Friday 18 December 2009
Tuesday 8 December 2009
shocked and stunned and well dunned
Controversialists must be in despair. The pile of atomised jet engine didn't scoop the Turner Prize after all, even though it had been favourite to win the famously contentious award.
Instead, Richard Wright, who had been considered the "quietest" yet most established entrant in the flamboyant four-strong shortlist – which included works made from plastinated cows' brains and a whale skull – scooped the £25,000 award.
When asked what he planned to do with the prize, he said: "I can't give you an answer but like everybody else I have bills. I suspect I'll have to pay some of those with it." He added: "I'm shocked – is there another kind of reaction?"
The job of the Turner Prize jury isn’t just to come up with four lively and upcoming artists. They’ve also got to come up with four reasonably distinct ones. These artists will appear in a show together for three months, and a stream of visitors will be invited to compare them. It’s important that they are able to tell the difference between the entries.
This year’s foursome is Roger Hiorns, Enrico David, Lucy Skaer and Richard Wright (I give them in the order of William Hill’s odds, starting with the favourite). If you didn’t know their work already – or even if you did – you might find hard to tell where one part of the exhibition stopped and the next started.
There’s plenty of common ground. There are wall markings (Skaer, Wright); there are liquid shapes (Wright, Hiorns); there are powdered materials (Hiorns, Skaer). There are points at which three of these four could almost be the same artist. Still, this doesn’t mean that the odd-man-out is the best.
This year’s foursome is Roger Hiorns, Enrico David, Lucy Skaer and Richard Wright (I give them in the order of William Hill’s odds, starting with the favourite). If you didn’t know their work already – or even if you did – you might find hard to tell where one part of the exhibition stopped and the next started.
There’s plenty of common ground. There are wall markings (Skaer, Wright); there are liquid shapes (Wright, Hiorns); there are powdered materials (Hiorns, Skaer). There are points at which three of these four could almost be the same artist. Still, this doesn’t mean that the odd-man-out is the best.
The odd-man-odd is Enrico David, and his work is a bit silly. It’s a sort of punch-and-judy psychodrama, a romp in a perverse shop window. You have a tableau made of miscellaneous effigies. There are propped up canvases with cartoony characters, banging drums, showing their bums. There’s a stuffed black cloth figure, his limbs stretched out and droopy. There are papier-maché puppets like humpty-dumpties on rocking-chair legs. It’s rude. It’s crazy. It’s quite inventive. But there could be more of this stuff, or less of it, and it wouldn’t make any difference.
Lucy Skaer’s work: what’s it about? Do I care enough to do the homework? There’s always some background thinking, tenuously connected to a curious exhibit. There’s a group of 26 replicas of that modernist classic, Brancusi’s Bird in Flight, but made from coal dust and resin. Pretty...but why? There’s the huge real skull of a sperm whale hidden inside a chamber, and glimpsed only through vertical slits. Startling...but why? I know I could read it up. I feel sure she’s got an interesting mind. I’m not sure it’s the mind of an artist.
Roger Hiorns does surprising things with surprising materials. His main piece here almost fills his allotted space: it’s a swirling sea or landscape, made of finely powdered stuff, poured onto the floor, in various rippling tones of grey. It lies there messy and fragile at your feet, or it would do. But (inevitably) Tate has surrounded it with a floor barrier to keep the public’s feet back, and its essential sense of risk is lost. Still, this spread of dust is beautiful and spectacular.
Hiorns’ art also puts its faith in what you might call the hidden ingredient. You’re asked to be excited by what something is made of, and by its associations, even though you could never tell just from looking. What is this grey powder? Check the label. “Atomised passenger aircraft engine”. What? Was there a momentary flinch when you thought it was actually passenger that had been atomised? But no, this dust is only the engine of a passenger aircraft, finely ground down. So what, though? It could be any kind of metal, ground down. Some connotation of plane crash? Don’t try and give us the willies.
Richard Wright has the longest odds, and I fear he won’t be much of a favourite with the public. His art is precise and laconic. But stand still for a while. Wait for his room to empty (it probably will). Involve. Wright takes a bare room and animates its space with tactical wall markings.
He fills one wall here with a vast, centred, symmetrical design. It’s painted in gold leaf. It’s enormously elaborate and detailed, with connotations of baroque ornament, rocker tattoos, oil patterns floated on water. On the opposite wall, high up above the doorway, there is a pair of small red explosive insignia. And between them, between this large complex field of gold and this small shot of red, the empty space of the gallery is held and balanced. Beyond that, I don’t have much to say about this work – except that it seems to be in perfect focus, and I kept going back.
