we make money not art

• Artnet News - artnet Magazine
  The National Endowment for the Arts has just issued Women Artists: 1990-2005 (the full text is downloadable here), a 17-page study about the status of women in the arts.

• It may be fashion, but is it art? - Features, Fashion - The Independent
  Last week, one of the world's most prestigious art fairs devoted an entire section to the glossy, airbrushed world of fashion photography. As demand for such imagery soars, Rhiannon Harries asks, does a Galliano shoot really belong in a gallery?
• data visualization of the week #03: visual DNA :: ritalink.org | no comments
  Visual DNA es una instalación que cuenta con veinte tubos de ensayo, un detector de código de barras, una mesa y un proyector. En cada tubo hay partes de seres vivos que contienen código genético, como por ejemplo pelo humano, pan con mohos o una pata de una tarántula.
• Colomer: Habitante del tiempo y el espacio | elmundo.es

• On Curating New Media: Connecting Catalytic Moments/ Interview with Sarah Cook - dance-tech.net
  hello Sarah
• Worldchanging: Be a Superhero: Support Worldchanging
  Worldchanging may look like an imposing ice fortress on the outside, but really we're a small non-profit, and we depend in part on donations to be able to do our job. Although times are tough, there has never been a better time to support our small organization that works to make big change.
• The hidden cost of our growing taste for meat | Environment | The Observer
  As the west's appetite for meat increases, so too does the demand for soya - used as animal feed by farmers. But the planting of huge tracts of land is causing deforestation and destroying eco-systems in developing countries.

I've posted 28, 237 pictures on flickr so far. Most of them fal into oblivion as soon as they are uploaded. Other generate an insane amount of 'favorite' tags. The latest in the band is one photo i took at the Fondazione Re Rebaudengo which is currently showing one third of the Turin Triennale. Proper report will follow. All i feel like saying right now is that it is a good art event. In a clinically clean sense. All is tasty, carefully selected, i just wish there were more surprises. Wait! i wish there were surprises. But i guess that no surprise is better than bad surprise.

Alll that blabla to say that one of the most popular photos i made at the Triennale is the one of the Keyboard cemetery by Paul Chan. It is a physical referent to Alternumerics, a work on fonts that explores the relationship between language and interactivity by transforming the simple computer font into an art form that explores the fissure between what we write and what we mean. By replacing individual letters and numbers (known as alphanumerics) with textual and graphic fragments that signify what is typed in radically different ways. Alternumerics transforms any computer connected to a standard printer into an interactive artmaking installation.

The Torino Triennale runs until February 2009 in various venues.

Shoot An Iraqi, Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun, by Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi American artist currently an assistant professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York Universit and author and journalist Kari Lydersen (Amazon UK and USA.)

Publisher City Lights says: Wafaa Bilal's childhood in Iraq was defined by the horrific rule of Saddam Hussein, two wars, a bloody uprising, and time spent interned in chaotic refugee camps in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Bilal eventually made it to the U.S. to become a professor and a successful artist, but when his brother was killed at a U.S. checkpoint in 2005, he decided to use his art to confront those in the comfort zone with the realities of life in a conflict zone. Thus the creation and staging of Domestic Tension, an unsettling interactive performance piece: for one month, Bilal lived alone in a prison cell-sized room in the line of fire of a remote-controlled paintball gun and a camera that connected him to internet viewers around the world. Visitors to the gallery and a virtual audience that grew by the thousands could shoot at him 24 hours a day. The project received overwhelming worldwide attention, garnering the praise of the Chicago Tribune, which called it "one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time," and Newsweek's assessment "breathtaking." It spawned provocative online debates and ultimately, Bilal was awarded the Chicago Tribune's Artist of the Year Award.

Soot an Iraqi is a tale that walks you through refugee camps and experiments in interactive art. It is both a biography of artist Wafaa Bilal and the chronicle of his one-month experience as a paintball target at Flatfile Galleries. The book pertains to the political, the art, the activist fields. It is not a novel but it reads like one.

