sheilablablabla

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

2010-04-09T06:33:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-09T06:26:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-23T05:50:00.001-07:00

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

2010-03-23T05:40:00.000-07:00

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

2010-02-18T09:22:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-06T05:04:00.001-08:00

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

2010-02-06T05:02:00.001-08:00

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

2010-02-06T04:54:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-13T07:34:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-13T07:13:00.000-08:00

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.

Ho HO HO...IT'S......

2009-12-18T03:47:00.000-08:00

Votive a. fulfilling a vow; done in devotion

2009-12-08T03:31:00.000-08:00

Nice word

Check out the agony of a body artist...and CCA

Reeling and Writhing

Tank man

shocked and stunned and well dunned

2009-12-08T03:21:00.000-08:00

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.

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.

Nostalgia for the future

2009-12-07T09:54:00.001-08:00

Nostalgia

Prado...Goya was when?

2009-12-07T09:49:00.000-08:00

Prado...Goya

2009-12-07T09:48:00.000-08:00

Black paintings

War Artist...bizarre thing

2009-12-07T09:34:00.000-08:00

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.

Cedric Christie

2009-12-02T07:10:00.000-08:00

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.

Me and Tony

2009-12-02T06:30:00.000-08:00

Tony Cragg

Galleries if you cant travel view

2009-12-02T06:12:00.000-08:00

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.

The Fine Art of the Steidl Book

2009-12-02T06:11:00.000-08:00

Just a link but a good one all be it in French

Donald Judd and Thomas Demand and Richard Artschwager

2009-12-02T05:55:00.000-08:00

Strange mixture but it sort of works...well for me and thinking about tables

More Jenny Holzer Oh and of course John Baldessari

2009-12-02T05:53:00.000-08:00

Conceptual paradise...for me anyway

Joseph Kosuth and Robert Therrien and Jenny Holzer

2009-12-02T05:48:00.000-08:00

What more can I say people of words and art....perfect

and there's more.......

2009-12-02T05:39:00.001-08:00

Like this Stuart Haygarth....very much

2009-12-02T05:37:00.001-08:00

Somehow this reminded me of last years bag of dead rabbits

2009-12-02T05:30:00.000-08:00

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

Colour Theory

2009-12-01T02:53:00.000-08:00

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).

•
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.

•
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

2009-12-01T02:38:00.000-08:00

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

Joseph Albers

2009-12-01T02:36:00.000-08:00

Joseph Albers was born to a family of artisans in Bottrop Germany and inherited a family tradition of careful, exact workmanship. As a young man, the works of Cézanne, Matisse, and Cubism inspired him. After attending the Königliche Kunstschule in Berlin from 1913 to 1915, he was certified as an art teacher. In 1915, he married Anni Fleischmann, who became a noted weaver and his wife of fifty-one years. From 1913 to 1920, he studied art in Berlin and in Munich, but his most significant education took place in Weimar, Germany at the Bauhaus, an association of artists, craftsmen, and architects committed to a creed of merging craft techniques with creative aspects of fine art. As a student, he became renowned for stained glass designs that he created from broken bottles and fragments he found at the city dump. These "found object" designs show his early predilection for optics.Beginning in 1923, he became a Bauhaus teacher and taught furniture design, drawing, and calligraphy. He helped guide the Bauhaus away from expressionism and towards a constructivist art in the service of architecture. This was achieved through an extreme reduction in form to a lapidary, geometric idiom. During this time, Albers contributed significantly to the development of industrial design. His working philosophy was to build carefully and meticulously with sturdy materials from a base of simple, fundamental forms too increasingly complex shapes. In 1933, Albers and his associates dissolved the Bauhaus because of Nazi pressure. He and his wife moved to America, where he spent the next sixteen years as head of the art department at the newly established, Black Mountain College, New Carolina, an experimental school operating with the principle that fine art integrated all learning.
Albers became a prolific artist, known primarily for his "Homage’s to Squares." Although he disavowed style category labels, he is credited with influencing the movements of Geometric Abstraction and Minimalism. He was also one of the first modern artists to investigate the psychological effects of color and space and to question the nature of perception. Indicative of the impact of his work is the fact that he was the first living artist to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
He influenced many artists such as Neil Welliver and Robert Rauschenberg. From 1950 to 1958, Albers served as Chairman of the Department of Design at Yale University. As an art teacher in America, his methods were both innovative and shocking because he eliminated copying from nature and from other artists. His goal was to create an attunement or close investigative relationship between the artist and the work and to exclude anything that might interfere with this synchrony. To set the tone, he began his classes with kinetic exercises whereby each student was asked to foreshadow with movement the designs he or she intended to depict in their artwork.
The square was the ideal shape for Albers’ "Homage’s," series. Squares were mathematically related to each other in size, perfect for superimposition, shapes that never occur in nature--thus assuring its man-made quality. Albers intended that the colours in his "Homage’s" series react with each other when processed by the human eye, causing optical illusions due to the eye's ability to continually change the colors in ways that echo, support, and oppose one another. He executed these paintings with a deliberate, careful technique using a minimum of tools and paint. He hated chaos and was adamantly opposed to the freedoms of Abstract Expressionism. When working, he applied one base or primary coat to Masonite, a ground he found most durable, and then squeezed unmixed paints directly from the tubes and spread the paint evenly and as thinly as possible with a palette knife.
In addition to painting, printmaking, and executing murals and architectural commissions, Albers published poetry, articles, and books on art. Thus, as a theoretician and teacher, he was an important influence on generations of young artists. As a colour theoretician, the principles, he sought to illustrate were reversed grounds, transparencies, space, and vibrating boundaries. Albers explained that since "color deceives continually", he developed a unique experimental way to study and teach color through a series of practical exercises. Albers, who taught at Yale and lectured widely, combined the careers of teacher and painter so that his paintings demonstrate his theories and his theories draw upon his discoveries in design and color.

