Jeanne-Claude, who collaborated with her husband, Christo, on dozens of environmental arts projects, notably the wrapping of the Pont Neuf in Paris and the Reichstag in Berlin and the installation of 7,503 vinyl gates with saffron-colored nylon panels in Central Park, died Thursday in Manhattan, where she lived. She was 74. nytimes

NYtimes reports on Smithson's Spiral Jetty and the preservation efforts being pursued by Dia and the Getty. + full entry...

Ornette Coleman on sound and improvisation. pt.1 & pt.2

Angela Palmer embarked on a mission two years ago to try to capture the physical properties of climate change - by finding what is thought to be the most polluted air on Earth, and the purest. Audio Slideshow

Last spring, Mies van der Rohe's Haus Lange in Krefeld was the subject of artist John Baldessari's playful work described as “contra-Mies”. MUSEUM HAUS LANGE | video clip

"Baldessari structured his Krefeld exhibition essentially as a work relating to the location or the architecture. The artist calls his concept for Haus Lange “contra-Mies”. Point of departure for him was the physical structure of the brick building. On the one hand he has focused on what for Mies was the source of a confrontation with his client: Mies vainly attempted to increase the extent of the building's outside glazing in order to increase the desired permeability between inside and out. However, the artist has used the former Bauhaus master's own idea quite pointedly against him: he has completely obscured the windows with pictures of bricks. At the same time though, he has intriguingly restored the connection between inside and outside by likewise covering the interior walls with brick wallpaper - in an extension of Mies's ideas that takes them to their logical and absurd extreme! To top it all, the artist has placed photographs of Californian land- and seascapes on the inside of the windows: as simulacra of the Miesian view through the window, these scenes bring about a complete dislocation of the building inside while at the same time simulating a link between the Lower Rhine and the artist's home in California. Anti-Miesian furnishings in the form of an Ear-Couch, decorated with two vases shaped like noses (Nose Sconces), are complemented on the outside by a winking win-dow eye: ironic apercus that are further crowning points of this intervention."

Selected works of Swiss artist Felice Verini, using Anamorphosis, requiring the viewer to use a specific vantage point to see the composite image.

Tate Modern's 10th Turbine Hall commission, Miroslaw Balka's, How It Is. It's dark.

Looking from and glued to my laptop's flawless high tech stream of DSL jettisoned podcast last night, U2's Los Angeles concert in Pasadena's Rose Bowl to 96,000 was a spectacular event befitting of all the technology, sponsorship, globalism, slowly cooked glossy leftism in need of the American flag as well as BlackBerry and YouTube. + full entry...

"Buffalo's detritus and blight, what Hadas Steiner, associate professor of architecture at the University at Buffalo, calls "its bounty of domestic and industrial flotsam," has long been the stuff of Dennis Maher's art..." And with that, we're taken into the vortex of a plurality of responses to the changes of the Buffalo landscape.
+ full entry...

Surgeons at a clinic in Munich on Monday performed surgery on 51-year-old Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, after diagnosing a cerebral hemorhage on the right side of his brain. Mr. Weiwei accuses government for injury. spiegel

April Greiman talks with Josh Smith on trans-media and technology. Great interview! idsgn

The Indianapolis Cultural Trail announces a public art installation. “Moving Forward,” by Indianapolis-based architect Donna Sink, (aka, archinect's great Liberty Bell) is a series of three custom-designed eco-friendly bus shelters that will showcase original poetry by published writers. The shelters will be located along the Cultural Trail on the south side of Virginia Avenue near Lexington Street, McCarty Street and Woodlawn Avenue. + full entry...

Police in Los Angeles say a multi-million dollar Andy Warhol art collection has been stolen from the house of Richard Weisman. l.a. times

Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison will be exhibiting a new multimedia installation titled The Force Majeure at Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art. The Force Majeure takes form as a body of photos, text, drawings, large-scale mappings, ecologically based proposals and global warming narratives. Indeed, the crisis of global warming is not a recent concern for these artists, but one they have addressed throughout an exhibition career going back to 1970. (The 1970-71 period, for example witnessed the Harrisons’ Ecosystem of the Western Salt Works at LACMA’s famous – or notorious – Art and Technology exhibition, their controversial Portable Fish Farm project at London’s Hayward Gallery and as well, a spirited debate with artist Robert Smithson on the paradoxes of art and ecology). The Harrisons, whose proposals have influenced long-term public policy planning, are internationally recognized for their visionary artworks grounded in the natural sciences.
Among the leading pioneers of the eco-art movement, the collaborative team of Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison (often referred to simply as "the Harrisons") have worked for almost forty years with biologists, ecologists, architects, urban planners and other artists to initiate collaborative dialogues to uncover ideas and solutions which support biodiversity and community development.
Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art

More on the artists:
The Harrison Studio
Peninsula Euope
Radical Nature
Green Museum

If you’re in London this weekend, don’t miss The Termite Pavilion at Pestival, a mobile arts festival examining insect-human interactivity in bioscience, through paradigms of contemporary art, cinema, music and comedy as well as direct scientific demonstration and educational projects. Event details and installation photos at Bustler