Sheila will meet Morandi off to Bologna in a couple of weeks

Morandi was born in Bologna, Italy 1890.

In 1907 he went to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti.
The school, which based its traditions on 14th-century painting is where he taught himself to etch by studying books on Rembrandt.
The works of his formative years show him experimenting with a style related to Cézanne and to Cubism, with a brief digression into a Futurist style in 1914. In that same year, Morandi was appointed instructor of drawing for elementary schools in Bologna—a post he held until 1929. Today, there is a museum dedicated to the display of Morandi's work, including a reconstruction of his studio, in Bologna.
In 1915, he joined the army but suffered a breakdown and was indefinitely discharged. During the war, Morandi's still lifes became more reduced in their compositional elements and purer in form, revealing his admiration for both Cézanne and the Douanier Rousseau.
A Metaphysical painting (Pittura Metafisica) phase in Morandi's work lasted from 1918 to 1922. This was to be his last major stylistic shift; thereafter, he focused increasingly on subtle gradations of hue, tone, and objects arranged in a unifying atmospheric haze, establishing the direction his art was to take for the rest of his life.
Morandi showed in the Novecento Italiano exhibitions of 1926 and 1929, but was more specifically associated with the regionalist Strapaese group by the end of the decade, a fascist-influenced group emphasizing local cultural traditions. He was sympathetic to the Fascist party in the 1920s, although his friendships with anti-Fascist figures led authorities to arrest him briefly in 1943.
From 1930 to 1956, Morandi was a professor of etching at Accademia di Belle Arti. The 1948 Venice Biennale awarded him first prize for painting, he visited Paris for the first time in 1956, and in 1957 he won the grand prize in São Paulo's Biennale. He died in Bologna in 1964.

May have too many blogs to keep up with

I keep doing stupid things....I'd blame Art Skool but Im on Holiday....grrrr.
Why oh why did I opt for presentation...suppose only plus side is I don't have to hear it I pity everyone else and avoiding doing it allows me to update blogs.
This one.
One about Fish
N what to put in the cabinet of monkeys?
Yah too many blogs that's for sure.

Laaannndddaaannn

The art of revisiting the Swinging SixtiesBy Nick Hackworth, Evening Standard 22.11.06

Riflemaker becomes Indica: Sixties to the present

Riflemaker becomes Indica is an intelligent and entertaining show in which a young gallery in Soho pays homage to a legendary West End gallery of the Sixties. Indica pioneered experimental art in Britain and was one of London's Swinging Sixties hotspots. It was here that John Lennon met Yoko Ono and hip aristos hung out with assorted Beatles and Stones.
Asking whether the open-minded Sixties approach could be revived today, Riflemaker invited Indica's founders to curate a show, displaying art from their original exhibitions next to the work of young artists today.
The dialogue between the generations is fascinating. Conrad Shawcross's kinetic machine seems at home with the older blinking lights of Greek artist Takis's installation. Yoko Ono's conceptual work, comprising of an apple on a Perspex plinth with a label "Apple", looks rather more contemporary than young Aishleen Lester's forest of tall, elegant sculptures, which have a distinctly Sixties feel with their plastic-surfaces and pseudo-futuristic forms.
Pleasingly, neither old nor new triumphs here - it's all part of a similar and ongoing project. Every generation believes they invented sex, drugs, rock'n'roll and, it seems, paradigm-shattering art.
But best of all, the exhibition highlights the value of a real engagement with the past, placing the idea of progress in much-needed perspective. If you have the cultural memory of a goldfish, then everything seems new, even if it's the same thing you were sold last year in slightly different packaging.

Saw this and found stuff when spring clearing

Just lovely

John

McCracken (b. 1934, Berkeley, California) is an American artist.

He started his career creating bold, tight geometric compositions on Masonite or treated canvas. While still in school, his first exhibition at Nicholas Wilder's gallery in Los Angeles, California in 1965 was a critical success.

He was included in the seminal 1966 exhibit, "Primary Structures" at the Jewish Museum (New York) as part of the West Coast influence.

The new work he presented jumped off the wall in the form of objects that had been distilled down to their most basic form. McCracken calls his objects "blocks, slabs, columns, planks. Basic beautiful forms, neutral forms."

After his early paintings, a technique emerged on these physical forms of high gloss lacquer over fiberglass or polyester resin on plywood or wood substructure similar to techniques used in surfboard construction pervasive in his Southern California environment.