Joseph Albers and colour

2009-12-01T02:34:00.000-08:00

Interact with colour how does one influence the other...click and see

Some tables some artists...From Richard Tuttle to Damien Hurst

2009-12-01T02:30:00.001-08:00

And there's more...all about Mario (Metz)

2009-12-01T02:28:00.001-08:00

Tables

2009-12-01T02:27:00.001-08:00

Tables

2009-12-01T02:26:00.001-08:00

Periodic tables
Monograph
Cheyney Thompson
‘He says: it is not good to be living in a human body. I’d rather cower under the earth or run across the fields and eat whatever I can find, and the wind blows and rain falls and the cold days come and go, that’s better than living in a human body. The mice scamper about, and now Franz Biberkopf is a field mouse, and he digs along with them.’ Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929)
The protagonist of Alfred Döblin’s famously expressionistic novel is released from prison only to face the harshness of working as a street pedlar while attempting to re-establish a ‘normal’ life within a disintegrating social order. His story is bound up with one of the first fully realized representations of the modern city and it retains the power to influence profoundly our reading of the metropolitan setting as a matrix of restrictions, both physical and psychological, which are continuously reinforced by the hegemony of the market.
Cheyney Thompson’s move to New York coincided with his initial reading of Döblin’s novel, and the first paintings he made there are depictions of commercial rubbish: crumpled plastic bags, bundles of flattened cardboard boxes and piles of discarded magazines. Each item occupies its own canvas but is arranged on the wall with a group of others, connected to them by a common vanishing point. Together they form a mouse’s-eye view of day-to-day existence: a street-level index of city life as an unbroken cycle of sale and purchase, acquisition and waste.
Thompson retains this focus through to his most recent work, An Event Commencing in the Spring of 1997, a life-size painting of a news-stand destined for Andrew Kreps’ booth at the 2003 Armory Show, and later for the Venice Biennale. Recalling Russian Constructivist Gustav Klucis’ ‘propaganda kiosks’, or the more recent versions knocked up from string and brown paper by Thomas Hirschhorn, Thompson’s image is a companion piece to a painting of the same edifice made three years earlier. It is also, he says, derived from an idea for a play in which extras and locations replace characters and situations as the primary focus. It documents both change and stasis; details have been altered but the essence of the thing remains. For Thompson the news-stand functions as a map of contemporary afflictions, a guide to the comfortable and seductive illusions by which capitalism (which very much includes the business of contemporary art) sustains itself. In his drive to avoid becoming a mere symptom of such a culture, Thompson shifts his practice and position the moment that predictability beckons, ducking and diving in the finest tradition of the independent trader.
In a series of paintings depicting cheap folding tables, items familiar from SoHo’s hectic Canal Street and a million other markets around the world, Thompson appropriates another breadline staple as a supremely adaptable prop for exploring his fascination with different forms of display. Put something on a table and immediately you elevate its status, if only incrementally, by the implication that it might be worth keeping for future use. The tables in Thompson’s paintings have nothing on them - they are pregnant pauses, empty parentheses waiting patiently for the arrival of content and meaning. In the sculptures that follow them, however, Thompson abandons restraint and embraces a brimming maximalist aesthetic.
Table of Blood and Guts (2002) is a repulsive mass of plastic joke-shop entrails, spray foam and hair extensions that oozes over the edges of a rickety, hand-built platform. The same table holds up a dozen or so twitching, fuzzy-tailed ‘Weazel balls’ in Table of Hubris (2002), and a dripping gilded turd in Table of the Golden Faeces (2002). Tiny renditions of the flags of the world crowd Table of Territory (2002), while Table of Tables (2002) is topped with 16 miniature replicas of itself. According to Thompson, this simple piece of furniture has the power to legitimize just about anything. In using it to present a (fictitious) history of his own achievements in drawing and lamenting its increasingly schematic function, he tests this capacity to its limit by appearing to turn it on himself. The results end up somewhere between tongue-in-cheek self-mythologizing and a rather more convoluted deconstruction of process and exchange value - the plinth and the archive.
If the preoccupations of museology intersect with Thompson’s work, their influence is certainly matched, or even eclipsed, by those of traditional art history. Wanting to follow up a series of frenetic post-Salle cut ‘n’ paste canvases with something more tightly defined, he reclaimed a longstanding interest in conventional rendition by working through a sequence of experimental variations on the genres of still life, figure painting and landscape. Paring his subjects back to their basic elements, he turned bodies into monotremata (or, in one case, nothing more than three minutely painted curls of pubic hair), faces into deadpan masks, and outdoor scenes into drastically simplified component parts. A graph-paper ground heightens their engineered look and interchangeable feel, as if the world were made of Lego.
In a series of more elaborate paintings based on these studies Thompson replaces the paper with translucent organza in order to suggest a virtual interzone. He uses images of architectural components organized according to a system of precisely calculated angles and proportions in such a way as to approximate partially completed, or partially exploded, modern buildings. Each plank, panel or brick wall appears to be suspended in the space between the stretchers, the opacity of the paint lending it a remarkable appearance of solidity. Thompson’s belief that painters have a responsibility to acknowledge the objecthood of their output is firmly held. Naming the 50-painting series ‘1741’ in homage to Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, whom he admires for his attempts to capture moments of revelatory understanding induced by the senses of touch and sight, Thompson hoped to suggest the possibility of reconfiguring even the most apparently immutable of subjects. The ‘1741’ series represents a benignly revisionist history painting, in which visual perspective stands in for both perfect hindsight and qualified optimism. The artist’s self-published booklet Three Paintings (2000), offers a fragmented guide to the territories that he has set out to explore via quotations from Charles Baudelaire and Jonathan Crary, interspersed with details from the works themselves. The dates of each text (1739, 1854 and 1928) are given a full page each, stressing again the inescapability of historical influence and the responsibility of the artist to confront its lingering challenges.
Thompson, a voracious music collector and occasional DJ, once made a ten-minute compilation of his entire record collection by sampling one second of each CD and sequencing them into a continuous stutter of blips and blurts, cries and whispers. Dubbed The Subject of History (2002), like a bored child flipping through radio stations it veers from genre to genre without warning; its chronological ordering reflecting the way in which cultural narratives are filtered through individual taste. In a similar vein, Ibiza Apocalypse (2001) was constructed entirely from the intros and synth breaks of anthemic dance-floor Techno tracks, an eternally hyperbolic build-up with no final release.
Thompson’s approach to the arrangement of sound echoes his own mercurial nature, but also makes direct reference to the culture of recycling, distillation and bootlegging upon which Canal Street, and the entire social system that it implies, depends. The twitchy impatience communicated by his treatment of music - an uneasy blend of fascination with the recent past and an insatiable appetite for the new - is consistent with his ouevre as a whole: desire for excess is kept in check by measured pace, and subjected to critique through subtly strategic thought. In Warsaw (2001), Thompson loops and rearranges Ian Curtis’ out-of-order countdown to the Joy Division song of the same name until its anticipation is almost, but not quite, dissipated. Identifying the point at which hyperbole collapses into excess, he holds on to its nervy excitement for as long as possible then, finally, lets go.
Michael Wilson

