Saturday 22 December 2012
Monday 12 November 2012
When Brian Eno met Ha-Joon Chang
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/nov/11/brian-eno-ha-joon-chang
Friday 2 November 2012
Tuesday 11 September 2012
Tuesday 14 August 2012
Josh Brand 'Nature' at Herald Street
Tuesday 3 July 2012
Alain de Botton Living Architecture
http://www.living-architecture.co.uk/registration.asp
A Room for London, designed by David Kohn Architects in collaboration with Fiona Banner, is a one-bedroom installation that will sit on roof of Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall and be part of the London 2012 Festival.
The design competition for A Room for London, which attracted entries from around 500 architects and artists from across the world, was set by Living Architecture and Artangel, in association with Southbank Centre. The brief was to create a room on one of the most visible sites in the British capital, where up to two people at a time could spend a unique night in an exemplary architectural landmark.
The winning design, A Room for London: Roi des Belges, is a boat perched on the Queen Elizabeth Hall roof which appears to have come to rest there, grounded, perhaps, from the retreating waters of the Thames below. David and Fiona drew inspiration from the riverboat captained by Joseph Conrad whilst in the Congo in 1890, a journey echoed in his most famous work Heart of Darkness.
From the lower and upper ‘decks' of this beautifully crafted timber structure (see a plan here), there are extraordinary views of a London panorama that stretches from Big Ben to St Paul's cathedral. With an en-suite double bedroom, kitchenette, library and viewing deck, guests are invited to rest and reflect upon what they see and hear during their one night stay; logging their thoughts, observing cloud patterns, the character of the river and deeper undercurrents.
Thursday 14 June 2012
Paul Thek at The Modern Institute & Frieze Article
Despite the impermanence of Thek’s environments, the artist’s Pied Piper-like influence on current art production can be felt in contemporary works such as Sebastian Hammwöhner, Dani Jakob and Gabriel Vormstein’s I Cannot Forward, or Rewind This State of Being, This Aged Resign: Let the Wind Catch a Rainbow on Fire … (2004). This eccentric tabletop collection of objects – including a bronze honeycomb bisected by a mirror and a child’s galoshes graced with bells – bears the signature of what seems to be the collective mind of an uncharted civilization. Kai Althoff and Robert Elfgen’s Das Floss (The Raft, 2004), with its makeshift hut on a life-size raft, seemed to be broadcasting from the same evangelical channel as Thek’s Noah’s Raft, which he built with the help of street children at the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1985. Many other works – Gregor Schneider’s Hannelore Reuen (2004), a middle-aged lady who has fallen flat on her face in her tights (but missing pants), or the grotesque mannequins of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Outgrowth Family (2006) – were linked, however, only by formal affinities. Which is ironic, given that Thek’s work was less about a succession of similarities than a secession from the compos mentis.
April Elizabeth Lamm, Frieze Magazine, May 2008
Jan Verwoert
Apropos Appropriation: Why stealing images today feels different
Jan Verwoert
http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/verwoert.html
Tuesday 29 May 2012
Tuesday 17 April 2012
Contemporary Collage
http://www.modernedition.com/art-articles/contemporary-collage/contemporary-art-collage.html
Towering ambitions, brutalist truths The high rise in contemporary art
http://www.modernedition.com/art-articles/building-utopias/cyprien-gaillard.html
Monday 16 April 2012
Tuesday 13 March 2012
Wednesday 7 March 2012
Fluxus Exhib at Ann Arbour, Michigan
INTENT ON QUESTIONING EVERYTHING
http://www.annarbor.com/entertainment/umma-fluxus/
Finisterrae
Perhaps the most bizarre film I have seen yet, Sergio Caballero's FINISTERRAE is equal parts intriguing, humorous and surreal. It is a film loaded with so much symbols that you just sit back, relax, and hope that you can piece together the plot (or the lack of it) as soon as the credits roll.
The basic premise is that there are two ghosts who decide they want to become human again, and so embark on "The Way of St. James" to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, and on to Cape Finnistera (or Finnisterae), which literally means "land's end". Along the way, they consult with an oracle, meet a hippie chick, elude an unknown assailant, encounter a forest filled with trees who bear ears (literally human ears!), and even find time to go fishing. The adventure is quite funny, at times just plain absurd, but all throughout existential questions abound. Just when I thought two guys dressed in white sheets were just escaped mental patients, Caballero pushes the surrealist atmosphere further, making the trip more bizarre as it goes on.
c. http://deathoftraditionalcinema.blogspot.com/2011/12/finisterrae-sergio-caballero.html
Wednesday 29 February 2012
Nudie Cohn - Rhinestone Cowboy
Nudie Cohn was the Russian-born tailor whose designs transformed the clothing of American country music. At one time a designer of highly embellished g-strings for New York strippers, Nudie moved to Hollywood in 1947 and originated the Rhinestone cowboy look that has become visual shorthand for a particular strain of country music style. His fantastical, intricately embroidered and heavily ornamented outfits have adorned the backs of countless stars within country music as well as those from the worlds of rock n roll, film and the rodeo. They include Elvis Presley, Roy Rogers, John Wayne, Hank Williams, Porter Wagoner, Gram Parsons, John Lennon, Cher, Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash and Elton John. Today his work is still sought after and admired. Contemporary musicians such as Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream, Mike Mills from R.E.M. and Beck; fashion photographers including Craig McDean; and fashion designers from Tommy Hilfiger to Giles Deacon have been inspired by his incredible designs.
