More on the colour front

Rebecca Warren

Rebecca Warren is an almost perfect example of an extremely rare phenomenon: a soaring career in clay sculptures. She makes strange and ungainly quasi-figures out of this claggy substance that look as though they can hardly stand up, let alone decide what they actually want to be. What is more, her misbegotten creatures are not even fired.

Some sage and some red

I like a vase of flowers

I like the use of vases of flowers to show form and colour.

Images from Metropolitan...colour

Some things I like

Duncan Wooldridge

Images are created through a string of repetitions and recurrences, of history repeating itself, of processes imitated and images reproduced. The appropriation in my practice, which engages with such repetitions, is a reiterative gesture that pulls together the singular encounter of looking with that of making. The space of the reiteration is one of endless creativity, one which allows for mutations and deterritorialisations without obscuring roots and influences which are often clouded in an attempt to be original."

"Duncan, No More Photography, Get a Job (After Christo)

Classical colour

What is colour

Equinox, Hans Hofmann, 1958. Note how the contrasting colors create energetic forms, which Hofmann famously termed “push and pull.”

Yale University School of Art...Jessica Stockholder is here

Jessica Stockholder

Jessica Stockholder was born in Seattle, Washington in 1959. She studied painting at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and received an MFA from Yale University. Stockholder is a pioneer of multimedia genre-bending installations that have become a prominent language in contemporary art. Her site-specific interventions and autonomous floor and wall pieces have been described as “paintings in space.” Stockholder’s complex installations incorporate the architecture in which they have been conceived, blanketing the floor, scaling walls and ceiling, and even spilling out of windows, through doors, and into the surrounding landscape. Her work is energetic, cacophonous, and idiosyncratic, but close observation reveals formal decisions about color and composition, and a tempering of chaos with control. In a single work, Stockholder deploys a myriad of materials that might include bales of hay, fruit, toys, laundry baskets, curtains, heat lamps, fans, yarn, newspaper, bowling balls, automobiles, and construction materials—bricks, concrete, plywood, and sheetrock. Bringing the vibrant, Technicolor plastic products of consumer culture to her work, she later adds painted areas of bright purple, turquoise, pink, orange and green, calibrating each color for maximum optical and spatial impact. Stockholder’s installations, sculptures, and collages affirm the primacy of pleasure, the blunt reality of things, and the rich heterogeneity of life, mind, and art amid a vortex of shifting polarities—abstraction/realism, classical order/intuitive expressionism, conscious thought/unconscious desire. Jessica Stockholder is Director of Graduate Studies in Sculpture at Yale University. Her work has been exhibited at Dia Center for the Arts, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; P.S. 1, New York; SITE Santa Fe; the Venice Biennale; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, among others.

Some stuff from MET New York

Metal work...think I would like to do some wirework

Jake & Dinos Chapman

Jake and Dinos Chapman make iconoclastic sculpture, prints and installations that examine, with searing wit and energy, contemporary politics, religion and morality.
Working together since their graduation from the Royal College of Art in 1990, the Chapmans first received critical acclaim in 1991 for a diorama sculpture entitled 'Disasters of War' created out of remodelled plastic figurines enacting scenes from Goya's 'Disasters of War' etchings. Later they took a single scene from the work and meticulously transformed it into a 'Great Deeds Against the Dead' (1994), a life-size tableau of reworked fibreglass mannequins depicting three castrated and mutilated soldiers tied to a tree.
Arguably their most ambitious work was 'Hell' (1999), an immense tabletop tableau, peopled with over 30,000 remodelled, 2-inch-high figures, many in Nazi uniform and performing egregious acts of cruelty. The work combined historical, religious and mythic narratives to present an apocalyptic snapshot of the twentieth-century. Tragically this work was destroyed in the MOMART fire in 2004 and the Chapmans rebuked by saying they would make another, more ambitious in scale and detail - the result of which was 'Fucking Hell' (2008). The interim saw 'The Chapman Family Collection' (2002), comprised of a group of sculptures that bring to mind the loot from a Victorian explorer’s trophy bag, yet also portraying characters from McDonald’s. The conflation of the exotic fetish and the cheap fast-food giveaway, imperialism and globalisation, created a powerful sense of dislocation. ‘Like A Dog Returns To Its Vomit’ (2005), was an exhibition of the Chapmans’ graphic works, a large collection of etchings and drawings displayed on two walls and arranged in the shape of dogs. Many of the works were reinterpretations of Goya etchings, including the ‘Disasters Of War’ and the ‘Los Caprichos’ series. Using the Tate Collection's erotomanic sculpture 'Little Death Machine (Castrated)' (1993) as their point of departure, the Chapmans created 'When Humans Walked the Earth' (2008) an installation of ten improbable machines, cast in bronze and now ossified, emulating aspects of human behaviour with a trademark subversive wit.