Nest

2009-11-12T10:43:00.000-08:00

Meaning and Colour

1. a pocketlike, usually more or less circular structure of twigs, grass, mud, etc., formed by a bird, often high in a tree, as a place in which to lay and incubate its eggs and rear its young; any protected place used by a bird for these purposes.
2. a place used by insects, fishes, turtles, rabbits, etc., for depositing their eggs or young.
3. a number of birds, insects, animals, etc., inhabiting one such place.
4. a snug retreat or refuge; resting place; home.
5. an assemblage of things lying or set close together, as a series of boxes or trays, that fit within each other: a nest of tables.
6. a place where something bad is fostered or flourishes: a nest of vice; a robber's nest.
7. the occupants or frequenters of such a place.

TABLE

table, article of furniture employed for household or ecclesiastical purposes. Elaborately decorated tables of wood or metal were known in ancient Egypt and Assyria, and the Greeks used small tables of low construction to be placed beside a couch. During the Roman Empire massive rectangular pieces were developed, which were made of marble and supported by carved end slabs as well as square or circular forms of bronze supported on a pedestal or on legs often representing wild beasts, sphinxes, or other figures. Although small tables of various shapes, some covered with precious metals, were used during the Middle Ages, the most common form was the long trestle table that was disassembled and removed after meals. Tables of the Italian and Spanish Renaissance were rectangular with end supports braced by stretchers; they often had an arcade of columns through the center. The magnificent Farnese table of marble inlay, attributed to Vignola (Metropolitan Museum of Art), is a notable piece from this period. Tables of the Elizabethan Age were supported on bulbous legs and included the draw table, forerunner of the extension dining table. By the end of the 17th cent. the console, the gateleg, and a variety of occasional tables had come into use. Striking tables of modern workmanship include elegant, simple designs in glass and chromium or stainless steel, and in a great variety of unvarnished woods. Tables vary in size with their purpose from the smallest candlestand to the great banquet table. They are named according to the place for which they are intended (center, library, side, sofa, tavern), their use (tea, china, drawing, writing, sewing, billiard, dining), their form (folding, console, extension, parson's trestle or sawhorse, piecrust, gateleg, butterfly, drop-leaf, tilt-top, nest), period or style (Gothic, Queen Anne, Empire), or the names of designers who created distinctive types (Adam, Chippendale, Hepplewhite, Sheraton, or Phyfe).

