Week Twelve: Public Art for Athletes

by Corinna Kirsch on January 29, 2014 Dream Exhibitions

From one of this week's dream exhibitions: one of Jimmy McBride's space tombstones.

From this week’s dream exhibitions: one of Jimmy McBride’s outerspace tombstones. Courtesy of the artist.

Dream Exhibitions is a new weekly series that asks artists, writers, curators, and other creative types what as-yet unrealized exhibition they’d like to see. Everyone’s invited, so dream a big dream, and send it our way (Corinna Kirsch, corinna@artfcity.com).

This week’s dream exhibitions brought to you by Lauren van Haaften-Schick, Jimmy McBride, and Jesse Darling.

Lauren van Haaften-Schick

Favorite moments in public art re-visited:

 – Re-install Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc” as a handball court.

 – Every Mark di Suvero gets a ladder and slide welded to it.

 – Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” surrounded by rice.

 – Christo makes an updated version of “The Gates” for the slalom course at Sochi.

 – Nancy Holt’s “Sun Tunnels” are really a Tilt-A-Whirl.

I’m serious about that Serra one.

  • Jimmy McBride

    monolith (1)

    Excerpt reprinted with permission from McBride’s 2012 blog post on Intergalactic Transport:

    Idea: What if there were headstones in space for people that died in battle?

    Not only do I love the black monolith from 2001, but also the monoliths that John McCracken was making in the sixties. I love the simplicity of the beautiful minimal object (added to the fact that McCracken finished his with automotive finishes).

    If there were floating headstones in space, maybe they would have some kind of galactic goo/space algae/space mushroom growing on them.

    What if this goo was somehow correlated to where the ground-line on an earth headstone was?

    Of course the headstone would be some bright color, as a marker.  Maybe it has small lights on it like boats do.  They might also be much larger, and not necessarily be just planks, but maybe crystalline shapes, and close to life-size.

    It would be cool to actually suspend them in a space with fishing wire or some kind of invisible thread.

    Jesse Darling

    My dream art show is where everyone has to hand over all their clothes at the door; there’s a lovely cloakroom, polite smiling attendants, very fancy and beautiful, very art-world-blue-chip-gallery-dinner vibes. You’re allowed to keep your shoes on. Everyone changes in separate lil’ white cubicles that suggest installation art, and then walks through into the space alone. It’s pitch dark in there with intermittent flashes of light. It’s a small room. Sometimes the lights go up and you see the others, naked. Sometimes a hand will brush your hip. It’ll be like, “Oh, I’m sorry.” Sometimes there’s sound but it isn’t music. The ceiling is high but the walls are close. The door is hard to find and it leads into a big locker room with everyone’s clothes in compartments of a doorless cabinet, Ikea sports porn. Everyone stands around changing in front of each other. Maybe it’s mad awkward. Maybe it’s beautiful.

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