Wafaa Bilal during the Domestic Tension exhibit at the Flatfile galleries in May 2007. © Photo: Dimitris Michalaros

Defining the book is no straightforward enterprise and things do not get any more clean-cut when ones decides to focus on the performance at the center of the book. Domestic Tension is a playful and provocative online game, a cathartic performance that went further than the artist expected, a reflection on the impact that a seemingly innocent online gesture can have in the physical world, an invitation to dialog -no matter how contentiously- about war in Iraq. The artwork attracted the attention and most enthusiastic comments from art critics but it also appealed to the geeky type who'd define conceptual art a pretentious bore. And even there, one should stear clear of any hasty judgment, the experience taught the Bilal (and now its readers) that people you wouldn't expect to have much sympathy for Iraq's plight or for conceptual art turned out to be more supportive than expected. Shoot an Iraqi has a lesson for everyone, even for those who 'know better.' I just wish all lesson-bearing books could be as devoid of self-pity, regrets, anger or hauteur as one is.

City Lights also uploaded a video in which Wafaa Bilal discusses the motivation behind Domestic Tension:

Photo on homepage by Shawn Lawson. Copyright: Wafaa Bilal, 2007. More images in Universe in Universe.

Previously: A few words with Wafaa Bilal and When interactive art becomes bored with you.

Paulistas much chagrined by the pauperism of this year's São Paulo Biennial pointed me to its Off version, the Paralela '08. They made sure to add "You know this isn't a huge event either but there are a few interesting pieces over there!"

Titled From Near and Far, the event nods to De près et de loin, a book that documents a conversation between philosopher Didier Eribon and anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Curator Rodrigo Moura chose artists who invite us to reflect on the influence of space in their respective works. Although the selection stretches over several continents, most of the pieces are by Brazilian artists.

It's been a challenge to find information and good pictures about the artworks i liked the most so i'm going to highlight just a few of them and end with a slideshow, i added the name of the artwork and its author wherever i could so that you can get a better idea of what the Paralela was like (to see the titles of the pictures, i'm afraid you'll have to click on the images and go straight to clumsy clunky flickr).

Rubens Mano 'Espaço Aberto/ Espaço Fechado' (Open Space/Closed Space) 2002

By the entrance, the provocative and highly ironic photograph made by Rubens Mano shows the Niemeyer pavilion used for the Biennial since 1957. Empty, like most of the pavilion of the Biennial this year, it suggests the limitless potential of the unfilled site.

Lina Kim's Rooms are also empty but they have reached a stage of total abandonment. The photographer patiently archives rooms that have been abandoned to time. Sometimes, objects and equipment such as cables, tired wallpaper, peeling paint, fire extinguishers or metal cabinets subsist but nothing reveals what the former function of the room. But outside, the vegetation keeps growing.

Rooms Wittstock, 2008

Rooms Beelitz, 2006

Sara Ramo explores everyday life. In her photo series, Como aprender o que acontece na normalidade das coisas, Ramo investigates the moment when objects stop making sense in people's life and generate chaotic situations. Like when she has all shampoos, soaps, towels and brushes pulled out of bathroom cupboards and laid on the floor.

Como aprender o que acontece na normalidade das coisas 1, 2002-2005

That was already it, i'm afraid.

Slideshow Paralela08:

On view until December 7, at the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios, Sao Paulo.

• Heterotopia and the City, Public Space in a Postcivil Society
  The book discusses the concept of heterotopia: urban spaces that carry multiple, fragmented meanings. Heterotopia and the City seeks to clarify this concept and investigates the heterotopias which exist throughout our contemporary world: in museums, theme parks, malls, holiday resorts, gated communities, wellness hotels, and festival markets.
• Design.nl - ‘Changing Ideals: Re-thinking the House’
  The new exhibition at NAi Maastricht ‘Changing Ideals: Re-thinking the House’ presents superb examples of architects' and designers' endless fascination with the ideal house throughout the years.

Cinema Sim - Narratives and Projections, currently on view at Itau Cultural in Sao Paulo, is one of those rare exhibitions you exit wearing the silliest smile on your face. You are happy. The selection of the artworks is faultless, each piece gets the space it deserves and needs, and the theme of the exhibition with tis mix of edginess and approachability is particularly appealing.