Article of furniture used in the Western world since at least the 7th century BC, consisting of a flat slab of stone, metal, wood, or glass supported by trestles, legs, or a pillar. Though tables were used in ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Greece, only during the Middle Ages, with the growing formality of life under feudalism, did tables increasingly take on social significance. Tables with attached legs appeared in the 15th century. The draw top was invented in the 16th century, making it possible to double the table length. Increasing contact with the East in the 18th century led to increasing specialization in the design of occasional tables.
eb('http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9070839/table','table')

1. any flat or level area, such as a plateau
2. a rectangular panel set below or above the face of a wall
3. Architect another name for cordon

4. Music the sounding board of a violin, guitar, or similar stringed instrument
5. a tablet on which laws were inscribed by the ancient Romans, the Hebrews, etc.
6. Palmistry an area of the palm's surface bounded by four lines
7. a. either of the two bony plates that form the inner and outer parts of the flat bones of the cranium
b. any thin flat plate, esp of bone

A horizontal projection or molding on the exterior or interior face of a wall.
(computer science)
A set of contiguous, related items, each uniquely identified either by its relative position in the set or by some label.
(lapidary)
The flat face forming the top of a brilliant-cut stone.
(mathematics)
An array or listing of computed quantities.
(mechanical engineering)
That part of a grinding machine which directly or indirectly supports the work being ground.
(mining engineering)
In placer mining, a wide, shallow sluice box designed to recover gold or other valuable material from screened gravel.
A platform or plate on which coal is screened and picked.

here@s more

2009-11-12T10:34:00.001-08:00

Aide-mémoire

2009-11-12T10:29:00.000-08:00

Fragments

2009-10-30T09:37:00.000-07:00

Reflection and reflecting

2009-10-30T09:36:00.001-07:00

Journey

2009-10-30T09:35:00.001-07:00

Hanging indent

2009-10-30T09:33:00.001-07:00

Studio stuff

2009-10-30T09:32:00.001-07:00

Links

2009-10-26T11:34:00.000-07:00

Loverly gallery

Roman Signer

2009-10-26T11:31:00.000-07:00

Roman Signer

Christine and Irene Hohenbuchler

2009-10-26T11:29:00.001-07:00

Giuseppe Gabellone

2009-10-26T11:25:00.000-07:00

Photos photos everywhere

2009-10-25T05:51:00.000-07:00

Some photos

2009-10-25T05:48:00.001-07:00

Paul McCarthy in Edinburgh

2009-10-25T05:34:00.000-07:00

Images of artists in their studio have a long tradition in art history, spanning the Renaissance to Romanticism and beyond. In picturing themselves at work, artists often created flattering and dramatic portraits and such works were always made to reflect a particular self-image.
But from the 1960s onward, these self-images have been questioned. Art criticism exposed clichés and stock phrases, and artists themselves criticised and attacked old-fashioned artistic stereotypes.
The American Paul McCarthy (b.1945) is one of the most influential of these artists. With a traditional background in painting, McCarthy made his name with performance art, lashing out against traditional artistic ideas. His famous and irreverent video Painter (1995) satirises the formula of the artist as lonely genius in his studio.
Painter is shown next to the Dean Gallery's own ‘Paolozzi Studio'. This partial reconstruction is an educational stage-set, exhibiting the generous donation of Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005), and is one of our most popular and successful displays. By contrasting the Studio presentation with McCarthy's critique, ‘Painter' and The Studio casts a second glance at how museums present the making of art.
Please note: viewers may find some scenes disturbing.

Agnes Martin in Edinburgh

2009-10-25T05:27:00.000-07:00

This exhibition of late paintings by Agnes Martin (1912-2004), one of America's foremost abstract painters, forms part of ARTIST ROOMS, the new collection of modern and contemporary art donated by Anthony d'Offay jointly to National Galleries of Scotland and Tate in 2008. This display features a selection of her work from ARTIST ROOMS and is also complemented by works lent by a private collection, a rare opportunity to experience at first hand the ethereal beauty of Martin's minimalist painting.
Dating from between 1994 and 2003, the paintings presented at the Gallery of Modern Art, highlight the scope of Martin's late practice, particularly her tactile handling of paint and use of a broader range of hues in her palette.
In the late 1990s after a long period of leaving her works untitled, Martin reintroduced titles into her work to evoke states of euphoria and memories of past happiness, such as the two paintings Happy Holiday (1999) and Faraway Love (1999) which will be on show as part of the display.
The Agnes Martin exhibition forms part of the ARTIST ROOMS collection.

Annette Messinger and Karla black and Pedro Cabrito Reis

2009-10-25T05:25:00.000-07:00

Getting lazy but looking at Karla black

2009-10-25T05:13:00.000-07:00

Am getting lazy about using blog so here is a catch up I am looking at tables and what can be put under them how they can become nests and hidey holes. Looking at colour as always. How to combine them that is the question....

mapping stuff

2009-10-15T06:30:00.000-07:00

I was to " not break the silence "and this woman helped me tho she thought I was mad or deaf or daft and/or all of these but she helped me...well done her.

Mapping stuff

2009-10-15T06:27:00.000-07:00

Skye stuff

2009-10-15T06:26:00.001-07:00

Skye stuff

2009-10-15T06:24:00.000-07:00

Skye stuff

2009-10-15T06:20:00.000-07:00

Skye stuff

2009-10-15T06:14:00.000-07:00

Geometry

2009-10-01T06:21:00.001-07:00

Light

2009-10-01T06:18:00.001-07:00

Moving finger

2009-10-01T06:12:00.001-07:00

What is ugly?

