In a world...

Maybe you've seen that book Our Final Hour stacked in stores, or maybe you've read reviews. One of them, on the cover of the New York Times Book Review a couple of weeks ago, summed it up pretty succinctly: "Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, a professor at Cambridge University, one of the world's most brilliant cosmologists and a longtime arms control advocate, gives civilization as we know it only a 50-50 chance of surviving the 21st century."

Well, civilization as we know it has pretty much always been teetering on the edge, but having so recently lived through a period Bruce Sterling sharply identified almost immediately after 9/11 as the Belle Epoque of the late 20th century, 1989 - 2001, we're feeling the return to the ol' teeter all the more. Which is probably why star curators Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rirkrit Tiravanija have chosen a particular Buckminster Fuller quote - "Today the world is too dangerous for anything less than utopia" - as a launching pad for their Utopia Station, blasting off from Venice and spreading out across the globe over the next several years. Part of the project involves posters done up by over 160 artists, and fortunately, they've asked at least one filmmaker to contribute: Agnes Varda.

On another art-related note, Cindy Sherman. An old favorite. A retrospective has just opened at the Serpentine Gallery in London which'll include many of the incredible Untitled Film Stills, several of which you can see here; or, better yet, just start here and click those little black arrows on the right all the way through until there aren't any anymore. In the Observer, Laura Cumming recaptures the surprise they sprang all those years ago:

Part of the pleasure lay in spotting the stylistic allusions - Hitchcock or Hawks, Fellini or Godard, New Wave or Italian New Realism. So authentic was the pastiche that people who saw these so-called stills often told Sherman they had seen the original movies as well. But the films were imaginary and the photographs had all the involving values of fiction. Some of the story was given, or could be deduced, but the rest you imagined, the characters developing in your head.

And finally, in another act of imagining oneself into another world, Jillian Mcdonald slips into something a little more comfortable, namely, scenes selected from films with Billy Bob Thornton and slowed down to the dreamy pace of the accompanying ballad. Of meandbillybob.com, Curt Cloninger writes for Net Art News, "Far from being cynical and campy, the overall effect is unexpectedly sad and poignant."



Posted by dwhudson at June 9, 2003 6:57 AM