View of one of the exhibition rooms. Image courtesy of Itau Cultural

Cinema Sim - Narratives and Projections is not an exhibition about cinema, but rather about the idea and concept of cinema and how contemporary artists imbue their works with creative and aesthetic principles that hark back to the cinematic language and its means of expression, wrote Curator Roberto Moreira S. Cruz in the catalog of the exhibition.

The 18 works selected explore three core themes: narrativity, the illusion of visualness and the reference to the kinetic experiences of the pre-cinematic era.

Milton Marques, Untitled

To create its little cinematic devices, Brazilian artist Milton Marques uses all kinds of discarded technological instruments rummaged through second-hand shops: optical elements, step motors, printers, copy machines, fruit squeezers, cameras, mini-tv, etc.

There is magic not only in the way he infused a new life into the abandoned objects but also in the outcome of his manipulation. Itau Cultural was exhibiting three of his sculptures:

To activate the first one, you have to insert a coin in a slot and the photos of a photographic film will (almost) appear to become animated inside a tiny tv-like screen. Because the whole mechanism is exposed, the spectacle is also present out of the screen.

Milton Marques, Untitled

A mundane fruit squeezer powers another of Marques' work.

Milton Marques, Untitled

Marques' pieces provide some further thoughts on the analogy/dissimilarity between cinema and the 18 visual art works at Itau Cultural. Of course, the devices that project the moving images are quirky and ingenious. They clearly refer to cinema but even the space where they are exhibited is miles away from what you would expect to see in a movie theater. Visitors are not spectators bound to their seats, they can circulate and move from one screen to another. The screens themselves are worth a closer look. They do not come necessarily in the typical shape of a large-scale two-dimensional white canvas. As the rest of the exhibition demonstrates, some of these screens are tiny, one is the surface of a light bulb, one is made of sand, another one moves. Sometimes the images are split over multiple screens.

89 Seconds at Alcázar, a work by The Rufus Corporation + Eve Sussman, might look at first sight as almost cinematographic but it refers to other artistic disciplines such as performance, photography and painting. 89 Seconds at Alcázar is almost as haunting as the artworks it takes its inspiration from: Diego Velasquez's seventeenth-century masterpiece, Las Meninas.

Video Still from "89 seconds at Alcázar" by Eve Sussman and The Rufus Corporation. Photo: Eve Sussman and The Rufus Corporation

Velasquez's painting is one of the most studied and discussed in the history of art. He shakes up the traditional rules of the pictorial architecture by placing King Philip IV of Spain and Queen Mariana both "outside" the painting as observers of the scene and "inside" the space through their reflection in the back wall mirror. Besides, he became one of the first painters known to address his own identity as artist by portraying himself in the act of painting the canvas.

In the ten-minute high definition video 89 seconds at Alcázar, the court of Spain is animated. Its protagonists murmur and whisper in each other's ears, they move in a slow choreography across the space to finally take up their position in the painting. But unlike in the original artwork, the scene is envisioned from Velasquez' perspective.

Jeff Wood as Philip IV, King of Spain. Production Still from "89 seconds at Alcázar" by Eve Sussman and The Rufus Corporation. Photo: Benedikt Partenheimer for The Rufus Corporation

The fact that the protagonists in baroque wardrobe do not look very Spanish is a bit uncanny. That detail left aside, the instant frozen in time by Velasquez's brush is brought back to life true to its original objective: to capture a scene in the everyday life of the royal family.

Rosângela Rennó's Frutos Estranhos delicately plays with our perception. Each image, displayed inside a tilted portable DVD player as if it were a picture frame, presents what looks like a static image. Yet, because sound has been added and because the images have been edited and digitally manipulated, viewers have the feeling that they can perceive some type of subtle movement in photos.

View of Rosangela Rennó's Frutos Estranhos in Itau Cultural exhibition space. Credits: Cia de Foto

Menina, by Rosângela Rennó

In the early '70s Anthony McCall developed solid light films, which emphasize the sculptural qualities of a light beam as it comes in contact with particles in the air. In You and I, Horizontal III, he uses vapor from a haze machine to shape an almost tangible 3D ray.

Anthony McCall, You and I, Horizontal III. More images at the Serpentine Gallery. Installation view at Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, 2007. Photograph Steven P. Harris

I still have to meet someone who would remain indifferent to Hiraki Sawa's charming Going Places Sitting Down. I am not going to comment on the work. Instead, let me point you to the video over here.