2009-10-01T05:58:00.000-07:00

Aye Aye

2009-10-01T05:57:00.001-07:00

Aye-ayes can be found only on the island of Madagascar. These rare animals may not look like primates at first glance, but they are related to chimpanzees, apes, and humans.

Aye-ayes are dark brown or black and are distinguished by a bushy tail that is larger than their body. They also feature big eyes, slender fingers, and large, sensitive ears. Aye-ayes have pointed claws on all their fingers and toes except for their opposable big toes, which enable them to dangle from branches.

Aye-ayes spend their lives in rain forest trees and avoid coming down to earth. They are nocturnal, and spend the day curled up in a ball-like nest of leaves and branches. The nests appear as closed spheres with single entry holes, situated in the forks of large trees.

While perched aloft, the aye-aye taps on trees with its long middle finger and listens for wood-boring insect larvae moving under the bark. It employs the same middle finger to fish them out. The digit is also useful for scooping the flesh out of coconuts and other fruits that supplement the animal's insect diet.

Many people native to Madagascar consider the aye-aye an omen of ill luck. For this reason they often have been killed on sight. Such hunting, coupled with habitat destruction, have made the aye-aye critically endangered. Today they are protected by law.

Merkabah

2009-10-01T05:46:00.000-07:00

The Hebrew word Merkabah (מרכבה "chariot", derived from the consonantal root r-k-b with general meaning "to ride") is used in Ezekiel (1:4-26) to refer to the throne-chariot of God, the four-wheeled vehicle driven by four "chayot" (Hebrew: "living creatures"), each of which has four wings and the four faces of a man, lion, ox, and eagle. Several movements in Jewish mysticism, including the Ma’asei Merkavah of the late Hellenistic period following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, and later, students of the Kabbalah, have focused on these passages from Ezekiel, seeking underlying meaning and the secrets of Creation in what they argued was the metaphoric language of the verses. Due to the concern of some Torah scholars that misunderstanding these passages as literal descriptions of God's image might lead to blasphemy and/or idolatry, there was great opposition to studying this topic without the proper initiation. Jewish biblical commentaries emphasize that the imagery of the Merkaba is not meant to be taken literally; rather the chariot and its accompanying angels are analogies for the various ways that God reveals Himself in this world.[1] Hasidic philosophy and Kabbalah discuss at length what each aspect of this vision represents in this world, and how the vision does not imply that God is made up of these forms. Jews customarily read the Biblical passages concerning the Merkaba in their synagogues every year on the holiday of Shavuot, and the Merkabah is also referenced in several places in traditional Jewish liturgy.

jablonka gallerie

2009-10-01T05:40:00.000-07:00

Link

John Baldessari - I like at the moment

2009-10-01T05:38:00.000-07:00

Interview with John Baldessari
by Nicole Davis

Nicole Davis interviewed John Baldessari in his studio in Santa Monica, Ca., on Apr. 12, 2004.

John Baldessari: So, fire away.

Nicole Davis: What led you to become an artist?

JB: I always had this idea that doing art was just a masturbatory activity, and didn't really help anybody. I was teaching kids in the California Youth Authority, an honor camp where they send kids instead of sending them to prison. One kid came to me one day and asked if I would open up the arts and crafts building at night so they could work. I said, "If all of you guys will cool it in the classes, then I'll baby-sit you." Worked like a charm. Here were these kids that had no values I could embrace, that cared about art more than I. So, I said, "Well, I guess art has some function in society," and I haven't gotten beyond that yet, but it was enough to convince me that art did some good somehow. I just needed a reason that wasn't all about myself.

ND: I'm sorry, I hate to interject, but how tall are you?

JB: 6 feet 7 inches.

ND: You're so tall! It's amazing!

JB: I know.

ND: Okay, sorry, how did you end up in Los Angeles and why are you still here?

JB: Why am I still here? A job. I was born south of San Diego in a kind of service community. That's a euphemism for ghetto. I taught at a couple of schools, and then I got a job teaching at the University of California in San Diego. Then, the chairperson of the art department there was asked to be the new chairperson of the art department of Cal Arts, and he asked me if I'd want to come and be on the faculty here. So, I changed because Cal Arts at the time had all this buzz that it was going to be "the" art school of the U.S. You know, that sounded really attractive, so I moved up here, and, the first studio, it's still here.

ND: So this is your first studio?

JB: Yeah, I've had it since 1970. So I came here in 1970. "Why am I still here?" I thought for a moment about moving to New York, but I was then married and didn't want to raise children in New York. I had taught the prior summer at Columbia, and they had offered me a job there, so I could have gone, but you know I wanted to abide by what my wife wanted to do, so I stayed here.

ND: Did you feel like you wanted to be in New York because that was where more action was, and where more artists were?

JB: Probably, yeah. Probably, of course. You know it was the art center. I don't know if it is now. In one way you could say yes. In one way no. I think it still has the best museums. I think also art is more in your face there. You can't avoid it. Here you can, which is good because one gets a lot of work done that way.

ND: Do you think your work would have been different if you moved to New York?

JB: That's a tough one. It just seems logical that one's work is effected by where he or she is living. It's a moot point, kind of. I don't know if you know the artist Allan McCollum, he's from here, and he used really bright colors and even sparkle dust in his paintings. Then he goes to New York and all of a sudden he's doing all these black paintings.

ND: That's a little extreme. How do you feel that the esthetic and lifestyle of Los Angeles effects the art work created here?

