This is a work by Subodh Gupta, Nature Morte/Bose Pacia in Basel, where this summer the Messeplatz, sited directly in front of the buildings hosting the 40th edition of Art Basel, will once again become a stage for art projects in the public space. Eight works by internationally renowned artists Valentin Carron, General Idea, Mark Handforth, Jeppe Hein, Gabriel Kuri, Mathieu Mercier, John McCracken and Ken Price will be installed. Of course the advantage is that a project like this turns the city into a gallery: as we’ve argued before, temporary public art is a lot easier to live with…

looms over Grange House and Park in downtown Toronto. The break-out staircase, nicknamed “the barnacle”, is on the back wall of the new galleries of the Frank Gehry (re)designed Art Gallery of Ontario. Clearly it was not enough for FG to simply clad the “back” of the building in titanium or stainless steel. No matter how well it might frame the original 1816 building, it seems that even the back wall also has to say something about the interior life of the building. And the view is apparently quite special! We like it just as much as the other more spectacular details of the front and interior of the AGO we’ve posted previously. Add Gehry or AGO to the search box and you’ll see them all. Thanks to Max for the image and info… (For lots more, go to Craig James Whites’ photostream on Flickr).

Yuri Wiedenhofer, the inspired/inspiring ceramic artist who lives on a mountain behind Tanja, the man who milks death adders for a living, ran into some more mundane challenges when he tried to build his fire sculpture on the beach at Bermagui. This was to be the culmination of Sculpture on the Edge, but the censorious local intelligentsia got in the way. It was planned to be a much more ambitious affair, with bottles, sea grass, and offal, but the locals had apparently had enough of high culture for one week, and so his materials were edited during the night. Even so, the show went on, and thanks to Chris Polglase for the pics…

Yesterday ArtWranglers paid a lighting visit to Bermagui’s annual Sculpture on the Edge, and here’s the verdict of the drive-home jury: this furry “falling man” detail is from the work Pitch by Chloe Bussenschutt. While it may have been the least “sculptural” work in the show by traditional criteria, somehow its persuasive three dimensional illusionism and unlikely materials (carpet remnants, some branded “Tate Gallery”) has remained in our memory.

Elsewhere the good Burghers of Bermagui paid not the slightest attention to this flash (flesh) event by the installation artist Alice Fresco, who comandeers vacant plinths at events such as this. This work, Les Fillettes Mignons, is characteristic of Alice’s interventionist aesthetic.

In more relaxed mode, Suzie Bell and Berndt Weiss discovered this whimsical work Another famous cast for that Siren! by the photographer Wesley Stacey. If Wes was attempting to lure these water nymphs, clearly he was looking in the wrong direction! More tomorrow!

This makes us very nostalgic. Here’s a work by your blogwrangler from 1993 “Maquette for an Invisible Sculpture” in the exhibition Décor, curated by David Watt, with an essay titled Object Language by Gordon Bull. All of which was very close to the antecedent provided by Art & Language in “The Air Conditioning Show” in 1966-7, which is referenced in this CGP “retrospective”. They love Art & Language in Paris. It translates so well…

News from McNamara Gallery always pleases. You can always go to the link in our sidebar or subscribe to get their monthly emails. You’ll find things like this Ben Cauchi, “Untitled [Borderland]” in Lull [the Tylee Cottage Artist-in-Residence exhibition] at the Sarjeant Gallery, Wanganui, until March 8. He also has a show at McNamara, online images available from March 3…

Here’s a set of 64 mini-vids by the mobile politics collective. Work your way past the rather funereal and ungroovy front page, (black screens we don’t like) and on the right hand side you will find directional buttons which allow you to see sets of four tiny thumbnails of each video. Well worth the journey, and along the way you’ll find works by Lucien Leon, Ivo Lovric, Charlie Sofo, Dan Bell, Reuben Ingall, Liang Luscombe, and Trish Roan. Click on an image and you’re there! And there’s another button below if you wish to download. How you get it on your phone is another story…

Some say all contemporary art’s a swiz: here’s an artist who appears to fully embrace the concept! From ArtDaily.org – go there to read the full story… but can we imagine such a work on the streets of Canberra? I suspect we don’t have a category for his sense of humour…

“The idea was simple but good. So effective that he convinced the presidency of the European Council, which this semester is headed by the Czech Republic, to give its blessing and the 500,000 Euros needed to finance it. Czech artist David Cerný promised the following: a collaboration between 27 artists from the European Community who would put forth their vision from their own countries. France was portrayed as a labor strike, Spain as a slab of concrete and Italy into a soccer field. [and jeepers, go to his website above if only to look at his bus stop!]

The only problem is that behind this work of art, which has caused great controversy reducing Greece to a huge fire, Romania into a Dracula castle, there is only one creative mind, that of David Cerný.

Czech Deputy Prime Minister, Alexandr Vondra, has confessed feeling “surprisingly sorry” after discovering that the only author of Entropa is Cerný and not 27 artists, as had been stipulated in the contract with the artist.

“David Cerný is the only person responsible for not fulfilling his commitment”, said Vondra, who added that the Czech presidency is analyzing what to do with the installation, which has already been placed at the Justus Lipsius builiding of the EU Council building and which was supposed to be inaugurated on Thursday.

Meanwhile, Cerný, known for his sculptures such as Freud hanging in the middle of the streets in Prague or for painting a rose on a Soviet tank, has laughed all along and said that he wanted to prove “that Europe could laugh at itself”.

Cerny, who also invented 26 false names of European artists that had supposedly collaborated with him, recognizes that he knew the truth would come out and says that economic restrictions and lack of time motivated him to do the whole work by himself.”