For him, color is also used as "material." Bold solid colours with their highly polished finish reflect the unique California light or mirror the observer in a way that takes the work into another dimension. Although many of his pieces stand solidly on or off a pedestal, it was his decision to lean the objects against the wall that gave him international recognition.
McCracken currently lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Off to Eigg to set fish free...or dispose of

For installation see other blog
Eigg Stuff...going to look for singing sands
Singing sand, whistling sand or barking sand is sand that produces sounds of either high or low frequency under pressure. The sound emission is usually triggered by wind passing over dunes or by walking on the sand. The sound is generated by shear stress.
Certain conditions have to come together to create singing sand:
The sand grains have to be round and between 0.1 and 0.5 mm in diameter
The sand has to contain silica
The sand needs to be a certain humidity
The most common frequency emitted seems to be close to 450 Hz.
Importantly, there are still scientific controversies on the details of the singing sand mechanism (see references). It has been proposed that the sound frequency is controlled by the shear rate. Others have suggested that the frequency of vibration is related to the thickness of the dry surface layer of sand. The sound waves bounce back and forth between the surface of the dune and the surface of the moist layer creating a resonance that increases the sound's volume.
Other sounds that can be emitted by sand have been described as "roaring" or "booming".
The particular note produced by the dune, between 60 and 105 Hertz, is controlled by the rate of collision in the shear band separating the avalanche from the static part of the dune. For spontaneous avalanches, the frequency is controlled by gravity and by the size of the sand grains.

Didier n Fishy

Pierre Vivant, Traffic Light tree 1995-98, painted steel & lights

Funded and produced by the Public Art Commissions Agency. On roundabout just beyond the Canary Wharf estate there are three trees, two are London planes; the third is a traffic light tree; Pierre Vivant's eternal tree replaced another London plane as it was dying. The arbitrary cycle of light changes are not supposed to mimic the seasonal rhythm of nature, but the restlessness of Canary Wharf. Born in Paris in 1952 Pierre Vivant has been commuting between his Oxford and Paris Studios since 1973 producing and exhibiting work on both sides of the Channel.
Canary Wharf’s little sister, originally an eight-acre quay but now extended by a further three acres to connect with Canary Wharf at its eastern end. Narrower than the other quays of the West India Docks, it formerly separated the Export and South Docks and was mostly filled with offices and stores rather than warehouses. There was a herring shed on the quayside from around 1840, but never any trade in herons or with a place of that name. In an early chapter of Docklands redevelopment Tarmac Properties drew up plans in 1981 for a mixed-use scheme that would cover the whole Heron Quays site, but only the first two phases were completed. These were high-tech cabins with monopitch aluminium-clad roofs and colourful enamel panelling. Although generally well received, the buildings were not of the scale and grandeur of neighbouring developments. Despite proposals to build an apartment complex, the rest of the quay remained empty for more than a decade, mainly owing to uncertainty in the property market. In 2001 the Canary Wharf Group bought the site from Tarmac and began work on the HQ project, also known as Canary Wharf South. The scheme consists of five office blocks, of which the three tallest are around 500 feet high. Tenants include Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers and Clifford Chance. Heron Quays station has been rebuilt beneath the HQ2 podium, with an underground link to the Jubilee Line station via a new shopping centre called Jubilee Place. The neighbouring Jubilee Park has a moderately pleasing water feature, shown below. The result of all the redevelopment is that, on the ground, the quay is no longer visually distinguishable from the rest of the Canary Wharf complex

Have been using another blog...public art

Drive through the Heron Quays Roundabout in Canary Wharf and you’ll be able to catch a view of this traffic light mutation. This stoplight “tree” changes its many lights in a random order, no doubt much to the confusion of unprepared drivers.
Designed by artist Pierre Vivant in 1998, the changing patterns of the “Traffic Light Tree” were meant to reflect the “never ending rhythm of the surrounding domestic, financial and commercial activities.”