Lucy Skaer’s work: what’s it about? Do I care enough to do the homework? There’s always some background thinking, tenuously connected to a curious exhibit. There’s a group of 26 replicas of that modernist classic, Brancusi’s Bird in Flight, but made from coal dust and resin. Pretty...but why? There’s the huge real skull of a sperm whale hidden inside a chamber, and glimpsed only through vertical slits. Startling...but why? I know I could read it up. I feel sure she’s got an interesting mind. I’m not sure it’s the mind of an artist.
Roger Hiorns does surprising things with surprising materials. His main piece here almost fills his allotted space: it’s a swirling sea or landscape, made of finely powdered stuff, poured onto the floor, in various rippling tones of grey. It lies there messy and fragile at your feet, or it would do. But (inevitably) Tate has surrounded it with a floor barrier to keep the public’s feet back, and its essential sense of risk is lost. Still, this spread of dust is beautiful and spectacular.
Hiorns’ art also puts its faith in what you might call the hidden ingredient. You’re asked to be excited by what something is made of, and by its associations, even though you could never tell just from looking. What is this grey powder? Check the label. “Atomised passenger aircraft engine”. What? Was there a momentary flinch when you thought it was actually passenger that had been atomised? But no, this dust is only the engine of a passenger aircraft, finely ground down. So what, though? It could be any kind of metal, ground down. Some connotation of plane crash? Don’t try and give us the willies.
Richard Wright has the longest odds, and I fear he won’t be much of a favourite with the public. His art is precise and laconic. But stand still for a while. Wait for his room to empty (it probably will). Involve. Wright takes a bare room and animates its space with tactical wall markings.
He fills one wall here with a vast, centred, symmetrical design. It’s painted in gold leaf. It’s enormously elaborate and detailed, with connotations of baroque ornament, rocker tattoos, oil patterns floated on water. On the opposite wall, high up above the doorway, there is a pair of small red explosive insignia. And between them, between this large complex field of gold and this small shot of red, the empty space of the gallery is held and balanced. Beyond that, I don’t have much to say about this work – except that it seems to be in perfect focus, and I kept going back.
Monday 7 December 2009
War Artist...bizarre thing
Official war artists are normally appointed by governments for information or propaganda purposes to record events on the battlefield. However, there are many other types of war artist. These can include combatants who are artists and choose to record their experiences, and prisoners of war who may voluntarily record the conditions or be appointed war artist by senior officers. Ronald Searle is a famous example of a war artist who was not officially appointed.Wednesday 2 December 2009
Cedric Christie
Love Me or Fuck Me but don't do both
Decking out the whitewashed surrounds of London’s Flowers East gallery with his large-scale, wall-based sculptural work until the middle of November, Christie’s exhibition straddles the boundary between high-art and commodity with expert dexterity.
Practicing as a welder prior to his art world calling, Christie puts his hands-on pedigree to good use for the show, employing found objects ranging from plastic pipes to snooker balls, and brickwork to scraps.
Fascinated by the fluid boundary between art and the ordinary, Christie’s compacted pink oldsmobile - transformed into a wall mounted ‘painting’ - is an articulate exposition of Christie’s off-kilter artistic agenda.
All at once a two-dimensional artwork and a worthless addition to the scrapheap, Christie subverts the notion of the artist as alchemist with this gentle poke at overwrought modernist values.
The ‘Pink Painting’ - when taken with the swooping snooker ball-filled curves of Christie’s industrial sculpture ‘Phoenix’, and the hanging banality of his gas-station-style light box advertisements - encapsulates Christie’s somewhat irreverent approach to his art.
Subtle, funny and erudite - despite his valiant efforts to ‘bring down’ high art - Christie’s latest outing can’t help but lodge his pin even more firmly into the art world map.
Galleries if you cant travel view
Its Christmas
Its Gagosian to see more of Cy Twombly(pictures above) and his eight sculptures I read the book like his sculptures very much indeed
"A show at any of Gagosian's influential galleries—three in New York, two in London, one in L.A., and one in Rome—is the flashing neon announcement that an artist has made it. (When he poached painter-of-the-moment John Currin, Gagosian reportedly added another digit to Currin’s prices.) In his elegant Madison Ave. space, he’s shown the latest works of Cy Twombly, and a superb exhibit of Picasso’s sculptures. In 2000, Gagosian branched out and inaugurated a vast, cathedral-like warehouse space in Chelsea with a massive steel installation by Richard Serra, followed by a stern Anselm Kiefer show of steel bookcases filled with lead books and sunflowers and grit-studded canvases. His 2000 Damien Hirst exhibit is legendary as one of the most extravagantly produced shows in recent history, with a three-story-high anatomical model and an ob-gyn examination chair sunken in a fish tank. And the museum-quality show of De Kooning paintings was a stunner, proving Gagosian one of the very few galleries capable of competing with museums." NYTimes
Barbara Gladstone is the obvious gallery owner for art investors or gossip columnists to follow: over 25 years of practice have tuned her professional instincts to perfect pitch. Artists represented by Gladstone are among the most dependably popular—and profitable—in recent contemporary art. Among the most successful are Iranian photographer and filmmaker Shirin Neshat, young British photographer and installation artist Sarah Lucas, and sculptor and filmmaker Matthew Barney whose series of Cremaster films was co-produced by Gladstone herself. The shows, naturally, are must-see events, and Gladstone's spectacularly cavernous gallery space is one of the largest and most imposing in Chelsea's high-rent district. The lofty rooms exemplify the local industrial aesthetic: cracked cement floors surrounded by blindingly white walls, large loft-like rooms subdivided into smaller but still ample spaces, and so on. It's all strategically designed for optimum display of installations that are physically—or at the very least, conceptually—larger than life.