Tuesday 28 February 2012
Art as Social Activism
“Art as social practice,” that’s the phrase that is often used to characterize a socially conscious form of creative expression that seeks to engage the artist and art work in humanitarian struggle.
You could say it is a predictable aesthetic resolution of a world that has devalued value, that suspects concepts of truth and beauty, that fears work being co-opted into propaganda or that asserts suppositions of cultural dominance or ideological superiority. It is the striving for art that is useful, to participate in social and political struggle, to quit making things that just stand around and create something that actually does something.
Get familiar with the concept; this isn’t the last you’ll hear of it in Dallas. It was the underlining theme of Creative Time’s visits to Dallas and the April symposium that was the culmination of that process. It is also a vision of art that Southern Methodist University’s art school is eagerly pursuing as a potentially defining characteristic. Coffee shop chatter suggests the possibility of the school moving their art department off the refined, faux-Georgian confines of its Park Cities campus and into one of Dallas’ more economically challenged neighborhoods. The school wants to roll up its sleeves and get into the thick of things.
Some of the cast of characters in town in April for SMU’s symposium – Creative Time, Project Row House’s Rick Lowe, the Queens Museum – make appearances in this ArtNews article about the movement. From the article:
One way or another, artists have acted as activists for centuries. But it seems that more and more artists around the world are devising projects that harness their creative sensibilities—and, significantly, their international profiles—to both raise awareness and improve living conditions. Brooklyn-based Swoon, for example, helped build a community center and shelters in Haiti. Vik Muniz advocates for Brazil’s garbage pickers. Most famously—and ominously—Ai Weiwei criticized shoddy construction in schools in China’s earthquake zones, along with other government policies, resulting in his detention last April.
Closer to home, curators Leila Grothe and Cynthia Mulcahy are organizing a community engaging project in South Dallas — a square dance at the Trinity River Audubon Center — that will be funded through grants from the Idea Fund and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
However, as the Ai Weiwei incident illustrated, the art world’s boisterous engagement of political activism comes with its own set of tough questions. Petitions were created to voice artists’ objections to China’s treatment of the WeiWei, yet while both artists and museum directors were vocal, other tougher measures remained off the table:
The prospect of more tangible measures—sanctions or a boycott—was regarded by several museum directors I spoke to as beyond the bounds of feasibility, given the realities of traveling exhibitions and loans, among other cultural, political, and financial entanglements.
But that doesn’t mean tougher measures won’t soon be part of the regular modus operandi of the activated art world, Creative Time chief curator Nato Thompson tells ArtNews. One petition that is currently circulating among artists demands regulation of labor conditions for migrant workers at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi with the threat of eventual boycott. And before we dismiss these kinds of tactics, Thompson is quick – like everyone else these days – to point to the effectiveness of social networking activists in Tunisia and Egypt:
“These are new equations. Artists are finding they can organize and have power in a way they didn’t used to,” he notes. “They’re finding ways their community can demand ethical behavior.”
Surely, artist can demand ethical behavior. Artists, like everyone else, can demand whatever they want to demand. But the jury is still out on the more vital questions:
Are the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi’s conditions worse than those at other museums around the developing world? Will a boycott sever lines of communication with foreign institutions? Are there times when the solutions can become part of the problem? Can the art world really influence China’s human-rights policy?
c. Peter Simmek- FrontRow, Dallas
You could say it is a predictable aesthetic resolution of a world that has devalued value, that suspects concepts of truth and beauty, that fears work being co-opted into propaganda or that asserts suppositions of cultural dominance or ideological superiority. It is the striving for art that is useful, to participate in social and political struggle, to quit making things that just stand around and create something that actually does something.
Get familiar with the concept; this isn’t the last you’ll hear of it in Dallas. It was the underlining theme of Creative Time’s visits to Dallas and the April symposium that was the culmination of that process. It is also a vision of art that Southern Methodist University’s art school is eagerly pursuing as a potentially defining characteristic. Coffee shop chatter suggests the possibility of the school moving their art department off the refined, faux-Georgian confines of its Park Cities campus and into one of Dallas’ more economically challenged neighborhoods. The school wants to roll up its sleeves and get into the thick of things.