JB: You know, there is just so much trading of information in magazines and web sites on the internet, I don't know that it pertains anymore. But, I always thought there was this kind of "why not" attitude. You can't call this a European city. We have no history, relatively speaking. I remember way back in the late ‘60s, hanging out in New York at Max's Kansas City. You'd just go there every night, and it's like every artist, always at least six, ten or eight artists at the same table. And, I said something, some art idea, and you could hear a pin drop. And someone said, "Well, how does that fit into art history?" And, I'm thinking inside, "Who the fuck cares?" Out here you don't worry about how things fit into art history. You just do what you're going to do.

ND: Who were some of the first artists that you were having a dialogue with in New York?

JB: Well, you know, because I was doing all that text stuff and text with photography, at first I was directed to painters, and they said, "This isn't painting." And then, there's this one guy, Dick Bellamy, he was a very famous gallerist for a while, the Green Gallery, where a lot of Minimalists had first shown. He looked at my work, and he said, "I don't quite know what you're doing, but there are some people here in New York that you might want to meet." And so, there are people who are now good friends of mine that I was introduced to, like Lawrence Weiner, Mel Bochner, Sol LeWitt and Bruce Nauman.

ND: Are you still friendly with them?

JB: Oh, yeah.

ND: What was the mission behind your early works?

JB: My mission for my own art I think was to break the certain "no-no's" and "taboos" for galleries. One: that you never saw photographs in art galleries, they were always in photo galleries. So, I wanted to do that. . . photography as a tool that an artist can use. Then, I was very much interested as using language as a tool for art and just information, rather than something visual. Both of those battles have been won.

Now, you see so much photography and text stuff. Do I have any mission right now? My current one is that I'm somehow trying to jam the media world together with what we would call the "real world." And sort of, like a square peg in a round hole, I keep on doing that, like a kid, trying to make it work. Also, on a formal level, I'm trying to make something that's neither painting nor photograph.

ND: What do you feel is going on in the art world in L.A. right now?

JB: You know, one of the reasons I teach is to get a sense of what's going on at the grass-roots level. There is one thing that came up in the painting department just a month ago. We didn't see any really good abstract painters. What I saw in painting that I thought was interesting was translating photographs into paintings. The kids are taking snapshots and then using it as the basis of their paintings. So, this is a curious fusion of photographic vision into paint.

ND: Did you like it?

JB: I see a lot of it. For me it's not particular. I just like good art when I see it. Doesn't matter where I see it. That's what excites me. It can happen any place. Sometimes, it's done by an artist I really hate. That's a real falsity; there is no connection between the artist and the work.

ND: Well there is, but you can still somehow appreciate the work.

JB: A lot of times, you've probably gone through this, there is an artist you really like and you wish their work was better, and you really want to like it. One of the most obnoxious people in the world, I've known him forever, is Richard Serra, but he does great work.

ND: Who would you consider to be a breakthrough artist within the last decade?

JB: There are certain artists that interest me. Not so much in what they're doing now, but why there's attention given to them at a particular time. For example, in 1985 I did a two-person show in Chicago with Gerhard Richter. Neither of us sold anything, which was not unusual back then, but the paintings he had in the show were the candle paintings, which are now $23 million each. I find that so puzzling. What was wrong with them then? Plus, he was doing pretty much the same art when I came across him in the late ‘60s. He didn't have much of a following.

And in the ‘80s there was this surge of interest in German artists in the U.S. The one that was embraced by everyone was Anselm Kiefer. I don't think he was the most interesting artist that was available. I think it was the whole thing about German guilt that the Americans seemed to embrace. And now he's completely off the radar. You can't say he's on everybody's tongue. It would be Richter, wouldn't it? And of course, we are going to get tired of Richter. I think the best of them is Polke. But, I think he's just a little bit too much for everybody. And somebody who had always wanted to inherit that position, but unfortunately died, was Kippenberger. But, he's now getting revered in Germany. And there's a big show of his at the Tate.

ND: Yes, and there's a huge explosion of interest for German artists right now, young German artists.

JB: I guess it's like fashion. Why something gets embraced at one moment and then it's dropped. Well, so, anyway, all I was saying is someone who interested me some years ago is very popular. He's always interested me as a painter. I don't know why.

ND: Are you still friendly with Richter?

JB: Oh sure. Yeah, yeah.

ND: I would almost be a little wary of work that is accepted immediately.

JB. Yeah, you know something that just struck me, do you know the artist Thomas Kinkade, who does these schlock paintings? He's a huge industry. He has all these satellite galleries that sell his work. He's licensed all of his imagery so there's all his tchotchkes out there. It's enormous. Just enormous. There's even now been a housing development with cottages that look like his paintings.

ND: A housing development? Where?

JB: It's up in Northern California. So anyway, the point I'm trying to make, if you listen to Kinkade's argument, it's exactly the same argument as Jeff Koons. Exactly. "This is what America likes." The only difference is that they operate in two different territories. Jeff operates in the avant-garde art world, and this other guy operates on the other end of the spectrum, but they talk exactly alike. He went to art school, he went to Art Center. He just figured out what America wants. They want Hallmark Cards. I thought it would be great to have a public debate with Kinkade and Koons. Well, it wouldn't be a debate. They wouldn't argue. It would just be the two of them talking.

