For those of you lucky enough to be in London for Frieze this weekend, make sure to stop by Altman Siegel‘s booth to see artist Trevor Paglen’s new work: Prototype for a Nonfunctional Satellite. Paglen, whose work is currently part of Ballroom’s Quiet Earth exhibition in New York, is one of the most cerebral contemporary artists, examining topics as varied as geography, the United States military, and space travel.

The kinetic sculpture and model, Prototype, represents a significant departure for Paglen (least of all because he is primarily known as a photographer). As noted by the gallery, while Paglen usually documents “the clandestine world of covert military operations,” here “he is using the engineering funded by this vast military industrial complex to create public sculpture. Thus, drawing our attention to the non-military potential of technology.”
Paglen transforms what would usually be viewed as a scientific object, into a work of art; consciously putting “aerospace engineering into conversation with the legacy of minimalist sculpture, earthworks, and formalism in general.” And like most works of art, it really should be experienced in person (but a .gif is good too).

In the next step of the process, the clarifier (2), solid particles settle to the floor as sludge and purified water can be returned to the environmentOther activities took place during the workshop where the mothers spoke about the issues they face most in raising their children as well as their success stories.
Kris Works and Tevin Grouse led all scorers and Works was chosen player of the game.

The food at Georgia’s is pretty much the same as what Shoemaker cooked in the kitchen of her Lake Forest home for her family and for a sideline catering business she had started in the mid 1970s.
The city’s acting fire chief has said crews are stringing a cable through the railcars and securing it to bulldozers on land.

Before Teresa Hubbard & Alexander Birchler’s Trilogy opens here at Ballroom Marfa in 2014, be sure to check out their new exhibition, Eight, Eighteen, at the Linda Pace Foundation.

Eight, Eighteen consists of two films: Eight from 2001, which revolves around the birthday of an eight-year-old girl and Eighteen (2013), which follows the same subject, only 10 years later on her 18th birthday. Due to video looping, changing locations, and the non-linear and disjointed narrative present in both films, the viewer is forced to question what is fact and what is fiction, leading one to examine the larger theme at the core of Hubbard/Birchler’s work: the subtleties found in cinema’s components and within its history.

Eight, Eighteen opens on Saturday, October 12, 2013 and runs until March 29, 2014 at the Linda Pace Foundation in San Antonio, TX.

The third largest cable television company in the United States, Cox offers an array of advanced digital video, high speed Internet and telephony services over its own nationwide IP network, as well as integrated wireless services

The Seattle based artist is renowned for his large scale art, critiquing mass consumption and global wastage.
From Great Lakes Brewery in Toronto, there Pompous Ass English Pale Ale.
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Environmental advocates want the Environmental Protection Agency and the Consumer Product Safety Commission to take a closer look.
One tool: an air service incentive program that provides him up to $3 million a year to lure air carriers with landing fee waivers and matching dollars for advertising.
20 years later, his daughter, Nastia, was able to claim gold in the all around at the Beijing Games with Valeri coaching her every step of the way.

Houston Police officer Tim Norris said over 1,000 people mobbed Willowbrook mall for one of those tickets which resulted in an emergency “citywide assist’ call that sent some 50 officers rushing there in the thick fog early Sunday morning.

James Evans
Prada Marfa, 2005
Digital photograph
40 x 50 inches (unframed)
Limited edition available from Ballroom Marfa

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Prada Marfa: An Explainer

What is Prada Marfa?

Prada Marfa is a site-specific, permanent land art project by artists Elmgreen & Dragset constructed in 2005. Modeled after a Prada boutique, the inaccessible interior of the structure includes luxury goods from Prada’s fall collection from that year. The door does not open, ensuring that the sculpture will never function as a place of commerce. Art Production Fund and Ballroom Marfa co-produced the project.