Jake Chapman was born in 1966 in Cheltenham, Dinos Chapman in 1962 in London. They live and work in London. They have exhibited extensively, including solo shows at Tate Britain (2007) Tate Liverpool (2006) Kunsthaus Bregenz (2005), Museum Kunst Palast Düsseldorf (2003) and Modern Art Oxford (2003) and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2000). Group exhibitions have included: Summer Exhibition 2007, Annenberg Courtyard, Royal Academy of Arts, London, ARS 06, Museum of Contemporary Art KIASMA, Helsinki and the Turner Prize, Tate Britain (2003).

gego...I love gertrude goldsmith

Latin American artist Gego (1912–1994) produced a range of line-based abstract work, including drawings, prints, and wire sculptures. Focusing on a rare series of monotypes from the early 1950s, drawings and prints, and “drawings without paper” and “tejeduras” (woven paper pieces) of the late 1970s and 1980s, this fascinating book traces Gego’s exploration of line and space.

Gego used lines as conceptual and visual tools to create in-between spaces within her works. Whether drawing lines on paper or projecting them into space, the artist sought to “make visible the invisible.” She believed that line could express what is not physically present in nature––including thought, intuition, and emotions. By manipulating the density of the lines or by interrupting them, she brought light, shadow, and feeling into her linear works.