Peter Schlemhil....Adelbert von Chamisso

After an arduous voyage Peter Schlemihl met the wealthy businessman John Thomas know in whose garden he encounters a strange gray Lord. Dieser bietet ihm, im Tausch gegen seinen Schatten , einen Säckel voller Gold , der nie versiegt. This gives him, in exchange for his shadow, a purse full of gold, which never runs dry. Schlemihl willigt in den Handel ein. Schlemihl agrees to the trade.
Schon bald muss er erkennen, dass dies den Ausschluss aus der menschlichen Gesellschaft bedeutet. Soon he realizes that this means the exclusion from human society. Sobald die Menschen merken, dass er keinen Schatten hat, bekommen sie Angst und halten sich von ihm fern oder verspotten ihn. Once people realize that he has no shadow, they are scared and stay away from him or taunt him. Er reist deshalb über das Gebirge zu einem Badeort und richtet sich dort mit Hilfe seines treuen Dieners Bendel so ein, dass seine Schattenlosigkeit zunächst nicht bemerkt wird. Thus he travels across the mountains to a seaside resort, where he set with the help of his faithful servant Bendel so that its shadow, is not noticed at first.
Schließlich verliebt er sich aber in die schöne Mina, und sein Geheimnis wird von seinem zweiten Diener Rascal verraten. Finally, he falls in love but in the beautiful Mina, and his secret is betrayed by his second servant Rascal. Nur wenn er seinen Schatten zurückbekommt, erklärt ihm sein Schwiegervater, kann er Mina heiraten. Only when he regains his shadow, his father tells him he can marry Mina. Da erscheint der graue Mann wieder. As the gray-haired man appears again. Peter Schlemihl will seinen Schatten zurück, aber die wahre Natur des grauen Mannes offenbart sich ihm: Er ist der Teufel , freilich ein sehr höflicher, und ist nur bereit, den Schatten zurückzugeben, wenn Schlemihl ihm dafür seine Seele überlässt. Peter Schlemihl wants his shadow back, but the true nature of the gray man reveals himself: he is the devil, of course, a very polite, and is only willing to give back the shade when Schlemihl him for his soul leaves.
Schlemihl versucht, vor ihm zu fliehen, wird aber immer wieder eingeholt. Schlemihl tried to flee from him, but is caught again and again. Noch einmal versucht der Teufel, ihn zu überreden, indem er ihm vor Augen führt, was für ein Ansehen Peter Schlemihl erwerben könnte. Again, the devil tried to persuade him by showing him in mind, what could acquire a reputation for Peter schlemiel. Dieser lehnt freilich ab und wirft das Säckchen, welches er mit seinem Schatten bezahlt hatte, in einen Abgrund. These declines, however, and throws the bag, which he had paid with his shadow, into an abyss. Damit kappt er die letzten Bande zum Teufel. He severs the last links to the devil. Mit seinem letzten Geld kauft er sich ein Paar alte Stiefel, die sich als Siebenmeilenstiefel erweisen. With the little money he buys a pair of old boots, proving itself as seven-league boots. Bis zum Ende der Erzählung lebt er einsam als Naturforscher. By the end of the story, he lives alone as a naturalist.

Start again tis 2010

Spook fish has mirrors for eyes...yes it does fact stranger than fiction

Installation....swim with fishes...mirror people...real unreal virtual...

Thats it...DONE

If someone is swimming with the fishes, they are dead, especially if they have been murdered. 'Sleep with the fishes' is an alternative form.

Theres been a murder

The perfect crime

Art died when it was installed....

From Jorge Luis Borges' story"The Library of Babel"

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps an infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with enormous ventilation shafts in the middle, encircled by very low railings. From any hexagon the upper or lower stories are visible, interminably. The distribution of the galleries is invariable.

Twenty shelves--five long shelves per side--cover all sides except two; their height, which is that of each floor, scarcely exceeds that of an average librarian.

One of the free sides gives upon a narrow entrance way, which leads to another gallery, identical to the first and to all the others,

To the left and to the right of the entrnce way are two miniature rooms.