Hiraki Sawa, Going Places Sitting Down, 2004

There is much more to see at Cinema Sim - Narratives and Projections. The exhibition runs until December 21 at Itau Cultural, Sao Paulo. If you can't make it to Sao Paulo before the show closes, a consolation prizes awaits you: the catalog is available online as a PDF (now you'll just have to click around, cuz it is burried somewhere inside one of those Flash obnoxiousness.)

• Frieze Magazine | Archive | The Wrong Note
  How Western pop music is being used as ‘touchless torture’ by the American military
• A toxic legacy | World news | The Guardian
  One of the first problems Barack Obama will have to address when he takes office is Guantánamo. What fate awaits its inmates - and how disastrous are the long-term effects of its very existence, asks Julian Borger
• Thoughts on "New Media Artists vs Artists With Computers"
  "New Media vs Artists With Computers", artist and blogger Tom Moody sees the distinction between conceptual photography and art photography made in the 1970s as a correlate to that between new media artists (i.e. those who exact a high level of mastery over hardware and software) and artists working with computers now (i.e. those who use computers and digital technologies in their art practice, often towards a conceptual end and in a more amateur fashion.)
• Resist - Journal - Leaked BNP list published on the web by Wikileaks.
  You may have heard of the BNP members list that was leaked onto the internet this week by Wikileaks. A few months ago one of the founders of Wikileaks explained to Resist the power of leaking secrets via the web and the ethical justifications behind it.
• BUILDING OF THE YEAR « ARCHINMOTION (ar+mo)
• Is technology rewiring our brains? - News, Gadgets & Tech - The Independent
  Small says the effect is strongest in so-called digital natives - people in their teens and 20s who have been "digitally hard-wired since toddlerhood." He thinks it's important to help the digital natives improve their social skills and older people - digital immigrants - improve their technology skills.

• Body swap research shows that self is a trick of the mind | Science | The Guardian
  Brain scientists have succeeded in fooling people into thinking they are inside the body of another person or a plastic dummy. The out-of-body experience - which is surprisingly easy to induce - will help researchers to understand how the human brain constructs a sense of physical self. The research may also lead to practical applications such as more intuitive remote control of robots, treatments for phantom limb pain in amputee patients and possible treatments for anorexia.
• News of the Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, actualités de la Galerie
  aaaaaaaaaaarg! Mr is in paris
• "Découvertes : retour de Chine" @ Galerie Albert Benamou - Les cahiers d'Alain Truong
• ZuiPrezi zooming presentation editor
  ZuiPrezi is a zooming presentation editor which allows you to easily create stunning presentations. With the help of ZuiPrezi you can create dynamic and visually structured zooming maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings. ZuiPrezi has a very intuitive interface and support for online sharing.
• YouTube - Demis Roussos is Russel Brand's father

• POC
• Frisson of power: blockbusting art shows - Features, Art - The Independent
  Byzantium, Babylon and now the Tsars. The blockbuster shows of the moment all celebrate the art and artefacts of long-lost empires. Tom Lubbock thinks he knows why
• Turner winner Mark Leckey attacks 'shock art' - Times Online
  “I kind of hate the relationship the press in Britain has towards art,” he said. “I hate the way it’s all Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin and Banksy. They expect spectacle and shock. Art is not like that. The art world I know is not like that; it’s a whole other world.”
• Interview with Visual Artist Marnix de Nijs | Aap!Global! Blog!
  Marnix de Nijs is as one of the leading exponents of interactive sculptures, and recently sat down with Aap! to discuss some of his recent artwork that explores the dynamics between the human body, machines and other technology.
• george orwell in the sentient city | varnelis.net
  Yesterday's New York Times reports on something I've been saying all along: that the sentient city is also a surveillance city and the digital trail we leave as we move through it allows corporations and governments to spy on us like never before. Yes, there's a chance it's all for our benefit. But for how long? See You're Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy?

Two of my favourite mags The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest and Volume are out:

Volume is an architecture and urbanism magazine. It's neither a highly specialized print that mere mortals like me find hard to approach nor is it one of those glossy Vogue-lookalikes with chichi spreads of fashionably 'sustainable' buildings. It's not 'something in between' either.