ND: To me, someone like Kinkade is a big turnoff. It seems to be all marketing and branding.

JB: Kinkade probably thinks he's being totally genuine. I don't know. I would just love to hear him talk. Jeff I know very well because we show in the same gallery. And that guy I can't. . . I still can't. . . that's part of his mystique because nobody can figure out whether he's just tongue and cheek, or whether he believes this stuff.

ND: And he looks so...

JB: Like Howdy Doody.

ND: Exactly! It's almost like pathological liars. You do something enough, you tell a lie enough, and you believe it to be true. So really, they blur the lines themselves.

JB: Everything is getting blurred now. I mean between fashion and art. A couple years back they came up with the idea of pairing up an artist with a fashion designer. Now architects are trying to be artists. It's all turning into one big soup. Frank Gehry is an old friend of mine, and he's designing everything. This weekend there's a party for an unveiling of a vodka bottle that Frank has designed. Last time I saw him he was designing a car for one of the Japanese brands.

ND: What next, hygiene products?

JB: I mean I've done some things. I did a few T-shirts, and I did two posters for New Order. Then I started to get phone calls. I got a call from Lenny Kravitz and I didn't know who he was. I said, well can you send some tapes? The first time was fun, but then I said this is has to stop. I don't want this to be my life.

ND: Well, music is different. You know, there's something about artists and musicians, they've always had a running dialogue.

JB: Yeah, yeah. Michael Stipe from REM used to live around here. This woman who runs Blind Spot Magazine, she knows Michael. She said he was interested in photography, "He wants to come visit you is that okay?" So, I had dinner with him. We talked about photography, and music, and so on. And there are continually all these crossovers going on.

ND: What is inspiring your work right now?

JB: One of the questions that I've always pursued or has pursued me is, "Why is something art, and why is something else not art?" That I always find fascinating. And, then another thing is that I never want to copy myself or repeat successes. So, now we've just finished this project for the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and the next show I have to do is a show in New York, which is, you know, a tough place to show.

And I'm always thinking about that, and what it might look like. So, right now it's just this hazy image in my mind. I want it to go beyond the Deutsche Guggenheim.

ND: Where did you get the photographic images that you use in your work?

JB: I collected them for years. They are all the stuff that nobody wants, because they're always from some movie that never made it. I used to buy them for 15 cents each. I use found photography a lot. I think I'm going to continue using photographic imagery and painting. Right now, I got fascinated with orange, as you can see.

ND: Why orange?

JB: I don't know. I think, why it might be, I have this house, which is an old Arts and Craft house that's being redone by an architect friend of mine. That's actually another story with Frank Gehry, but anyway, I made this one bathroom downstairs all orange tile. It just seemed the right thing to do, I don't know why. And then my kitchen is all cobalt blue tile. Then the upstairs bathroom is this beautiful green.

So, I have these three colors, but you can never see them at the same time, you just have this memory. I think what it is, every morning taking a shower in this orange bathroom. It seems so simple minded. I think it's a lot about how that color feels, you know, that I've never been around orange.

ND: Do you think orange is an unnatural color?

JB: Well, you have oranges and you have carrots.

ND: Yes, but even when you see oranges in a tree they seem so striking and unnatural.

JB: Yeah, I see what you're saying. It's an interesting thing. It's between red and yellow. It doesn't have that memory of blood so much. It seems friendly, but you can also think of fire. Yellow, for me, always signals some kind of craziness. So, I don't know if I want to do that. I thought maybe I could try another color for New York. I want to see when I'm done with this stuff if I have orange out of my system. I don't know; we'll see.

But, I think what I want to do, because I realized that the work prior to this was using images of slapstick comedy, which gets really physical, so, if you just see them as shapes, they get really abstract. I think what I'm going to do is a lot of research, and find a principal shape that is a thing rather than a person that's really big, and then go from there. I think what's happening is that the orange stuff is occupying more and more of the space of the picture plane. I would like to up the ante even more.

ND: Who represents you in New York?

JB: In the last three or four years, I changed galleries, and that was like a divorce for me. I got divorced and that was probably worse than getting divorced.

ND: Which gallery?

JB: I was at Sonnabend Gallery in New York, and you know, they're a fantastic gallery, and after over 30 years, I've gone to Marian Goodman Gallery. They are both very powerful women, but I began to panic a bit about what would happen to my kids after I died, and how they would support themselves. With Ileana Sonnabend, she has all the money in the world, and so she doesn't have to make money, and they only have a staff of about five or so, and they were just overworked all the time, so they could never pay attention to things. She didn't go out actively and try to sell work, and so I just decided I had to get somebody who was a little more aggressive, and Marian Goodman, I looked around, and she seems the best for me, but it was really really difficult for me after 30 years.

ND: Are you reading anything interesting right now?

JB: Two books just came in the mail yesterday, you're gonna laugh at this one. One, is the South Beach Diet. . .

ND: No, you're not going on a diet, are you?

JB: No, no. I'm always curious about why some foods are not good for you and others are.

ND: You know who loves that book, Bill Clinton.

JB: Yeah, well, I pick up certain things. Like, I've always had orange juice in the morning and that's a no-no.

ND: No more orange juice to follow your orange shower?

JB: No.

ND: What was the other book?

JB: Godard at Seventy.