One allows standing room for sleeping; the other, the satisfaction of fecal necessities. Through this section passes the spiral staircase, which plunges down into the abyss and rises up to the heights. In the entrance way hangs a mirror, which faithfully duplicates appearances. People are in the habit of inferring from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it really were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that the polished surfaces feign and promise infinity. . . .
Light comes from spherical fruits called by the name of lamps. There are two, running transversally, in each hexagon. The light they emit is insufficient, incessant.
Like all men of the Library, I have travelled in my youth. I have journeyed in search of a book, perhaps of the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can scarcely decipher what I write, I am preparing to die a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once dead, there will not lack pious hands to hurl me over the banister; my sepulchre shall be the unfathomable air: my body will sink lengthily and will corrupt and dissolve in the wind engendered by the fall, which is infinite. I affirm that the Library is interminable. the idealists argue that the hexagonal halls are a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. they contend that a triangular or pentagonal hall is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that to them ecstasy reveals a round chamber circling the walls of the room; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. That cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice me, for the time being, to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose consummate center is any hexagon, and whose circumferenBorges is that rare writer, one who can truly change your outlook forever. To read Labyrinths or Ficciones is to experience the universe anew, to find a poetry in mathematics, a mysticism in reason. In tales like "Funes the Memorious", "The Library of Babel" and "The Garden of Forking Paths", Borges explores the concept of infinitude. A child with endless knowledge, a library that goes on forever, the constantly diverging paths of reality which make possibility itself endless. In doing so he finds a beauty in the concept perhaps unique in literature - the master poet-in-prose of the infinite. The prose he captures these dizzying absolutes within is understated, mellifluous and simple, dreamlike and factual, making the fantastical real, and the prosaic extraordinary. In "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", he describes a man re-writing Cervantes' work, word for word, without reading the original, and makes the idea seem not just possible but inevitable, and beautiful. In "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" another world - one whose inhabitants inhabit a realm of pure thought - floods from the pages of an encyclopaedia to overwhelm our own. Borges not only makes us accept this could happen, he makes us welcome it. The highest philosophical concepts of time, space, reality and perception are rendered malleable and human, the arcane loses its abstraction while retaining awe.
In 1957, after he had written most of the stories which make up Labyrinths, Borges undertook the task of penning a compendium of descriptions of fantastical beings - dragons, unicorns, phoenix and the like. Such an obscure, niche-laden, listing exercise would probably be seen as treading water at best in most other authors, - and in the case of most other authors the accusation would probably be accurate. You can't readily imagine James Joyce publishing a list of his favourite fairy tales for example, nor a joke book by Samuel Beckett. What could be a mere whimsical addendum to a body of work from another writer instead becomes a wonderful vista on the gifts of Borges. This is not a case of "he could write about anything and make it wonderful" - the old "I'd listen to him sing the phone book" cliche - for Borges, style and content are inseparable. Rather, the format of a scholarly researched compendium allows him to brandish with a flourish the outstanding knowledge and learning which pepper his writing, while the subject of the fantastic complements completely the strange insights which inform his vision.
The expected exotic are all here, the dragons, the unicorns, the nymphs, the phoenix and the salamander. What Borges brings to his description of these creatures, which many readers may think themselves already familiar with, is the learning which marks much of his best work ("research" is somehow an inadequate word) immense, profound, yet somehow worn lightly. European medieval manuscripts, the scrolls of ancient Greeks, Egyptians and Persians, the musings of esoteric Victorians, and the lore of all world religions casually surface and recede as the moment demands.
Thus we learn that eastern dragons are associated with both emperors and Confucius and have saliva of medicinal qualities:- "Buddhists affirm that Dragons are no fewer in number than the fishes of their many concentric seas; somewhere in the universe a sacred cipher exists to express their exact number."
The Phoenix, we see was conjured of by the Ancient Egyptians in their dreams of eternal life, and alluded to by Tacitus and Pliny hundreds of years later as they fixed the intervals of the fiery bird's visits as once every 1,461 years. We learn that in England once Christianity vanquished the older Norse gods that they didn't just lie down and die, but instead corrupted and withered into Trolls, while the beautiful Valkyries became witches. These witches were also known as Norns or Fates, grim augurs of the future the memory of which survives in the weird sisters of Macbeth.
References to Tacitus, Pliny, Terulius, Propertius, and St Ambrose remind us that the most learned men of the day considered all these "imaginary beings" as "real", believed in every bit as much we today accept the existence of exotic fauna we have only seen on television screens. These beings informed the landscape of the mind, which in turn became the landscape of history, and therefore the world. The Nordic Elves who shoot the invisible arrows which cause common itches, their Scottish counterparts the Brownies, who rather more winsomely turn up and tidy around the house, the Harpies, who we learn "wielded weapons of gold - lightning - and milked the clouds" , all these dwelt in the minds of our ancestors in a more profound sense than the mundane insects, cats and cattle which walked among them.
While descriptions of these more familiar fiends and fairies are captured marvellously (in both senses) and show us far more of the subjects than we could have imagined, Borges comes still more into his own with narrations of the more outlandish creatures. Here is Kujata, a huge bull from Islamic folklore, with 4000 eyes, ears, nostrils, mouths and feet. Kujata stands on the back of the great fish Bahamut, "All the seas in the world placed in one of the fish's nostrils would be like a mustard seed placed in the desert". Under Bahamut is water, and under the water darkness, "and beyond this men's knowledge does not reach". The uncanniness of cosmology is brought to us with a quiet aplomb, as it is with the "Fauna of Mirrors" where we learn that the people of Canton believed another hostile world was behind every reflective surface, the people of whom are enslaved into copying our actions for now, but whose turn to rise will come, and whose uprising will be heralded by.... a rogue yellow fish you may see in the mirror that shouldn't be there. That such a potentially risible, laughable notion instead haunts the memory is further testimony to Borges' mastery.
Occasionally the book has guest spots from other authors - mainly Kafka and C S Lewis - which, good as they are, simply serve as contrast to the particular visions of the grand editor. Elsewhere in the bestiary we meet Haniel, Kafziel, Azriel and Aniel, a four headed creature surrounded by rings full of eyes, as envisioned by the prophet Ezekiel. One of its heads is that of an ox, one of man, one of lion, and one of eagle, "each one went in the direction of its face, so imaginable as to be uncanny." Borges is adept at describing things, which, in terms of physical human description, cannot be described. When H P Lovecraft does this, he horrifies. When Borges does it, he simply entrances.
With all this talk of mystique and wonder, you could be forgiven for thinking this book a po-faced thing. Not at all. Borges is always aware the things he describes are as ridiculous as they are sublime, and a wryness sometimes peers through. Of the strange visionary Swedenbourg, who wrote with incredible vividness of the celestial beings he claimed to know - "as the English are not very talkative, he fell into the habit of conversing with angels and Devils." When the allegorical nature of some of the creatures is a little too heavy handed for his tastes, he is not above mocking it. (The hippogriff is the combination of a griffin and a horse which denotes the impossible - Luis notes the Greek scholar Servius somewhat milked this by inventing the "fact" that griffins must hate horses). Sillier creatures like the Squonk, ( of Aboriginal folklore, which cries to itself until its body disintegrates) appear with a mordant dryness. The entire "Fauna of the United States" are of a somewhat facetious nature, such as the axehandle hound - shaped like an axe, and which eats only axes. But what Borges never does is pour contempt on the fantastical - he knows its importance too well.
Borges knew that while the religions may be wrong in their claim to give us morality, they and their myths have more far more valid claim in giving us a sense of wonder, helping the impossible peer in, making life, rather than existence, possible. It is in no way a betrayal of rationalism to find a sense of transcendent mystery and awe in the Moslem Jinn (people of fire, as angels are of light and men of earth), the Jewish Golem, (a kind of ancient clay android), or the angelic hordes of in the Christian-informed visions of Swedenbourg. They don't exist, never have, and countless crimes have been committed in the names of the theologies which conjured them up. But these are beings without which the world of the mind, the world we inhabit, would not exist. Part of Borges' very real genius is to illuminate these corners of what makes us human, with a wisdom so acute it meets itself round full circle so as to appear childlike, an endless loop of wild possibility.
Not bad for a book about about dragons, witches and gnomes eh? No, he's not bad this Borges.

