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.

I recently attended a press conference for Olafur Eliasson's New York City Waterfalls, which will be realized from mid-July through mid-October 2008 in four East River/Upper New York Bay locations: the Brooklyn Bridge anchorage, Governors Island, the Red Hook piers, the riverfront just north of the Manhattan Bridge. Presented by the Public Art Fund, these monumental, 90 to 120-foot tall free-standing installations of cascading water, created from scaffolding and pumps, will be Eliasson's first major public project in the city. They promise to continue his alchemical reference to natural elements and his abiding interest in the environment as both raw material and metaphor. Moreover, they will coincide with exhibitions of his work at MoMA and PS 1.

Saturday, December 1: Big Paintings

Made it to LaGuardia with time to spare, courtesy of a moving performance by Eric “to the airport” Payson. Adam Cvijanovic was already standing at Departures, draped in a long black leather coat, awaiting his dealer Becky Smith. We were on the same Jet Blue flight, beating the crush down to Art Basel, while also sidestepping New York’s first seasonal ice storm, due to arrive in less than twenty four hours. Several days (and several score of Art Basel events) later, I would eventually view his panoramic landscape painting, huge, green and vegetal, which wrapped around the walls of the Bellwether booth at NADA and was one of the hits of
that particular fair.

A stiff tailwind brought us into Ft. Lauderdale 45 minutes ahead of schedule. I judged this a good omen. It allowed me to spend some quality time in Wynwood before dropping off my luggage at my Miami apartment. I cruised by various tents still under construction (Scope, Photo Miami, AIPAD) and visited a number of local spaces which held “soft” openings that night for the local audience, in advance of the great influx.

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.

During this early Spring of 2007 in New York, a moment decidedly après le deluge , with a leg and a half still stuck in winter gloom, one of our few guilty pleasures is a show of photographs at the new FIAF Gallery by Arman (1928 – 2005). Here is his self portrait.

Herzog & de Meuron at MoMA: The Limits of Pedagogy and the Specter of the Dysfunctional Museum
Artist's Choice: Perception Restrained
Museum of Modern Art, New York
June 21 through September 25, 2006

(This text was commissioned by Paletten Art Magazine, based in Gothenburg, Sweden. It will appear in issue #266, January 2007, focusing on art and pedagogy. www.paletten.tk )

Artist's Choice: Herzog & de Meuron, Perception Restrained
Museum of Modern Art, New York
June 21 through September 25, 2006

Strange Powers, July 19 – September 17, 2006
curated by Laura Hoptman and Peter Eleey
produced by Creative Time
at 64 East Fourth Street, second floor

Scope (a.k.a. –scope) is the little art fair that could. A scrappy competitor able to roll with the punches and come out ahead on points, it gives proof to a central precept of natural selection: survival through mutation. One of the obvious mutations of the recent Scope Hamptons (July 13 - 16, 2006) was a significant change in personnel. This overhaul came a scant four months since its last outing in March, when the fair took place in an Eleventh Avenue warehouse just one block from the Armory Show’s Hudson River piers.

Saturday before Easter was unseasonably warm and sultry. The art troops were out in Chelsea en masse, and in their shirtsleeves. I returned to Gladstone to seek closure in my discussion of Barney. I made a final visit to The Occidental Guest.