ND: Are you into movies?

JB: Yes and no. I am into people that are creative.

ND: What about the whole movie thing here in L.A.?

JB: You know there's no crossover, at least for me. I know a couple of people involved. I am interested from a distance, but I don't want to be close to it.

ND: Do you go to the movies a lot?

JB: I'm pretty much a workaholic. I used to go to movies a lot, but now I don't do that, because I realized I used to go mostly with my son, and now he's agoraphobic. You know, I have Tivo, but I don't watch that much. But, on the other hand I draw a lot of my imagery from the movies.

ND: Why's that then?

JB: Well, I think it's just that it mirrors the real world, but it's in another place. It's always set up. And, when it gets really confusing, especially like when I'm traveling some place and watching a movie and a lot of locations are around Santa Monica, and then you say, "How can this be a movie," because I live there. The worst it ever got, was when I was married, and I was living up the street, and I came down here to my studio and there were movie trucks all over. In the parking lot out there they had some chairs set up and it was Jack Nicholson and Mike Nichols. They were doing this shot in Chinatown, and I said, "Pardon me, can I get into my studio?" I'm thinking, "Okay so, the line between reality is my door."

ND: "The line between reality is my door." I'm going to quote you on that.

NICOLE DAVIS is associate editor of Artnet Magazine.

Things off phone

2009-10-01T05:30:00.001-07:00

some more

2009-10-01T05:28:00.001-07:00

some more

2009-10-01T05:26:00.000-07:00

and again

2009-10-01T05:24:00.000-07:00

Some photos

2009-10-01T05:15:00.001-07:00

I like

2009-09-24T10:19:00.001-07:00

Start with a photograph...

2009-09-24T10:14:00.000-07:00

Saw this was coming and courtesy of a friend of a friend saw a very early preview...forgive me but liked concept slightly better than outcome...but its all taste innit.

Fab Fab Fab idea and am going to do it do it do it

Starting with a Photograph

An exhibition of Saatchi Online Artists at Michael Hoppen Contemporary

10th September – 12th October 2009

Michael Hoppen Contemporary is delighted to collaborate with Saatchi Online for an exhibition of work by six artists, hand-picked from the Saatchi Gallery website. Entitled Starting with a Photograph, the key criterion is that the work must begin with a photographic image -found or made. Beyond that, each piece is unique, sharing only an interest in exploring and expanding the limits of photography. The exhibition will take place at Michael Hoppen Contemporary, situated close to the new Saatchi headquarters on the King's Road in Chelsea, and will open on the 10th September.
The show is curated by Rebecca Wilson, head of development and editor of Saatchi Online with support from Charlotte Nation, director of Michael Hoppen Contemporary. The artists exhibiting range from individuals who have not yet been seen to emerging talents. The work chosen shows not only the wide range of work at Saatchi Online, but also thevery high standard presented on the site

No Begining No End Less Focus....beautiful

2009-09-24T10:02:00.000-07:00

I so connect with this

connect with

2009-09-09T03:37:00.001-07:00

Apparently a view from another planet

2009-09-09T03:25:00.000-07:00

Hello

Changing planet

Calculate

2009-09-09T03:23:00.000-07:00

Why would you know this?

aaaah

2009-09-09T03:17:00.000-07:00

Phonetics (from the Greek: φωνή, phōnē, "sound, voice", pronounced /fɵˈnɛtɨks/) is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech.[1] It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds (phones), and the processes of their physiological production, auditory reception, and neurophysiological perception.
Phonetics was studied as early as 2500 years ago in ancient India, with Pāṇini's account of the place and manner of articulation of consonants in his 5th century BC treatise on Sanskrit. The major Indic alphabets today order their consonants according to Pāṇini's classification.

Sand

2009-09-09T03:08:00.000-07:00

Sand

Picasso - my favourite place

What is the burning man?

access all current thoughts

2009-09-09T03:03:00.000-07:00

Sand

2009-09-09T02:53:00.000-07:00

Drawing sand

Some links to blogs

2009-09-09T02:36:00.000-07:00

Blog i

Blog ii

Stones throw

2009-09-01T04:43:00.000-07:00

The Monkey Fist is used as an end knot for a heaving line.

A heaving line is a line used for throwing from one location to another.

This enables a larger line that could not be thrown over the distance to be pulled over.

The most common use of a heaving line is at sea, to pull a cable to shore from a ship.

A cable is not easily thrown over a distance of 10m [ ft]or more, so instead one throws a heaving line. The line is tied to the cable and when it has been received the cable can then be pulled over. To make it easier to throw one needs to connect a weight on the end of the line - usually a stone, lead-ball or a small bag of sand is connected to the end.

Better still a small rope ball is tied on the end.

It is neat, it will endure many tosses last long and it is easily thrown.

That is what the monkey fist is was originally used for.

Now it is also used as fancy knot for key-rings, necklaces and so on.

The knot can be done with or without a central core (i.e. a round stone or ball bearing) to add extra weight but it is recommended to use extra loops depending on the size of the object.

Monkey's Fist
Make three turns round the hand.
Start making turns passing outside the middle of the first three turns.
Complete the three second turns.
Make three more turns passing inside the first set of turns and outside the second set.
Tighten up the knot round a soft core, e.g. a ball of ropeyarn. Splice or whip the end to the standing part