Some of the cast of characters in town in April for SMU’s symposium – Creative Time, Project Row House’s Rick Lowe, the Queens Museum – make appearances in this ArtNews article about the movement. From the article:
One way or another, artists have acted as activists for centuries. But it seems that more and more artists around the world are devising projects that harness their creative sensibilities—and, significantly, their international profiles—to both raise awareness and improve living conditions. Brooklyn-based Swoon, for example, helped build a community center and shelters in Haiti. Vik Muniz advocates for Brazil’s garbage pickers. Most famously—and ominously—Ai Weiwei criticized shoddy construction in schools in China’s earthquake zones, along with other government policies, resulting in his detention last April.
Closer to home, curators Leila Grothe and Cynthia Mulcahy are organizing a community engaging project in South Dallas — a square dance at the Trinity River Audubon Center — that will be funded through grants from the Idea Fund and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
However, as the Ai Weiwei incident illustrated, the art world’s boisterous engagement of political activism comes with its own set of tough questions. Petitions were created to voice artists’ objections to China’s treatment of the WeiWei, yet while both artists and museum directors were vocal, other tougher measures remained off the table:
The prospect of more tangible measures—sanctions or a boycott—was regarded by several museum directors I spoke to as beyond the bounds of feasibility, given the realities of traveling exhibitions and loans, among other cultural, political, and financial entanglements.
But that doesn’t mean tougher measures won’t soon be part of the regular modus operandi of the activated art world, Creative Time chief curator Nato Thompson tells ArtNews. One petition that is currently circulating among artists demands regulation of labor conditions for migrant workers at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi with the threat of eventual boycott. And before we dismiss these kinds of tactics, Thompson is quick – like everyone else these days – to point to the effectiveness of social networking activists in Tunisia and Egypt:
“These are new equations. Artists are finding they can organize and have power in a way they didn’t used to,” he notes. “They’re finding ways their community can demand ethical behavior.”
Surely, artist can demand ethical behavior. Artists, like everyone else, can demand whatever they want to demand. But the jury is still out on the more vital questions:
Are the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi’s conditions worse than those at other museums around the developing world? Will a boycott sever lines of communication with foreign institutions? Are there times when the solutions can become part of the problem? Can the art world really influence China’s human-rights policy?
c. Peter Simmek- FrontRow, Dallas
Mathew Derbyshire T Rooms at Tramway
I enjoy the doll's house-esque quality of this show and the use of pattern and architectural styles mixed up and basterdised to create a new and confusing approach to architectural representation.
However, on a conceptual level I can't say that I completely disagree with many points made in this rather scathing review. I also have a problem with art that deals with important social issues with an approach that comes from a very particular social perspective on what is right for 'society'. Perhaps if the artist was from the city his take on it's architecture might be an easier pill to swallow but as it is, the comment does some across as rather hollow.
Still, many of the aesthetics appeal to me and this is why I have included the show here.
http://www.scotsman.com/scotland-on-sunday/scotland/visual_art_review_matthew_darbyshire_t_rooms_tramway_glasgow_1_2125210
Friday 24 February 2012
Ibsen- The Dolls House
A Doll's House (Norwegian: Et dukkehjem; also translated as A Doll House) is a three-act play in prose by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen.[1] It premièred at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 21 December 1879, having been published earlier that month.[2]
The play was controversial when first published, as it is sharply critical of 19th century marriage norms.[3] Michael Meyer argues that the play's theme is not women's rights, but rather "the need of every individual to find out the kind of person he or she really is and to strive to become that person."[4] In a speech given to the Norwegian Women's Rights League in 1898, Ibsen insisted that he "must disclaim the honor of having consciously worked for the women's rights movement," since he wrote "without any conscious thought of making propaganda," his task having been "the description of humanity."[5] The Swedish playwright August Strindberg attacked the play in his volume of short stories Getting Married (1884).[6]
UNESCO inscribed Ibsen's autographed manuscripts of A Doll's House on the Memory of the World Register in 2001, in recognition of their historical value.[7]
Wikipedia
Tuesday 21 February 2012
Hill of Crosses, Lithuania
Over the centuries, the place has come to signify the peaceful endurance of Lithuanian Catholicism despite the threats it faced throughout history. After the 3rd partition of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, Lithuania became part of the Russian Empire. Poles and Lithuanians unsuccessfully rebelled against Russian authorities in 1831 and 1863. These two uprisings are connected with the beginnings of the hill: as families could not locate bodies of perished rebels, they started putting up symbolic crosses in place of a former hill fort.
When the old political structure of Eastern Europe fell apart in 1918, Lithuania once again declared its independence. Throughout this time, the Hill of Crosses was used as a place for Lithuanians to pray for peace, for their country, and for the loved ones they had lost during the Wars of Independence.
Most recently, the site took on a special significance during the years 1944–1990, when Lithuania was occupied by the Soviet Union. Continuing to travel to the Hill and leave their tributes, Lithuanians used it to demonstrate their allegiance to their original identity, religion and heritage. It was a venue of peaceful resistance, although the Soviets worked hard to remove new crosses, and bulldozed the site at least three times (including attempts in 1963 and 1973). There were even rumors that the authorities planned to build a dam on the nearby Kulvė River, a tributary to Mūša, so that the hill would end up under water.
