Rirkrit Tiravanija Lights Stockhausen at the Armory

The most recent project by the central artist of the so-called "relational aesthetics" movement, Rirkrit Tiravanija, is a staging at New York's Park Avenue Armory of "Oktophonie," a performance of electronic music by the singular, often controversial German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (through Mar. 27). The music, a 70-minute excerpt of the late composer's 29-hour opera "Licht," was intended to be performed in a specially designed chamber with octophonic (8-channel) sound. Tiravanija conceived of a circular stage with a lunar surface to include both the audience and the performers, all-white smocks to be worn by all attendees, and a light show that approximates an eclipse. Read More

Beauty and the Bees: Q+A with Wolfgang Laib

Wolfgang Laib's sculptural materials include beeswax, pollen, stone, milk and rice. Beeswax is used in large amounts to build towering ziggurat sculptures and caves, such as the one he constructed in the French Pyrenees, which is accessible only by footpath. Pollen, on the other hand, is available in only small amounts, and he collects it over many years from the bushes and wildflower fields surrounding his exquisite German home. For him, these substances are not a means toward creating art, but the art itself.

Though trained as a doctor, Laib changed his direction after medical school and began creating his now iconic "milkstones," slabs of polished marble with a thin layer of fresh milk sitting atop their surfaces. His work emits a subtle spiritual resonance, as does Laib himself, who speaks simply and with monastic restraint. In addition to his home in Hochdorf, Germany, he divides his time between an apartment in Manhattan and a small village in India.
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Olaf Breuning is Home Again

In Olaf Breuning's Home trilogy, three half-hour videos released over the past seven years, we are guided by a nameless buffoon played by actor Brian Kerstetter. Rare is a scene without the presence of his face floating before the camera or his bipolar, delusional, egomaniacal and clownish personality.

Like the Swiss-born Breuning, the buffoon is a scruffy, sandy-haired New Yorker around 40 years of age with a penchant for masks and face paint. He's obsessed with the culture around him. In the first film of the trilogy, Home (2004), he holes up in a hotel room and reimagines his life as a collage of film references and anecdotes. Throughout Home 2 (2007), shown at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, he travels the globe, spitting terrible American tourist-speak wherever he goes.
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Kids' Stuff, Adult Matters: Q+A with Charlie White

Artist Charlie White is consumed by the phenomenon of the consumerist teenager, particularly the female, who has, since the 1970s, been the prime target for advertising. In "The Sun and Other Stars," his two-person show with photographer Katy Grannan, on view through Oct. 14 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, White offers a wide variety of works reflecting mass-media depictions of adolescence: '90s-style after-school cartoons, documentation from a performance-audition in which he photographed 107 teenage models, and photographs of dolls fabricated to eerily resemble real teenage girls.
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