Prada Marfa is an artwork initiated by ourselves and realized in a collaboration with the not-for-profit cultural organizations Art Production Fund and Ballroom Marfa in 2005. It was not a work commissioned by the fashion brand Prada nor had the fashion brand any involvement in the creation of this work. They kindly gave us the permission to use their logo after we asked them, due to the founder Miuccia Prada’s personal interest in contemporary art, and she donated shoes and bags, which have never been renewed but stay the same – as a historic display – inside the sculpture. The right definition of advertisement must be based on criteria more accurate than just including any sign which contains a logo. It is advertisement only when a company either commissions someone to make such a sign, pays for its execution or makes a sign themselves in order to promote the company’s products. And this is not the case here since Prada Marfa never had any commercial link to the fashion brand Prada, unlike the Playboy bunny which went up this summer initiated by Playboy itself.

Prada Marfa is firmly positioned within a contemporary understanding of site specific art, but also draws strongly on pop art and land art – two art forms which were conceived and thrived especially in the USA from the 1960’s and onwards. Many artists, from Andy Warhol with his famous Campbell soup cans to Andreas Gursky with his grand photographic documentation of retail spaces have appropriated and dealt with the visual language of commercial brands. In an increasingly commercialized world, we see the independent artistic treatment of all visual signs and signifiers as crucial to a better and wider understanding of our day-to-day surroundings, including the influence of corporations.

It comes as a big surprise for us that the Texas Department of Transportation now after eight years may declare this well-known artwork to be illegal and we think it would be a shame for the local community if it disappeared after being there for so long since the work clearly is one of the strong points for the cultural tourism, which is such an important financial factor in this region. However, we are very happy to experience the fantastic support from both art professionals internationally, locals and others, who have even created a Facebook page named “Save Prada Marfa” that after just a short while has received almost 4000 likes and daily receives plenty of new posts, stories and images from people who once visited this site.

— Elmgreen & Dragset

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Within our 13 years of producing and presenting important public art, few works have been as eagerly embraced than Prada Marfa by Elmgreen & Dragset. With full integrity, the artists refused for us to ask any corporation, especially Prada, for monetary donations to support the making of this project. It took us over a year of intense fundraising from local and international private patrons to realize this authentic and pure permanent artwork. The family of the late Walter Alton “Slim” Brown, even generously contributed to the project by lending their land. Great public art empowers people and gives them alternate ways to understand the times that we live in; Prada Marfa is a civic gift that has become one of the great worldwide pop icons.

– Yvonne Force Villareal & Doreen Remen
Co-founders
Art Production Fund

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Prada Marfa is a living sculpture, an installation that has taken on a life of its own. In the eight years since its creation, Elmgreen & Dragset’s work has become part of the cultural and physical landscape of Far West Texas. At the same time it has entered into international art history discourse. It’s part of what people think of when they think of Marfa, either as art lovers on a pilgrimage, or as surprised passersby.

It’s also a non-profit project — supported entirely by funds from foundations and individuals — and the antithesis of commercialism. Prada Marfa is an embodiment of the Ballroom Marfa mission to combine innovation and accessibility without compromising on either front. We are encouraging engagement with art, and Prada Marfa is an important precursor to other public art projects in Marfa and Far West Texas.

– Fairfax Dorn
Co-founder and Artistic Director
Ballroom Marfa

Where is Prada Marfa?

Scenes from the Comic Future installation. Aaron Curry in the courtyard!

Before the opening of Comic Future on September 27th, we thought it might be helpful to provide some background reading and information about some of the artists and their work represented in the show. First up is this introduction to the work of Walead Beshty from Ballroom’s intern, Rebecca McGivney, who writes here about Beshty’s 2012 work, Unmasking.