On September 7, 1993, Pope John Paul II visited the Hill of Crosses, declaring it a place for hope, peace, love and sacrifice. In 2000 a Franciscan hermitage was opened nearby. The interior decoration draws links with La Verna, the mountain where St. Francis received his stigmata. The hill remains under nobody's jurisdiction; therefore people are free to build crosses as they see fit.
Wikipedia
Monday 6 February 2012
James Clarkson at Rhubaba
Rhubaba are delighted to announce A Chance Encounter Between an Umbrella and a Sewing Machine, the first Scottish exhibition by James Clarkson. Taking its title from Comte de Lautréamont’s 19th century prose poem, ‘Les Chants de Maldoror’, a seminal work of literature often sighted as an influence on the methodologies of French Symbolist, Dada and Surrealist movements during the 1920’s. Lautréamont was himself influenced by the works of Baudelaire and the two share an interest in the random possibilities or associations that occur when two unrelated objects or concepts meet in an unfamiliar situation.
From this basis, and taking Lautréamont’s text as a particular reference point, Clarkson will present a number of existing works reconfigured for the Rhubaba Gallery in an attempt to tease out tensions and relationships between disparate pieces.
The title of the exhibition, aside from its significance as a historical reference, is also used as a means of reflecting upon Clarkson’s use of found objects in the fabrication of his works.
The work ‘Two Birds in Space,’ previously exhibited as a public artwork, has been moved into the gallery and is presented as an expansive print, becoming a backdrop to the sculptural works on show. Brancusi’s ‘Bird in Space’ is pressed against a woman’s rear clad in gold hotpants that meld with the masterpiece. Clarkson brings together the formal attributes that circle between each of the images, allowing an equality of form to occur between them.
From this basis, and taking Lautréamont’s text as a particular reference point, Clarkson will present a number of existing works reconfigured for the Rhubaba Gallery in an attempt to tease out tensions and relationships between disparate pieces.
The title of the exhibition, aside from its significance as a historical reference, is also used as a means of reflecting upon Clarkson’s use of found objects in the fabrication of his works.
The work ‘Two Birds in Space,’ previously exhibited as a public artwork, has been moved into the gallery and is presented as an expansive print, becoming a backdrop to the sculptural works on show. Brancusi’s ‘Bird in Space’ is pressed against a woman’s rear clad in gold hotpants that meld with the masterpiece. Clarkson brings together the formal attributes that circle between each of the images, allowing an equality of form to occur between them.
Monday 30 January 2012
The Boyle Family
Boyle Family is a group of collaborative artists based in London. Mark Boyle and Joan Hills met in Harrogate, Yorkshire in 1957. Joan had studied art and architecture and was bringing up her first son Cameron whilst running her own business. Mark was in the army, writing poetry. After a period of working separately on visual art pieces, they incrementally moved into a natural collaboration - agreeing that art should not exclude anything as a potential subject.
Wherever Mark and Joan lived became their studio, so it seemed natural and necessary that friends and family be co-opted to help whenever there was a big show going off or an event to put on. From very early on, Mark and Joan’s children, Sebastian and Georgia, went around the studio, doing bits here and there, gradually getting more deeply involved: going on working trips, expeditions, helping to finalise and hang exhibitions. This co-creational approach also was applied to the evolution of the work itself and led to innovative and collaborative partnerships with many artists, performers, musicians, filmmakers and dancers, notably Jimi Hendrix and the psychedelic jazz-rock pioneers Soft Machine.
Originally the work went under Mark Boyle's name, largely because Mark and Joan were more concerned with making their work than attempting to fight the stereotype that artists were solo and usually male. Labels never mattered to them - it was the work that was important, not the marketing, image or personal recognition. Taking the view that if the art world wanted to believe in obsessed, lone male artists starving in their studios, they could present their work in a way that would fit. However, as their work became widely known, and at the same time the artistic stereotype began to broaden, they began to exhibit as Mark Boyle and Joan Hills. As adults, Sebastian and Georgia both opted to remain part of the team and since 1985 the four of them have exhibited as Boyle Family. Following the death of Mark Boyle in May 2005, Boyle Family continues to work and exhibit internationally, and to progress the execution of their best known work, the huge global World Series.
Boyle Family aims to make art that does not exclude anything as a potential subject. Over the years, subjects have included: earth, air, fire and water; animals, vegetables, minerals; insects, reptiles, water creatures; human beings and societies; physical elements and fluids from the human body. The media used have included performances and events; films and projections; sound recordings; photography; electron-microphotography; drawing; assemblage; painting; sculpture and installation.
Boyle Family is best known for the earth studies: three dimensional casts of the surface of the earth which record and document random sites with great accuracy. These works combine real material from the site (stones, dust, twigs etc) with paint and resins, preserving the form of the ground to make unique one-off pieces that suggest and offer new interpretations of the environment, combining a powerful conceptual framework with a strong and haunting physical and visual presence.
