

      I love the connection with people. And I love the unique challenges posed by working in a public space. There are clearly logistical considerations in work of this scope: dealing with the paperwork and the local governments, making a work asshole-proof, as we call it in Holland; that is, protecting it from vandals. The challenges of public installations—the approvals, the safety standards—push you to be more creative. There are problems that you have to solve, issues to overcome. As a result, it becomes a collaborative process. Part of the strength of the work comes from this collaboration with the many hands that touch it.

      When beginning a project, I start with a site visit. You have to take into account all of the ingredients—the history of the place, the demographics, who lives there, the buildings—everything that comes together to make the place what it is. A public space can become so familiar that a person doesn’t see it anymore. People pass through a space that they’ve been through dozens, even hundreds, of times before, and it has become completely invisible, utterly strange, to them. When I insert a new object into that space, it provides a bright new perspective to the viewers, so that all of a sudden, they experience their surroundings once more.

      Changing the volume of the space is one way to make the familiar fresh and new. The materials I use are also key to providing the unexpected—I have used flip-flops, tiles, plastic bags, thatch. If I try to astonish myself first and foremost, I can feel confident about bringing the awe factor to an installation.

      Slow Slugs, in Angers, France, took many hands to complete. I worked with dozens of volunteers who tied forty thousand plastic bags to the frames forming the slugs, which crawled up the stairs to the church. Seeing this location in Angers, a stairway to a church—to God, to religion, to death—as well the way to a commercial district behind the church, brought to mind a race to the finish. The slow race of slugs up the church stairs combined with the suffocating effects of plastic bags and commercialism all came together in this public work. As with many public pieces, it was up for only a short time—days—but if I have succeeded in changing the space, providing the audience with a new perspective, then the impact has been made. And the work will live on in publications and on the Internet.

      A dozen years ago, I bought a world map. I fashioned stickers in the shape of a rubber duck, and I stuck them all over the map in the hopes that one day, I would bring my Rubber Duck project—a giant version of the child’s bath toy—to these places. Now, it’s happening. The Rubber Duck has been to more than twenty locations in eleven countries, and the momentum is growing. It’s an installation in which the audience reaction, the joy, the togetherness, is

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