A bit of colour

Cildo Meireles
11/02/2009 - 26/04/2009 MACBA
Without seeking to be a retrospective, the Cildo Meireles exhibition offers a survey of the work of the artist through his large-scale installations, drawings and objects created between 1967 and 2008. Cildo Meireles (Rio de Janeiro, 1948) is the inventor of an œuvre of extraordinary complexity, which has its roots in the confluence of the politics, philosophy and symbols of our time. The recent awarding of the 2008 Velázquez Visual Arts Prize to Meireles confirms the fascination and interest the work of this Brazilian artist awakens outside his own country. The figure of Cildo Meireles is crucial to understanding the postwar Brazilian artistic avant-garde, since he forms a bridge between the Neo-concretism of the late 1950s and Brazilian conceptual art of the end of the 1960s. Neo-concretism, whose main representatives – Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape – are constant references in Meireles's work, rejects the extreme rationalism of geometric abstraction in order to create more sensory and participatory works that appeal not only to the mind but also to the body. The utopian optimism of the movement collapsed following the coup d'état of 1964, which gave way to a military dictatorial regime, and which marked a new generation of artists, including Cildo Meireles, whose work has greater political commitment, as a reflection of the historical context. Meireles's œuvre could be defined as a poetic approach to the study of society, since he sets out to respond to questions relating to all kinds of social concerns: he examines the processes of communication, the figure of the spectator, the value of art and the legacies of history. The subject matter of his work extends from the expansion of capitalism in the international realm to the culture of the Brazilian Indians in the Amazon, and does not correspond to any hierarchy of materials or size. His works usually proceed from a concrete element that is developed in such a way that the real, the symbolic and imaginary are brought into balance with one another. Meireles's first works took the form of drawings. Thus, in his series Espaços virtuais: Cantos (Virtual Spaces: Corners, 1968), Volumes virtuais (Virtual Volumes, 1968–69) and Ocupações (Occupations, 1968–69), Meireles investigates the possibilities of Euclidian geometrical space, using three planes to define a figure in space. This is an abstract concept that he will try and express in the series of sculptures called Cantos (Corners, 1967–68), which functions according to the same principle and in which, through life-size models, he reconstructs typical domestic corners. Mutações geográficas (Geographical Mutations, 1969) is a series of works that analyzes the immense territory of Brazil and the nature of geographical frontiers. At the same time it refers to Cildo Meireles's childhood and to his family's constant journeying through the vast Brazilian region on account of his father's work for the Indian Protection Service. The series Arte física (Physical Art, 1969) is based on collages that offer proposals for potential actions relating to geographical and topological space, actions that in many cases never took place. At the end of the 1960s Meireles began working on the concept of Condensations, small objects that demonstrate how the symbolic power of an artwork has nothing to do with its size. A paradigmatic example of these is Cruzeiro do Sul (Southern Cross 1969–70), in which a tiny cube of oak and pine, woods sacred to the Indians, becomes an emblem of the modern condition. Notwithstanding its smallness, it is a work which lays the foundations of many of the themes Meireles will develop during his career, since it involves a first approach to the spatial dimension in terms of scale; at the same time it is a critique of the Eurocentric conception of history and a reflection on the need for myths, positing a dialogue between the West and the traditions of the native peoples, in turn critical and unresolved. In Árvore do dinheiro (Money Tree, 1969) Meireles analyzes the paradox of symbolic value versus the real value of things: a wad of a hundred one-cruceiro notes, which he presents as an artwork on a pedestal, was put on sale at a price twenty times greater than this amount. In this way he questions the differences between real, symbolic and exchange value. In order to go further into this analysis of value, from 1974 to 1978 he ventured onto the terrain of artistic falsification and produced, as a parody, Zero cruzeiro (Zero Cruceiros) and Zero centavo (Zero Centavos), reducing the value of money to nothing. He also replaced the illustrious figures who usually decorate banknotes with two individuals who are theoretically on the fringes of Brazilian society: an inmate of a psychiatric hospital in Trinidad and a Kraô Indian. En Zero dollar (Zero Dollars, 1978–84) and Zero cent (Zero Cents, 1978–84), he delves into the meaning of the monetary, by understanding foreign currency as an iconic representation of a country. In these works money becomes a paradigm of the relationship between matter and symbol, since it can be both things at once. The callousness of the military dictatorship at the beginning of the 1970s was to result in a further radicalization of the political content in Meireles's œuvre. This moment is marked by the Inserções em circuitos ideológicos (Insertions into Ideological Circuits, 1970), which relate to the idea of exchange and are based on an investigation of the social mechanisms that articulate the circulation of consumer goods and information. His best-known work in this series is the Projeto Coca-Cola (Coca-Cola Project), in which Meireles printed messages like "Yankees Go Home" on bottles of this soft drink and then put them back into circulation. The Malhas da liberdade (Meshes of Freedom, 1976–77) began as a doodle: Meireles drew a line and then another one that crossed it until forming a reticulated pattern. If there are no formal limits, the reticulated pattern can grow indefinitely until creating an increasingly disordered system of bifurcations, divisions and duplications, according to the principle defined by mathematician Mitchell Feigenbaum in his studies of chaos theory. By means of a metal mesh, a material associated with restrictive devices, Malhas da liberdade transforms this irregular system into the possibility to free oneself from the coercion and repression of life under military dictatorship. Cildo Meireles has shown on various occasions that space possesses "physical, geometrical, historical, psychological, topological and anthropological" connotations and that these constitute the central core of his work. This is reflected in one of his most emblematic works, Eureka/Blindhotland (1970–75), in which he analyzes the relationship between knowledge and perception, mental construction and sensory experience. In this sculpture various elements are combined: a soundtrack, newspaper ads and spheres of the same size but with different weights. The surprise is that weight and volume do not correspond; this is an invitation to play and to the participation of the spectator. Excess and accumulation are present in Missão/Missões (Como construir catedrais) (Mission/Missions [How to Build Cathedrals], 1987), in which Meireles returns to the idea of the religious colonization of Brazil and attempts to quantify the human cost of evangelization and its connection with the exploitation of the riches of the colonies. Also seen in Através (Through, 1983–89/2007) is a labyrinth of grilles and meshes in which the floor is made up of broken glass and where the public is invited to confront its fears and its inherited or imposed beliefs. In Meireles's maze access is both permitted and denied: the gaze may penetrate what the body may not pass through. As an antithesis to excess we encounter extreme reduction, one of whose most intense forms is the monochrome, utilized at the beginning of the twentieth century as an element in the search for "pure art," which Meireles endows with symbolism and non-artistic connotations. Thus, extreme accumulation and reduction characterize Desvio para o vermelho (Red Shift, 1967–84), an installation in three parts in which the color red acts as a structuring element, causing our perception of the world to be transformed and to lose its visual logic. Sound is another of the elements Cildo Meireles uses to create spaces. In Babel (2001), an enormous tower of radios, relating to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, posits people's inability to communicate as a cause of all mankind's conflicts. Due to the essentially time-based nature of a medium like radio, no two experiences in this work are ever the same. Meireles's work is defined by the search for new meanings through confrontation, the exploration of limits in the realms of the aesthetic, perception, science and the economy. This is a body of work which in its ceaseless quest reflects upon its own place in art and seeks to be a trace, vestige or residue of an activity, that of an artist aware that memory is the only possibility of permanence remaining to an œuvre. Exhibition dates: From 11 February to 26 April 2009 Curators: Vicente Todolí and Guy Brett Production: Exhibition organised by Tate Modern, London, with the collaboration of the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA)