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Unmasking is composed of isolated panels from 41 comic books, each depicting a character removing his/her disguise either forcibly or voluntarily. Although a compelling piece on its own, it is made even more arresting when one consider how much it differs from the rest of Beshty’s oeuvre. Beshty, who is most-well known for his colorful photograms and glass boxes transported in FedEx containers, rarely uses found material, instead preferring to emphasize the human touch in his work. Although Unmasking appears to dramatically differ from Beshty’s previous pieces, thematically the work fits in with Beshty’s continued interest in the demystification of the artist’s process and the subject of transition.

In Unmasked, Beshty’s interests are made manifest through characters who are literally revealing what lies beneath the surface. Often caught in the midst of removing their disguises, these subjects are seen in transition; they are in between two completely separate identities and it is this in between space that interests Beshty fully. As he notes in his 2008 article “Abstracting Photography”:

The world we see from transitional spaces— the world outside the window; the world from the perspective of escalators, people movers, monorails, and shopping centres—has become an intellectual bogeyman, a storage container for all our
alienations. These infrastructural interstitial zones stand as compromised, indeterminate way stations between chimerical destinations. As an open field they occupy the space of bare fact, which we should approach with suspicion, but they are also unprocessed, and this has potential.

Beshty fixates on the liminal, on the moment of flux, because of its “potential” for transformation. It is this interest in transition that makes Beshty, and particularly Unmasking, such a great fit for Comic Future, an exhibit composed of works, which examine our (often) grim future through a cartoonish and/or ironic lens. Beshty’s pieces are always dynamic, either themselves in transition or depicting places or objects that are, but even more relevant to the exhibition, their final outcome is often unknown to the artist, his work being shaped by a symbiosis of chance and human (the artist’s) intervention, leaving their fates as uncertain as ours.

For more reading on Beshty and his process, particularly on his interests in the transitory, read Jonathan Nisbet’s excellent 2011 article for X-Tra. An excerpt:

Ballroom alumnus Rashid Johnson — see our archive of photos from, New Growth his 2013 solo exhibition — has a new site-specific work on display in Chicago at moniquemeloche, entitled Remembering D.B. Cooper.

From moniquemeloche.com

Rashid Johnson’s Remembering D.B. Cooper transforms the 25 foot “on the wall” space into one of his iconic shelf works. The “on the wall” work will showcase a mix of Johnson’s signature materials– plants, black wax, books, albums, and shea butter — to explore the notion of escapism, an issue that continues to permeate his multi-dimensional practice. In Remembering D.B. Cooper, Johnson explores the personal as opposed to the political reasons for the famous, unknown highjacker of a Northwest flight in 1971- a media epithet known today as D.B. Cooper; today, the true identity of D.B. Cooper, who parachuted from the flight holding 200,000 worth of ransom money, remains unknown. Since his 2008 solo exhibition at moniquemeloche titled “The New Escapist Promised Land Garden and Recreation Center,” Johnson has carved out a space for a black secret society (the Boule) to study, meet, work, get their leisure on – and yes escape, and the lore of D.B. Cooper is yet another historical avenue for Johnson to mine.

Remembering D.B Cooper will be on display from now until January 4, 2014.

If you’re in Los Angeles tomorrow (Friday September 6th) be sure to stop by Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. Not only will you be treated to work by Cecily Brown and Roe Ethridge, but friend of the Ballroom (and incoming Comic Future installer), Justin Waugh’s work will also be displayed in the very lovely and spacious restrooms of the gallery. Restrooms, though a necessity are rarely a destination, let’s change that, shall we?

Justin Waugh’s Untitled (Shape Painting #6), Oil and graphite on paper mounted to dibond, 40 x 28 inches, 2012.

Ballroom alumnus Bruce Davenport, Jr. checks in. Davenport was here in Marfa in the spring of 2011 as part of the Dan Cameron-curated exhibition The World According to New Orleans.

Friend and artist Mitchell Anderson curates a show, Some Europe in Texas, which opens tonight, August 2, from 6 to 8 pm, at 403 E. Texas in Marfa, Texas.

And for your Friday listening pleasure: Pink Floyd, Live at Paris Cinema, London, July 1970.