This issue presents many trends, people, ideas that might look like they do not directly belong to the world of architecture and urbanism but are perfectly pertinent and relevant to architects and urbanists. And because almost anything architects and urbanists do ends up concerning the hoi polloi (that's you and me, my friend), there's much food for thoughts and heated discussions in Volume 17:

The editors explain: At the close of this era of expansion and surplus Volume speculates on one of the period's emblematic inventions: Content Management, or the collecting, organizing and sharing of digital information. Our retrospective appraisal of recent developments in the managing of information offers inside into the ability of Content Management to serve the current realities of digital abundance and material shortage, and to protect both vast and extremely limited quantities.

Jesse Seegers and Jeffrey Inaba quizz Ken Goldberg on burning dollar bills and other less trivial matters, Chris Anderson about 'free' culture and PageRanking on business cards. They also get Julien De Smedt to discuss his views on free-wheel experiementation, the proliferation of 'post-OMA offices', why not choosing and mismanaging can be valuable strategies. Benedict Clouette and Forrest Jessee's interview with publisher Lars Müller (whose Face of Human Rights is on my must read list) evokes books as a form of content management.

Volume dives into almost mainstream US culture with an interview of Rachel Maddow (available online) and another one with Arianna Huffington (best enjoyed after having savoured this article about the so-called death of the blogosphere.)

Entrance of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Credit: Mari Tefre / Global Crop Diversity Trust (more images)

Those are only a few of the many interviews of smart people by other smart people.

Just to contradict all the above i should add that many of the issues covered in Volume 17
1. are not interviews. C-LAB explores the World Heritage, the content management system for cultural and natural treasures. Easy happiness is at reach in "Architecture is Merciless", a presentation by Jacques Herzog about Beijing's Bird Nest and in a short series of photos that display how Vogt Landscape Architects transplant nature into a constructed context. "Seeds of Paranoia" gives the lowdown on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. This must be one of the rare articles that goes beyond the hype aspect of the project.

2. openly belong to the world of architecture. For example, Professor of Architecture at Columbia University Mark Wigley has a short essay on architecture seen under the lens of content management.

The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest by the same publishers who released the very excellent the book, An Atlas of Radical Cartography.

Among all paper magazines, JoA&P is probably the one most likely to truly and gently give rise to social changes. Smart, wonderfully edited and available for a mere $15, the magazine is heavily centered on the US scene and i wonder if we have anything similar in Europe. And if we don't i wonder what we're waiting for.

The 300 pages of the sixth issue are broken down in three 'conceptual' sections.

1. I Love To We is a call for a new terminology to describe the formations of grassroots cultural resistant practices. These "interventions, strategies and tactics in the territory" explore the war on terror and the global order. A quick selection of the many essays featured in this section: LA-based organization Bicicocina (or Bicycle Kitchen) describes its self-assigned mission to teach people to work on their own bikes. Lisa Anne Auerbach wrote an insightful essay on the new "Don't Do It Yourself" battle triggered by corporations' avid assault and capitalisation of the D.I.Y. culture. Aimee Le Duc analyzes what happens when an old police station in San Francisco is bought and transformed into a home and office by someone like artist and architect Bruce Tomb.

Graffiti Wall

2. Antiwar Survey Respondents has almost 20 activists not only describe their antiwar activities but also answer vital questions such as "How do you measure success for this activity?' and 'In order to continue and be successful with this or other related activities, what would you do or need?' The answers should convince readers that activist actions do have an impact and inspire them to join the movements or start their own.

Center for Tactical Magic collaborating with UC Santa Cruz students on Wells Fargo Embargo

3. Another Theory Section. Under a title which could hardly get any more cloudy and bland are a handful of lessons learnt (sometimes the hard way) by artists and activists: problems encountered when trying to get art in public space, the recent history of the art collective in light of the persecution of the Critcal Art Ensemble, the danger of nostalgia to culture, etc.

