Eliasson is also planning his first permanent outdoor sculptural installation in the United States on the Bard College campus, in a field close by their Frank Gehry-designed performance arts center. Entitled The Parliament of Reality, its opening is scheduled for July 2008, roughly the same time as the Waterfalls.

Bulgarian artist Ivan Moudov shows his "Fragments" project in this exhibition, as seen at the Venice Biennale.

Lifting. Theft in Art

Peacock Visual Arts
21 Castle Street
Aberdeen AB11 5BQ

25 August - 29 September, 2007
Curated by Atopia Projects

Lifting is a show at Peacock Visual Arts exploring instances when art gets in the way of what is considered "legal". The show creates an archive of historical and contemporary works of radical appropriation- how theft and vandalism are "lifted" from criminal behaviour and into the art sphere. The results are humourous and poignant revelations on the absurdity of the legal and social ideas of ownership, originality and copyright.

Duchamp, A Biography by Calvin Tompkins, published by Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1996

A frequent critique of the Venice Biennale is its organization into national pavilions. As a legacy of the first Biennale of 1895, when nations were young, naive, and given to a prideful beating of their imperial wings, the idea of identifying particular art with a particular country and then competing for the best of show, a Golden Lion, might have once seemed appropriate. It now seems wholly anachronistic. In our current climate of globalization, of multi-national corporations and commissions funding large exhibitions in far flung territories, of curators and artists hopping from one project and one continent to another, segregation according to nationality appears somewhat fusty and quaint.

Show-in-a-box 1994

“We wanted to provide a viewpoint or rather a grammar for people to understand and compare different structures.” — Bernd Becher
The Artist and Photographer Bernd Becher died last week in Germany.
Bernd and Hilla Bechers current show at Sonnabend Gallery New York is still on view.

The process of picking up the threads of a project from 14 year ago, Faux Conceptual Art, is quite interesting. I’ve been framing the works, re-photographing them and creating new pieces. Looking at four works I see similar themes and ideas emerging. The pieces, Fibonacci Series With Calculators, Sit On, Price List and Not Here, have never been exhibited other than being presented on the web. This is a very strange idea. The whole web site, Faux Conceptual Art is a work that is a proposition. It is also in some measure a critique of the art market. Since re-engaging the works I am plodding along at a leisurely rate like a sort of anthropologist trying to piece together what I was thinking. This becomes fairly interesting because the world has changed, art discourse has advanced, and I have gone through many stages in that time.

Oppenheim Sunburn Remix -1993
I’m looking at the works I did fourteen years ago to understand what I was trying to get at. The works were done as I was beginning to work with the internet. One of the web sites I created was called Faux Conceptual Art. I was thinking about the burgeoning business of counterfeit products such as watches and designer label products coming from China. Since I live a few blocks from Canal Street in New York, I am aware of all the counterfeit products being sold on the street. I thought that the fakes were a very interesting by product of globalism. They also functioned as a linguistic game. The game is about a shift in the idea of creativity. It also extends the 1980’s discussion of appropriation into the 1990’s debate about intellectual property. The shift in creativity is subtle. This also has it’s basis in the famous essay by Walter Benjamin, Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction. What Benjamin says is that art loses its’ “aura” when it is reproduced. The discussion is about the qualities of an artwork. This presupposes that art is about a unique object, a masterwork. The copy supposedly has no “aura.” What conveys uniqueness or the quality of art to an artwork? This becomes a central question for every generation of artists.

I called this piece 3-In-1 done in 1994, a fake Joseph Kosuth. Actually it was a restaging of the Kosuth piece that put the three separate elements (photo, chair, Photostat) into a frame making it into a single discreet art object. The original piece by Kosuth titled, One In Three Chairs has three separate parts. It was done in 1965.

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There’s a terrific discussion on http://post.thing.net concerning legacy conceptual art. Look though the comments section on the right. In particular Joseph Nechvatal and Blackhawk have been adding very incisive texts and commentary.

Information theory is constantly butting up against property rights. That was the premise behind Faux Conceptual Art http://www.artnetweb.com/projects/fauxcon/home.html