These ideas are strongly enshrined in the major Boyle Family work, World Series, initiated in 1968 as part of the exhibition Journey to the Surface of the Earth at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London. The World Series has been developed over the past forty years alongside a number of parallel and related series and projects including: the London Series; Tidal Series; Thaw Series; Japan Series. Each of these groups of work has involved various random selection techniques to isolate a rectangle of the Earth's surface. In the case of the World Series 1000 sites were chosen at random by visitors to the artists’ studio and the ICA exhibition. Participants were blindfolded and either threw a dart or fired an air rifle at an unseen wall-sized map of the world, which now forms part of the work itself.
This random selection serves several purposes: nothing is excluded as a potential subject; the particular is chosen to serve as a representative of the whole; the subjective role of the artists and creators is re-designated to that of ‘presenters’. Boyle Family seeks to present a version of reality as objectively and truthfully as possible, calling this process ‘motiveless appraisal’.
Once the random selection of subject has been made, the artists recreate the site in a fixed and permanent form as a painted fibreglass relief. They recognise that each work is in some respect necessarily flawed because the selections can never be truly random and that it is impossible to eliminate themselves and their own subjective influences. They attempt to present a slice of reality as they found it at the moment of selection, but no matter how good the re-creation, it is still a re-creation and only an approximation of reality. Boyle Family know that it is impossible to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but in their work they try to isolate and reduce randomly chosen elements to as truthful an approximation as is within their power.
Their search is to find out if it is possible for an individual to free him/herself from conditioning and prejudice. To see if it is possible to look at the world, or a small part of it, without being reminded consciously or unconsciously of myths and legends, art of the past or present, art and myths of other cultures. ‘We also want to be able to look at anything without discovering in it our mothers' womb, our lovers' thighs, the possibility of handsome profit or even the makings of an effective work of art. We don't want to find in it memories of places where we suffered joy and anguish or tenderness or laughter. We want to see without motive and without reminiscence this cliff, this street, this field, this rock, this earth.’(1)
Thursday 26 January 2012
Cyprien Gaillard - Pruitt Igoe Falls
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YiQPVvSD7M
Between iconoclasm and minimal aesthetics, romanticism and Land Art, the work of Cyprien GAILLARD (born in 1980 in Paris, lives and works in Berlin) questions man's traces in nature. Through sculpture, painting, etching, photography, video, performance and large scale interventions in public space, GAILLARD has established himself as a major emerging artist on the international art scene.
Whether he commissions a traditional landscape painter to paint colourful views of housing projects in Swiss suburbs, surrounded by their luxurious natural environment (Swiss Ruins, 2005), or introduces a view of a tower-block into a 17th Century Dutch landscape etching (Belief in the Age of Disbelief, 2005), GAILLARD shows contemporary architecture as a modern ruin on the verge of being taken over by nature. Just like 18th century French 'ruiniste' painter Hubert ROBERT did when he painted the Louvre as an imaginary ruin, GAILLARD follows French philosopher Denis DIDEROT's advice according to which 'One must ruin a palace to make it an object of interest'.
In The New Picturesque series (from 2007), Cyprien GAILLARD questions the representation of nature through the notion of 'picturesque', literally 'what is worth being painted': originally, in the 18th century, rough or rugged landscapes, far from the 'beautiful' landscapes the notion later designated. Intervening either with white paint on 18th or 19th century landscape paintings or with torn white paper on old postcards of castles, GAILLARD covers all narrative elements and decorative details, thus revealing their truly 'picturesque' quality.
These series echo in a minimal gesture GAILLARD's seminal Real Remnants of Fictive Wars series (2003-2008), short-lived Land Art performances documented on videos and photos, where the artist activates industrial fire extinguishers in carefully chosen landscapes (amongst which Robert SMITHSON's iconic Spiral Jetty), stressing their beauty at the same time he vandalises them.
Confronting Robert SMITHSON's theory of entropy to issues such as urbanism, vandalism and the decay of modernists utopias, GAILLARD's ruined architectures and disappearing landscapes, just like Hubert ROBERT's paintings, romantically embody man's ineluctable fate through the passing of time. In the video The Lake Arches (2007), for instance, a young man breaks his nose after diving in the moat-like pond surrounding a ghostly post-modern tower block, thus making it look like a castle impenetrable by the youth.
GAILLARD's vision for an 'archaeology of the future' is brought together in his Geographical Analogies series (2006-2008): in wooden boxes recalling display cabinets in natural history museums, nine Polaroid photographs, shot by GAILLARD in locations around the globe, all baring some sense of entropy, are carefully arranged, according to analogies sometimes obvious to the viewer, sometimes personal to the artist.