• Murakami animation studio coming to L.A. | Culture Monster | Los Angeles Times
  Murakami already has a studio in New York. But he has decided that Hollywood is the place to expand his filmmaking capabilities. The new studio will operate under the umbrella of Kaikai Kiki, his production and artist-management company.
• Nick Cave’s Soundsuits : Bad at Sports
  Often, Cave’s Soundsuits are assembled by a multigenerational, multicultural group of volunteers in his Chicago neighborhood.
• Pentagon hires British scientist to help build robot soldiers that 'won't commit war crimes' - Telegraph
  By 2010 the US will have invested $4 billion in a research programme into "autonomous systems", the military jargon for robots, on the basis that they would not succumb to fear or the desire for vengeance that afflicts frontline soldiers.
• MAKE: Blog: The Culture Jamming gift guide at MAKE - hack, stick, throw, jam and inspire!
  gift ideas for that mischief maker in your life!
• Artlog / Miami Art Fairs
  printable map guide and details on Art Basel Miami Beach and the twenty satellite fairs

I arrived yesterday in São Paulo and i still have to recover from the shock. This is the new Berlin, the new New York, the new 'i've never seen such an exciting place before.'

Fernando Llanos, his shirt with dancing skeletons and i went to visit the very disputed 28th edition of the São Paulo Biennale. There are so few artworks to see that the 2nd floor of Oscar Niemeyer's Bienal pavilion has been left completely empty (the pleasure of seeing the interior architecture of the splendid building is such a treat i'm not going to complain about the strikingly poor offer of art.)

Women's bathroom at the biennale

Instead of the usual plethora of artworks, Curator Ivo Mesquita has organized a cycle of conferences focusing on the place and meaning of biennials not only in São Paulo but also around the world. According to Mesquita, the Biennial model is ill and must be quarantined. This is why the 2008 Biennial lasts only 42 days long, the normal length of a real quarantine. This is a brave and radical gesture, one that certainly gets tongues wagging. Everyone in town seems to have an opinion about the biennial, its future, biennales in other countries, the way this one should have been handled, etc. I think Mesquita marks a point here.

A few hours before hitting the biennale, we were walking along Avenida Paulista and stumbled upon this official statue wearing a life jacket. What looks like a prank has actually received the blessing of the government. Eduardo Srur did a total of 16 similar interventions all over the city, targeting XXth century monuments glorifying the heroes of national history.

The life jacket invite passers-by to get a renewed, fresher look at the city landmarks.

By creating a situation in which the city turns its gaze inwards again, Srur proposes a reflection on the connection between the citizen and city space and the possibility of recreating the collective landscape.

• How to calm binge drinkers: get them all blowing bubbles | Society | The Observer
  Drinkers will be encouraged to play with children's bubble blowers instead of picking fights, in a scheme to start next month in Bolton. Police will hand out the free toys as young people pour out of pubs and clubs in typically boisterous mood.

• Paris's booksellers under threat | World news | The Guardian
  Bouquinistes' sales have dived as their carefully collected stocks of rare and out-of-print books face competition from online dealers and a change in Parisians' reading and shopping habits. Many now sell tourist trinkets to stay afloat, cramming their stalls with souvenirs.

• Lucha libre - ¡Viva México, cabrones! - ¿Wrestling? No chingues - ADN.es
  En su versión mexicana, la lucha libre cuenta con una tradición centenaria. Se trata del segundo espectáculo más visto en su país natal tras el fútbol. Tan sólo en ciudad de México se puede asistir a un evento cualquier día de la semana en al menos diez lugares.

• The Myrtle Street Review: Pigeon Attractor

The Mata gallery. Photo: Bruno Magalhães.

Sorry for the long silence, this visit to Brazil is far more absorbing than i expected. On Sunday, the organizers of arte.mov (the festival for mobile media art) took us for a school trip to the Instituto Cultural Inhotim. An hour drive away from Belo Horizonte, Inhotim is a contemporary art museum, made of pavilions and installations spread over a lush botanical garden.

By garden i mean 600 hectares of natural reserve and a Tropical Park, with 45 hectares of gardens with botanical collections and five ornamental lakes, which together form an area of 3.5 hectares. Part of it was designed following the suggestions of landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx. The enormous variety of plants makes it one of the largest botanical collections in the world, with rare tropical species and a forest reserve which is part of the Atlantic Forest biome.