Donald Judd and Thomas Demand and Richard Artschwager
Strange mixture but it sort of works...well for me and thinking about tables
Joseph Kosuth and Robert Therrien and Jenny Holzer
What more can I say people of words and art....perfect
Somehow this reminded me of last years bag of dead rabbits
London:Stuart Haygarth
Found
In his first exhibition at Haunch of Venison, British artist and designer Stuart Haygarth will examine his ongoing relationship with abandoned objects and his fascination with taxonomy through a series of new furniture works, lamps and chandeliers. Finding beauty in everyday, discarded items, the artist's work challenges perceived notions of the precious and beautiful.
Haygarth has spent many years gathering seemingly insignificant, discarded items such as ceramic figurines, spectacles, glassware and plastic objects. Often inspiring the final work through their form, previous use, tactile qualities and their relationship to light, the found materials are then painstakingly compiled to create lamps and furniture, giving otherwise banal and overlooked objects a new significance.
Opens 1 December
Haygarth has spent many years gathering seemingly insignificant, discarded items such as ceramic figurines, spectacles, glassware and plastic objects. Often inspiring the final work through their form, previous use, tactile qualities and their relationship to light, the found materials are then painstakingly compiled to create lamps and furniture, giving otherwise banal and overlooked objects a new significance.
Opens 1 December
Tuesday 1 December 2009
Colour Theory
The aim of such study is to develop—through experience—by trial and error—an eye for colour. This means, specifically, seeing colour actionas well as feeling colour relatedness.
•
This way of searching will lead from a visual realizationof the interaction between colour and colour to an awareness of the interdependence of colour with form and placement; with quantity (which measures amount, respectively extensionand/or number, including recurrence); with quality (intensity of light and/or hue); and with pronouncement (by separating or connecting boundaries).
•
This way of searching will lead from a visual realizationof the interaction between colour and colour to an awareness of the interdependence of colour with form and placement; with quantity (which measures amount, respectively extensionand/or number, including recurrence); with quality (intensity of light and/or hue); and with pronouncement (by separating or connecting boundaries).
•
By exercising comparison and distinction of colour boundaries, and new and important measure is gained for the reading of the plastic action of colour, that is, for the spatial organization of colour. Since softer boundaries disclose nearness implying connection, harder boundaries indicate distance, separation.
By exercising comparison and distinction of colour boundaries, and new and important measure is gained for the reading of the plastic action of colour, that is, for the spatial organization of colour. Since softer boundaries disclose nearness implying connection, harder boundaries indicate distance, separation.
•
No mechanical colour system is flexible enough to precalculate the manifold changing factors, as named before, in a single prescribed recipe.
No mechanical colour system is flexible enough to precalculate the manifold changing factors, as named before, in a single prescribed recipe.
•
Besides a balance through colour harmony, which is comparable to symmetry, there is an equilibrium possible between colour tensions, related to a more dynamic asymmetry.
Besides a balance through colour harmony, which is comparable to symmetry, there is an equilibrium possible between colour tensions, related to a more dynamic asymmetry.
Again: knowledge and its application is not our aim; instead, it is flexible imagination, discover, invention—taste.
Well there you go then....
that's that....
I think....
sort of...
maybe
Joseph Albers...something to interact with
An instructor of the famed Bauhaus until 1933 when Hitler shut it down, Joseph Albers continued his teachings abroad to the United States, teaching at such institutions as Harvard (1938- 1941), Black Mountain College at North Carolina(1941- 1950), and Yale, where he retired (1950-1960).
This Interaction is an abreviated version based upon his in-depth study of color and applied to the web-safe palette.
Works Cited:Interaction of Color, Albers Modern Art, Hunter, Jacobus Art, Hartt
This Interaction is an abreviated version based upon his in-depth study of color and applied to the web-safe palette.
Works Cited:Interaction of Color, Albers Modern Art, Hunter, Jacobus Art, Hartt
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