Imaging Urban Park Utopias

 http://hyperallergic.com/51446/brooklyn-utopias/

After spending time in the tranquility of Brooklyn Utopias: Park Space, Play Space in the Old Stone House and stepping out into the swirls of people drawn to the park in the spring sun, it was possible to imagine that although art can be much more romanticized than what usually ends up in city planning, it is possible to bring some of its spirit into Brooklyn, and that artists are an essential voice in imagining an exuberant, yet intelligently developed, future for the borough.

Brooklyn Utopias: Park Space, Play Space shows through June 24 at the Old Stone House (336 3rd Street, Park Slope, Brooklyn).

Is Marina Abramović Trying to Create a Performance Art Utopia?

Shigematsu discussed the design for the institute, which will be housed in an old community theater-turned-tennis-court in Hudson. The architects used three guiding principles in their planning, the first of which is the idea that everyone and every space should stay connected. So a circuit of rooms devoted to the Abramović Method will ring the main performance space, and wherever a visitor is in the institute, even eating a sandwich in the cafe, she will have a view of that central space. It’s hard not to find this constant ability to watch and be watched a bit creepy, rather than a utopia it even has the makings of some kind of performance-art police state (a feeling bolstered by the cool surrealism of some of the architectural renderings for the project); but it will theoretically help further erase the distinctions between performer, audience member and audience-member-in-training.

 http://hyperallergic.com/51149/is-marina-abramovic-trying-to-create-a-performance-art-utopia/

The Age of Aquarius

if you can't know how beautiful you are

If you can’t know how beautiful you are

I will say it for you

Your skin carries charm

And each quake of your heart shakes snowflakes

And your eyes the deep green beginning of spring

And I love your long fingers that don’t even waste time trying to hold sand

Your back is a sacred land

Dotted with lighthouses along the coast

Where most ribs meet there’s a tickle

Dragged out on the street

And you, you have something to share

Save spindrift waved into your hair

A soul casting stare

Baby I know you feel like

Broken driftwood

And oceanic botchulism

But the body should not be a prison

Especially your own.

Especially when I want to play you like a saxophone

And rip jazz down into speak ease’s

And freeze the notes around

Your electrified face

Your icy, kundalini pace

queer utopia?

utopia

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