bell, book and candle

From Valentine’s Day through mid-May, Washington DC’s Hirshhorn Gallery is reviving the political-charged projection of Polish-Canadian monumental artist Krzystof Wodiczko [UPDATED], first put on display on the museum’s façade in October of 1988.
The massive image of a clutched candle and a clutched pistol between a row of microphones was interpreted as a backlash to Regan-era foreign policies and gunboat diplomacy at the waning end of the Cold War—which I don’t think anyone saw on the horizon back then—is being presented as part of a wider exhibit on the 1980s when art became a commodity and the artist an influencer, a pivot that still defines and informs our notions of contemporary art.

perturbation

Exploiting some of the same technical achievements that enabled the precision measurements sensitive enough to detect passing gravitational waves as they ripple through the Cosmos, as Slashdot reports, researchers at the Goddard Space Flight Centre have demonstrated that they can radically tune up the resolution in their search for the signature distortions that exoplanets would have on its host star. This level of refinement means that the hunt for Earth-sized and smaller rocky worlds would be much easier to carry out. To make this experiment a practical exercise would require an observatory that’s built to stability standards that have not been trialled in the field of optical astronomy, shuddering or settling with less tolerance than an atom, but it is nonetheless an attainable goal.

tanpopo

Spoon & Tamago features the delicate and wispy structural art of Yusuke Aonuma who has selected a very ethereal, ephemeral media to work in the parachute-like seeds of dandelions (タンポポ, tanpopo). His last exhibition in Tokyo which invited guests to gently blow on his creations to watch their reaction and imagine what it would be like to drift away on a breath but more showings are scheduled for later in the Spring.

an unlikely weapon

Fifty years ago today, combat photographer and journalist for the Associated Press Eddie Adams whilst on an extended assignment to cover the Vietnam War was in Saigon at the exact moment to capture the summary execution of Vietcong prisoner Nguyễn Văn Lém by South Vietnam’s national police chief Nguyễn Ngọc Loan.
The widely circulated and iconic image coincided with the start of the Tết Offensive and caused many Americans to question whom their allies were in this battle and their motivations for being in it in the first place and was the impetus for burgeoning protests. Though winning a Pulitzer prize for the picture the following year, Adams did have misgivings and wondered if the brutal act was not done to play to the press and reflected on the impact the photograph had had on its subjects’ lives and was far prouder of his later work with refugees that persuaded President Jimmy Carter to grant asylum to two hundred thousand boat people. Adams’ corpus of work is archived by the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.