Alexander Calder

I am adding this as i was unintentionally part of this installation one of the video boxes featured me in Madrid which I viewed in Barcelona having no idea it was there - I got quite a surprise.

This is the blurb.....
The ornament of the masses: red, white, blue

23/01 - 15/03/2009 The Joan Miró Foundation presents "The ornament of the masses: red, white, blue", an exhibition by Javier Arce as part of The 24 steps programme dedicated to Joan Miró and his leading role in the field of contemporary art, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death on 25 December 1983. Javier Arce (Santander, 1973) explores the frontiers of art in search of the limits that define its nature. He tries to extend these limits into the territories in which Art with a capital A, as an expression of high culture, is contaminated by the manifestations of popular culture, while at the same time questioning the existence of these barriers, often with a touch of humour.His exhibition in the Espai 13 follows this line of analysis of the distance between the work of art and popular culture at a time when merchandising, an important feature of every museum, makes famous works of art easily available to the public at large.Arce's installation consists of two elements. The first is re-invention of Andy Warhol's installation in the Stable Gallery in New York in 1964, which turned a consumer product into a work of art: the room is filled with a mound of crumpled three-dimensional drawings of the Brillo Box, produced with a felt-tipped pen on untearable paper. Javier Arce, however, transforms the neat, clean lines of the original installation into an accumulation of art junk.The second element, Abandonment, is made up of four simultaneous screenings of a series of actions that the artist performed recently, which consist in abandoning original works of art from the Crumpled (Brillo Box) series alongside the articles on sale in the museum shops at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Tate Modern in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona. In this way the work of art is converted into a mere product.With "The ornament of the masses: red, white, blue" Javier Arce invites viewers to reflect on the role of museums and the value of art.

Thing on at Talbot rice....

Oliver Godow employs the photographic medium to observe subtle but powerful visual juxtapositions, often within environments in a state of flux. He is interested in observing the everyday, through a unique sense of composition and colour. For Desire Lines, Godow has created a photographic portrait of life in the University, visiting various departments and capturing traces of occupancy and daily life. Godow invites us to look at and question our surroundings and their use. Oliver's work is situated in the Information Hub, which is located in the foyer area of Talbot Rice Gallery.

Hola...again

Finallymastered both the fone and trying to use t'internet in Spanish...different keys for this and different keys for that...mad...and of course I cant speak Spanish!

I am very interested in an exhibition I saw in Joan Miro. Will try and find a foto....
But meanwhile this is out my window in Cadaques and the wee rabbit is from an exhibition in Girona of Joseph Beuys...very unlike him I think but some expedition he was on in South America..so even Joseph Beuys likes wee toys...interesting!

Had a day ......

With a bit of luck have got my fone to work so a few thoughts about BLOODLINES as that is what Im thinking of for project.....