Between iconoclasm and minimal aesthetics, romanticism and Land Art, the work of Cyprien GAILLARD (born in 1980 in Paris, lives and works in Berlin) questions man's traces in nature. Through sculpture, painting, etching, photography, video, performance and large scale interventions in public space, GAILLARD has established himself as a major emerging artist on the international art scene.
Whether he commissions a traditional landscape painter to paint colourful views of housing projects in Swiss suburbs, surrounded by their luxurious natural environment (Swiss Ruins, 2005), or introduces a view of a tower-block into a 17th Century Dutch landscape etching (Belief in the Age of Disbelief, 2005), GAILLARD shows contemporary architecture as a modern ruin on the verge of being taken over by nature. Just like 18th century French 'ruiniste' painter Hubert ROBERT did when he painted the Louvre as an imaginary ruin, GAILLARD follows French philosopher Denis DIDEROT's advice according to which 'One must ruin a palace to make it an object of interest'.
In The New Picturesque series (from 2007), Cyprien GAILLARD questions the representation of nature through the notion of 'picturesque', literally 'what is worth being painted': originally, in the 18th century, rough or rugged landscapes, far from the 'beautiful' landscapes the notion later designated. Intervening either with white paint on 18th or 19th century landscape paintings or with torn white paper on old postcards of castles, GAILLARD covers all narrative elements and decorative details, thus revealing their truly 'picturesque' quality.
These series echo in a minimal gesture GAILLARD's seminal Real Remnants of Fictive Wars series (2003-2008), short-lived Land Art performances documented on videos and photos, where the artist activates industrial fire extinguishers in carefully chosen landscapes (amongst which Robert SMITHSON's iconic Spiral Jetty), stressing their beauty at the same time he vandalises them.
Confronting Robert SMITHSON's theory of entropy to issues such as urbanism, vandalism and the decay of modernists utopias, GAILLARD's ruined architectures and disappearing landscapes, just like Hubert ROBERT's paintings, romantically embody man's ineluctable fate through the passing of time. In the video The Lake Arches (2007), for instance, a young man breaks his nose after diving in the moat-like pond surrounding a ghostly post-modern tower block, thus making it look like a castle impenetrable by the youth.
GAILLARD's vision for an 'archaeology of the future' is brought together in his Geographical Analogies series (2006-2008): in wooden boxes recalling display cabinets in natural history museums, nine Polaroid photographs, shot by GAILLARD in locations around the globe, all baring some sense of entropy, are carefully arranged, according to analogies sometimes obvious to the viewer, sometimes personal to the artist.
Tatham and O'Sullivan
'We consider our work as being in a tradition of conceptual art; its about questioning the parameters of art, what contemporary art is, whats allowed and whats not allowed. We're interested in making art that is very public; art that has a physical and intellectual effect on the viewer - whether you like it or not, you have to engage with it.'
(Tatham & O'Sullivan interviewed by Will Bradley, Berlin 2001).
Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan have worked collaboratively since 1995 creating work that is concerned with the mythic potential of art, and how art can exist as an event in a particular space and time. Their installations are often a re-staging of a vocabulary of images, phrases and forms which are part of a common history, though these reference rather than directly quote specific artists and artworks or reveal the origin of a motif: 'There's always more than one meaning. The pink lights in 'The Glamour' are Dan Flavin, but then theyre too camp, a backdrop for a seedy strip club, and in a way they refer to a whole genre of bad art.' (1)
Employing theatricality, Brechtian absurdity and Wittgensteinian word-play, the viewer is playfully complicit in the construction of meaning. Both 'HK' (2001) and 'The Slapstick Mysticks' (2002) use words as found things that can misdirect or mislead a viewer; 'The Blacks' (2002), a sculptural work commissioned by Cubitt, London, is both the title of the work and the work itself: 'a title, a label, a reading, a social indicator, a presentation, a construction a description of the letters themselves and a theatrical design: an absurdly flamboyant non-sculpture sculpture'. (Cubitt, London, 2002)
Helen Hirsch writes, 'Tatham & O'Sullivan proceed to the brink of intelligibility with their work, in as much as they play with the viewer's expectations and irritate them by means of technically diversionary manoeuvres. The title 'Think Thingamajig and Other Things' is symptomatic of the artists' complex rapport with form and speech. This installation begins with a tiny, enigmatic sculpture placed under glass on a made-to-measure wooden pedestal, standing almost unnoticed in the entrance corridor of the Glarus Kunsthaus. Whoever engages with it will irritably have to search for clues, since coded messages belong programmatically to Tatham and O'Sullivan's strategical thinking.' (2)
''Think Thingamajig' [is] a ceramic cube decorated with pink diamonds on a black background that the artists have described as an esoteric object, a thing for thinking. Thinking about what, though? About the artists straw-and black paint-plastered monolith 'This Has Reached the Limit Conditions of Its Own Rhetoric?' About their drawing 'This Is the Thing That Has Reached the Limit Conditions of Its Own Rhetoric', in which the monolith reappears, this time as a chess piece manoeuvred by a suave, top-hatted gentleman? About their recent sculptural work 'That is the Way, it is, it is, that is', in which the 'The Glamour', 'HK' and 'This Has Reached...' projects are smooshed together in what is at once a caricature of the artists oeuvre, a mini-retrospective and, quite possibly, an endgame in which each element cancels the other elements out?