SPOOKFISHA Pacific fish uses mirrors as well as lenses to help it see in the murky ocean depths, scientists have revealed.
The brownsnout spookfish has been known for 120 years, but no live specimen had ever been captured.
Last year, one was caught off Tonga, by scientists from Tuebingen University, Germany.
Tests confirmed the fish is the first vertebrate known to have developed mirrors to focus light into its eyes, the team reports in Current Biology.
"In nearly 500 million years of vertebrate evolution, and many thousands of vertebrate species living and dead, this is the only one known to have solved the fundamental optical problem faced by all eyes - how to make an image - using a mirror," said Professor Julian Partridge, of Bristol University, who conducted the tests.
Spookfish is a name often given to Barreleyes - a group of small, odd-looking deep-sea fish species, found in tropical-to-temperate waters of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans.
A rare live brownsnout spookfish, Dolichopteryx longipes, was caught last year between New Zealand and Samoa, by Professor Hans-Joachim Wagner, of Tuebingen University.
Deep see
While the animal appears to have four eyes, it technically has two, each of which is split into two connected parts.
The spookfish needs one half to point upwards, to capture faint glimmers of light from the sea surface 1,000m above.
The other half, which looks like a bump on the side of the fish's head, points downwards.

Seen from below, the mirrored eyes (red) focus light from the depths
These "diverticular" eyes are unique among all vertebrates in that they use a mirror to make the image.
Prof Partridge said: "Very little light penetrates beneath about 1,000m of water and like many other deep-sea fish, the spookfish is adapted to make the most of what little light there is.
"At these depths it is flashes of bioluminescent light from other animals that the spookfish are largely looking for.
"The diverticular eyes image these flashes, warning the spookfish of other animals that are active, and otherwise unseen, below its vulnerable belly."
The mirror uses tiny plates, probably of guanine crystals, arranged into a multi-layer stack.
Prof Partridge made up a computer simulation showing that the precise orientation of the plates within the mirror's curved surface is perfect for focusing reflected light on to the fish's retina.
It its murky world, the spookfish's visual system would give it a head start on its prey whilst at the same time providing those vital few moments of advance notice to escape the clutches of a predator.