Simon Starling, 'The Mahogany Pavillion' (Mobile Architecture No.1), 2004

Since its opening in 2005, Inhotim has opened new pavilions to house permanent as well as temporary exhibitions and commissioned new site-specific projects to artists such as Doug Aitken, Matthew Barney, Victor Grippo, Chris Burden and Pipilotti Rist.

It is a breath-taking place. You walk around and think 'Wow! If the Xanadu of art existed it would be this place. Or at least something disturbingly similar.'

There is some 350 works to discover. I'm not sure i managed to track down all of them but here's a brief overview of my favourites:

Chris Burden, Samson, 1985, mixed media, photo: Eduardo Eckenfels

Chris Burden's work is often reduced to the stunning performances in which he explored personal danger as artistic expression. For Shoot (1971), he had an assistant shoot a bullet in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about five meters. Why stop there when you can do better? He set fire to himself, nailed himself on a car, had himself cut, starved, drowned, sequestered, etc.

Chris Burden, Samson, 1985, mixed media, photo: Eduardo Eckenfels

The work on show at Inhotim, Samson, is of a different genre. It is potentially dangerous but not for the artist. The piece consists of a 100 ton jack connected to a gear box and a turnstile. The jack pushes two large timbers against the walls of the gallery. To enter the gallery, visitors must pass through the turnstile and each turn of the turnstile slightly expands the jack. If enough people visit the exhibition, Samson could, theoretically, destroy the building. The installation speaks volume of Burden's opinion of museums and art institutions which the artist identified with "the establishment." By forcing spectators to pass through the turnstile in order to satisfy their curiosity, Burden assigns them equal culpability in the potential destruction of the gallery space.

The True Rouge Gallery contains only one installation: True Rouge (1997) by Brazilian artist Tunga.

True Rouge Pavilion

Tunga, True Rouge, 1997

The work of Adriana Varejão has also been given its own beautiful pavilion, designed by architect Rodrigo Cerviño Lopez. Among the works exhibited, I particularly liked the Panacea phantastica (2003-2007). You don't need to know that the tiles portrays 50 species of hallucinogenic plants from different parts of the world to be slightly troubled when you see it.

Adriana Varejão Gallery, photo: Bruno Magalhães

Adriana Varejão, Carnívoras, 2008, oil and plaster on canvas

John Ahearn's murals are often the outcome of a long immersion by the artist and his frequent collaborator, Rigoberto Torres, into a community. They spend time observing its people, their character, values, and vitality in order, in order to better portray everyday people, who rarely have a say in how they are portrayed.

John Ahearn e Rigoberto Torres, Rodoviária de Brumadinho [The Bus Station of Brumadinho] (2005)

The protagonists of Inhotim's murals are the people living in Inhotim's surrounding region of Brumadinho. A first mural, Rodoviária de Brumadinho [The Bus Station of Brumadinho] (2005), depicts the bus station of Brumadinho and the people who move through it, a place that is not only a center of transport but of social life as well, as it is also home to popular dances.

John Ahearn e Rigoberto Torres, Abre a Porta, 2006, automotive paint on fibre glass, 530 x 1500 X 20 cm, photo: Eduardo Eckenfels

The other mural, Abre a Porta [Open the Door] (2006), depicts a solemn and spirited religious procession that takes place every year at the church just behind this mural and uphill from it, that is enacted by the Congado and Moçambique, two branches of a local population of pure African lineage descended from slaves who practice a kind of Catholicism that has absorbed animistic deities.

And of course any collection of contemporary art has its Olafur Eliasson. There's actually more than one at Inhotim. The one i found most engaging is the Viewing Machine.

Olafur Eliasson, Viewing machine, 2001-2008, stainless steel, photo: Pedro Motta

Looking like a grown-up and luxury version of the kaleidoscope gadgets for kids, the work creates an effect of reflected light with six mirrors forming a hexagonal tube. Visitor can maneuver the machine toward any point of interest. Through superimposed reflections, a myriad of forms is exposed.

More images in my flickr set.

• Charlotte Higgins says one of the most interesting aspects of Barack Obama's speeches is the enormous debt they owe to the oratory of the Romans | World news | The Guardian
  Barack Obama's speeches are much admired and endlessly analysed, but, says Charlotte Higgins, one of their most interesting aspects is the enormous debt they owe to the oratory of the Romans