In fact, it does not help us to think about these objects at all. It, like them, is a prop, a decoy. Its only purpose is to get us to think about thinking, and who might want us to do that thinking, and why. This may seem meagre, but it has its consolations. Thinking doesn't disappoint us or compromise us. Thinking guides us through glamour. Thinking is where compassion lives. (Tom Morton, 'Mirror, Mirror', Frieze, issue 87, November-December 2004, pp. 90-93).
Tatham & OSullivan (b. 1971 & 1967) are based in Glasgow. Recent solo exhibitions include Art Basel Statements, 2005, Oh We Will, We Will, Will We, Studio Voltaire, London 2005, That is the Way, it is, that is, Sutton Lane, London, 2004, and Think Thingamajig and Other Things, Kunsthaus Glasus, Switzerland, 2003.
Recent group exhibitions include Sutton Lane in Paris, Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris, (My private) Heroes, MARTA Museum of Art & Design, Herford, Germany, Reflection part II, Sutton Lane, London, 2005, Aint no love in the heart of the city, Cardiff, 2004, and Zenomap, Venice Biennale, 2003.
Tatham & O'Sullivan are represented by The Modern Institute, Glasgow and Sutton Lane, London.
Both artists are Research Fellows at Grays School of Art, Aberdeen.
References
1. Interview with Will Bradley, Berlin Biennale 2, Kunstwerke, Berlin, 2001
2. Helen Hirsch, Kunstbulletin 6, 2003, pp. 36-37
www.suttonlane.com
www.themoderninstitute.com
www.scotlandandvenicebiennale.com
Friday 20 January 2012
Mark Dion - Thames Dig
In this work Dion takes the Thames River, the heart and vein of London as his starting point in his quest to take on the role of excavator and explorer to discover a deeper understanding of the river, the city and it's inhabitants.
The finds of the excavation are meticulously cleaned, by a group of volunteers in tents outside of the Tate Britain in Millbank, then put on display in a large display cabinet which has echoes the Wunderkammer of the Victorian era in it's design and mode of display.
Alongside sherds of deft pottery sits a Pret a Manger soy sauce bottle. Assorted nails confirm the presence of London's first ship yards whilst a fossilised sea urchin hints at an earlier time and the farther reaches of the river and it's estuaries. Dion shows no reverence for any particular artefact he puts on display. All are of equal significance in building the greater picture of mankind. Like digging a pit in the sand, the present penetrates the past, creating layers of meaning that all go some way towards creating a fuller picture of the whole.
CMcA
Thursday 19 January 2012
Richard Wright- Wall Painting
When you enter a room housing one of his works, for a split second it seems empty. Then you might notice a small patch of coloured pattern near the floor, or running up one edge of a corner. Occasionally you won’t see it until you’ve turned around to leave. Reminiscent of sculpture or, perhaps more accurately, modest pieces of furniture or personal belongings, they occupy the room in a completely original way. Most ‘wall painters’ either use the room’s dominant wall as a substitute for the stretched canvas (Sol LeWitt, Simon Patterson or Jessica Diamond, for example), or they cover each wall from floor to ceiling and corner to corner (Robert Barry, Michael Craig-Martin or Martin Boyce). Essentially, the former strategy derives from the mural; the latter from wallpaper. Wright’s interventions tend to occupy very little of the total available wall space, often electing to work those parts of a gallery which no one in their right mind would choose, such as awkward thoroughfares outside the exhibition spaces themselves - stairwells, corridors, entrances.
When Wright does work in the gallery proper, he riffs off the eccentricities of the space and its door frames, skirting boards, alcoves, exit signs, pipes and shelving. Rooms with Rococo cornices don’t seem to bother him (Inverleith House, Edinburgh, 1999); nor does beige floral embossed wallpaper (Belmont Hotel, Glasgow, 1995), stained concrete and scruffy windows (Luxembourg, 1998) or black rubber folding partitioning or views of obscene pink walls (Salon 3 in London’s Elephant and Castle shopping centre, 1998). Sometimes the relationship between Wright’s painting and a certain fixture gels to evoke a new figurative association. At TeclaSala in Barcelona in 1999 he painted four strips of what look like arabesque ironwork in blue and black, starting from just beneath a protruding pipe and ending just above the skirting board. The effect half-suggests a shower curtain, with the pipe standing in for the rail. The odd colour change from blue to black implies that the pipe is casting a slim area of shadow. By bringing the space’s anomalies into play, Wright pulls off a paticularly sly version of institutional critique. While most other interventions tend to require, ironically, the authority of the most immaculate white cubes, Wright’s additions bring out narratives of historical identity lurking beneath the matt emulsion of a given space.
Hannah Sawtell
Sawtell's videos and installations investigate the ways in which form and image are disseminated, interpreted and used. Interrogating how we categorize and respond to the barrage of homogenous and repeated imagery they generate relationships between objects, creating playful but critical dialectical encounters.
Clunie Reid - physical awkwardness & absurdity
I Need You To Behave shows the Oval Office inset with a news clipping of guide dogs trained to operate ATMs. Adorned with a sticker and marker pen drawing, Reid’s photo-collage dissembles notions of power and corruption to ridiculously abject proportions. “The text is like a psychotic voice addressing the image,” says Reid. “There’s an imperative in the way that the text works in relation to the image. The drawing is a continuity of the photograph. It’s all organised quite formally and done very quickly. There’s not a lot of time spent considering, and I do more than I use, make and edit later. Each work is developed from a bank of association. It’s informed, but the connections come from the habit of making. Most of my work deals with the idea of absurdity – things like ‘Homer’s finger’s too fat’, cultural things that enter parlance, things that get picked up amongst friends: they’re like symptoms or a currency. This ties in with physical awkwardness; it’s related to our physical relation to things, like making art.”
Steven Claydon
The Thingness of Things- Heideggers exploration of what differentiates an ordinary object from one which is inbued with cultural significance.
The Thingliness of Things I (Potatoes In The Cellar) takes its inspiration from Heidegger’s writings on art. One of Heidegger’s philosophical problems was what exactly is it that gives art its special value? At what point does art become art and not just an ordinary object? Heidegger explored this question via a comparison between a stored work of art and potatoes kept in a cellar. Claydon’s own position in relation to this is “I see it as a more complex situation with subtle variations between the realms of material baseness and balanced subjectivity.” In The Thingliness of Things I (Potatoes In The Cellar) Claydon offers an assemblage incorporating domestic and institutional forms that reference both the everyday and the power systems that assign cultural worth.
Wednesday 18 January 2012
Investigations of a Dog, Deste Foundation, Hydra
Investigations of a Dog – Works from the FACE Collections
Athens, DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art
June 22 – October 30, 2011
The DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art is pleased to present Investigations of a Dog – Works from the FACE Collections, the first exhibition organized and curated by the FACE group that features works from the collections of the five partner institutions.
Investigations of a Dog takes its title from the short story by Franz Kafka (1922), whose main character, a dog, questions the limits of his canine existence, or rather, the sense of the community to which he belongs. This constant questioning distances the dog from the others and forces him into the position of the outsider. Nonetheless, in his solitude the dog expresses his most intense form of interest for the community and his compatriots.
http://www.deste.gr/en/index.html
Kippenberger's Wonky Street Lights
In the absence of human life Kippenberger's street lamp takes on the character of the old drunk leaning against it. The inanimate becomes animate. The scene is lit by two real interior wall lights, transferring the light of the cosy interior out into the cold and blue outside of Kippenbergers deserted street. CMcA
Urs Fischer at The New Museum, NYC
Comparisons may be odious, but Fischer's art betrays all kinds of influences and careless correspondences. A pink cast of a Beaux-Arts ornamental street lamp has gone all droopy, like a wilting guest at a Salvador Dali theme night. It reminds me of Martin Kippenberger's wonky streetlights, but they were funny. This is just rhetorical. Kippenberger's tempestuous spirit is one of several hanging over Fischer's work. In 2007 Fischer had a crew excavate a hole, eight feet deep, beneath the ground floor of Gavin Brown's New York gallery, while deliberately omitting to inform the landlord. He called the work You. It was a sort of grave; a belated continuation of an already familiar artistic gambit, but audacious and raw. Fischer has also cast heads in the manner of Bruce Nauman, and perpetrated a bewildering variety of works in his career, which began in the mid-90s. Some of what Fischer does may be unoriginal, but unoriginality is something all artists have to deal with. His art has always had a lot of spirit, even when he reprises the familiar.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/nov/09/urs-fischer-review
Tuesday 17 January 2012
The Happy End of Franz Kafka's Amerika
Martin Kippenberger
Although most of Kippenberger’s oeuvre tends toward the creation of a vast, interconnected artwork, The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s ‘Amerika’ (1994) is unique in that it might be considered his masterwork and the culmination of his achievement. Based on Kafka’s novel Amerika, the installation re-imagines a section of the book when the protagonist Karl Rossmann, having travelled across America, applies for a job at the ‘biggest theatre in the world’. ‘Everybody is welcome!’ proclaims the call for employment, ‘Whoever wants to become an artist should sign up!’. Kafka never completed the novel, which he abandoned writing over ten years before it was posthumously published in 1927, and Kippenberger claimed that he never finished reading it, hearing the story second-hand from a friend. The unfinished condition of the book leaves open the possibility, unusual in Kafka’s fiction, for a ‘happy ending’.
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